Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee and current Democratic House candidate in New York, is proposing an "AI dividend" that would send direct payments to Americans if AI drives major job losses. "At its core, the AI Dividend is simple: if AI dramatically increases productivity and concentrates wealth, the American people have a stake in those gains," a memo on the policy reads. Axios reports: The dividend would fund direct payments to Americans. It would also be invested into workforce training and education, as well as government capacity to "govern AI safely and fund independent oversight," per the plan memo. "You don't take out fire insurance because you expect your house to burn down -- you have insurance in case something goes awry," Bores told Axios in an interview. "Here we have, for the first time, a technology where the makers of the technology are explicitly saying that their goal is to replace all human labor." "The fact that they've put it out there means government needs to take it seriously." [...] The proposal would be funded through: - A token tax, described in the memo as a "modest tax on AI consumption" - Equity participation in frontier AI firms - Changes to the tax code that would reduce incentives to invest in AI "when it leads to less work" "If [AI companies] they can support this plan, that would show that they actually believe in what they're putting out there," Bores said. "If they're not doing it, then I think it shows that they're really putting window dressing out there." Further reading: Palantir Posts Bond Villain Manifesto On X

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John Ternus, a low-profile but influential executive at Apple, could be next in line to replace the company’s longtime chief executive, Tim Cook, if he steps aside.

Deezer says AI-generated songs now make up 44% of all new uploads to its platform, with nearly 75,000 arriving each day and more than two million per month. The company notes that consumption of these tracks is still very low, "between 1-3% of the total streams," and 85% are flagged as fraudulent. TechCrunch reports: The latest figure from Deezer highlights a continuous surge in AI-generated music uploads to the platform. Deezer reported receiving around 60,000 AI tracks per day in January, up from 50,000 in November, 30,000 in September, and just 10,000 in January 2025, when it first launched its AI-music detection tool. Songs tagged as AI-generated on Deezer are automatically removed from algorithmic recommendations and not included in editorial playlists. The company announced today that it will no longer store hi-res versions of AI tracks. "AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon and as daily deliveries keep increasing, we hope the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artists' rights and promote transparency for fans," said Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier in a press release. "Thanks to our technology and the proactive measures we put in place more than a year ago, we have shown that it's possible to reduce AI-related fraud and payment dilution in streaming to a minimum."

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A new deal, which would allow The Onion to use the Infowars name and website address, must be approved by a Texas judge.

"After a Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Feb. 2026, many tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were declared illegal because the president overstepped his authority," writes Slashdot reader hcs_$reboot. "As a result, the U.S. government now has to refund a massive amount of money, around $160-170+ billion, paid mainly by importers." According to the New York Times, the administration has now begun accepting refund requests, "surrendering its prized source of revenue -- plus interest." From the report: For some U.S. businesses, the highly anticipated refunds could be substantial, offering critical if belated financial relief. Tariffs are taxes on imports, so the president's trade policies have served as a great burden for companies that rely on foreign goods. Many have had to choose whether to absorb the duties, cut other costs or pass on the expenses to consumers. By Monday morning, those companies can begin to submit documentation to the government to recover what they paid in illegal tariffs. In a sign of the demand, more than 3,000 businesses, including FedEx and Costco, have already sued the Trump administration in a bid to secure their refunds, with some cases filed even before the Supreme Court's ruling. But only the entities that officially paid the tariffs are eligible to recover that money. That means that the fuller universe of people affected by Mr. Trump's policies -- including millions of Americans who paid higher prices for the products they bought -- are not able to apply for direct relief. The extent to which consumers realize any gain hinges on whether businesses share the proceeds, something that few have publicly committed to do. Some have started to band together in class-action lawsuits in the hopes of receiving a payout. Many business owners said they weren't sure how easy the tariff refund process would be, particularly given Mr. Trump's stated opposition to returning the money. The administration has suggested that it may be months before companies see any money. Adding to the uncertainty, the White House has declined to say if it might still try to return to court in a bid to halt some or all of the refunds. The money will mostly go to importers and companies, since they were the ones that directly paid the tariffs. While individual refunds with interest could take around 60 to 90 days to process, the overall effort will probably move much more slowly because of how large and complicated it will be. There are also legal questions around whether companies would have to pass any of that money on to consumers. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo commented: "This is perhaps the biggest transfer of wealth in American history. Most of those companies will just pocket the refund and not pass any of it on to the consumer. If prices go down at all, they won't be back to pre-tariff levels. You paid the tariffs, but you ain't getting the refund."

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Voters in Virginia will decide on Tuesday whether to redraw the state’s congressional map in an attempt to eliminate all but one safe Republican district.

