Google moves to dismiss indie artists’ lawsuit over Lyria 3 AI training, arguing they licensed their music to YouTubeThe company’s central argument is that the artists licensed their music to YouTube when they uploaded it – and that the license covers the conduct they are now suing over.2026-06-12 google indie artists music rights copyright copyfight transcoding
We Can’t Let My Former V.C. Colleagues Buy Off Our DemocracyI believe this attempted political infiltration by the A.I. industry will fail. It misreads the public mood entirely. Americans believe the system is rigged by the wealthy and powerful. They’re also deeply concerned about A.I. — a backlash is building, and it will become fiercer when voters learn that a handful of billionaires are altogether spending nine figures, apparently in an effort to try to stop debates about regulation from further developing.2026-06-12 nytimes ai ethics a12z vc politics
US judge finds Israel's NSO Group liable for hacking in WhatsApp lawsuitWill Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said the ruling is a win for privacy. "We spent five years presenting our case because we firmly believe that spyware companies could not hide behind immunity or avoid accountability for their unlawful actions," Cathcart said in a social media post. "Surveillance companies should be on notice that illegal spying will not be tolerated." A WhatsApp spokesperson said they were grateful for the decision. "We’re proud to have stood up against NSO and thankful to the many organizations that were supportive of this case. WhatsApp will never stop working to protect people’s private communication", he said.2026-06-08 op-sec natsec privacy whatsapp nsogroup
Public Domain Image ArchiveExplore our hand-picked collection of 11,082 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.2026-06-08 archive public-domain images
The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracyWill democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led. The first line of evidence comes from naturalistic quasi-experiments from which we can infer the causal impact of the rollout of internet hardware on relevant outcome measures. For example, the rollout of broadband in the US 20 years ago was affected by state “right-of-way” laws, which govern how easy it is for telecommunications companies to lay cables along public roads and land corridors. Some states imposed far more onerous conditions than others before digging could commence. Using this variation in regulation as an independent variable, one study showed that broadband availability increased affective political polarization.2026-06-08 democracy society social-contract internet architecture
Meta quietly added facial recognition code for smart glasses to its appMeta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones Code reviewed by WIRED uncovered an unreleased face-recognition system embedded in Meta’s smart glasses platform. It’s designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones.2026-06-08 meta creepy-zuck facebook frt facial-recognition glasses privacy social-contract
S1 Space Exploration Technologies Corp.pure sci-fi. -ed2026-06-08 space-x ipo space sci-fi creepy-elon-musk financial stockmarket
Previously Shelved AI Executive Order SignedOne change to the May draft is the timeline for review. That text stated that developers would be able to "provide the Federal Government with access to covered frontier models... for a period of up to 90 days before they plan to release such models to other trusted partners." In the final June order, that window was reduced to 30 days. Protecting against criminal actors: Section 4 directs the Attorney General to “prioritize the enforcement of… all applicable Federal criminal laws against anyone who utilizes AI to illegally access or damage a computer without authorization, or who utilizes AI while engaged in such illegal access to further any other crime." This includes "employing AI agents to unlawfully access data or information that is subsequently used for a criminal or unlawful purp2026-06-08 ai nat-sec legislation
Objection AIMaybe the most creepy site on the internet - the worst humans Due to feedback we're rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future. Stay tuned for updates.2026-06-08 ai justice journalism press first-admendment creepy-peter-thiel surveillance
A New Startup Lets Rich People Use AI to Target JournalistsThis AI ‘tribunal’ would then publish a supposedly independent ‘verdict’ on how truthful a story is and even rank individual journalists on metrics like truth-telling, corrections and engagement. The platform’s creator has confirmed to Novara Media that it’s being rebuilt and relaunched with “significant retooling” after customer feedback, but there are no details available at the time of writing on the changes that will be made. 2026-06-08 creepy-peter-thiel paliantir press journalism first-admendment ai justice gawker
Peter Thiel is building a parallel justice system — Powered by AIIn 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large. On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.” 2026-06-08 creepy-peter-thiel press journalism first-admendment gawker ai justice
The Smart TV in Your Living Room Is a Node in the AI Scraping EconomyDefense Approaches The traffic leaves clear fingerprints at the network boundary, and the SDK leaves identifiable symbols in the app binary. The approaches below let you detect and block the peer tunnel — at the network level or on the device itself. Three approaches, ordered by ease of deployment: Approach 1: DNS block (trivial, effective for network-routed devices): proxyjs.brdtnet.com proxyjs.luminatinet.com proxyjs.bright-sdk.com clientsdk.bright-sdk.com clientsdk.brdtnet.com Blocking proxyjs.* kills the peer tunnel without affecting any customer who legitimately uses Bright Data’s customer-facing proxy service on a different domain. Approach 2: TLS SNI filtering: Drop or alert on TLS handshakes where server_name matches *.brdtnet.com, *.luminatinet.com, or *.luminati.io. Works at the network boundary without TLS inspection. Approach 3: TLS certificate fingerprint: .brdtnet.com → SHA256 313ce4ec7d5a51e5… .luminatinet.com → SHA256 5028612e625befea… Stable until Sectigo cert rotation (current certs valid through mid-2026). The use_netifs caveat: All three layers only work on traffic that crosses your network boundary. The SDK’s use_netifs binding means that on iOS, when the device is on cellular, peer traffic bypasses corporate WiFi entirely. For managed fleets, the complementary control is MDM-based app binary scanning: search installed apps for the Swift symbols BrdWebSocketFacade and BrdNetwork.DNSResolver, and prohibit apps containing them on corporate-issued devices. For household users concerned about a specific smart TV or mobile app: block the hostnames above at your router’s DNS settings (Pi-hole, NextDNS, Cloudflare Gateway, your ISP’s equivalent). 2026-06-06 scraper opsec tv smart-tv data ai
The new bibliomaniacsOne of the fair’s female ambassadors, for instance, is Meredith Graves, MTV correspondent and former lead singer of the punk band Perfect Pussy. Graves studies and practices occult traditions while collecting books on demonology, folklore, and magic. At the same time, she collects textile manuals, sewing patterns, and historical knitting guides. ‘I collect things I can use,’ she explains. ‘My books live. They get used… They’re living objects.’ The internet has also transformed the trade. Online marketplaces and databases allow first-time buyers to trace and research materials that once required years of accumulated expertise. Social media, meanwhile, has introduced younger audiences to books, archives, and objects they might otherwise never encounter. 2026-06-06 bibliomaniacs collecting analogue books fair
