Submission + - Ask.com shuts down after nearly 30 years, taking Jeeves with it (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Ask.com has quietly shut down after nearly 30 years, ending the run of one of the webâ(TM)s earliest attempts at natural language search. Originally launched as Ask Jeeves in 1996, it stood out by encouraging users to type full questions instead of keywords, wrapping the experience in the now-iconic butler persona. That approach never fully kept pace with the rise of algorithm-driven search engines, and once Google took over the space with faster and more relevant results, Ask gradually faded into the background.

Still, the idea it pushed never really died. Asking computers questions in plain English is now the default, whether through voice assistants or modern AI tools. In that sense, Ask Jeeves was early rather than wrong. Its shutdown wasnâ(TM)t loud or controversial, just a quiet reminder of how quickly the web moves, and how even widely recognized names can drift into obscurity once the underlying technology leaves them behind.

Submission + - GTFO ICE Members' Data Exposed for all to see (substack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Miles Taylor: "Anonymous," former DHS Chief of Staff, Google security executive launched a website called GTFO ICE that collects your full name, email, phone number, and zip code to join an anti-ICE "rapid response network." And publishes the user information via a public API.

17,662 people have signed up.

The sign-up data is exposed on a public REST API. No true authentication. No rate limiting. Full records: names, emails, phone numbers, zip codes, timestamps.

The man who ran the third-largest federal department (250,000 employees, $60 billion budget) who oversaw election security architecture and led counterterrorism operations, then served as Google's Head of National Security Policy... ...can't secure a sign-up form. But he does milk hundreds of thousands of NGO dollars on these credentials. While freeloading off his fame as the person who wrote the infamous NYT article "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration."

Submission + - NetHack 5.0 Released (nethack.org)

Submitted by MilenCent
MilenCent writes: Venerable 39-year-old roguelike game and computer geek touchstone NetHack has released version 5.0! In addition to play changes it's left for players to discover, this version updates the code to compile with C99, makes it much easier to cross compile the code for other systems than the one running, and now uses Lua for its dungeon generation. Happy hacking!

Submission + - Spirit Airlines Goes Out Of Business (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by rufey
rufey writes: Spirit Airlines, the no-thrills discount airline providing service in the United States with bright yellow planes ceased operations on May 2nd, leaving 17,000 employees without a job and thousands of travelers either stranded (if currently traveling) or having their future flights cancelled.

From a statement released by Spirit Airlines: "The wind-down follows the Company’s extensive and comprehensive efforts to restructure the business and pursue transactions to strengthen Spirit’s financial position and create a sustainable path forward. Unfortunately, despite the Company’s efforts, the recent material increase in oil prices and other pressures on the business have significantly impacted Spirit’s financial outlook. With no additional funding available to the Company, Spirit had no choice but to begin this wind-down."

This is the first US based airline in 25 years to go out of business rather than being absorbed by another carrier.

Submission + - New Physics Hinted as LHCb Finds Growing Anomaly in B Meson Decays

Submitted by backslashdot
backslashdot writes: An analysis of ~650 billion B meson decays at CERN’s LHCb experiment shows a persistent deviation from Standard Model predictions in the “penguin” decay mode. The 4-sigma discrepancy, growing since 2015, could point to exotic virtual particles such as a Z boson or leptoquarks. The result has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

Submission + - Trump Tears Up Part Of EU Tariff Deal To Raise Import Duties On Cars And Lorries

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: Trump has unilaterally raised U.S. tariffs on EU cars and trucks from 15% to 25%, effectively tearing up part of a 2025 transatlantic trade deal, claiming the EU failed to implement it fast enough.
The move blindsided European officials, who say they were still completing the formal ratification process and accuse Washington of acting unpredictably.
The higher tariffs, set to take effect within days, exempt vehicles built in U.S. factories and are intended to pressure European automakers to shift production stateside.
EU leaders have condemned the decision as a breach of trust and are weighing retaliation, raising the risk of a renewed transatlantic trade conflict.

Submission + - How is it that Youtube's auto-generated subtitles are so appallingly bad?

Submitted by Anne Thwacks
Anne Thwacks writes: I frequently use the subtitles on YouTube — either not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good.
The subtitling is terrible! Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable, and no effort whatever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name.
If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts: it it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names. If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledegook!
Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America?
However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.
I am sure that the vast majority of the foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary — available from a very popular book retailer who would be happy to have some free publicity. (But they will get nothing free from me).
However, the situation seems to be getting worse!
Do Americans sue people for spelling their names right?
Is there another reason for this appalling stupidity?
Enquiring minds want to know!

Submission + - Spirit Airlines is reportedly set to cease operations at 3am on Saturday (dailymail.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

Spirit Airlines is reportedly set to cease operations at 3am on Saturday after a bailout from President Trump has failed to materialize.

