"In a recently published study, a group of researchers from Princeton University and the University of Chicago had a bunch of LLMs complete a hiring game that was previously run with human participants. In the hiring task, participants were asked to assign candidates to specific roles and then received feedback on whether their decision was a successful hire. The candidates were all equally likely to succeed in any given job, but they all belonged to one of four made-up ethnic groups: the Tufa, Aima, Reku, or Weki. When human participants went through this task, the feedback they received caused them to create certain biases against each made-up ethnic group. For example, if they hired a Tufa as a doctor and received negative feedback, they were unlikely to hire another Tufa as a doctor again. The participants even ended up retaining these biases against the made-up ethnic group well after the game ended. When the researchers had LLMs complete this task instead of humans, they found that the bias rates were much higher.

“LLMs can spontaneously develop novel social biases about artificial demographic groups even when no inherent differences exist,” the researchers wrote in the study. “These results reveal that LLMs are not merely passive mirrors of human social biases, but can actively create new ones from experience, raising urgent questions about how these systems will shape societies over time.”"
https://gizmodo.com/ai-tends-to-develop-new-stereotypes-to-base-hiring-decisions-on-study-says-2000787777

"Back in 2023, the NYT became the first major publisher to sue OpenAI. The prominent newspaper alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on its articles, infringed on its copyrights by outputting articles verbatim, and caused market harms by positioning ChatGPT as a substitute for a NYT subscription, as well as reputational harms by falsely attributing claims to NYT reporting. Additionally, ChatGPT outputs summarizing Wirecutter reviews robbed writers of commissions from lost clicks on affiliate links, the NYT alleged.

In the initial complaint, the NYT discussed Microsoft’s supercomputing systems as if they were providing generic cloud computing services. The updated complaint seeks to specify that the supercomputer was tailor-made to help OpenAI infringe and allege that it was built for the explicit purpose of training AI on copyrighted works without permission. And as the NYT alleged, its articles were more heavily weighted by this system, as both firms hoped to train models on the highest quality journalism possible, so that level of writing could be confidently mimicked in outputs."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/microsoft-built-supercomputer-to-help-openai-infringe-copyrights-nyt-alleged/

"Trump is facing some real danger regarding the suit he filed against the BBC:

–He filed suit over a story they did on the January 6 insurrection, which included parts of the speech he gave on January 6th. Trump claimed that they had spliced two parts of his speech together to make it sound like he had incited the riot. The BBC apologized, but he sued them anyway, for $10 billion dollars.

–Unlike most of the media organizations he sued, the BBC didn’t settle. (It’s not clear whether Trump even realizes it’s not an American media company or that it’s owned by the British government.) They proceeded to the discovery phase and have been demanding all sorts of documents from Trump.

–The BBC is citing Jack Smith’s report suggesting Trump’s speech met the incitement standards and that violence was foreseeable. Many of the documents they are requesting are the same ones Jack Smith requested as Special Prosecutor, documents which led Smith to conclude that Trump met the standards for incitement.

–Trump, meanwhile is refusing to hand over documents, claiming “a fishing expedition,” has offered no proof that he was harmed by the BBC program (which was never shown in the United States, and is seeking to shift the case to a different judge.

–There are reports that some of the documents implicate Trump more deeply in the insurrection than had been known before, and Trump’s lawyers are worried that discovery in Trump’s lawsuit could expose him to a January 6 “trial,” a trial he has managed to avoid until now.

–DefaultyTurtle2: “The Brits being the force behind deposing a tyrant would be very ironic on the US’s 250th birthday year.”"
https://azsf.net/cwdaily/2026/06/24/trump-shoots-himself-in-the-foot-several-times/

"Ars Technica: We are now starting to see news stories about how companies that invested in AI are suddenly getting hefty bills.

"Cory Doctorow: They’re getting the bill because the AI companies are trying to get out before they’re stuck holding the bag.

"They want to do IPOs, and to do IPOs, they need to clean up their balance sheet. So they’re like, “I bet these [companies] are pretty price-insensitive. Let’s just jack it. Let’s go from a 90 percent subsidy to a 40 percent subsidy and more than double everyone’s prices. They’ll hang in there.” And then you get the CTO of Uber saying, “I’m not sure why we put AI in the business to begin with, and I really don’t know why we’d use it if it was $20,000 a seat. So I don’t know that we are going to use AI anymore.”

"This is quite a backfire. It actually shows you how insulated these people are from any sense of how their products are received, from what people think of them, from the actual fundamentals of real businesses that have to bring in more money than they spend. It’s weird. I’m hardly a captain of industry or one of the great champions of markets, but I do understand that, by and large, firms should bring in more money than they spend if they are to be an attractive investment prospect."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/

"India’s Unified Payments Interface uses a different model: intervene before dominance rather than after. Instead of regulating private platforms that have already achieved lock-in, India built public payment infrastructure that any platform can connect to on equal terms. Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm compete on the same rails; none owns the customer relationship—that belongs to the user’s bank account. No single platform can raise fees on the underlying infrastructure because the infrastructure is public. Brazil’s Pix system follows similar principles, as do comparable approaches adopted by central banks in Ghana and Sri Lanka. The question today is not whether enshittification can be stopped, but why regulators in Canada, the US, and elsewhere choose not to stop it."
https://third-bit.com/2026/05/21/enshittification/

"Open Printer is an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair. You can print on standard sheets or paper rolls and choose between black or color cartridges, refillable at your convenience.

"This project aims to reclaim our everyday tools. As such, it features no proprietary drivers, no cartridge DRM that locks you to a single vendor and is designed to never become obsolete. The Open Printer is built for longevity and customizability, ensuring that it remains fully under your control."

#openSource
https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer

"It’s not every day you see a video that starts with chickens and ends with a genuine national security concern, but then, these are strange times. The story starts with YouTuber, musician, and increasingly influential amateur cybersecurity researcher Benn Jordan’s attempt to get a robot dog from Chinese firm Unitree—also responsible for the questionable Gundam and the kung-fu deathbots—to guard his chicken coop. The robot proves an abject failure at doing this, and at anything else remotely useful. What it does turn out to be good at, according to Jordan, is sending data back to China.

"… the really interesting part of the video comes once Jordan starts to look into the robot’s information security features—or, more specifically, the alleged lack thereof. This section of the video starts strong with the revelation that Jordan was able to obtain root access to the dog—yes, that’s a phrase I just typed—by adding Curl commands to the end of his wifi password."
https://gizmodo.com/man-finds-robot-dog-is-bad-at-protecting-his-chickens-but-might-be-good-at-sending-data-to-china-2000758796

"Dexerto: California man uses elaborate drone show to help delivery drivers find his house. “To help with this issue, [Tom] BetGeorge programmed an army of drones to perform an extravagant light show to guide confused couriers in the right direction. In the viral video, the drones show messages like, ‘Wrong driveway, back up,’ ‘There you go, keep going,’ and ‘Over here’ with a giant arrow pointing down.”"

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/california-man-uses-elaborate-drone-show-to-help-delivery-drivers-find-his-house-3359267/