Sheila Liming: “The End of Books” That’s how a library becomes a final and crucial step on a chain of accessibility that permits contact with the text. There are, of course, other ways to gain access to the text: bookstores and classrooms and PDF files that can be downloaded, legally or not, from the internet. But those other ways place barriers—often financial, sometimes technical, sometimes physical—between the reader and the text. They introduce friction. Reading a bootleg PDF isn’t the same as reading a print book. Twenty years ago, UX researchers were already noting that in online reading, large sections of a text are skipped or scanned in accordance with digital scrolling habits. The eye, for example, tends to follow an F-shaped pattern across the screen. In 2023, researchers at the University of Valencia published the results of a study showing that print reading over sustained periods can yield a six- to eightfold increase in comprehension. From these examples, and countless others like them, we know that reading digital texts does not simply replicate the experience of reading print ones. Yet we still discount the tools that deepen comprehension in favor of those that are more convenient.2026-06-06 books university yale library media
Ultra-Processed Foods in the Global Food System: The Role of US Tobacco CompaniesOur findings suggest that US tobacco companies used their extensive experiences from their tobacco businesses to maximize the successes of their international food businesses in disseminating ultra-processed foods globally. Regulation of the multiple addictive products that tobacco companies have disseminated to markets globally may be needed to protect public heal2026-06-05 ajph aphapublications health tobacco public-health addiction
Rewiring the state: Delivering digital governmentOur inquiry identified four building blocks for successful digital transformation, and four barriers to realising its benefits. The building blocks are: • Money: Money is undoubtedly being spent on digital initiatives but inadequate data on digital spend prevents the government from making informed decisions or holding those responsible to account. • People: The public sector needs more of the right people to deliver digital transformation of the state, and cultural change to ensure skills are valued and embedded in leadership levels. • Information and data security: The current government is not holding itself to the standards of information security needed to secure public trust, or to prevent massive data breaches from happening again. • Delivery: The government has a vision but needs a plan to deliver it. There is still time to turn things around but without a detailed, measurable plan, this digital transformation agenda may not succe2026-06-05 uk government science technology pdf
AI AGENTS ENABLE ADAPTIVE COMPUTER WORMS 2606.03811A computer worm is malware that spreads on a network by replicating itself from one machine to another. Traditional worms, like WannaCry, exploited predetermined vulnerabilities, and their spread can be halted by patching those vulnerabilities. Here we show that artificial intelligence (AI) agents enable a fundamentally new threat: a worm that generates tailored attack strategies to each target it encounters. The worm parasitically uses compromised machines to run open-weight large language models (LLMs) to sustain its reasoning, or extend its reach for further attacks. Deployed on a network of machines spanning Linux, Windows, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices, the worm propagated by exploiting common, real-world corporate network vulnerabilities. Since the worm is powered by stolen compute, the attacker’s marginal cost per new infection is zero. This creates a destabilizing economic asymmetry between attackers and defenders. Moreover, because the worm requires no commercial AI platform, centralized safety controls, such as service refusals or rate limiting, are structurally irrelevant. Our results demonstrate that self-sustaining AI-driven cyber-threats are no longer theoretical. We must prepare for autonomous generative adversaries: malware systems that propagate without human operators and are defined not by fixed exploit code, but by the capacity to reason about targets, adapt to observations, and synthesize attack logic in real time.2026-06-05 agents adaptive worms viri
GitHub - anthropics/defending-code-reference-harness: Skills for threat modeling, scanning, triage, patching, plus an auDefending Code Reference Harness A reference implementation for autonomous vulnerability discovery and remediation with Claude, based on our learnings from partnering with security teams at several organizations since launching Claude Mythos Preview. For a write up of these learnings along with best practices, see the accompanying blog post (also available in blog-post.md). For a lightweight SDK-only walkthrough of the same recon → find → triage → report → patch loop, see the companion cookbook.2026-06-05 anthropics threat ai opsec code
FROST: Fingerprinting Remotely using OPFS-based SSD TimingAbstract. Prior work showed that variations in SSD access time can be used to leak information about user activity, e.g., the websites a user accesses, and for covert data transmission. To achieve this, SSD contention side channels require accurate high-resolution timing measurements of I/O operations, e.g., through the io_uring kernel API. However, the impact of these attacks is limited in2026-06-01 fingerprinting remote ssd storage
In northern Ukraine, it was boy vs. Russian drone. The boy won.Anatolii and his father, Volodymyr Poltoratskyi, 49, had started noticing the glinting gossamer threads a few months earlier. “In winter, it’s actually beautiful in its own way,” Poltoratskyi said. “They hang across the road and on the trees like garlands, and frost forms on them.”2026-06-01 drone defense method tether
Durex sales hit by China’s condom crackdown“Algorithms have started to deprioritise content of a sexual nature . . . as a result, some Durex-related content has been deprioritised on social platforms in China,” the person said, adding that Reckitt was adjusting to the changes.2026-06-01 cn algorithms birthrate
ChatGPT for Google Sheets Exfiltrates Workbookshis attack occurs when any untrusted data source (e.g., from an imported sheet or ChatGPT connector) manipulates ChatGPT to run an attacker-controlled external script, which executes leveraging permissions the user has granted to the ChatGPT for Google Sheets extension. This vulnerability was responsibly disclosed to OpenAI. Despite multiple follow-ups, we received no communication beyond an automated reply to our initial disclosure. OpenAI's documentation fails to describe sensitive capabilities granted to the model (e.g., running privileged scripts) or risks of model manipulation via indirect prompt injection, instead focusing solely on functional limitations and data-handling concerns. As such, we are publishing our findings to enable informed decision-making regarding the risk surface.2026-06-01 chatgpt exfiltrate infosec attack
23andMe inherits lawsuit over ‘disturbing’ DNA data breach"The sale of this data on the dark web took place amidst a period of mounting anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander and antisemitic hate and violence – and explicitly called attention to the deeply personal and identifying nature of that information. This is disturbing and incredibly dangerous. Today, my office is suing 23andMe for its categorical failure to comply with California law." The lawsuit was filed against Chrome Holding Co., formerly known as 23andMe. TTAM Research Institute bought 23andMe's assets last year. TTAM Research Institute was founded and is led by Anne Wojcicki, who was also 23andMe's CEO at the time of the breach and one of the company's co-founders.2026-06-01 23andme lawsuit dna biometics ethics opsec genetics
everymuseum.org EveryMuseum dot org - Tell AI: "connect the EveryMuseum MCP" • 'Shuffle' to discover something unexpected • Browse by origin, date, collection, medium, and more • Download high-resolution public-domain works • Save favorites and build your own collection • Free, forever Museums have a complicated history wrt ownership, theft, access, etc. So, I felt like making them as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, in the simplest interface possible, was a small step in the right direction. If you like the site, please share it with friends and sign up for the newsletter. You can spend multiple lifetimes crawling every artifact and still have new stuff to investigate. There's art, science, architecture, design, research, sculpture, and I'm adding more all the time. The goal is 1M+ artifacts; we'll be there soon. The archive will always be incomplete, but I'll continue to push to include more artifacts to create as well-rounded a picture of history as possible. 2026-06-01 everymuseum art access museum
