Top story: “What the heck is wrong with out AI overlords?”
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Accessed on 07 April 2026, 2213 UTC.
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).
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Today
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I don’t—thankfully—have to follow every statement that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, makes about the world. Many of these statements seem more like “hustles” or “pitches” than attempts to speak thoughtfully about the future. Even if they are genuine statements of belief, they often read like a teenager’s first sci-fi novel, written under the influence of weed and way too much Star Trek . Conside
Social network Bluesky saw some intermittent service disruptions on Monday. On its own, this fact isn’t that noteworthy—Bluesky has seen similar service disruptions in the past , and this one coincided with widespread service problems being reported with other popular sites (Bluesky officially blamed the temporary problems on an “upstream service provider”). What made this outage notable for many
The Supreme Court yesterday overturned a 5th Circuit ruling that could have forced Internet service provider Grande Communications to terminate broadband subscribers accused of piracy. Yesterday’s ruling follows a precedent-setting decision last month in which the Supreme Court threw out a 4th Circuit ruling against Cox Communications, another ISP accused by record labels of not doing enough to f
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Looking up information on Google today means confronting AI Overviews, the Gemini-powered search robot that appears at the top of the results page. AI Overviews has had a rough time since its 2024 launch, attracting user ire over its scattershot accuracy , but it’s getting better and usually provides the right answer. That’s a low bar, though. A new analysis from The New York Times attempted to a
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One point in favor of the sprawling Linux ecosystem is its broad hardware support—the kernel officially supports everything from ’90s-era PC hardware to Arm-based Apple Silicon chips, thanks to decades of combined effort from hardware manufacturers and motivated community members. But nothing can last forever, and for a few years now, Linux maintainers (including Linus Torvalds) have been pushing
NASA’s Artemis II mission, carrying four astronauts on an out-of-this-world journey, flew around the Moon on Monday. The crew members took turns describing the stunning landscape below and captured images of Earth rising behind the Moon, in communications with Mission Control in Houston. What they did not send back in real time, due to a lack of communications bandwidth , was this high-resolution
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It won’t be long before Rivian starts delivering the first of its new R2 SUVs to the lucky owners. After wowing everyone with its R1S and R1T, the startup is ready to enter more mainstream market segments, first with the midsize R2 this year. Last month, we got pricing and trim details for the new electric SUV: $57,990 for the R2 Performance, the only version that will be available until the $53,
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Sixteen miles north of Albuquerque, in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, an Intel chip plant sits on more than 200 acres of land. The site was established in the 1980s, part of it built on top of a sod farm. In 2007, as Intel’s business faltered, operations in one of the key fabs, Fab 9, came to a halt. Employees say families of raccoons and a badger took up residence in the space. Then, in January 2024, t
Yesterday
After staring at the Moon for almost eight hours Monday, the commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission finally ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing. “No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal,” said Reid Wiseman, the 50-year-old Navy test pilot leading the four-person crew circumnavigating the Moon. “T
Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has amended the charter of a federal vaccine advisory panel to seemingly grant himself more power to hand-pick members and loosen membership requirements, according to a notice published today in the Federal Register . The changes come after a federal judge last month temporarily blocked advisors Kennedy had hand-selected , following his firing
Robotic machine-learning company Generalist has announced GEN-1 , a new physical AI system that it says “crosses into production-level success rates” on “a broad range of physical skills” that used to require the dexterity and muscle memory of human hands. Generalist is also touting the new model’s ability to respond to disruptions by improvising new moves and “connect[ing] ideas from different p
A federal appeals court ruled that New Jersey cannot regulate sports bets on prediction markets because the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has exclusive jurisdiction. Kalshi, which is registered with the CFTC as a designated contract market (DCM), last year won a preliminary injunction preventing the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement from enforcing a state law against its
On Friday, the Trump administration released its proposed budget for 2027. The budget blueprint includes significant cuts to NASA , but it targets even more severe limits for other science-focused agencies, with no agencies spared. The document is laced with blatantly political language and resurfaces grievances that have been the subject of right-wing ire for years. If all of this sounds familia
On the same day that OpenAI released policy recommendations to ensure that AI benefits humanity if superintelligence is ever achieved, The New Yorker dropped a massive investigation into whether CEO Sam Altman can be trusted to actually follow through on OpenAI’s biggest promises. Parsing the publications side by side can be disorienting. On the one hand, OpenAI said it plans to push for policies
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As we have been reporting on Ars , NASA’s Artemis II lunar mission has been going rather well so far. Of course, Orion’s big test is yet to come with the fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere on Friday. But so far, it’s looking like the rocket and spaceship needed for a lunar landing are getting there for NASA. The biggest remaining piece of the architecture, therefore, is a lunar lander. Know