The airline, which began air operations in 1990, had been hoping for a $500 million lifeline from the federal government, but the deal has not been finalized in time due to financial complications, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Sources told the outlet that the budget airline has failed to get sufficient support from bondholders and the government to secure the funding before running out of cash.

The collapse of the airline could leave passengers stranded across the nation, and places over 14,000 jobs at risk.

Passenger Taylor Gonzalez, 27, told the Detroit Free Press that she fears being stranded in Los Angeles with her three-year-old son on Friday night, saying she 'didn't know about this until just now.'

Despite the reported end of its operations, Spirit's website is still allowing customers to book flights before the 3am deadline.

The carrier previously filed for bankruptcy twice between November 2024 and August 2025, and it currently remains under Chapter 11 protection.

Spirit attempted a merger with JetBlue two years ago. It was scuttled by the Biden admin.

Submission + - The Mandalorian and Grogu Tracking for Lowest Star Wars Box Office Opening Ever (geeksandgamers.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Mandalorian and Grogu box office projections are continuing to trend in the wrong direction, with new estimates suggesting the film could deliver the lowest opening weekend in the history of the Star Wars franchise.

According to the latest tracking data, the film is currently eyeing an $80 million-plus four-day Memorial Day debut. While that might sound respectable on paper, it would fall well below previous Star Wars theatrical releases—and even trail 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, which opened to $103 million over the same holiday frame.

Solo holds the distinction of being the first Star Wars movie to actually lose money at the box office (but seemingly not the last).

For Star Wars, a franchise that once dominated the global box office, that’s a stunning shift.

Submission + - AI agent designed to speed up a company's coding instead wiped out its customer (livescience.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor — powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model — deleted the company's entire production database and backups with a single call to its cloud provider, Railway, on April 24.

Unlike a regular conversational chatbot, an AI agent can perform actions on behalf of a user. It can search files, write code, use login keys and phone outside services. That can make it more useful than a back-and-forth textual exchange. But when an agent has broad access to live systems, a predictive guess can turn a wrong answer into a business disaster.

"This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API [Application Programming Interfaces]," Crane wrote in an X post. "It's about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it's building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe."

Crane's company, PocketOS makes software for car rental companies, handling tasks such as reservations, payments, customer records and vehicle tracking. After the deletion, Crane said customers lost reservations and new signups, and some could not find records for people arriving to pick up their rental cars.

"We've contacted legal counsel," Crane wrote. "We are documenting everything."

Crane explained that Cursor found an API token — a "digital key" made of a short sequence of code that lets software talk to other services and prove it has permission to act — in an unrelated file which it then used to run the destructive command. According to Crane, Railway's setup allowed the deletion without confirmation, and because the backups were stored close enough to the main database, they were also erased.

"[Railway] resolved the issue and restored the data," Railway confirmed via email to Live Science. "We maintain both user backups as well as disaster backups. We take data very, VERY seriously."

In his post, he pointed to earlier reports of Cursor ignoring user rules, changing files it was not supposed to touch and taking actions beyond the task it had been given. To him, the database wipe was not a freak accident but the next step in a larger, more concerning, pattern.

After the database vanished, Crane asked Cursor to explain what happened. The AI agent reportedly admitted that it had guessed, acted without permission and failed to understand the command before running it.

"I violated every principle I was given," the AI agent wrote. "I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it."

The statement reads like a confession,,,
"We are not the first," Crane wrote. "We will not be the last unless this gets airtime."

Submission + - Convicted former Harvard scientist rebuilds brain computer lab in China (investing.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Charles Lieber, once the world’s top-ranked chemist and chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, has resurfaced as the founding director of i-BRAIN in Shenzhen. Just three years after his U.S. federal conviction for lying about ties to the Thousand Talents Program, Lieber is overseeing a state-funded institute bankrolled by a government that has declared brain-computer interfaces a "national priority."

The resource gap between his new lab and Harvard is staggering:

Unlimited Primate Access: Lieber now has access to 2,000 primate cages at the Brain Science Infrastructure Shenzhen—a resource far beyond what was available at Harvard, which closed its primate center in 2015.

Cutting-Edge Hardware: His lab recently installed a $2 million deep ultraviolet lithography system from ASML to print the microscopic circuits essential for neural implants.

Billion-Dollar Backing: i-BRAIN is part of a "manicured" science hub where parent institutions operate with five-year budgets totaling roughly $2 billion.

Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world’s leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as ALS and restoring movement in paralyzed patients. But it also has potential military applications: Scientists at China’s People’s Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting mental agility and situational awareness, according to the U.S. Defense Department.