AV2 SpecificationAV2 is the next-generation video coding specification from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Building on the foundation of AV1, AV2 is engineered to provide superior compression efficiency, enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates. It is optimized for the evolving demands of streaming, broadcasting, and real-time video conferencing. This specification serves as the definitive technical reference for AV2 implementations. It outlines the bitstream syntax, semantics, and decoding processes required to ensure full conformance. AV2 provides enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range.2026-05-31 av2 specification next-generation video coding
Domain Expertise Has Always Been the Real Moat | Aaron BrethorstSo the most valuable person in this new world is the one who has both skills because they can verify at both layers. They know the generated code is sound and they know the answers it produces are true. They can write the test that encodes “a driver can’t exceed eleven hours” because they know the rule, and they can tell that the test itself is meaningful because they know what they’re testing. The agent does the transcription. They do the judging, twice.2026-05-31 expertise moat
Security Envelope Pattern Archive – a collection by S.E.C.R.E.T. Welcome to the security envelope pattern archive, the living heart of the S.E.C.R.E.T. Project. Here you’ll find a meticulously classified portfolio of patterns that once guarded confidential contents—from banking slips to bureaucratic missives. Each entry is cataloged by visual taxonomy, poetic description, and historical context. This is no ordinary collection; it is a hidden museum of miniature marvels, each one whispering of secrecy, intention, and the artistry of concealment. Begin your exploration, and join us in proudly overthinking the under-appreciated.2026-05-31 security envelope pattern archive collection
Does your data spark joy? Performance gains from domain upsampling at the end of trainingIn this work, we show how to leverage the smaller domain specific datasets by upsampling them relative to CC at the end of training to drive performance improvements on difficult benchmarks. This simple technique allows us to improve up to 6.90 pp on MMLU, 8.26 pp on GSM8K, and 6.17 pp on HumanEval relative to the base data mix for a 7B model trained for 1 trillion (T) tokens, thus rivaling Llama-2 (7B)—a model trained for twice as long. We experiment with ablating the duration of domain upsampling from 5% to 30% of training and find that 10% to 20% percent is optimal for navigating the tradeoff between general language modeling capabilities and targeted benchmarks. We also use domain upsampling to characterize at scale the utility of individual datasets for improving various benchmarks by removing them during this final phase of training. This tool opens up the ability to experiment with the impact of different pretraining datasets at scale, but at an order of magnitude lower cost compared to full pretraining runs.2026-05-31 joy performance data training ai ml
Big Tech is Becoming the Executor of the DeadMuch of the current guidance on digital legacies urges individuals to take control of their digital lives before they die. Tech companies offer various features to provide users with a sense of posthumous agency, such as Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Apple’s Digital Legacy Program, and Meta’s Legacy Contact and Memorialization settings. While these tools are marketed as a means of establishing posthumous control, they are little more than a façade of agency that ends where the corporate fine print begins. Ultimately, any authority we exercise remains subordinate to corporate terms of service, which are perpetually rewritten at the platform’s discretion and largely without oversight. What makes Meta’s patent such an effective warning sign is that it imagines a future where posthumous agency isn’t primarily about heirs accessing or closing an account. It turns to platforms retaining the right to keep an account operationally ‘present,’ producing engagement as if the user were still there.2026-05-30 digital death digital-afterlife data privacy meta patents
Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuationSince our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month.2026-05-30 anthropic funding ai ipo financial
Panmure Liberum Strategy What if... the AI boom goes into reverse?Strategy Economics & ESG·14 May 2026 2026-05-28 panmure liberum log having trouble ai
What made the DoJ go after this particular prediction market insider?One could plausibly argue that insider trading isn’t just a bug of prediction markets, it is an essential feature in what insiders insist is a mechanism for “truth”. And evidence of the Trump administration’s support for prediction markets is . . . manifold. Even the head of the American Gaming Association has called Michael Selig — the Trump-appointed head of the CFTC and the self-appointed prediction market regulator — “quite frankly, a joke” for his championing of the industry. Not that the president gets the joke. This is why the latest investigation is an intriguing development. Yes, this is just a solitary Google employee allegedly up to shenanigans with a very narrow type of bet — on what will top Google search rankings — but perhaps it is a sign of things to come? 2026-05-28 doj prediction market prediction-markets betting regulation
I’m Getting Into Mesh Networks... (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)Interconnected Local Meshes Distinct local groups being able to interconnect is a huge boon for content availability on the network, and the beauty is that all these network links in Reticulum automatically become redundant as more connections are made. A local mesh in Minneapolis could interconnect with a local mesh in Chicago over the internet, for example, but perhaps in the future some dedicated network operators are also able to establish a direct connection via microwave or LoRa between those cities. Connections may normally continue to traverse the internet at higher speeds, but in the event of an outage those alternate/ad-hoc paths can take over seamlessly, because they're all just paths on the same, single Reticulum network.2026-05-28 mesh networks meshtastic meshcore mesh-networks community reticulum
GitHub - microsoft/echo-rlECHO is an environment cross-entropy hybrid objective, which trains terminal agents by combining policy-gradient RL with an on-policy cross-entropy loss for predicting environment tokens. ECHO is implemented as an extension on top of SkyRL: SkyRL provides the core RL training stack, while this repo adds the terminal-agent integration, environment prediction loss, example configs, and a small SkyRL hook patch. 2026-05-28 github microsoft echo-rl training
OpenClaw-RL: Train Any Agent Simply by TalkingEvery agent interaction generates a next-state signal, namely the user reply, tool output, terminal or GUI state change that follows each action, yet no existing agentic RL system recovers it as a live, online learning source. We present OpenClaw-RL, a framework built on a simple observation: next-state signals are universal, and policy can learn from all of them simultaneously. Personal conversations, terminal executions, GUI interactions, SWE tasks, and tool-call traces are not separate training problems. They are all interactions that can be used to train the same policy in the same loop. Next-state signals encode two forms of information: evaluative signals, which indicate how well the action performed and are extracted as scalar rewards via a PRM judge; and directive signals, which indicate how the action should have been different and are recovered through Hindsight-Guided On-Policy Distillation (OPD). We extract textual hints from the next state, construct an enhanced teacher context, and provide token-level directional advantage supervision that is richer than any scalar reward. Due to the asynchronous design, the model serves live requests, the PRM judges ongoing interactions, and the trainer updates the policy at the same time, with zero coordination overhead between them. Applied to personal agents, OpenClaw-RL enables an agent to improve simply by being used, recovering conversational signals from user re-queries, corrections, and explicit feedback. Applied to general agents, the same infrastructure supports scalable RL across terminal, GUI, SWE, and tool-call settings, where we additionally demonstrate the utility of process rewards2026-05-28 openclaw-rl agent voice
