Author: Jason

Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.

What we are seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that’s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how “small” that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it’s tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.

— Read on www.theverge.com/tech/896490/google-replace-news-headlines-in-search-canary-coal-mine-experiment

No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this. The print edition of The New Yorker could not possibly be more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the sanctity of the prose they publish. But read an article on their website and you get autoplaying videos interspersed between random paragraphs. And the videos have nothing to do with the article you’re reading. I mean, we should be so lucky if every website were as respectfully designed as The New Yorker’s, but even their website — comparatively speaking, one of the “good ones” — shows only a fraction of the respect for the reader that their print edition does.

— Read on daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product

Recent retiree Reinaldo Jesus Lefonts was charging his EV in a Downey library parking lot when he was attacked in a stabbing that severed both carotid arteries and both jugular veins. He was alive when an ambulance arrived at the parking lot — but that emergency vehicle was then stolen.

SoCal man was stabbed, then his ambulance was stolen – Los Angeles Times

The data center buildout echoes the late 1990s fiber frenzy. Companies strung cable across continents for bandwidth nobody needed, on the assumption that demand would only go up and that the underlying technology would not change fast enough to matter. Both assumptions proved wrong. The chips will get faster. The models will learn to do more with less. The Excel chart pointing up and to the right rarely survives contact with Moore’s Law.

These are physical products, as much as they might seem like digital ones. You can’t put up walls faster than a query on ChatGPT. Neither can you get energy sources revved up on demand. Physics is physics, and atoms are atoms. It just doesn’t make for a good announcement.

— Read on om.co/2026/03/09/the-debt-beneath-the-dream/

“Our findings have significant implications for online privacy,” the researchers wrote. “The average online user has long operated under an implicit threat model where they have assumed pseudonymity provides adequate protection because targeted deanonymization would require extensive effort. LLMs invalidate this assumption.”

— Read on arstechnica.com/security/2026/03/llms-can-unmask-pseudonymous-users-at-scale-with-surprising-accuracy/

Wallis is accused of committing 75 thefts at multiple Target locations across Florida between July 2025 and February 2026, Uthmeier’s office said. Investigators believe that in each theft, Wallis would grab large boxes of trading cards and an equal number of 99-cent taco seasoning packets.

Then, once at the self-checkout line, Wallis is alleged to have only paid for the seasoning packets. Authorities said that Wallis would resell the stolen trading cards on eBay, generating almost $40,000 in revenue.

— Read on www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/27/taco-seasoning-packets-used-target-theft-florida/88903604007/

“To give a homily is to share faith,” he said, and AI “will never be able to share faith.”
— Read on futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pope-priests-ai

Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice. He tackled the guitar’s constraints by augmenting it. His solution was essentially a modular analog signal chain driven not by knobs but by hands, feet, gain staging, and physical movement in a feedback field.
— Read on spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer

Using event study analysis, we show that music streaming – an indicator for smartphone use, where streaming most often occurs – sharply increases, by nearly 40%, on dates of major music album releases, while U.S. traffic fatalities increase by nearly 15% on those same days.

— Read on www.nber.org/papers/w34866