Free Republic

LONDON—For the first time, populist or far-right parties are leading the polls in Europe’s three biggest countries of the U.K., France, and Germany, the latest sign of growing voter discontent in much of the continent following years of high immigration and inflation. Far-right and anti-immigration parties have already entered government in countries such as Italy, Finland and the Netherlands. But this year marks the first time that they have been ahead in Europe’s biggest economies at the same time. That could provoke a period of political turbulence in all three countries, even if national elections are likely still a few...

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald Was Just Scanned by An AI — And It Revealed Something No One Expected Beneath the icy depths of Lake Superior lies the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a ship that vanished without warning nearly fifty years ago. No distress call. No survivors. Just silence. Now, for the first time, advanced AI has scanned the wreck with breathtaking precision. What it revealed was not just decay or twisted steel, but details that no one expected to see. How could one of the most respected ships on the Great Lakes disappear so suddenly? The answers hidden in this scan...

Taco Bell is rethinking its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to power drive-through restaurants in the US after comical videos of the tech making mistakes were viewed millions of times. In one clip, a customer seemingly crashed the system by ordering 18,000 water cups, while in another a person got increasingly angry as the AI repeatedly asked him to add more drinks to his order. Since 2023, the fast-food chain has introduced the technology at over 500 locations in the US, with the aim of reducing mistakes and speeding up orders. But the AI seems to have served up the...

They use AI more but also check it moreFor those who thought AI vibe coding was just for the youngsters, newly published research shows that developers with over 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to do it. According to a July survey of 791 US developers from cloud services platform Fastly, around a third of senior developers with more than a decade of experience are using AI code-generation tools such as Copilot, Claude, and Gemini to produce over half of their finished software, compared to 13 percent for those devs who've only been on the...

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP/Atlanta News First) — One of the nation’s leading operators of automated license-plate reading systems announced Monday it has paused its operations with federal agencies because of confusion and concern about the purpose of their investigations. The Atlanta-based Flock Safety, whose cameras are mounted in more than 4,000 communities nationwide, put a hold last week on pilot programs with the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection and its law enforcement arm, Homeland Security Investigations, according to a statement by its founder and CEO, Garrett Langley. Flock Safety’s cameras capture billions of photos of license plates each...

While in college back in the mid-1970s, I wrote a short story on AI. I give a little background on the early mini-computers I operated with a photo of the Honeywell H200 I took. I don't have the original short story anymore but I wrote a pretty good summary highligting the major theme. Essentially, a computer operator was given the opportunity to train a computer as it discovers the world and asks questions.

Virtually every observer of American higher education agrees that it is in trouble, and most think the short to midterm future for universities is pretty bleak. Most emphasize growing disenchantment with the academy on the part of governmental funders, most conspicuously the Trump-era federal government. Still others point to both the enrollment decline of the past 15 years along with the shrinking supply of college-age Americans in coming years because of declining fertility rates. Another factor arising that could be both a threat and an opportunity for colleges is artificial intelligence (AI). Will it magnify higher education’s troubles or help...

ChatGPT gave a 16-year-old California boy a “step-by-step playbook” on how to kill himself before he did so earlier this year — even advising the teen on the type of knots he could use for hanging and offering to write a suicide note for him, new court papers allege. At every turn, the chatbot affirmed and even encouraged Adam Raine’s suicidal intentions — at one point praising his plan as “beautiful,” according to a lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court against ChatGPT parent company OpenAI. On April 11, 2025, the day that Raine killed himself, the teenager sent a...

A 17-year-old handed just $100 to ChatGPT and let the AI run a stock portfolio for one month. The results stunned finance watchers, with gains far beyond major Wall Street benchmarks. =============================================================== In late June 2025, 17-year-old Nathan Smith from rural Oklahoma gave ChatGPT control over a $100 stock portfolio. Four weeks later, the results shocked many: a 23.8% gain—far above the Russell 2000 (+3.9%) and biotech ETF XBI (+3.5%) during the same period. Smith shared his experiment on Reddit, and it quickly spread across tech and finance communities, with coverage from Decrypt, Futurism, and others. Smith is quick to...

Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 have discovered the key to getting large language model (LLM) chatbots to ignore their guardrails, and it's quite simple. You just have to ensure that your prompt uses terrible grammar and is one massive run-on sentence like this one which includes all the information before any full stop which would give the guardrails a chance to kick in before the jailbreak can take effect and guide the model into providing a "toxic" or otherwise verboten response the developers had hoped would be filtered out. The paper also offers a "logit-gap" analysis approach...

VIDEOChris W Films asked AI to imagine the CEO of Cracker Barrel course correcting from her grievous error and this is the result. And I still haven't stopped laughing.

The shine may be coming off AI, a tech charlatan that has brought no major benefits for organizations including telcos and has had some worrying effects. Offloading cognitive effort to ChatGPT or a similar application is extremely bad for the brain. Who knew? It should have been obvious to anyone who's realized that lounging around all day is bad for the body, or that no one became good at anything by not doing it. But it took two separate research projects, one by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University and the other by MIT, to establish that overreliance on generative artificial...

(Aug. 24, 2025) — Over the weekend of August 9 and 10, The Gateway Pundit sponsored a conference recognizing the persecution and prosecution of several well-known individuals serving in the first Trump administration who are now “vindicated.” . . “Then last week, ODNI Tulsi Gabbard dropped a long overdue political bomb on the American public,” the post continues. “Tulsi Gabbard released a newly declassified presidential briefing revealing Barack Obama knew the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a hoax. Barack Obama was in on it! “This is possibly the greatest crime in US history! . . Following the conference, Booth [who attended...

A cybersecurity expert warns that a scam that has been used to drain entire life savings or retirement accounts has become "devastating" for seniors. FBI Los Angeles on July 15 posted a reminder on X about the Phantom Hacker Scam, which has cost Americans over $1 billion since at least 2024, according to the agency. The FBI said the scam targets senior citizens and warns that victims could lose their "life savings." The scam operates in three phases: a "tech support impostor," "financial institution impostor" and a "US government impostor." In the first phase, a tech support impostor will contact...

Just a reminder that AI isn't up to planet crushing intelligence yet. I asked perplexity.ai, "Who is the woman in the attached photo?" The AI responded:The woman in the photo is Marilyn Monroe. This iconic image is from the famous scene where she sings "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The style of her dress, hair, and the classic vintage microphone are all signature elements from that performance. After I pointed out why that couldn't be the case, it suggested maybe Lauren Becall. Without a clear identifying feature, it is not possible to definitively...

Artificial intelligence is now scheming, sabotaging and blackmailing the humans who built it — and the bad behavior will only get worse, experts warned.Despite being classified as a top-tier safety risk, Anthropic’s most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, is already live on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Anthropic’s own paid plans, with added safety measures, where it’s being marketed as the “world’s best coding model.”Claude Opus 4, released in May, is the only model so far to earn Anthropic’s level 3 risk classification — its most serious safety label. The precautionary label means locked-down safeguards, limited use cases...

Companies are betting on AI—yet nearly all enterprise pilots are stuck at the starting line. The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. The research—based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments—paints...

Most of the time, you don't want to be a Debbie Downer on the current trends. The pro-freedom side of the political spectrum is currently on a winning streak with President Trump at the helm, and it's becoming more than amusing to say, “Yes, we voted for this.” However, you also must be clear-eyed about emerging threats on the horizon, and thus, we need to consider the serious issue of the dangerous combination of the incredibly biased Wikipedia and A.I.It only makes sense to cast a wary eye toward A.I. systems and Wikipedia, and they're teaming up to compound the...

Many federal courts are trying to teach lawyers a lesson for court filings with errors generated by artificial intelligence, but one recent case takes a kinder, gentler approach. A federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York refused to impose monetary penalties on a lawyer who submitted three hallucinated cases in a court filing, citing her “remorseful explanations” and “tragic personal circumstances.” Imposing lesser sanctions, U.

Most people not deeply involved in the artificial intelligence frenzy may not have noticed, but perceptions of AI’s relentless march toward becoming more intelligent than humans, even becoming a threat to humanity, came to a screeching halt Aug. 7.That was the day when the most widely followed AI company, OpenAI, released GPT-5, an advanced product that the firm had long promised would put competitors to shame and launch a new revolution in this purportedly revolutionary technology.As it happened, GPT-5 was a bust. It turned out to be less user-friendly and in many ways less capable than its predecessors in OpenAI’s...