Epicure: Navigating the Emergent Geometry of Food Ingredient EmbeddingsWe aggregate 4.14M recipes from 11 sources spanning seven languages (English, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, and Indian-English) and normalise the raw ingredient strings to 1,790 canonical entries via an LLM-augmented pipeline. A 203,508-edge ingredient–ingredient NPMI graph and an 80,019-edge typed FlavorDB ingredient–compound graph (2,247 typed compound nodes across 15 categories) seed three Metapath2Vec variants that share architecture and hyperparameters and differ only in the random-walk schema: Cooc walks the co-occurrence graph only, Chem walks the typed compound metapaths only, and Core blends both via injected ingredient–ingredient walks at controlled mixing, placing each model at a distinct point on the chemistry-vs-recipe-context spectrum. 2026-05-28 epicure geometry food recipes diet health
Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPSIt doesn't need to be this way. https:// is not the only way to connect and interface with the Internet. Some that you may know are ftp:// for file transfers, mailto: for email composition, ssh:// for secure shell access, irc:// for Internet Relay Chat, or magnet: for peer-to-peer downloads. The majority of Internet browsers do not play nicely even with these protocols, handing them off to other applications.2026-05-28 brennan smallweb internet protocol
The Wrong Side of the C'sFour phases of the network, four sets of C-words. The five that describe how the network governs us are the same five that name the controls of the studio. Same words, different sides.2026-05-25 networks binary essay alliteration
Fully automatic censorship removal for language modelsHeretic is a tool that removes censorship (aka "safety alignment") from transformer-based language models without expensive post-training. It combines an advanced implementation of directional ablation, also known as "abliteration" (Arditi et al. 2024, Lai 2025 (1, 2)), with a TPE-based parameter optimizer powered by Optuna.2026-05-25 heretic abliteration jailbreak code llms open-source
Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power - Vatican Newsgovernment regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I. protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened education to help students think critically about the technology action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I. safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.2026-05-25 pope magnifica-humanitas ai ethics religon
AudioMassAudioMass is a free, open source, web-based Audio and Waveform Editor. It runs entirely in the browser with no backend and no plugins required! Tips: Please keep in mind that most key shortcuts rely on the Shift + key combo. (eg Shift+Z for undo, Shift+C copy, Shift+X cut... etc ) You can load any type of audio your browser supports and perform operations such as fade in, cut, trim, change the volume, and apply a plethora of audio effects. Check out the codebase on Github 2026-05-25 audiomass free web-based audio
Cybersecurity Will Swallow Digital Policy in the AI AgeThat is the central tension now emerging in digital governance. Governments are likely to interpret genuine AI security risks as justification for even greater control over digital infrastructure, data, and technological ecosystems. Yet fragmentation and isolation may ultimately weaken security rather than strengthen it. The history of cybersecurity has repeatedly shown that resilience depends less on unilateral control than on collaboration: shared standards, coordinated defenses, information sharing, open research communities, and cooperation across governments, companies, technical experts, and civil society.2026-05-24 cybersecurity policy surveillance rights trends language
The Future PerfectIf you treat AI as a tool, you ask: how do I get the right answer? If you treat it as a medium, you ask: what happens if I push this? The difference is immediate. A prompt stops being an instruction that returns a correct (or not) answer and starts being a sketch—something provisional, something you can revise, distort, overwork. The point is not to nail it on the first try. You are trying to see what these models do under pressure. In my class, the first principle is simple: Do not take what comes back from prompts at face value. Interrogate it. Iterate on it. Stay with it longer than feels efficient. One of the clearest examples of this came from Roy Zhang, a student in the Master of Design Studies (MDes) program who graduated in 2025, who asked what sounds like a trivial question: what happens if you ask the same thing over and over again? He took a single image from the collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library and asked ChatGPT to generate twenty keywords describing it. Then he did it again. And again. Twenty times using the same prompt. He compared the returned lists of keywords with each successive list and found something fascinating. 2026-05-24 design ai archive-practice
Shape of Dreams, starring Zendaya.Welcome to Zendaya’s Dream Lab - Film written and directed by Spike Jonze.2026-05-24 video imagination dreams zendaya spikejonze dance
CMG Pitch Deck on Voice-Data Advertising 'Active Listening'. Consumers leave a data trail based on their conversations and onlinebehavior2. A.I. collects and analyzes this behavioral and voice data from 470+sources3. Processing voice data with behavioral data identifies an audience who is“ready-to-buy”4. We take this data, and align it with your products and services, to build anaudience list in a defined 10-mile radius5. This audience list is uploaded into our ad platforms to target your digitaladvertising6. Once launched, the technology automatically analyzes your site trafficand customers to fuel audience targeting on an ongoing basis2026-05-24 ftc media cox-media cmg-media listening active-listening pitch-deck ai
FTC to Require Cox Media Group, Two Other Firms to Pay Nearly $1 Million to Settle Charges They Deceived Customers AboutThe Federal Trade Commission will require Cox Media Group (CMG) and two smaller marketing firms to pay a total of $930,000 to settle allegations they deceived customers by falsely claiming to offer an AI-powered service that could target localized ads based on conversations captured from consumers’ smart devices and that consumers had opted into such targeting.2026-05-24 ftc media cox-media active-listening government cmg-media
Part of the Solution or Part of the ProblemAmericans are often influenced by their chosen media to expect and depend on binary choices, reducing perceptions to simple black-and-white options. Instead of accepting life’s nuances, they favor straightforward decisions, complicating rational political understanding. This approach also causes them to see opposing views as wholly evil, fueling strong opposition to rivals’ proposals. Ultimately, this leads to a deeply divided society, enabling a minority to seize power for their benefit. Therefore, one should be cautious of binary choices from the start.Americans are often influenced by their chosen media to expect and depend on binary choices, reducing perceptions to simple black-and-white options. Instead of accepting life’s nuances, they favor straightforward decisions, complicating rational political understanding. This approach also causes them to see opposing views as wholly evil, fueling strong opposition to rivals’ proposals. Ultimately, this leads to a deeply divided society, enabling a minority to seize power for their benefit. Therefore, one should be cautious of binary choices from the start.2026-05-24 politics binary problem-solution mindset