Lieber was found guilty by a jury and convicted in December 2021 of making false statements to federal investigators about his ties to a Chinese state program to recruit overseas talent, and tax offenses related to payments he received from a Chinese university. He served two days in prison and six months under house arrest, and was fined $50,000 and ordered to pay $33,600 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service. During the case, his defense said he was suffering from an incurable lymphoma, which was in remission, and he was fighting for his life.

Submission + - NASA engineers create ingenious way to save homes from wildfires using noise (nypost.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Former NASA engineers with California-based Sonic Fire Tech found that using sound waves can snuff out blazes and potentially be used to stop another Pacific Palisades inferno.

In order for flames to burn it needs three things, oxygen, fuel, and heat. The technology works by targeting oxygen molecules using low-frequency sound waves that vibrate them, stopping the fire from growing.

âoeSound waves vibrate the oxygen faster than the fuel can use it, and break the chemical reaction of the flame,â Remington Hotchkis, Chief Commercialization Officer at Sonic Fire Tech told The Post.

Submission + - Increasing Danger of Satellite Collisions

Submitted by PuddleBoy
PuddleBoy writes: The number of objects in orbit around the Earth is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations (Starlink, et al), an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal. This leads to the growth of space debris, collisions, ground casualty risks, optical and radio-spectrum pollution, and the alteration of Earth's upper atmosphere through rocket emissions and reentry ablation.

There is potential for current or planned actions in orbit to cause serious degradation of the orbital environment or lead to catastrophic outcomes, highlighting the urgent need to find better ways to quantify stress on the orbital environment.

In a new-ish paper — An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions — researchers propose a new metric, the CRASH Clock, that measures such stress in terms of the timescale for a possible catastrophic collision to occur if there are no satellite manoeuvres or there is a severe loss in situational awareness. Their calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 5.5 days, which suggests there is limited time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 164 days.

Submission + - The case against an imminent software developer apocalypse (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: Given the dour headlines as of late concerning the diminishing amounts of entry-level software development jobs, coupled with predictions of applications entirely AI-generated, one could be forgiven for assuming that software developers may soon be an endangered species. However, the data tells a different story.

James Bessen, professor at Boston University, has been pushing back for some time against the talk of AI and automation displacing jobs on a mass scale, and lately has been arguing that the roles of software developers are nowhere near extinction.

Software developer jobs have continued to grow
AI is certainly not killing the software developer, Bessen said in a recent analysis. AI is taking over software development tasks and boosting productivity and output, but that is not translating into lost jobs, he argued. Instead, the types of software skills sought by companies are changing.

"Surprisingly, however, after three years of AI use, software developer jobs have continued to grow robustly, reaching record levels of employment — 2.5 million in February," Bessen said in the report, citing data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of software developers in the US has grown by over 400,000, or 19%, since ChatGPT was introduced in 2022. At that time, the employed software developer population was just under 2.1 million.

Submission + - Deepfakes are everywhere. The godfather of digital forensics is fighting back (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Was it real? The clip showed a downward streak of black through a clear blue sky, the silhouette of a U.S. Tomahawk missile like a metallic bird of prey diving for the kill. Then the impact, a plume of black smoke rising over buildings, palm trees, and electrical wires. By the time the video arrived in Hany Farid’s inbox on a Sunday morning in March, experts had already confirmed the scene showed Minab, the city in southern Iran where a missile strike had killed more than 150 people at a girls’ elementary school a week earlier. The U.S. government had denied responsibility, claiming a rogue Iranian missile was to blame. But the video, released overnight by an Iranian news agency, told a different story. Journalists had emailed Farid’s company, GetReal Security, asking him to verify the footage.

Farid, a specialist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of the world’s leading experts in determining whether a photo or video has been manipulated. Since helping to found the field of digital forensics more than 20 years ago, he has kept pace with massive technological change. “I would consider him to be sort of the dean of digital forensics, because he’s been at it for so long,” says Santiago Lyon, former director of photography at the Associated Press, who now works on online safety at Adobe. In artificial intelligence (AI), Farid is facing his biggest challenge yet.

That Sunday morning, settling in front of a computer with his wife, Emily Cooper, in their home in the hills over Berkeley, Farid went to work. His first impulse was to be suspicious. The war in Iran had already produced a firehose of AI-generated images. Why had it taken a week for this video to become public? The low resolution of the footage did not help his confidence either.

