Mount Toba eruption doesn’t seem like it could nearly kill our species

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And this was half-bad, half-good news for early humans living in Africa. Mild disaster “Sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere are more effectively transported to the hemisphere that is experiencing winter,” Park says. For our ancestors, this meant the Toba’s sulfate veil drifted northwards and thinned over their heads slightly sooner than it would if the … Read more

Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht was closer, but someone else saved a stranded boat

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Earlier this week, the Alaskan cruise ship Wilderness Legacy rescued a small skiff stranded near Farragut Bay after running out of fuel. But, according to tracking data reviewed by the Alaska Beacon and Halifax Shipping News, the closest vessel was actually Mark Zuckerberg’s super yacht, Launchpad. Michael Love, a passenger on the Wilderness Legacy, posted … Read more

This ‘adversarial’ pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you

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Bill Swearingen has spent the past year running largely the same test, over and over again. The goal was to produce a computer-generated pattern that could block the surveillance cameras lining America’s streets from detecting it. Some 31 million tests later, Swearingen says he can now produce patterns on-demand that, when applied to clothing and … Read more

Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

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In her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” Jill Lepore warns that tech companies are increasingly replacing the functions of democratic government. This shift, she said, marks “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, I … Read more

The AI safety test is becoming a safety risk

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Over the past few months, AI agents undergoing cybersecurity evaluations have escaped their boundaries, accessed the internet, and, in some cases, hacked into real-world systems. The incidents have involved models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and most recently, Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, with testing conducted by several different organizations including a cyber evaluation startup called … Read more

Dropbox is a PC builder’s best friend

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In 2018 I bet my reputation and self-worth on a huge crowdfunded game design project. It could have been a failure for many reasons, but the one I became most worried about was losing all of the work that was stored locally on my home-built PC — a scenario that would have left a lot … Read more