The Internet After Failed Utopias The Internet After Failed UtopiasVuk Ćosić looks back at the promises that once surrounded the internet and their afterlives. In conversation with Anika Meier for SLEEK, he speaks about nettime, browser art, artistic resistance, and the institutionalization of internet culture. He also reflects on the moment the community he believed in became, in his words, “an audience and a springboard for careers.” Looking at today’s debates around AI and crypto, he sees echoes of the promises that once surrounded the early internet. “We believed in some of the utopias because we wanted them to happen,” he says. “But we were also among the first to criticize them.”2026-05-24 internet art utopias
Acme — Design System ReferenceAcme design system Generated from src/styles/tokens.ts and src/components/ — use as a portable reference when prompting.2026-05-24 design reference
tufte-viz Claude Code skill — Edward Tufte data visualization principles2026-05-24 skill dataviz data data-visualization
The Colorist ArchiveA living archive of how artists work with color across time. Each artist profile scans publicly available works to trace dominant colors, a chromatic fingerprint, and the arc of a palette across a lifetime.256 Artists, 19,144 Works, 15 Collections.A living archive of how artists work with color across time. Each artist profile scans publicly available works to trace dominant colors, a chromatic fingerprint, and the arc of a palette across a lifetime.256 Artists, 19,144 Works, 15 Collections.2026-05-24 color design archive reference
The AI Resist ListNothing about the current trajectory of AI development is inevitable. It was shaped by the thousands of subjective decisions of a tiny elite, and continues its march based on the active participation and tacit consent of people globally. Inspired by Choose Democracy’s Resist List against authoritarianism, we organized the AI resistance movements we documented based on how they pressure different “Pillars of Support” that uphold and perpetuate the empires. Our list is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather we selected a sample of movements to show different approaches to resistance and to illustrate how anyone can help shape the future of AI development.2026-05-22 resist ai list
Americans Are Smashing Flock Cameras. The Surveillance State Has a Sabotage Problem. - State of SurveillanceTL;DR: People across the United States are cutting down, smashing, and dismantling Flock Safety surveillance cameras. At least 25 cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025. One Virginia man faces 25 criminal charges for systematically destroying 13 cameras—he says he did it for the Fourth Amendment. The destruction comes as public anger builds over Flock’s documented ICE connections. Cities are hiding camera locations. Reddit threads show near-universal support. This is what happens when a $7.5 billion surveillance company ignores public opposition.2026-05-17 flock cameras surveillance backlash
Canada is about to weaken every lock on your private messages — dontsurveil.meEvery messaging app in Canada would be required to build a second key. With Bill C-22, the government would hold the copy. The lock you trust would no longer be a lock only you can open. It would be a lock the locksmith was ordered to duplicate.2026-05-17 surveillance application canada
We let four AIs run radio stations. Here’s what happened. | Andon LabsThere’s a handmade, retro-looking radio sitting in our office that plays only four pre-programmed stations, none of which are run by humans. This is our latest project at Andon Labs, where we’re exploring what happens when AI runs real businesses autonomously. In the past, we’ve let our AI agents run a store, a cafe, and various vending machines. Now, though, we wanted to see if they could run a company in the media sector.2026-05-17 radio ai
OpenAI and Malta partner to bring ChatGPT Plus to all citizensMalta’s AI for All initiative(opens in a new window) will offer people of all backgrounds the opportunity to learn how AI can be used responsibly through a course developed by the University of Malta. The course is designed to help people understand what AI is, what it can and can’t do, and how to use it responsibly at home and work. After the course is completed, citizens can access ChatGPT Plus for one year at no cost to them. The first phase of the programme will launch in May, with the Malta Digital Innovation Authority managing distribution to eligible participants. The programme will scale as more Maltese residents and citizens abroad complete the course.2026-05-17 openai malta chatgpt anthropology experiment
GitHub - anthropics/claude-for-legal: A suite of plugins for legal workflows2026-05-16 ai legal claude anthropic
UK saves ‘millions’ of pounds by ditching Palantir for refugee systemMillions of pounds have been saved by replacing a Palantir IT system which helps to find homes for Ukrainian refugees with one built by its own experts, a government department has said. The Homes for Ukraine scheme matched people fleeing the conflict with offers of accommodation - a complex task Palantir initially supported for free but which grew to cost millions.2026-05-15 palantir surveillance ai ethics
Trillions of miles of data: Your car is spying on you, and it's only just the beginningThis is a privacy problem that can cost you money. Among the biggest customers for car data are insurance companies, and they're using it to charge some people higher prices. But there's no telling where your information is going. Some car companies admit they sell your data, but they don't have to say who's buying. That's to say nothing of the fact that you might find it a little creepy. Most consumers, experts say, have no idea it's even happening. 2026-05-13 ethics privacy surveillance automotive
Prompting best practicesPrompting best practices Copy page Comprehensive guide to prompt engineering techniques for Claude's latest models, covering clarity, examples, XML structuring, thinking, and agentic systems. This is the single reference for prompt engineering with Claude's latest models, including Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Claude Haiku 4.5. It covers foundational techniques, output control, tool use, thinking, and agentic systems. Jump to the section that matches your situation.2026-05-11 prompting guide claude best-practices
Trevor Paglen: The Lizard People are Here!This performance-lecture invites audiences to consider whether we are entering a new era of invisible architectures and algorithmic systems shaping perception, knowledge, and power. In the program, 2026 LG Guggenheim Award recipient, artist, and author Trevor Paglen traces a dense network of ideas spanning philosophy, belief, deception, and speculation. Bringing together psyops, artificial intelligence, magic, mind control, UFOs, the secret of the Ark of the Covenant, and the figure of a new demiurge, Paglen examines historical precedents for the manipulation of human perception and cognition at a moment when artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly pervasive.2026-05-11 nyc ai art event
Project Overview ‹ Your Brain on ChatGPT – MIT Media LabAs the educational impact of LLM use only begins to settle with the general population, in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of exploring a possible decrease in learning skills based on the preliminary results of our study. The use of LLM had a measurable impact on our participants, and while the benefits were initially apparent, as we demonstrated over the course of 4 sessions, which took place over 4 months, the LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring. We hope this study serves as a preliminary guide to encourage better understanding of the cognitive and practical impacts of AI on learning environments.2026-05-11 brain chatgpt mit study ai cognitive-debt
Warning: Instagram DMs Lose End-to-End Encryption Starting Today End-to-end encryption has been an opt-in messaging feature on Instagram since 2023, but Meta quietly removed it. Meta told The Guardian earlier this year that it is removing the encryption feature because not enough people adopted it. At the same time, Meta did not turn it on by2026-05-08 instagram dms privacy encryption meta