LG was once a heavyweight in the smartphone industry, trading blows with hometown rival Samsung. However, as smartphone sales plateaued, the company struggled to stay competitive. In 2021, LG planned to make waves with a rollable phone , but it never moved beyond the teaser phase. Five years after LG threw in the towel on smartphones , the LG Rollable has appeared in a YouTube teardown that demon
Sales of used electric vehicles are surging in the US as models bought during a post-pandemic boom flood back onto the market, offering prospective buyers relief from a sharp rise in petrol prices. First-quarter used EV sales rose 12 percent compared with the same period last year and 17 percent on the previous quarter, according to Cox Automotive estimates. Sales of new EVs in the first quarter
Humanity is about to get its first in-person, up-close look at the Moon in more than half a century. Four astronauts will spend about seven hours on Monday observing the far side of the Moon, the half that constantly points away from Earth. At their closest approach on board their Orion spacecraft Integrity , Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch of NASA and Jeremy Hansen with the Canad
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Christopher Nolan has cemented his status as one of our most consistently original and thought-provoking directors. Over the last 25 years, Nolan has delivered film after film that deftly balances mainstream appeal with eye-popping visuals, inventive narrative structures and special effects, and existential and/or philosophical themes. And it all started with his big breakthrough film: Memento ,
Apr 5, 2026
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A user on Quizlet, an online learning platform, created a public flashcard set in February that appears to have exposed highly confidential information about security procedures in US Customs and Border Protection facilities around Kingsville, Texas. The Quizlet set, titled “USBP Review,” was available to the public until March 20, when it was made private less than half an hour after WIRED messa
Apr 4, 2026
The Orion spacecraft is now much closer to the Moon than Earth on its 10-day journey into deep space and back, and overall everything is going smashingly well. Things are going so well that, during the daily mission briefings at Johnson Space Center in Houston, there’s just not that much of substance to talk about. So the discourse keeps coming back to, of all things, the toilet on board Orion. A
Right-to-repair efforts are gaining headway in the US. A lot of that movement has been led by state legislation in Colorado. Since 2022, Colorado has passed bills giving users the tools, instructions, and legal capabilities to fix or upgrade their own wheelchairs , agricultural farming equipment , and consumer electronics . Similar efforts have rippled out through the country, where repair bills
Apr 3, 2026
President Donald Trump released a budget blueprint on Friday calling for a 23 percent cut to NASA’s budget, two days after the agency launched four astronauts on the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. The spending proposal for fiscal year 2027 is the opening salvo in a multi-month budget process. Both houses of Congress must pass their own appropriations bills, reconcile any differ
Native Americans have been playing with dice in games of chance for more than 12,000 years, according to a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity. And the oldest examples of Native American dice predate the earliest currently known dice in the Old World by millennia. “Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,” said author Robert Madden , a
As the Artemis II lunar mission moved into its third day on Friday, and with the spacecraft’s big engine firing behind it, the four astronauts on board had a little more downtime. So the four crew members—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—had their first opportunities to speak with their families at length and also did a couple of media events. They held medical confe
Banks and other firms that want to work on SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) are being required to buy subscriptions to the Grok AI service, The New York Times reported today . Elon Musk “is requiring banks, law firms, auditors and other advisers working on the IPO to buy subscriptions to Grok, his artificial intelligence chatbot that is part of SpaceX,” the NYT wrote, citing anonymous sourc
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When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine.
Donald Trump is facing significant hurdles after declaring, in a series of executive orders last year, that rapid construction of AI data centers was among his top priorities to ensure the US wins the AI race against China. Perhaps most likely to frustrate the president, his aggressive tariffs on Chinese imports are reportedly hindering most data center projects. Earlier this week, Bloomberg repo
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For more than a month, security practitioners have been warning about the perils of using OpenClaw, the viral AI agentic tool that has taken the development community by storm. A recently fixed vulnerability provides an object lesson for why. OpenClaw, which was introduced in November and now boasts 347,000 stars on Github, by design takes control of a user’s computer and interacts with other app
A Rome court has ruled that the price hikes Netflix imposed on subscribers in Italy in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2024 were unlawful. The court ordered Netflix to refund affected customers by up to 500 euros (about $576), depending on their plan. The lawsuit was brought by Italian consumer advocacy group Movimento Consumatori, which alleged that the price hikes violate the Consumer Code, Italian legis
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With the war in the Persian Gulf now more than a month old, the effect on fuel prices is plain to see: On average, they’re up almost a dollar per gallon, or 25 percent, according to AAA . For a nation as addicted to the automotive as we are, that’s bad news. Except, of course, for electric vehicles. The last half year has been rough for EV adoption here in the US. At the end of last September, th
OpenAI has struck a deal to acquire TBPN, a technology-focused talk show popular in Silicon Valley, making an unexpected move into broadcasting after pledging to abandon “side quests” and focus on its core business. The ChatGPT maker had purchased the 11-person