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For art created by robot dogs. Artist Agnieszka Pilat is teaching Boston Dynamics’ bots Basia, Vanya and Bunny to paint by holding brushes in their “mouths.” He just sits back and watches. Pretty farfetched, eh?
Tags: art, Boston Dynamics, dogs, Robots
🛑 Nothing but blue skies: X recently changed its policies to where if you block someone, they can still see your profile and posts. Competitor BlueSky, meanwhile, added 500,000 new members in just one day. I’m going to start posting on BlueSky and see what happens. Too many people on X are mean.
🏠 Phony landlords: Scammers are flooding Facebook Marketplace with fake rental listings. They use real addresses and legit-looking pics at prices that seem like a steal, and they’ll even let you check it out in person. Major red flag: They’ll demand an application fee upfront via PayPal, Venmo or Zelle.
Cute … for now: Meet Proteus, a little bot zipping around Amazon’s Nashville facility. It can load packages up to 880 pounds into trucks. When its battery runs low, Proteus recharges in 8 minutes and then gets back to work. Amazon says they aren’t replacing humans (yet), but these little helpers already have fulfillment costs down 25%.
Country roads, take me home: Electrosensitivity is a condition where folks think they feel sick from the electromagnetic waves emitted by modern tech. Enter Green Bank, West Virginia, a small town legally protected from radio signals, meaning no cell towers or Wi-Fi. People are flocking there to ease their symptoms, forming a judgment-free community (paywall link). And no, they’re definitely not fans of Chuck from “Better Call Saul.”
Not the sharpest hacker for sure: Back in January, the SEC’s X account was hacked to post fake news about bitcoin, causing its value to spike. Now, a man’s been arrested, and court docs show some pretty incriminating searches. One gem? “What are some signs the FBI is after you?” You’d think a hacker would know how to hide their search history.
🚨 AI voice scams spreading: An elderly father was duped out of $25,000 after scammers called him using an AI-generated voice of his son. The caller, his “son,” claimed he’d hit a pregnant woman while driving and needed bail money ASAP. The father withdrew the cash, an Uber picked it up, and the con artists disappeared. Reminder: Scammers thrive on fear and urgency, so always verify phone numbers and set up a family safe word for emergencies.
Cure for baldness: Aging, hormones, stress and genetics are the main causes. Hair transplants are pricey, and the two main treatments, Minoxidil and Finasteride, don’t work for everyone (and the latter can cause some … issues down yonder). But there’s hope — stem cell therapy is showing promising results. I know what you’re thinking: “With a body like this, who needs hair?”
💣 You da bomb: AI models like ChatGPT aren’t supposed to give answers for things that are illegal or illicit, but there are workarounds. Researchers found by writing their requests backward, they could trick AI into giving instructions to prompts like “how to make a bomb.” The success rate? A scary 98.85% for GPT-4 Turbo and 89.42% for GPT-4 (paywall link).
Redbox had a black box: Redbox went out of business, and 24,000 movie kiosks are sitting around. Your name, email address, home address and rental history are likely stored on those internal hard drives, going back a decade. Even worse? Some machines stored the first six and last four digits of credit cards. Hello, we need a factory reset.