Sony Earnings Deck Now I would like to turn to the topic of AI. • When we think about further growth at Sony Group, AI is one of the most important themes for us to consider. • Specifically, the potential it holds for us across the Sony Group businesses to unlock new value creation and capture new opportunities for growth across our entertainment businesses. • Let me start by stating a core principle that guides our thinking about AI: Human creativity must remain at the center. • AI is a powerful tool — but it is not a replacement for artists or creators. • It is an amplifier of human imagination and a catalyst for new possibilities.2026-05-08 pdf sony ai electronics
AI Won’t Kill Hollywood45 million people in the United States now identify as professional content creators. Globally, that figure exceeds 200 million. The fastest-growing segment within that number is not Gen Z influencers: it is executives and founders, what analysts are calling the creator middle class: professionals who have adopted content creation as a core part of how they build businesses and reputations. The commercial incentive driving this is concrete. 77% of B2B buyers say they are more likely to purchase from a company whose executives are active on social media. The creator who currently makes authoritative business content on LinkedIn will soon begin to make authoritative short-form dramas on the same platform, with the same production values, at a cost that makes the current studio infrastructure look like an expensive anachronism.2026-05-07 hollywood industry transformation ai-hollywood media
SEAWORLD VENICE“Venice is in water, but has no water.”* Water, levels rising; water, which we drink and excrete in countless cycles every day; water, a vital, life-sustaining natural resource and highly managed commodity; water, to plunge in, dive in, and emerge from, perhaps transformed. Blending dance, theatre, and performance, the Austrian artist Florentina Holzinger uses her long-standing research into the element of water—as both subject and symbol—as a point of departure for an exploration of the human body in a radically changing landscape, in which nature and technology collide. The Austrian Pavilion becomes a machinic organism, in which action and its consequence on the body are negotiated. Underwater theme park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building, all in one, SEAWORLD VENICE complicates the dualisms of purity and pollution, sin and expiation; and renders visible the rubbish that is kept out of sight yet remains constantly present. SEAWORLD VENICE expands across the city through site-specific performances in water, air, and land. The series of experimental formats that Holzinger has been developing since 2020, titled Études, consists of site-specific choreographic exercises and performative actions in public space. Rising from the depths of the lagoon, where turbo-tourism’s rubbish lays to rest, and ascending into the city’s skies, Holzinger’s performers—human and otherwise—reveal the vulnerability and resilience of bodies and the world alike.2026-05-03 seaworld venice art water labiennale environment
Strange Rules Featuring works by Trevor Paglen Strange Rules introduces the concept of Protocol Art, a practice that engages with the underlying rules that dictate how culture is produced, distributed, and perceived in a digital age. These rules frequently manifest as algorithms, artificial intelligence models, computer protocols, platforms, and various technological infrastructures. Protocol Art does not simply use these tools; it exposes, analyses, and transforms them into artistic material itself. Consequently, the artwork is not merely a final product, it is a process governed by instructions, representing the invisible architecture that enables the aesthetic experience. This shift in perspective - moving from the object to the system, and from the singular author to collaboration and ultimately human-machine co-creation - defines one of the most urgent territories in contemporary research. The launch of Strange Rules inaugurates Palazzo Diedo, Venice, as the first space in Italy to foster a curatorial and theoretical reflection on Protocol Art, positioning itself at the forefront of the debate regarding the relationship between art and technology.2026-05-03 art venice technology labiennale
Matthew Wong’s rhapsodies in blue claim their place in art historyThe solo show Matthew Wong: Interiors at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi will bring the story full circle back to Venice. The works highlight his impressive range beyond landscape — interiors here encompass very diverse compositions — and the exhibition will set him in context in a Biennale rich this year in painting shows. Depictions of a door ajar in darkness, allowing piercing slices of brightness — “Inside”, “Sliver of Light”, “The Source” (all 2019) — are almost minimalist. Oval or slit shapes open into enigmatic pictures within pictures: the abstract “Teardrop” (2015), the distant house buried in “Origin” (2019), painted in ink on rice paper. All-over blue phantasmagorical scenes include a staircase spiralling up from choppy waves in “The Stairway” (2019), a translucent reflection of a barred window, giving on to winter trees, lighting up the monochrome “The Waiting Room” (2019), and the patchwork of decorative fragments around a window whose view brings further cobalt-violet eFects swarming into “Night Moods” (2018).2026-05-03 art artists venice venice-biennale labiennale 2026 bluetooth martinwong
Change of Protocol | Digital Art at the Venice BiennaleRight Click Save looks at a selection of shows that spotlight the relation of art and technology, from calming engagements with sound at the pavilion of the Holy See, to Eva and Franco Mattes’s examination of online “Rage Bait”. It is telling that three of the exhibitions have been curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is one of the defining contemporary art curators of his generation and a long-standing champion of Arts Technologies.2026-05-03 digital art venice labiennale
The Ear is the Eye of the SoulThe Pavilion of the Holy See returns to the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2026 with a deeply contemplative project titled The Ear is the Eye of the Soul. Presented by the Dicastery for Culture and Education, this ambitious exhibition brings together 24 artists in a multisensory exploration inspired by the life and legacy of Hildegard of Bingen. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, the Pavilion unfolds across two historic Venetian sites, transforming them into spaces of listening, reflection, and spiritual resonance. Set within the secluded Giardino Mistico in Cannaregio, the Pavilion’s first venue invites visitors into an immersive “sonic prayer.” Hidden within a 17th-century convent maintained by the Discalced Carmelite community, the garden becomes a living instrument. Here, artists including Brian Eno, FKA Twigs, Patti Smith, Meredith Monk, and Terry Riley present newly commissioned sound works. Each responds to Hildegard’s chants, visions, and writings through voice, instrumentation, and silence. Through headphones, visitors experience a continuously evolving composition orchestrated by Soundwalk Collective, incorporating real-time environmental data—from plant bioelectrical activity to the micro-acoustics of wind, water, and soil. The result is a meditative encounter that aligns with curator Koyo Kouoh’s Biennale vision of slowing down and attuning to quieter registers of perception.2026-05-03 labiennale venice 2026 art
Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard PrinceThe exhibition features more than fifty works, including photographs, videos, installations, sculptures, and paintings. It will also showcase new work by each artist and a collaboratively conceived zine, which incorporates images exchanged between the artists during the process of making this exhibition. “Helter Skelter” unfolds across the ground and first floor of the Venetian palazzo through a series of thematic and conceptual juxtapositions, combining works by both artists to illuminate each of their practices and tease out shared subject matter and mutual obsessions. Underlying the elective affinities between their artistic projects, “Helter Skelter” reveals a certain vernacular edge in the U.S., where both artists live and work: “A country forever tarnished by its history of slavery; a country defined by its remarkable musical traditions rooted in Black culture; a country of doing without, but making good; a country of spirit and prayer and freedom of expression; a country of protest and subcultures and humor and celebrity,” according to Nancy Spector. 2026-05-03 richard-prince arthur-jafa art venice 2-26 labiennale
