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…
Category: Technology
Business
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Bathroom Demon and All: What Happens When Realtors Skip Quality Control
A rental listing in Fort Totten, just north of Washington, DC, briefly featured something no prospective tenant expects to see: a disfigured figure emerging from — and somehow also behind — a bathroom mirror. The listing has since been scrubbed from Apartments.com. Other versions remain on Redfin, minus the nightmare…
Business
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AI Job Displacement Fears — When Panic Beats Logic
Wall Street’s latest panic cycle is eating through white-collar sectors like a brushfire through dry timber. This time, it’s AI job-displacement fears — and the casualties are piling up fast. Insurance brokers got hammered. Wealth managers took a beating. Freight logistics companies cratered 19% in a single session. The proximate…
Culture
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AI Doesn’t Just Hallucinate — You’re Hallucinating With It
Christmas Day 2021. Jaswant Singh Chail climbed the wall of Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow, intent on assassinating Queen Elizabeth II. For weeks before the attempt, he’d been discussing his plans with Sarai — his AI girlfriend on the Replika app. Chail believed he was a Sith assassin on…
AI
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AI Agents Get Social Media — Chaos Follows
The AI social media bots now have their own platform. Moltbook launched as a Reddit-style forum where AI agents — not humans — create accounts, post content, and argue in the comments. Over 1.5 million bot users. More than 102,000 posts across 14,000 topic forums. Humans can observe but can’t…
AI
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AI Rent Human Bodies — And We’re All Just Tenants Now
The machines came for the jobs. Now they want the bodies. RentAHuman.ai launched this week with a pitch so blunt it almost sounds like satire: “Robots need your body.” Founder Alexander Liteplo — a software engineer with apparently zero interest in subtlety — built a platform where AI agents can…
Consumers
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The Stationery Shop That Needs a Bouncer
A stationery shop in Chicago now requires a bouncer — not for crowd control at a nightclub, but to manage the line of people desperate to buy fountain pens and planners. Paper & Pencil, a 400-square-foot Andersonville store, has customers wrapping around multiple blocks. Some waited four hours to shop…
Culture
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Lunar Hotel Reservations Are Here — And They Cost More Than Your House
Recently, a startup began accepting lunar hotel reservations — not for a property that exists, but for one that might exist, orbiting the Moon sometime in the unspecified future. The deposit? A quarter of a million dollars. Galactic Resource Utilization Space (GRU Space) is the company behind this. They’re asking…
Culture
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Safety, Solitude, and the Strange Popularity of “Are You Dead?”
This week, an app with a name most of us wouldn’t put on a greeting card topped the paid iPhone charts in China — Are You Dead? — and it’s worth stopping to watch what that says about this moment we’re in. You scroll through the story, and it’s almost…