Japan’s government is battling record-low approval ratings as consumers voice anger at soaring rice prices just weeks before key national elections. Attempts to bring down the price of the Japanese staple have had little effect, prompting calls for a reduction in the consumption (sales) tax to ease…

A majority of US companies say they will have to raise their prices to accommodate Donald Trump’s tariffs in the US, according to a new report. More than half (54%) of the US companies surveyed by insurance company Allianz said they will have to raise prices to accommodate the cost of the tariffs.…

A grim prediction made in a manga first published a quarter of a century ago is being blamed for a dramatic fall in holiday bookings to Japan from several Asian countries. Flight reservations to Japan from some of its key tourism markets have reportedly plummeted, with some linking the fall to The…

Subscribe to Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At Get the free version of my newsletter. No spam ever, unsubscribe anytime. Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week,…

The new hire had a simple task. All they had to do was assign people to work on a new web development project based on the client's budget and the team's availability. But the staffer soon ran into an unexpected problem: They couldn't dismiss an innocuous pop-up blocking files that contained…

Violent tornado outbreaks, like the storms that tore through parts of St. Louis and London, Kentucky, on May 16, have made 2025 seem like an especially active, deadly and destructive year for tornadoes. The U.S. has had more reported tornadoes than normal – over 960 as of May 22, according to the…

AI’s integration into our lives is the most significant shift in online life in more than a decade. Hundreds of millions of people now regularly turn to chatbots for help with homework, research, coding, or to create images and videos. But what’s powering all of that? Today, new analysis by MIT…

Table of Contents The feeling If you’re like me, you’ve had this strange, uneasy feeling about the job market for a few years now. It’s like a splinter in the brain. We know something is deeply broken about the whole system, but it’s impossible to grasp or articulate. I’m writing this because I…

In this post I’ll show you how I found a zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel using OpenAI’s o3 model. I found the vulnerability with nothing more complicated than the o3 API – no scaffolding, no agentic frameworks, no tool use. Recently I’ve been auditing ksmbd for vulnerabilities. ksmbd is “a…

If you've been worried about the AI singularity taking over every job and leaving you out on street, you can now breathe a sigh of relief, because AI isn't coming for your career anytime soon. Not because it doesn't want to — but because it literally can't. A recent experiment by researchers at…

I’ve performed hundreds of security reviews over a decade. Here’s how to stack the deck in your favor. One of the most critical phases of the secure software development cycle is the security audit: an independent assessment of one’s code or systems that’s designed to flag possible flaws. I’ve…

Moderna said on Wednesday it had withdrawn an application seeking approval for its flu and Covid combination vaccine candidate after discussions with the US Food and Drug Administration. The company said it would resubmit the application later this year with vaccine efficacy data from a late-stage…

The destruction of the world’s forests reached the highest level ever recorded in 2024, driven by a surge in fires caused by global heating, according to “frightening” new data. From the Brazilian Amazon to the Siberian taiga, Earth’s forests disappeared at a record rate last year, losing an area…

UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate, has secretly paid nursing homes thousands in bonuses to help slash hospital transfers for ailing residents – part of a series of cost-cutting tactics that has saved the company millions, but at times risked residents’ health, a…

404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists. Our intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Become a paid subscriber here for access to all of our articles ad-free and bonus content. A student has made a…

CYBERUK Peter Garraghan – CEO of Mindgard and professor of distributed systems at Lancaster University – asked the CYBERUK audience for a show of hands: how many had banned generative AI in their organizations? Three hands went up. "And how many, in your deepest of hearts, actually have a good grasp…

Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe A few years ago, in 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired for claiming that the chatbot he was working on was sentient. He believed that it could feel…

▶ Follow live updates on President Donald Trump and his administration WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Saturday ripped into Walmart, saying on social media that the retail giant should eat the additional costs created by his tariffs. As Trump has jacked up import taxes, he has tried to…

