Industry
The question isn't whether the AI bubble will burst – but what the fallout will be
The question isn't whether the AI bubble will burst - but what the fallout will be Will the bubble ravage the economy when it bursts? What will it leave of value once it pops? The California Gold Rush left an outsized imprint on America. Some 300,000 people flocked there from 1848 to 1855, from as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Prospectors massacred Indigenous people to take the gold from their lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And they boosted the economies of nearby states and faraway countries from whence they bought their supplies.
A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language
In the Swiss Alps, a plan to tidy up Romansh--spoken by less than one per cent of the country--set off a decades-long quarrel over identity, belonging, and the sound of authenticity. After reformers launched Rumantsch Grischun, a standardized version of Romansh's various dialects, traditionalists denounced it as a "bastard," a "castrated" tongue, an act of "linguistic murder." Ask him how it all began, and he remembers the ice. It was a bitter morning in January, 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, aged thirty-six, carefully picked his way up a slippery, sloping Zurich street. His destination was No. 33, an ochre house with green shutters--the home of Heinrich Schmid, a linguist at the University of Zurich. Inside, the décor suggested that "professor" was an encompassing identity: old wooden floors, a faded carpet, a living room seemingly untouched since the nineteen-thirties, when Schmid had grown up in the house. Schmid's wife served, a Swiss carrot cake that manages bourgeois indulgence with a vegetable alibi. Cathomas had already written from Chur, in the canton of the Grisons, having recently become the general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, a small association charged with protecting Switzerland's least known national language, Romansh. Spoken by less than one per cent of the Swiss population, the language was itself splintered into five major "idioms," not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. Earlier attempts at unification had collapsed in rivalries. In his letter, Cathomas said that Schmid's authority would be valuable in standardizing the language. Cathomas wrote in German but started and ended in his native Sursilvan, the biggest of the Romansh idioms: " ." Translation: "I thank you very much for your interest and attention to this problem." Schmid, the man he was counting on, hadn't grown up speaking Romansh; he first learned it in high school, and later worked on the "Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun," a Romansh dictionary begun in 1904 and still lumbering toward completion.
An AI model trained on prison phone calls now looks for planned crimes in those calls
The model is built to detect when crimes are being "contemplated." A US telecom company trained an AI model on years of inmates' phone and video calls and is now piloting that model to scan their calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes. Securus Technologies president Kevin Elder told that the company began building its AI tools in 2023, using its massive database of recorded calls to train AI models to detect criminal activity. It created one model, for example, using seven years of calls made by inmates in the Texas prison system, but it has been working on building other state-or county-specific models. Over the past year, Elder says, Securus has been piloting the AI tools to monitor inmate conversations in real time (the company declined to specify where this is taking place, but its customers include jails holding people awaiting trial, prisons for those serving sentences, and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention facilities). "We can point that large language model at an entire treasure trove [of data]," Elder says, "to detect and understand when crimes are being thought about or contemplated, so that you're catching it much earlier in the cycle."
'It's going much too fast': the inside story of the race to create the ultimate AI
'It's going much too fast': the inside story of the race to create the ultimate AI On the 8.49am train through Silicon Valley, the tables are packed with young people glued to laptops, earbuds in, rattling out code. As the northern California hills scroll past, instructions flash up on screens from bosses: fix this bug; add new script. There is no time to enjoy the view. These commuters are foot soldiers in the global race towards artificial general intelligence - when AI systems become as or more capable than highly qualified humans. Here in the Bay Area of San Francisco, some of the world's biggest companies are fighting it out to gain some kind of an advantage. And, in turn, they are competing with China. This race to seize control of a technology that could reshape the world is being fuelled by bets in the trillions of dollars by the US's most powerful capitalists. Passengers get off a train at Palo Alto station.
Best Cyber Monday Vacuum Deals (2025): Dyson, Bissell, Eufy
From robot vacuums to Dyson stick vacs, don't miss these Cyber Monday vacuum deals happening on our favorite vacuums in every category. There's a lot of shopping you can do this weekend, but these Cyber Monday vacuum deals are ones you shouldn't skip if you need any kind of cleaning upgrade. Changing to a stick vacuum hugely improved my life after moving to a three-story home, but all kinds of vacuum types can turn your life around. Never have time to vacuum or mop? You'll want a handheld vacuum .
Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra
Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra NewsFeed Drone video shows devastation from floods in Indonesia's Sumatra Drone video shows widespread destruction in part of Sumatra in Indonesia, where more than 440 people have died in flooding and landslides across the country. Hundreds of others are still missing. Pope Leo says two-state is'only solution' for Israel-Palestine Netanyahu requests Israel's president grant a pardon in corruption cases
Takaichi and JIP's Yoshimura agree to submit bill reducing Lower House seats
LDP and JIP lawmakers discuss Lower House seats reduction in Tokyo on Nov. 21. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai) leader Hirofumi Yoshimura agreed Monday to submit a bill during the current parliamentary session that will reduce the number of Lower House seats by 10%, fulfilling a key goal of their coalition agreement. Introducing and passing a bill to reduce the number of parliamentary seats in the lower chamber was a core demand for the JIP in exchange for agreeing to a coalition government with Takaichi and the Liberal Democratic Party. "Takaichi and I agreed to submit a seat-reduction bill during the current parliamentary session," Yoshimura said on his X account. "To ensure the bill's effectiveness -- and taking into account the opposition parties' views -- we agreed on a plan that will reduce seats by 10% in single-seat constituencies and proportional representation seats, rather than reducing seats only in the proportional representation system."
Prague's City Center Sparkles, Buzzes, and Burns at the Signal Festival
The annual Signal Festival, an expo for experimental digital art, tested boundaries and warped minds in the Czech capital. The Signal Festival took over several venues in Prague in October with a mix of digital art, performances, and interactive installations. The Czech Republic's largest digital art festival became an international phenomenon this year as it once again transformed the center of Prague into a laboratory for visual experimentation. The 13th edition of the Signal Festival, which took place from October 16 to 19, presented 20 installations by Czech and international artists, including projections on a cloud of mist and interactive objects that responded to the movements of viewers. The Lone Soul Disco performance was choreographed by Viktor Konvalinka.
Amazon slashed Birdfy smart bird feeder cameras to their lowest prices ever for Cyber Monday
These smart bird feeders use connected cameras to capture up-close images and videos of visiting birds. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Birds are difficult to photograph. They move quickly, arrive sporadically, and have an uncanny knack for avoiding the camera. Birdfy's smart bird feeders make it easy to capture photos and videos of your feathered friends with a connected camera.
'It was extremely pornographic': Cara Hunter on the deepfake video that nearly ended her political career
'It was extremely pornographic': Cara Hunter on the deepfake video that nearly ended her political career The Irish politician was targeted in 2022, in the final weeks of her run for office. When Cara Hunter, the Irish politician, looks back on the moment she found out she had been deepfaked, she says it is "like watching a horror movie". The setting is her grandmother's rural home in the west of Tyrone on her 90th birthday, April 2022. "Everyone was there," she says. "I was sitting with all my closest family members and family friends when I got a notification through Facebook Messenger." It was from a stranger.