Free Republic

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made himself a cheerleader for AI’s potential to disrupt work while also laying off staff.SAN FRANCISCO — One gray morning this week, a crowd of parents and baby-laden strollers gathered for a sing-along in Salesforce Park, five acres of public green space on the roof of the Salesforce Transit Center in the shadow of the 1,000-foot Salesforce Tower.Among them was a local dad and software engineer who had learned days earlier that Salesforce was laying him off. The $240 billion cloud software company told 262 employees in San Francisco they were being let go, according...

Software companies that audit expense reports are adding a new arsenal of capabilities to try to detect receipts that have been created using A.I. chatbots.It wasn’t long after ChatGPT began generating realistic images that Anant Kale started seeing posts on social media that explained how it could be used to generate a pretty convincing fake receipt.That was, he recognized, his problem.As the chief executive of AppZen, a software used by finance teams to manage expenses, he had overseen the creation of fraud-detection tools that flagged A.I.-generated receipts. But this was different.“We were like, oh, shoot, this is too easy,” he...

Like millions of fellow 18-year-olds across the U.S., Zach Yadegari spent his summer preparing for college. Unlike most other freshmen, Yadegari doubts he’ll linger in academia for very long. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Cal AI, a calorie-tracking mobile app he launched from his parents’ home in Roslyn, New York, in May 2024 — and the app’s success to date makes him think he’ll take it full-time well before his class’ graduation date, he says. Cal AI’s users upload a photo of their food, and the app’s artificial intelligence-based software gives them an estimate of the total calories. The...

Well-known authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued the company over what their lawyer calls “brazen infringement.”AI startup Anthropic will pay a $1.5 billion settlement after being accused of copyright violations and piracy by illegally downloading books to train its AI's language models. (Scripps News)AI startup Anthropic will pay a $1.5 billion settlement after being accused of copyright violations and piracy — a case that legal experts say is a first-of-its-kind, that "will be known by its first name to law students for a long time." Well-known authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued...

A federal jury ordered Google to pay $425.7 million for invading users' privacy by collecting data over an eight-year period on millions of people who had turned off a tracking feature in their Google account. The verdict on Wednesday in San Francisco comes after a trial in a class-action case applying to roughly 98 million users in the U.S. between July 1, 2016, and Sept. 23, 2024. The jury found that the company had been spying on users in violation of California privacy laws. Google denied that it was improperly accessing devices to collect, save, and use data of people...

A new survey suggests many Baby Boomers are struggling with digital overuse, with nearly half spending more than three hours a day on their smartphones and a significant number experiencing anxiety when disconnected. The poll, conducted by AddictionResource.net, surveyed 2,000 adults ages 59 to 77 about their digital habits and found signs of emotional dependence, compulsive behavior and difficulty reducing screen time. Experts say adults who spend more than six hours a day on screens are at increased risk of depression. While screen addiction is not defined by time alone, experts recommend recreational use stay below two hours daily.

The term “tech bro” refers to a specific archetype within the technology sector, particularly in Silicon Valley. This designation highlights individuals who embody a mix of ambition, innovation, and often a casual, laid-back style. These individuals frequently wear hoodies, casually sip energy drinks, and fiercely pursue startup opportunities that challenge traditional business models. In many instances, tech bros are characterized by their drive to disrupt established industries through technological advancements. They prioritize growth, scalability, and often embrace risk as part of their professional ethos. Startups led by tech bros often trend toward aggressive marketing strategies and a fast-paced work environment....

A recent survey of AI and labor data by a team of researchers at Stanford's Digital Economy Lab uncovered some of the first comprehensive evidence that the AI industry really is throwing the job market into flux. The scholars compiled three years of payroll records on millions of US workers at tens of thousands of businesses, allowing them to identify long-term trends according to jobs and age groups. Their first finding was a dramatic decline in employment for entry-level knowledge workers aged 22 to 25 years old, whose occupations are at the highest theoretical risk for automation — a metric...

In July 2025, the U.S. unemployment rate was at 4.2% — which, historically speaking, is rather low. But that doesn’t mean that all job seekers are thriving.An NBC News analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data finds that the unemployment rate among men ages 23 to 30 with a bachelor's degree has reached 6%. By comparison, the unemployment rate among women with a bachelor's degree in that same age range is 3.5%.During the pandemic, the term “she-cession” was created to illustrate just how unfavorable the economy was for working women at the time. Now, with many young men struggling to find...

Mount Fuji is the tallest peak in Japan, with a height of 3,776 meters (12,388 feet). Image credit: Tomáš Malík/Shutterstock.com The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has released a video containing AI-generated imagery to warn what would happen if Mount Fuji erupted in the 21st century. While there’s no suggestion the volcano is set to blow any time soon, an eruption within the next century would not be totally unexpected – and the impact on Tokyo would be significant. The video (below) was released by Japanese local authorities on August 22, 2025, as part of the newly designated Volcano Disaster Preparedness Day,...

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...