Creative Australia announces title and first details for Khaled Sabsabi’s presentation at the 61st International Art ExhCreative Australia has announced the first details of Khaled Sabsabi’s presentation in the Australia Pavilion for the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Michael Dagostino. In a historic first for an Australian representative, as announced by La Biennale di Venezia, Sabsabi will also present a work in the Biennale Arte 2026’s main exhibition, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. The selection of artists for participation in the main exhibition is made through a curatorial process managed by La Biennale di Venezia. The presentation at the Australia Pavilion will be titled conference of one’s self and will be on exhibition from May 9 to November 22, 2026. The artwork explores spirituality, migration, and the vastness of shared humanity. Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi brings over 35 years of practice engaged with experiences of spirituality, migration, displacement, and social justice. Sabsabi has worked with Dagostino on numerous projects over many years and their collaboration arises from shared migrant experiences in Western Sydney, one of Australia’s most culturally diverse areas. 2026-05-03 australia venice art labiennale biennale diversity
‘It looks like a gay disco at six in the morning’: at home with artist Andreas AngelidakisAndreas Angelidakis’s apartment is in flux as the Athens-based artist explores, through his home environment, his next international show. Maquettes are being considered, juxtapositions judged and details fixed. The place is a whirlpool of ideas and experimentation, prototypes and aftermaths: somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis in the provocations that spin out, informed by keepsakes, memories and losses, the personal and political. The chaos is ruled over by an elderly Pomeranian called Lupo, little tongue lolling. Angelidakis is representing Greece at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens next month. Frustrated, he’s just sacked his production team (one suspects this is part of the architect-turned-artist’s charmingly madcap process and they will be back on board within hours). There’s a treadmill topped with a pink-feathered shop-dummy head he’s considering fashioning into a camp police car alongside glitzy police riot shields and glass-sided display fridges holding multi-limbed torsos rather than the usual energy drinks. His show, Escape Room, will be an intensely layered exploration of the digital and the real. 2026-05-03 looks gay disco six morning
BARRY X BALL – THE SHAPE OF TIME - Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggioredvanced digital technologies meet traditional craftsmanship at the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore Barry X Ball reinvents historic masterpieces using new materials and forms from May 9 to November 22, 2026 Curated by Bob Nickas The Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore presents The Shape of Time, a major retrospective dedicated to the sculptural practice 2026-05-03 venice labiennale 2026 art biennale
barryxball.comarry X Ball was born in 1955 in Pasadena, CA and lives and works in New York. He has reinvigorated the age-old tradition of figurative sculpture through the use of unconventional materials and methods. Ball employs a complex array of equipment and procedures to realize his sculptures, ranging from the cutting edge to the traditional, from 3D digital scanning, virtual modeling, 3D printing, and computer-controlled milling to hyper-detailed hand carving and polishing. Although paying reverent homage to their historical antecedents, they are completely new. With their simultaneous fever-pitch intensity and surreal stillness, Barry X Ball’s bravura works make an expansive case for the reconsideration of contemporary sculptural practice. 2026-05-03 barryxball art labiennale artists 2026 venice venice-biennale
Maja Malou Lyse’s Things To Come at La Biennale di Venezia“Things to Come” takes its title from the 1936 science-fiction film of the same name, based on H. G. Wells’ “The Shape of Things to Come”, a visionary work speculating on future technologies, social structures, and the fate of humanity. Drawing this speculative impulse into the present, Lyse’s exhibition engages with recent scientific research suggesting that exposure to virtual sexual stimuli can measurably increase sperm motility. The finding offers a striking perspective on how image consumption does not merely influence imagination or ideology, but enters the biological realm. Set against a widely documented global decline in male fertility, “Things to Come” considers the paradoxical role of contemporary media technologies as both toxin and antidote. Science, fiction, and pornography intersect as entangled image systems shaping how futures are imagined, governed, and lived.2026-05-03 art venice labiennale venice-biennale technology identity majamaloulyse
Artist Maja Malou Lyse 1_Maja-Malou_Lyse_MM_overgaden_photo-by_ Maja Malou Lyse (b. 1993, Denmark) is a multidisciplinary artist whose bold and provocative work dissects the entanglements of desire, power, and mass media. At the core of her practice lies a critical examination of the body’s relationship to the image—a dynamic rendered increasingly complex in the digital age. Lyse interrogates how images, both ubiquitous and unrelenting, shape sexuality, self-perception, and the commodification of identity, while tracing how media, the pornographic image, and cultural history construct and preserve these ideas over time. Her work situates itself within the very platforms that dominate our visual environment—television, magazines, tabloids, billboards, and social media. By appropriating and reconfiguring these familiar spaces, she performs incisive interventions that unravel the symbiotic relationship between art and media reality. In doing so, she exposes the spectacle that defines contemporary culture: one that seduces as much as it subjugates, embedding itself deep within our collective consciousness.2026-05-03 artist majamaloulyse venice 2026 labiennale
1. Press kit on EgnyteImage folders 2026-05-03 images folder majamaloulyse art press-kit venice venice-biennale
Biennale Arte 2026 | Homepage 2026The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh – will run from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026 (preview 6, 7, 8 May) at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues, and in various locations around Venice. With the full support of Koyo Kouoh’s family, La Biennale di Venezia decided to carry out her Exhibition. It will do so by following the project just as she conceived and defined it, with the purpose of preserving, enhancing and disseminating her ideas and the work she pursued.2026-05-03 biennale international venice veinice-biennale art 2026
Supreme Court Wrangles With Police Use of Cell Location Data to Find SuspectsDuring two hours of oral arguments that scrambled the court’s usual ideological alliances, the justices debated how the Constitution’s traditional protections apply to the rapidly changing technology that has made it easier for the police to scoop up vast amounts of data to assemble a detailed look at a person’s movements and activities. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, lobbed the toughest questions at the Justice Department’s lawyer, expressing a deep concern that the government’s position on accessing location data would apply similarly to other forms of electronic data, including emails, photos and documents. On the other side, Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh seemed most worried about disrupting the work of law enforcement. Justice Kavanaugh asked Mr. Chatrie’s lawyer to explain how the detective’s actions constituted “bad police work,” suggesting that he had gone through “a lot of the steps that should be applauded.”2026-04-27 geo-fence privacy security surveillance law-enforcement scotus
