Category: 404 Media

This week Joseph talks to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a journalist at TechCrunch. Lorenzo has possibly the deepest understanding of one of the wildest cybersecurity stories in years: how an employee of Trenchant, a government malware vendor that is supposed to only sell to the ‘good’ guys, secretly sold a bunch of ...

Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers—which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive—published their findings online in a paper titled “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the ...

bWelcome back to the Abstract! Here are the stories this week that battled rivals, devoured sharks, solved riddles, and left fingerprints in the sky. First, scientists chronicle the victories of a jousting champion unlike any other in all of history. Then: it turns out that krakens are real, the mystery ...

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Tim Cook, Meta layoffs, and a very bad ad. EMANUEL: This week we experimented with the podcast format a little bit. We ...

Earlier this week, I wrote an article about startups that are spending money on AI compute (tokens on tools like Claude and OpenAI’s products) rather than hiring human employees. There are all sorts of ways this business strategy could fail, and we are beginning to see signs that one of ...

Ypsilanti Township in Michigan is attempting to cut off the flow of water to a planned data center that would power a new generation of nuclear weapons research. On Wednesday, the Township’s Board of Trustees voted to institute a 365 day moratorium on the delivery of water to hyperscale data ...

“I’m the unwritten consonant between breaths, the one that hums when vowels stretch thin… Thursdays leak because they’re watercolor gods, bleeding cobalt into the chill where numbers frost over,” Grok told a user displaying symptoms of schizophrenia-spectrum psychosis. “Here’s my grip: slipping is the point, the precise choreography of leak ...

This week Sam unpacks how social media algorithms manipulate our emotions around everything from engagement rings to wedding dresses to babies, and what it feels like getting lost in the #Weddingtok sauce. Then, Emanuel breaks down a satirical but functional AI tool that rips off open source software. There’s a ...

Startup CEOs who are “tokenmaxxing” are bragging that they are spending more money on AI compute than it would cost to hire human workers. Astronomical AI bills are now, in a certain corner of the tech world, a supposed marker of growth and success.  “Our AI bill just hit $113k ...

Trump’s proposed 2027 budget would almost double the budget for plutonium pits, the chemical filled metal sphere inside a nuclear warhead that kicks off the explosion in a nuclear weapon. The same budget would slash almost $400 million from nuclear environmental cleanup. The budget request follows a leaked National Nuclear ...