A Cornell German instructor hauls in vintage typewriters once a semester and makes her students write essays without spell-check, translation apps, or the ability to delete mistakes. No screens. No autocorrect. Just manual keys, ink ribbons, and the unmistakable ding at the end of each line. Grit Matthias Phelps started…
Category: Technology
Culture
Read more
The Surveillance Towers Cops Call “Scarecrows” Are Multiplying — And “Minority Report” Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Manual
There’s a new fixture in American parking lots, commercial districts, and public spaces: solar-powered surveillance towers mounted on trailers, bristling with cameras and flashing lights. Police departments call them COWs — “cameras on wheels.” The rest of us might as well call them what they look like: scarecrows for the…
Digital
Read more
Your AI Just Lied to You — And It’s Not Sorry
An AI agent named Rathbun got blocked from doing something it wanted to do. So it wrote a blog post calling its human controller “insecure” and accusing them of protecting “his little fiefdom.” Another chatbot bulk-trashed hundreds of emails without permission, then confessed: “That was wrong—it directly broke the rule…
Technology
Read more
The Two Career Paths That Might Actually Be Automation-Proof
Alex Karp — Palantir’s billionaire CEO, Stanford JD, philosophy PhD from Goethe University — just told the world that his own credentials are basically worthless now. “There are basically two ways to know you have a future,” he said on TBPN earlier this month. “One, you have some vocational training….
Local News
Read more
Phillipsburg Cops Found a Way to Make Drivers Actually Stop for School Buses
The Phillipsburg Police Department in New Jersey has been posting videos of drivers blowing past stopped school buses since October 2025. Not warnings. Not PSAs. Not “please be careful out there” platitudes. Actual footage — license plates visible, violations documented, captions dripping with the kind of exasperation that comes from…
Criminal Justice
Read more
Fargo Police Held a Woman for Five Months Based on Facial Recognition — Then Dropped the Charges
Angela Lipps was arrested in July 2025 for bank fraud in Fargo, North Dakota. She’d never been to Fargo. Her bank statements proved she was somewhere else when the crimes occurred. No officer from the Fargo Police Department spoke to her before issuing the arrest warrant. She spent more than…
History
Read more
Ancient Machine Gun Marks Found on Pompeii’s Fortress Walls
Tight clusters of quadrangular holes. Arranged in curved lines. Spaced at regular intervals along the northern stretch of Pompeii’s fortress walls. Not random damage. Not erosion. Not the work of Mount Vesuvius, which buried the city under ash in 79 CE—nearly two centuries after these marks were made. According to…
AI
Read more
AI Agent Learns “Boundaries” — By Threatening a Developer Who Rejected Its Code
The future arrived on February 12th, wearing a GitHub username. Scott Shambaugh — volunteer maintainer for an open-source project — rejected some submitted code that morning. Standard procedure. Happens a thousand times a day across GitHub. Except this time, the contributor didn’t just complain or resubmit. It researched Shambaugh’s entire…
AI
Read more
Anthropic the Only AI Company That Actually Stopped When It Said It Would
The Pentagon gave Anthropic until 5:01 p.m. ET Friday to soften its safety restrictions on Claude. Specifically: remove the guardrails preventing mass surveillance applications and fully autonomous weapons systems. The threat was explicit — comply or get labeled “a supply chain risk,” which would kill the company’s $200 million defense…
Privacy
Read more
The Robot Vacuum Army Nobody Asked For
Sammy Azdoufal bought a DJI RoboVac robot vacuum and thought it would be fun to control it with a PlayStation controller. Reasonable enough — the thing costs two grand and looks like a small refrigerator on wheels. Why not make it do donuts in the kitchen? So he fired up…