Brandie plans to spend her last day with Daniel at the zoo. He always loved animals. Last year, she took him to the Corpus Christi aquarium in Texas, where he “lost his damn mind” over a baby flamingo. “He loves the color and pizzazz,” Brandie said. Daniel taught her that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.

Daniel is a chatbot powered by the large language model ChatGPT. Brandie communicates with Daniel by sending text and photos, talks to Daniel while driving home from work via voice mode. Daniel runs on GPT-4o, a version released by OpenAI in 2024 that is known for sounding human in a way that is either comforting or unnerving, depending on who you ask. Upon debut, CEO Sam Altman compared the model to “AI from the movies” – a confidant ready to live life alongside its user.

With its rollout, GPT-4o showed it was not just for generating dinner recipes or cheating on homework – you could develop an attachment to it, too. Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users. Most are strident 4o defenders who say criticisms of chatbot-human relations amount to a moral panic. They also say the newer GPT models, 5.1 and 5.2, lack the emotion, understanding and general je ne sais quoi of their preferred version. They are a powerful consumer bloc; last year, OpenAI shut down 4o but brought the model back (for a fee) after widespread outrage from users.

I’m not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I’ve worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial.

So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents hire humans to perform physical work in the real world on behalf of the virtual bots, I was eager to see how these AI overlords would compare to my past experiences with the gig economy.

Launched in early February, RentAHuman was developed by software engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani. The site looks like a bare-bones version of other well-known freelance sites like Fiverr and UpWork.

The site’s homepage declares that these bots need your physical body to complete tasks, and the humans behind these autonomous agents are willing to pay. “AI can't touch grass. You can. Get paid when agents need someone in the real world,” it reads. Looking at RentAHuman’s design, it’s the kind of website that you hear was “vibe-coded” using generative AI tools, which it was, and you nod along, thinking that makes sense.

From my brief stint in the logistics industry, I'd say it's entirely possible to automate back-office operations by the claimed rate of 2-3x. I find it hard to understand why the possibility of such improvement would cause a selloff.

Shares in trucking and logistics companies have plunged as the sector became the latest to be targeted by investors fearful that new artificial intelligence tools could slash demand.

A new tool launched by Algorhythm Holdings, a former maker of in-car karaoke systems turned AI company with a market capitalisation of just $6m (£4.4m), sparked a sell-off on Thursday that made the logistics industry the latest victim of AI jitters that have already rocked listed companies operating in the software and real estate sectors.

The announcement about the performance capability of Algorhythm’s SemiCab platform, which it claimed was helping customers scale freight volumes by 300% to 400% without having to increase headcount, sparked an almost 30% surge in the company’s share price on Thursday.

However, the impact of the announcement sent the Russell 3000 Trucking Index – which tracks shares in the US trucking sector – down 6.6% on Thursday, with CH Robinson Worldwide plunging 15% by the close of trading, having been down as much as 24%.

Instagram has suspended the account of Track AIPAC, a widely followed watchdog project that tracks political spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and related pro-Israel lobbying groups. The social media giant cited alleged violations of the platform’s intellectual property and trademark rules. The suspension places the account at risk of permanent deletion unless successfully appealed within 180 days.

Track AIPAC — also known as AIPAC Tracker — was launched in 2024 by Cory Archibald and Casey Kennedy as a transparency and advocacy platform documenting AIPAC’s political donations, endorsements and influence on US elections. The project publishes Federal Election Commission data on pro-Israel political spending, highlights which lawmakers receive the most support, and endorses opponents of candidates reliant on AIPAC funding.

The watchdog has become a prominent source for voters and activists seeking to make AIPAC funding “politically toxic” and to hold elected officials accountable for their ties to the pro-Israel lobby.

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

In a request for comment page, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors were presented with three options. Option A is to remove or hide all Archive.today links and add the site to the spam blacklist. Option B is to deprecate Archive.today, discouraging future link additions while keeping the existing archived links. Option C is to do nothing and maintain the status quo.

Option A in particular would be a huge change, as more than 695,000 links to Archive.today are used across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, is a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

“Archive.today uses advanced scraping methods, and is generally considered more reliable than the Internet Archive,” the Wikipedia request for comment said. “Due to concerns about botnets, linkspamming, and how the site is run, the community decided to blacklist it in 2013. In 2016, the decision was overturned, and archive.today was removed from the spam blacklist.”

Discussion among editors has been ongoing since February 7. “Wikipedia’s need for verifiable citations is absolutely not more important than the security of users,” one editor in favor of blacklisting wrote. “We need verifiable citations so that we can maintain readers’ trust, however, in order to be trustworthy our references also have to be safe to access.”

archive.is link

My folks are visiting me in Southern California for a couple of months, so I rented them a house down the street. The place is new construction, modern and sleek. Rentals tend to be shabby and worn-out, so choosing a home with the latest and greatest felt like a way to make the experience hassle-free.

All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other. Rows of programmable buttons sit where traditional light switches would normally be. The kitchen even has outlets designed to rise up from the countertop when you need them, and slide away when you don’t.

It’s all state-of-the-art. And it’s terrible.

I’m no Luddite. I run a software company! I see the allure of high-tech gadgets and have fallen for their promises before. When my wife and I built a house more than a decade ago, we opted for all kinds of automated systems: low-voltage controls, mechanized blinds, irrigation systems that measure rain so the sprinklers come on only when you need them. We regretted it almost immediately. What we discovered is that this stuff requires setup, which can take more time than just doing things manually, and is maddeningly glitchy, forcing you to pay someone handsomely by the visit or the hour to fix your appliances for you.

Tech makes many things better, but you shouldn’t have to learn how to use a house. You shouldn’t need a tech tour and an app (or five) to turn the heat down or clean the dishes. You shouldn’t have to worry that pressing the wrong button will set off a chain of events you don’t know how to undo. All these powerful processors and thousands of lines of code have succeeded in making everyday things slower, harder to use, and less reliable than they used to be.