Free Republic

Tech billionaire Elon Musk — who spearheaded the cost-cutting efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — said he was “disappointed” to see the massive legislative package of Republican priorities make it through the House. “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit… and it undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in a preview of an interview set to air this weekend on “CBS Sunday Morning.” The bill — titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” adopting Trump’s slogan for the measure — passed the House...

ChatGPT's latest artificial intelligence model has refused to switch itself off, researchers claim. The model, created by the owner of ChatGPT, has reportedly disobeyed human instruction and refused to power down. Experts say they gave the AI system a clear command but the o3 model, developed by OpenAI and described as the 'smartest and most capable to date', tampered with its computer code to avoid an automatic shutdown. According to The Telegraph, AI safety firm Palisade Research said: 'OpenAI's o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off. 'It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow...

Payment card giants Visa and Mastercard have announced plans to integrate with AI “agents,” enabling them to make purchases on users’ behalf by accessing their credit card information. According to Visa, the agents would verify purchases with users at first, but would gain more autonomy over time. AI agents, or “personal assistants,” are advanced versions of popular chatbot large language models (LLMs). They are designed to simplify users’ lives by taking over critical functions across work and day-to-day life. So far, progress on these AI agents has been slow, with little to show for it. However, the payment card companies...

Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler stumbled upon a large database of login information and passwords containing over 184 million records recently. He mentioned the discovery in an article on Website Planet. The data was not encrypted in any form and stored publicly, which meant that anyone with knowledge of its existence could download the data. The sheer size of the database, more than 47 gigabytes of data, makes it one of the largest leaks in recent history. In early 2024, a 70 million records password dump was discovered. A preliminary sampling of the data unveiled emails, usernames, passwords, and also links...

This Memorial Day, for a change, the USA is not actively at war in some distant land, only against ourselves. One faction in this as yet cold civil war seeks to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and the other side seeks what. . . ? To do the opposite of that? Make America Disintegrate (MAD). It’s hard to come to another conclusion. MAGA is led, of course, by Mr. Trump, president again after the strangest executive interregnum in our history. At its plainest, MAGA means returning to an economy based on producing things of value. To many, this might conjure...

OpenAI said it was buying IO, a start-up founded by Mr. Ive, the designer of the iPhone, to usher in a new era of artificial intelligence hardware. The deal, which is OpenAI’s biggest acquisition, will bring in Mr. Ive and his team of roughly 55 engineers and researchers. LoveFrom will assume creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and build hardware that helps people better interact with the technology. In a joint interview, Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman declined to say what such devices could look like and how they might work, but they said they hoped to share details next...

Journalism has experienced its share of revolutions, from Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press in 15th-century Germany to the high-speed presses of the 19th century to the disruptions of radio, network television and cable television as primary sources for live, breaking news. Yet even as competition soared and the number of daily newspapers declined, local news thrived as an industry. In a 1990 Washington Journalism Review article, former Chicago Tribune editor James D. Squires called newspapers “the most profitable legal business in America.” Then came the internet.

A gang of wealthy 'crypto bros' have been arrested for luring their former business partner to a stunning New York City mansion before torturing him for weeks. The group are accused of kidnapping the 28-year-old Italian man before committing sickening acts on him in the $75,000-per-month rented brownstone in Soho. They alleged to have Tazed him, pistol-whipped him and threatened to carve him up with a chainsaw if he did not give up the millions of dollars in his crypto account. But their plot was foiled when the victim - who has not been named - escaped and flagged down...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is partnering with Jony Ive, the legendary designer behind the iPhone, to create wearable AI devices that can be “fully aware” of a user’s surroundings and life. According to the Wall Street Journal, Altman has directed his team to produce 100 million of these secretive “AI companion” gadgets. The unnamed device, still in development, will be compact—small enough for a pocket or desk—and designed to reduce screen time. Unlike an Apple Watch, it won’t have phone features. The collaboration between Altman and Ive sounds like a Silicon Valley dream, but skepticism remains. After the Humane AI...

ProPublica, which received a Pulitzer Prize this month for its misleading reporting on “preventable” deaths in pro-life states, recently published an analysis that contradicts its own reporting — and proves it isn’t pro-life laws that are leading to women’s injuries and deaths. Yet despite its own finding that medical leadership’s lack of guidance is to blame for worse outcomes for pregnant women, ProPublica continues to blame pro-life laws — specifically the Texas Human Life Protection Act. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ProPublica found a lack of guidance from hospital/medical leadership on the law is the true cause of physician confusion, which can harm...

