Free Republic

Several urgent care workers in Santa Barbara have been fired after a TikTok taken inside medical exam rooms went viral over Labor Day weekend, officials confirmed to KTLA. The post shows a compilation of photos where Sansum Clinic workers are joking and posing with patients’ bodily fluids left on exam tables. Text over one of the first images reads, “Are patients allowed to leave you guys gifts?” followed by slides showing staff laughing, pointing, and even posing playfully around the stains with the caption: “guess the substance!” In another frame, the on-screen words say “all shades and opacities.” In the...

An 18-year-old Texas man who said he "wanted to commit a homicide for a long time" and followed through on that desire when he shot two of his friends, killing one, just days before Christmas, is headed to prison for a long time. Connor Lynn Hilton was sentenced to 50 years behind bars after pleading guilty to the murder of 18-year-old Ethan Riley and the shooting of Benjamin Bliek on Dec. 23, 2023, in Galveston County. ... "Stop crying. You did this to yourself. Secondly, the grief you have caused the Rileys and my own family, I will never forgive...

“My observation is that a major driver of white males becoming trans is the relentless propaganda portraying white men as the worst human beings.” “If those lies land, especially during vulnerable teen years, and they are given an option to be a ‘celebrated’ group, some will do it,” Musk added.

'I think it's becoming very, very common,' Amy Bach, Executive Director at consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, told the outlet. 'People are getting dropped on basis of, "We see mold on your roof," or "We see damaged roof tiles," or "There's trees touching your house," risk factors that insurance companies are increasingly on the lookout for.' Schueler found company to remove the branches in time, and so was able to keep her coverage. 'It ended up costing $1,200. I had no choice,' she told CBS. Her policy was renewed for another year, but having her home monitored without her being...

Elon Musk has said Grok, the A.I.-powered chatbot that his company developed, should be “politically neutral” and “maximally truth-seeking.” But in practice, Mr. Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues, according to an analysis of thousands of its responses by The New York Times. The shifts appear, in some cases, to reflect Mr. Musk’s political priorities. Grok is similar to tools like ChatGPT, but it also lives on X, giving the social network’s users the opportunity to ask it questions by tagging it in posts. One user...

When was the last time you logged into that old Gmail account or your photo storage app? If it’s been a while, don’t be shocked if all your stuff is gone for good. Most tech companies have policies that let them totally wipe out your account and everything in it if you haven’t signed in for a while. This could mean losing years of family photos, important emails and priceless memories. Yeah, that’s bad. It happened to Andrew, my podcast cohost. He stored thousands and thousands of family photos on Shutterfly. One day, he went to log in and all...

Opinion With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots. Cloud services company Fastly agrees. It reports that 80% of all AI bot traffic comes from AI data fetcher bots. So, you ask, "What's the problem? Haven't web crawlers been around since 1993 with the arrival of the...

A 'pregnant' pickpocket was grabbed by the hair and prevented from running away by an irate husband as she tried to steal his wife's backpack in Italy. The woman, who claimed to be pregnant after being caught, was held by the hair and arms and stopped from 'stealing' the tourist's bag at Piazza di San Lorenzo, a popular square in Florence. Footage of the fracas shows two men, including the husband of the victim, keeping hold of the 'thief' as she tries to wriggle free. One man clutched onto her hair, before she drops the backpack, while another gripped her...

Requests for advice and help with computer issues seem to produce more jokes than anything else, but I'm wondering if someone here who is more tech-savvy than I am can help me. I had a rectangular Dell monitor for a long time and it did great, until eventually the text and images began (I don't know what to call it. Bleeding? Ghosting?) rightward across the monitor. I am not talking about light spots around the edges of the monitor, nor am I talking about some sort of reflection following moving objects. I simply mean that, text or picture, there is...

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...

Scribble & Clue can solve math by barking! Image credit: Gutmann & Neuhaus 2025, CC BY 4.0/A. Carpineti, IFLScience/Valentin Drull/Shutterstock.com In one of the most hilarious papers we have read this year, two scientists challenged some famous quantum factorization records, pointing out how these approaches are only possible using very specific numbers or by changing the problem into an altogether easier-to-solve one. The team calls it sleight of hand, and are calling it out using old computers, an abacus, and even a dog! You most likely learned factorization in elementary school. You take a number and, using some known rules...

Government agencies from around the world, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA), shared a new advisory Wednesday warning of China's "global espionage system." The advisory details how state-backed threat actors, including Salt Typhoon, penetrate networks around the world, as well as how defenders can protect their own environments. The document was cosigned by nations including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. The advisory tracks this cluster of activity to multiple advanced persistent threats (APTs), though they say it partially...

The parents of Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April, claim in a new lawsuit against OpenAI that ChatGPT was “explicit in its instructions and encouragement toward suicide.” In the days after their 16-year-old son died by suicide, Matt and Maria Raine say, they searched through his phone, desperately looking for clues about what could have led to the tragedy. “We thought we were looking for Snapchat discussions or internet search history or some weird cult, I don’t know,” Matt Raine said in a recent interview. The Raine family said they did not find their answer until they opened...

“We’ve also been going through it, and I can tell you there are crude diagrams of the church. There are also photos of the weapons, and they include all sorts of writings, the names of past mass shooters, criticism of Israel, the name of President Trump written on the guns,” Katersky added.

OpenAI's ChatGPT appears to be more likely to refuse to respond to questions posed by fans of the Los Angeles Chargers football team than to followers of other teams. And it's more likely to refuse requests from women than men when prompted to produce information likely to be censored by AI safety mechanisms. The reason, according to researchers affiliated with Harvard University, is that the model's guardrails incorporate biases that shape its responses based on contextual information about the user. Computer scientists Victoria R. Li, Yida Chen, and Naomi Saphra explain how they came to that conclusion in a recent...

The lawmakers said their investigation seeks to examine how the nonprofit responds to bad actors in order to restore its credibility as a neutral arbiter of information, and what actions are taken to hold the bad actors accountable. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee and one of its subcommittees on Wednesday announced an investigation into allegations of an organized effort to skew U.S. public opinion on sensitive topics by manipulating Wikipedia articles.Wikipedia is a nonpartisan nonprofit that allows the public to edit encyclopedic articles, but the website's editing team is supposed to review information and remove material that is not...

A Texas-based wealth management firm has apologised for a clerical error that gave the appearance it took a massive short position on shares in Donald Trump’s social media company just before Saturday’s assassination attempt. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing by Austin Private Wealth dated July 12 showed the firm had shorted 12 million shares in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (DJT) via a put option, sparking frenzied conspiracy theories after the unusual trade was highlighted by a number of social media users.

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...

Fraudsters in Ghana are deliberately targeting British women in online scams as retribution for colonialism, a report has claimed. Accra, Ghana’s capital, is a hub for gangs of cyber criminals, known as Sakawa Boys, who pose as white men on Facebook to manipulate affluent Western women into entering a relationship.