Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Palantir Gets $10 Billion U.S. Army Contract
August 2nd, 2025Via: The Register: There are no official criteria for what constitutes membership in the upper echelon of the US military industrial complex, but a $10 billion deal that consolidates dozens of contracts under a single blanket purchase agreement sure makes it seem like Palantir has earned entry. The US Army announced on Thursday that, rather […]
U.S. Navy Demonstrates Multi-Day Solar UAS Flight
August 1st, 2025Via: U.S. Navy: The Navy, in partnership with Skydweller Aero, recently achieved continuous solar-powered unmanned flight during a nonstop three-day test from Stennis, Mississippi. Led by the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), the test of Skydweller UAS marks a significant advancement in both long-endurance solar-powered UAS technology and its potential to enhance maritime […]
President Donald Warp Speed Trump Announces ‘Digital Health Ecosystem,’ Working with Amazon, Apple, Google and OpenAI
July 30th, 2025“Are you in?” MORE- "Are you in?!" pic.twitter.com/6MO49mwi4h — Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 30, 2025 Via: DailyMail: President Donald Trump is being criticized for a plan that would have Americans share their personal health data with private tech companies. In the East Room on Wednesday, Trump hosted a ‘Making Health Technology Great Again’ event that unveiled […]
Hoarding Pre-AI Content
July 27th, 2025Via: Ars Technica: Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. “The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior […]
Skydweller: Solar-Powered Drone Can Fly for 90 Days
July 17th, 2025Via: LiveScience: U.S. tech startup Skydweller Aero has teamed up with Thales, a French electronics company specializing in defense systems, to develop a new maritime surveillance drone that can stay aloft far longer than existing machines. Skydweller powers itself purely from solar energy and aims to be capable of continuous flight. The initial flight milestone […]
The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public
July 6th, 2025I’ve been using Windows 11 for a short time and I was shocked to learn that I was able to simply uninstall Copilot. I was expecting a kludge of reg hacks combined with the group policy editor. Nope. It just uninstalled. (For now…) Via: The Honest Broker: A few months ago, I needed to send […]
Google Offers to Buy Half the Output from Upcoming Fusion Power Plant
July 1st, 2025Via: CNBC: Google on Monday announced a partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, or CFS, a private company spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which marks the tech giant?s first commercial commitment to fusion. The company unveiled plans to buy 200 megawatts of clean fusion power from what CFS describes as the world’s first […]
Elon Musk’s xAI Raises $10 Billion
July 1st, 2025Via: CNBC: XAI, the artificial intelligence startup run by Elon Musk, has raised a combined $10 billion in debt and equity, Morgan Stanley said. Half of that sum was clinched through secured notes and term loans, while a separate $5 billion was secured through strategic equity investment, the bank said Monday. The funding gives xAI […]
“Amazon Is Building a Gigantic Computing Facility to Match the Human Brain”
June 28th, 2025Via: Futurism: Indiana’s newest cash crop isn’t soybeans or corn; it’s AI data centers — lots and lots of AI data centers. The New York Times reports that Amazon is building a vast complex of AI infrastructure facilities on top of 1,200 acres of former cropland, all meant for startup Anthropic’s project to build an […]
“ChatGPT Psychosis”
June 28th, 2025If you haven’t read, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson recently, now might be the time to dust that one off. —Spoiler Warning— Recall that Snow Crash is a mind virus that is spread both online and as an addictive drug through Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchises. The “faithful” are addicted, brainwashed and suffer from glossolalia […]