An Indigenous tribe from the Brazilian Amazon has sued The New York Times, saying the newspaper’s reporting on the tribe’s first exposure to the internet led to its members being widely portrayed as technology-addled and addicted to pornography. The Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley, a sovereign community of about 2,000 people in the rainforest, filed the defamation lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages this week in a court in Los Angeles. It also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants, alleging that their stories amplified and sensationalized the Times’ reporting and smeared the tribe in the process....

A halal butcher in Zurich, Switzerland has sold 3.1 tons of pork labeled as veal to Muslim customers, who haven’t noticed any difference for three years. https://x.com/AzatAlsalim/status/1925558828701024355

Microsoft has announced that it has open sourced the Windows Subsystem for Linux. WSL, as it's commonly called, allows users to run Linux apps directly on Windows. All you need to do to install WSL is run the following command in a terminal: wsl --install Refer to this article for additional details regarding how to set up WSL. WSL was first announced at the Build 2016 developer conference, and shipped with the Windows 10 Anniversary update. While the original release was based on lxcore.sys, a pico process provider that Windows used to run ELF executables natively. Microsoft released WSL 2...

Trump administration revoked Harvard University's ability to enroll international students in escalating battle with the Ivy League school, saying thousands of current students must transfer to other schools or leave the country. The Department of Homeland Security announced the action Thursday, saying Harvard has created an unsafe campus environment by allowing “anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators” to assault Jewish students on campus. It also accused Harvard of coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party, saying hosted and trained members of a Chinese paramilitary group as recently as 2024. “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer...

Steve Bannon: “I got a problem. And it’s not with Andy Harris. Here’s what I’ve got a PROBLEM with…JOHNSON should not put the President of the United States in this situation…the President of the United States should not have to come to Capitol Hill…and have to WHIP VOTES…Johnson, in these rooms, tells everyone what they want to hear. That’s why people CAN’T STAND HIM…”

OnlyFans users in Sweden could face prison sentences under a harsh new law that treats buying online sex shows the same as paying a prostitute for sex. The law, which will take effect July 1, also criminalizes profiting from or promoting others who perform sexual acts for payment on demand. “This is a new form of sex purchase, and it’s high time we modernize the legislation to include digital platforms,” Swedish member of parliament Teresa Carvalho said after the bill passed. Under the new law, it will be illegal to pay someone to carry out a sexual act remotely —...

Mexican authorities are extremely restrictive when it comes to access to ancient Aztec, Mayan and other archaeological sites. Since COVID, the pyramids have been cordoned off and access to them prohibited. However, and as is typical with the Mexican malinchismo (a term used for locals who give preferential treatment to foreigners), MrBeast was granted unfettered access not only to the pyramids themselves but also permission to enter areas millions of Mexicans have never seen. “I can’t believe the government’s letting us do this,” he said. “Nobody gets to go where we’re going,” he said inside one of the pyramids. He...

In a nutshell AI resume screening tools showed strong racial and gender bias, with White-associated names preferred in 85.1% of tests and Black male names favored in 0% of comparisons against White males. Bias increased when resumes were shorter, suggesting that when there’s less information, demographic signals like names carry even more weight. Removing names isn’t enough to fix the problem, as subtle clues—like word choice or school name—can still reveal identity, allowing AI systems to continue filtering out diverse candidates. ================================================================= SEATTLE — Every day, millions of Americans send their resumes into what feels like a digital black hole,...

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) revealed in a bombshell interview with Jason Chaffetz that his committee has identified the shadowy White House staffers responsible for wielding President Joe Biden’s infamous autopen during a period when Biden was “clearly in mental decline.” The autopen scandal first erupted in March when President Trump, in a fiery late-night Truth Social post, declared Joe Biden’s autopen pardons “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.” Trump revealed that Biden, whom he branded “the Worst President in the History of our Country,” did not personally sign the pardons, nor was he even aware...

and why some critics are 'unfair' The long rows of tiny Victorian terraced houses are like hundreds of others around the Midlands, the North and any of the towns and cities whose occupants powered Britain's industrial past. But Mornington Street, in St Matthew's, Leicester, can 'boast' something the others cannot. It is, according to official statistics, the road with the lowest proportion of English speakers in the UK. It's hardly a surprise to find that dubious title is claimed by a street in Leicester. After all, according to the 2021 Census, only 57 per cent of the city's residents were...