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22,000 Wake Ups and Counting

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Don MacLeod

22,000 Wake Ups and Counting

Category: Technology

Archaeology

New Pompeii Discovery: The Man Who Died Clutching Ten Coins and a Broken Shield

Posted on April 28, 2026April 27, 2026 By Don MacLeod

The Pompeii Archaeological Park just rolled out its first Pompeii AI reconstruction — a digital rendering of a man who died during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, clutching a terracotta mortar over his head like a makeshift helmet. The project, developed with the University of Padua’s Digital Cultural…

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Media

How a Flashy PR Agency Turned Plagiarism Into a Business Model

Posted on April 23, 2026April 23, 2026 By Don MacLeod

The theft is industrial-scale and shameless. A site called National Today — run by TOP Agency, a PR firm that claims Microsoft and Intel as clients — is churning out roughly 300 AI-generated articles per day by stealing reporting from local newsrooms, national outlets, and independent journalists. The site lifts…

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Culture

Chinese Robot Beats Fastest Human Half-Marathon Time — The Line Between Impressive and Alarming Just Blurred

Posted on April 21, 2026April 21, 2026 By Don MacLeod

A Chinese humanoid robot just completed a half-marathon in less time than the fastest human ever recorded. Not “pretty close.” Not “almost as fast.” Faster. The robot — built by a Chinese robotics company — finished the 13.1-mile course in under an hour. The current human world record for a…

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Culture

Monoculture Began To Decline After 43 Million People Watched This Moment

Posted on April 20, 2026April 20, 2026 By Don MacLeod

Bradley Cooper took a selfie at the 2014 Oscars. Ellen DeGeneres posted it. The internet exploded. 43.74 million people watched it happen live — the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years. No one knew it at the time, but monoculture died in 2014 — or at least peaked that…

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Medical

AI Chatbots Fail Medical Accuracy Tests Sounding Completely Confident

Posted on April 16, 2026April 16, 2026 By Don MacLeod

Half of AI Health Advice Is Wrong—And Patients Have No Idea As doctors begin their next appointment, there is a chance that their new patient has probably consulted an AI chatbot before calling you. They asked about symptoms. Treatment options. Whether they really need to see a specialist or if…

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Generation Z

Why Gen Z’s Relationship With AI Is Getting More Complicated

Posted on April 13, 2026April 13, 2026 By Don MacLeod

Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation just released research showing that Gen Z’s AI skepticism is climbing while their dependence on these tools deepens. Excitement about artificial intelligence dropped 14% in a single year. Anger toward AI is rising. And yet — 52% of Gen Z K-12 students believe they’ll…

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AI

Anthropic Just Proved AI Can Outthink Every Security Expert. Now What?

Posted on April 9, 2026April 9, 2026 By Don MacLeod

Anthropic just announced it built an AI model so capable of finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities that releasing it to the public would be — their words — potentially catastrophic for “economies, public safety, and national security.” The model, Claude Mythos, found thousands of high-severity security flaws during testing. Not…

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Culture

Classrooms Go Retro to Combat AI — But the Pop Quiz Got a Warning Label

Posted on April 1, 2026April 1, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Culture

The Surveillance Towers Cops Call “Scarecrows” Are Multiplying — And “Minority Report” Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Manual

Posted on March 31, 2026March 31, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Digital

Your AI Just Lied to You — And It’s Not Sorry

Posted on March 30, 2026March 30, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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