The university says it has no confidence in a widely circulated paper by an economics graduate student May 16, 2025 at 9:46 am ET The Massachusetts Institute of Technology didn’t give details on what it believes is wrong with the paper. Photo: Simon Simard/Bloomberg The Massachusetts Institute of…

Joe Biden “failed this country in the most important job that he had” by deciding to run for another term as US president before dropping out of the election that returned Donald Trump to the White House, where he has unflinchingly assaulted democratic norms, the former representative Beto O’Rourke…

In a week in which former allies in a redividing globe separately commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war, the sense of a runaway descent towards a third world war draws ever closer. The implosion of Pax Americana, the interconnectedness of conflicts, the new willingness…

As I write this article, I have a cold. At some point in the past couple of weeks, I managed to inhale a droplet of water suspended in the air that contained hundreds or thousands of copies of a virus (probably a rhinovirus, the kind that causes most common colds). That virus infected my throat and…

Artificial intelligence companies have been urged to replicate the safety calculations that underpinned Robert Oppenheimer’s first nuclear test before they release all-powerful systems. Max Tegmark, a leading voice in AI safety, said he had carried out calculations akin to those of the US physicist…

At least 216 children have died of influenza in the US during the last flu season in what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said was classified as the first high severity season overall and for all age groups since 2017-2018. That number marks the highest pediatric death toll…

Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg the company is in the midst of a recruitment drive to ensure customers always have a human to talk to. “[I]t’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want,” he said. The apparent turnaround comes…

Eighty years after the second world war, polling shows many Americans and western Europeans believe an even more devastating third global conflict could break out within a decade, with tensions with Russia seen as the most probable cause. As Europe prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day,…

On Monday, April 29th, Luis von Ahn, the billionaire CEO of the popular language learning app Duolingo, made a public announcement that his company is officially "going to be AI-first.” Duolingo, von Ahn wrote in an email to all employees that was also posted to LinkedIn, will “gradually stop using…

The generative AI revolution shows no sign of slowing as OpenAI recently rolled out its GPT-4.5 model to paying ChatGPT users, while competitors have announced plans to introduce their own latest models—including Anthropic, which unveiled Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its latest language model, late last…

Executive summary Shortages of some goods expected in the US starting later this month, because of tariffs. The power outage on the Iberian Peninsula was the worst in Europe since 2003, and Europe may have been close to a more widespread blackout. Trump wants to involve the military in policing…

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that one of the reasons why tech companies are so enthusiastic about shoving AI into every product and service is that they fundamentally do not understand why people dislike AI. I will elaborate. I was recently made aware of the Jetbrains developer ecosystem…

A Soviet-era spacecraft meant to land on Venus in the 1970s is expected to soon plunge uncontrolled back to Earth. It’s too early to know where the half-ton mass of metal might come down or how much of it will survive re-entry, according to space debris-tracking experts. Dutch scientist Marco…

Donald Trump has signed an executive order that seeks to cut public funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, accusing them of leftwing bias. The order, signed late on Thursday, directs the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which sends funds to NPR and…

A leading immunologist warned of a “post-herd-immunity world”, as measles outbreaks affect communities with low vaccination rates in the American south-west, Mexico and Canada. The US is enduring the largest measles outbreak in a quarter-century. Centered in west Texas, the measles outbreak has…

Small packages Microsoft’s “1‑bit” AI model runs on a CPU only, while matching larger systems Future AI might not need supercomputers thanks to models like BitNet b1.58 2B4T. Kyle Orland – Apr 18, 2025 3:46 PM | 105 Can big AI models get by with "smaller" weights? Credit: Getty Images Can big AI…

OpenAI also said it would consider releasing AI models that it judged to be “high risk” as long as it has taken appropriate steps to reduce those dangers—and would even consider releasing a model that presented what it called “critical risk” if a rival AI lab had already released a similar model.…

Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool artificial intelligence chatbots on key topics, offering a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform. Experts warn the problem is worsening as more people…

OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models. Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult…

The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality-control program for testing fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters. The suspension is another disruption to the nation’s food-safety…