In perhaps the most adorable hacker story of the year, a trio of technologists in India found an innovative way to circumvent Apple's location restrictions on AirPod Pro 2s so they could enable the earbuds' hearing aid feature for their grandmas. The hack involved a homemade Faraday cage, a microwave, and a lot of trial and error. On the other end of the tech-advancements spectrum, the US military is currently testing an AI-enabled machine gun that is capable of auto-targeting swarms of drones. The Bullfrog, built by Allen Control Systems, is one of several advanced weapons technologies in the works to combat the growing threat of cheap, small drones on the battlefield. The US Department of Justice announced this week that an 18-year-old from California has admitted to making or orchestrating more than 375 swatting attacks across the United States.

Between a cascade of indictments against former US president Donald Trump, a tumultuous 2024 election season (in which Trump is a main character), and the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence, 2024 is shaping up to be a complete nightmare. At the center of it will be a rise in personalized disinformation. Not only will there be more BS to sift through thanks to tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard, but the disinformation will likely be more effective, and even tailored to target specific groups with frightening consequences. Of course, some of this could be fixed with new regulations. But the US Congress still hasn't figured out how to tackle privacy, and regulating AI will only be more difficult.

Byron Lichtenstein is a principal at Insight Partners, and sees most opportunity in the convergence between software and payments. Insight Partners focuses mainly on growth-stage software companies across verticals from education to social media to fintech, and it has invested in German neobank N26, business expense management startup Divvy, and payment fraud monitoring startup Sift. Here are the ways he sees payments and software coming together to find value in a changing industry. "Historically, we've always been software investors," Lichtenstein told Business Insider. "What's changed over the past two years that we found really interesting is that dumb payments don't really --obviously, they exist --but they're not really a thing anymore," Lichtenstein said.

Roy Lichtenstein's wry, comic book-y images may feel quintessentially New York. The Pop art pioneer, after all, grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he lived most of his life. But for more than 25 years, Lichtenstein had a love affair with Los Angeles. At least every other year starting in the late 1960s, and always strategically timed in the dead of winter, Lichtenstein migrated to L.A. to create new prints at Gemini G.E.L., the workshop that was at the epicenter of the nationwide printmaking revival happening at the time. The Skirball Cultural Center's "Pop for the People: Roy Lichtenstein in L.A.," which opens Oct. 7, explores the artist's relationship with L.A.

The questions of how humans process uncertain information is important to the development of knowledge-based systems in term of both knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation. This article reviews three bodies of psychological research that address this question: human perception, human probabilistic and statistical judgement, and human choice behavior. The general conclusion is that human behavior under certainty is often suboptimal and sometimes even fallacious. Suggestions for knowledge engineers in detecting and obviating such errors are discussed. The requirements for a system designed to reduce the effects of human factors in the processing of uncertain knowledge are introduced.