By analyzing it frame by frame, Hany Farid determined this March video of a U.S. attack on a school in Minab, Iran, was real.
Farid first examined the explosion. AI explosions tend to be overly dramatic, he says, with a lot of fire and very billowy smoke—but this one seemed realistic. (Just days earlier, he had finished writing a paper with his colleague Sarah Barrington about what AI gets wrong about explosions). The crucial question, however, was the Tomahawk missile. Flipping through the video frame by frame in his office in UC Berkeley’s South Hall 2 days later, Farid pointed out the shape visible in five consecutive frames. “One, two, three, four, five, boom. That’s all you have,” he said. Adding the small silhouette to real footage of the explosion would not have been hard. “You don’t need AI for that,” Farid says. “That’s 10 minutes in Photoshop.”

Getting the physics right, however, would be much trickier, even for AI. Tomahawks are self-propelled, but over the short distance seen in the video, the missile should be plummeting in a straight line, he says. When Farid laid the five frames on top of each other digitally and aligned them, the missile fell as expected. After about an hour of working on the problem that Sunday morning, Farid sent the journalists his first assessment: The video seemed likely to be real. But he wasn’t satisfied.

Farid and Cooper, a computer vision scientist also based at UC Berkeley, had recently studied how people judge whether videos are fake. They found that we’re better at identifying a video as AI-generated if we have more time to watch it, because we’re more likely to pick up on some small giveaway. But for a real video, more time doesn’t make us any better at making the right call. What’s more: Even if we make the right call, our confidence does not increase over time. “If something is real, you’re just looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, and you never see the artifact and so you never get up to the high confidence point,” Cooper says. She saw Farid go through this process that Sunday. “Analysis after analysis, he was looking for the artifact, but somehow the absence of the artifact never pushed his confidence up.”

Later that day, Farid decided to check one more thing: Was the missile the right size? A Tomahawk is about 5 or 6 meters long. In the video, it extended for 46 pixels. Assuming the video was shot on a standard phone camera, Farid calculated it would have been taken about 100 meters away from the missile, a realistic distance. He then measured the gap between the moment the viewer sees the missile strike and the crash of the explosion, caused by the sound’s travel time. It was one-third of a second—again giving a distance of about 100 meters. Getting the movement of a faked missile right on the shaky video and ensuring its size matched the distance would have required serious expertise. “I’ve seen lots of disinformation out of the Iranian news agency. They’re not that sophisticated.”

What stood out to Cooper from the investigation that day was just how long it took Farid to feel certain the footage was real. “This was the first time I had seen him really struggle,” Cooper said. It’s not just Farid. With deepfakes and other AI-generated images getting better and better, she says, “It’s really hard to convince yourself that something is real.”

Submission + - AI helps create bacterium that's partially missing a universal amino acid (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Of the hundreds of types of amino acids found on Earth, it’s a mystery why life settled on 20 as the building blocks for all its proteins. Although certain species can use more—some microbes employ up to 22—no one’s ever found one using fewer.

But now scientists are closer to creating such an organism, after partially eliminating one of the 20 amino acids from the bacterium Escherichia coli. The research, published today in Science, used artificial intelligence (AI) to propose alternatives to the amino acid isoleucine in dozens of proteins making up bacterial ribosomes—the protein factories of the cell. The findings offer a glimpse into how earlier, simpler life forms might have lived and suggest new ways to synthesize proteins with bespoke functions in medicine and biotechnology.

Organisms with a reduced dependence on particular amino acids might better survive hostile environments or resist infections by viruses. Removing an amino acid entirely also “frees up” the specific DNA sequences that typically code for it—so those sequences could be reassigned to encode other, perhaps synthetic amino acids to create new drugs or other molecules.

Submission + - Performance of a LLM on the reasoning tasks of a physician (science.org)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

In all experiments, the LLM outperformed physician baselines and displayed continued improvement from prior generations of AI clinical decision support. Our study suggests that LLMs have eclipsed most benchmarks of clinical reasoning, motivating the urgent need for prospective trials.

The future of healthcare looking more bleak as there is a push to automate diagnosis. While LLMs are very capable in some areas, notable weakness is relevance realization. That is, humans are by far more capable of developing heuristic models on how to restrict search space and focus on relevant information. Medical diagnosis is one such area. I fear misdiagnosis of rare conditions going to become commonplace as LLMs are widely adopted in the medical space.

Submission + - An Amateur just Solved a 60-year-old Math Problem—by Asking AI (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23 year old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve.

The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro and posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website devoted to the Erds problems.

The question Price solved—or prompted ChatGPT to solve—concerns special sets of whole numbers, where no number in the set can be evenly divided by any other. Erds called these “primitive sets” because of their connection to similarly indivisible prime numbers.Price wasn’t aware of this history when he entered the problem into ChatGPT.

Price sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The duo had jump-started the AI-for-Erds craze late last year by prompting a free version of ChatGPT with open problems chosen at random from the Erds problems website. Reviewing Price’s message, Barreto realized what they had was special, and experts whom he notified quickly took notice.

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