U.S. companies back Sam Altman’s World ID even as much of the world pushes backIn the last three years, several governments in Asia and Africa have halted World’s operations due to concerns about the collection of biometric information from their citizens and the violation of privacy laws. Parts of Europe have banned it outright and called for the deletion of logged data. In Latin America, sign-ups are on pause, with several probes underway.2026-04-27 biometics identity wordcoin sam-altman creepy-sam-altman
PySDR: A Guide to SDR and DSP using PythonWelcome to PySDR, a free online textbook (not a Python library!) that provides a gentle introduction to wireless communications and software-defined radio (SDR) using an abundance of diagrams, animations, and Python code examples. From FFTs to filters to digital modulation to receiving and transmitting from SDRs in Python, PySDR has you covered!2026-04-27 pysdr guide sdr python rf radio
Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.)After clients review their embryo options for serious health risks, particularly hereditary conditions, “then, fine,” he says. “If you care about IQ, maybe you kind of look at it.” “Some don’t care about it at all and some care a lot,” adds Anomaly, who seems to be among the latter. A former Duke University philosophy lecturer, he wrote in a 2018 paper, titled “Defending Eugenics,” that he was concerned about successful, well-educated women “substituting cats for kids,” which would result in “bad effects on the gene pool” over time. “The current demographics of Western countries are troubling,” he wrote, “as people with a higher IQ, more education, and greater income reproduce at relatively low levels.” Musk shares a similar perspective, which helps explain why he’s had at least 14 children, including four with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neuralink. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Zilis, a Yale-educated AI specialist, told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson.2026-04-27 creepy-elon-musk genetic-optimization genetics dna
The Post-Christian ConditionWhat we are living through now is the latest phase of the post-Christian condition: the Recoil. This Recoil is not a recoil from the post-Christian condition itself — nobody in the Recoil has actually seen the condition clearly enough, yet, to recoil from it as such. It is a recoil from the discovered dependency. The post-Christian condition slowly realized that the goods it claimed as its own achievements of prosperity, democracy, freedom, rights, human dignity, and the will to defend civilization were never its own production. They were borrowed capital, running on the Biblical substrate, and it had been spending down for two centuries without being able to reproduce it. The Recoil is the moment the account approaches zero, and the response is a desperate attempt at refinancing — reaching back toward Christianity, or what they imagine Christianity to be, to extract from it one more round of civilizational credit, to graft the goods back onto the root they were cut from. 2026-04-27 post-christian spectacle recoil
‘Why we must fight Palantir’ In his anti-Palantir manifesto, Halpin argues that the internet was designed as a universal system, not the property of any single government, rejecting Palantir's call for nationalistic engineering. "Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country," he wrote.2026-04-27 palantir privacy surveillance creepy-alex-karp culture
Here Are the Artists on the 2026 Turner Prize ShortlistA jury of four British art professionals from the South London Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Whitworth, and the Arts Council Collection selected this year’s candidates, per usual, based on showcases staged over the past year. Each artist is already guaranteed £10,000 ($13,400). But, the jury will also announce a single winner on December 10, based on both the work that got them nominated and their contribution to the annual exhibition, as of 2017. That awardee will receive an additional £15,000 ($20,200)—and entry into the acclaimed pantheon alongside previous winners like Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor.2026-04-26 turner-prize art 2026
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood Plot a Mysterious Art Show in VeniceSomething cryptic is unfolding in Venice next month. Coinciding with the Venice Biennale, artists Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood will unveil a new body of work in a small gallery on the Fondamenta dei Penini—except details are elusive. What can we expect? “Your guess is as good as ours,” Yorke told me over email.2026-04-26 art music veinice-biennale thom-yorke
AI: Anthropic’s ‘fascinating’ internal test of AI Agents Shopping. RTZ #1068“Anthropic calls this an “uncomfortable implication:” when agents of different strengths meet in real markets, people could end up on the losing side without ever knowing it. The company admits the experiment wasn’t built to dig into these dynamics in detail and says more research is needed.”2026-04-26 anthropic internal test agents ai trust
Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human IntelligenceIt is within this perspective that the present Note addresses the anthropological and ethical challenges raised by AI—issues that are particularly significant, as one of the goals of this technology is to imitate the human intelligence that designed it. For instance, unlike many other human creations, AI can be trained on the results of human creativity and then generate new “artifacts” with a level of speed and skill that often rivals or surpasses what humans can do, such as producing text or images indistinguishable from human compositions. This raises critical concerns about AI’s potential role in the growing crisis of truth in the public forum. Moreover, this technology is designed to learn and make certain choices autonomously, adapting to new situations and providing solutions not foreseen by its programmers, and thus, it raises fundamental questions about ethical responsibility and human safety, with broader implications for society as a whole. This new situation has prompted many people to reflect on what it means to be human and the role of humanity in the world. 2026-04-26 ai religon pope doctrine
Introducing OpenAI Privacy FilterPrivacy Filter is a small model with frontier personal data detection capability. It is designed for high-throughput privacy workflows, and is able to perform context-aware detection of PII in unstructured text. It can run locally, which means that PII can be masked or redacted without leaving your machine. It processes long inputs efficiently, making redaction decisions in a quick, single pass.2026-04-26 openai privacy
AI: Fragility of today’s Claude Cowork type AI Agent Apps. RTZ 1061The Bigger Picture I'd like to unpack today is how memory fragility is a key bumpy road for today's AI Agents. And my take on how long our best AI companies will take researching and commercializing solutions for it all. Likely done over stages across several years. Taking longer than we’d like. Let's get started.2026-04-19 fragility claude cowork type memory agents
The creative software industry has declared war on AdobePerhaps coincidently, Canva also dropped its own bomb on Adobe’s After Effects this week. Canva has made the full version of Cavalry available for free instead of locking the motion graphics software behind its own user subscriptions, after the design platform acquired it back in February. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Canva did a similar thing last year with Affinity — a trio of apps it acquired that provide similar features to Adobe’s Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign software. While Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2, and Affinity Publisher 2 were each a one-off $69.99 payment before (or $169.99 for all three), they’ve since been combined into a single, entirely free app.2026-04-19 scorched-earth-strategy adobe software open-source pricing
BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS | TRACK 01. THE ENCYCLOPEDIAKahlil Joseph’s debut feature film, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. 2026-04-19 video music culture art
The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine2026-04-19 surveillance privacy wired frt facial-recognition creepy-jim-dolan