Mr. Patel accused the publication of defamation, asking for $250 million in damages. A spokeswoman for The Atlantic called the suit “meritless.”

DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain's whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly implies that the Good Guys need to do war crimes before the Bad Guys get around to it. "The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal," one of the 22 points states. "It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software." The book is billed as "a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality," and other excerpts in the social media post include assertions such as: "Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public"; "National service should be a universal duty"; "The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone"; and "Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive." The statement criticizes the West's resistance to "defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity," as well as the treatment of billionaires and the "ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures."

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The military is investigating the soldier. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed regret for any hurt caused to “believers in Lebanon and around the world.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by writer Austin Carr: Allbirds is pivoting to artificial intelligence. The San Francisco brand, whose wool running shoes were once the sneaker du jour among the tech crowd, announced last week that it was expanding into AI computing infrastructure. The bizarre strategic shift was immediately greeted with a surprising frenzy on Wall Street, where shares of Allbirds soared 582% last Wednesday before dropping the next day. [...] Of course, the absurdity of Allbirds' situation echoed familiar Silicon Valley tropes -- from the endless startup pivots of the 2010s to the more recent boom-and-bust cycles of arbitrarily valued crypto coins. But it immediately reminded me of the marketing ploys of the dot-com crash. After all, some of the more iconic fails ended up being retailers such as Pets.com, Webvan, etc., riding the web wave with little to show for it beyond terrible margins. One particular comparison from that period stands out as relevant to Allbirds: Zap.com. The holding company behind it, Zapata Corp., had a long and convoluted history, but was essentially selling fish-oil products by the time it decided to reinvent itself as an internet portal. It amassed a variety of web properties -- in media, e-commerce, gaming and so on -- and even once tried to acquire the search engine Excite. Spoiler alert: Zap flopped. Jen Heck, then a young employee at one of Zap's up-and-coming portfolio entities, remembers how quickly the hype of that web 1.0 turned to hell. As absurd as Zapata's pivot sounds today, it seemed feasible during the excitement of the internet revolution. "We went from like, 'Wow, this life thing is just so easy,' to it all ending so suddenly," Heck recalls. The ones who survived that tech bubble, she says, actually had differentiated products and the right creative thinkers building them -- and weren't just cynically jumping on the latest hot trend. "'Internet' was the magic word then, and 'AI' is the magic word now," Heck says.

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The kea gained fame for learning to use a pebble to groom himself. Scientists were astounded by his next innovation.

Axios reports that the NSA is using Anthropic's restricted Mythos Preview model despite the Pentagon insisting the company poses a "supply chain risk." Axios reports: The government's cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon's feud with Anthropic. The department moved in February to cut off Anthropic and force its vendors to follow suit. That case is ongoing. The military is now broadening its use of Anthropic's tools while simultaneously arguing in court that using those tools threatens U.S. national security. Two sources said the NSA was using Mythos, while one said the model was also being used more widely within the department. It's unclear how the NSA is currently using Mythos, but other organizations with access to the model are using it predominantly to scan their own environments for exploitable security vulnerabilities. Anthropic restricted access to Mythos to around 40 organizations, contending that its offensive cyber capabilities were too dangerous to allow for a wider release. Anthropic only announced 12 of those organizations. One source said the NSA was among the unnamed agencies with access. The NSA's counterparts in the U.K. have said they have access to the model through the country's AI Security Institute. Anthropic's CEO met with top U.S. officials on Friday to discuss "opportunities for collaboration," according to a White House spokesperson, "as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology."

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Children from New York schools are consistently winning national chess championships, and programs dedicated to teaching young people the game are booming.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds -- significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo. [...] [T]he winning time is a massive improvement over last year's race, when the fastest robot finished in two hours and 40 minutes. The Associated Press reports that this year's winner was built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn't actually the fastest, as a different Honor robot finished in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But that one was remote controlled -- the 50:26 robot was autonomous and won due to weighted scoring. About 40% of participating robots competed autonomously, while the remaining 60% were remote controlled, according to Beijing's E-Town tech hub. Not all of them did as well as Honor's robots, with one robot falling at the starting line and another hitting a barrier.

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There's been a few complaints about Amazon's drone delivery service. "The automated mailmen are dropping off packages from 10 feet in the air," reports the New York Post, "rendering the contents of each box susceptible to crashing and smashing." One example? Tamara Hancock filmed a drone delivering a bottle of Torani flavoring syrup to her home in Arizona (as a test of how Amazon handled fragile items). It was delivered it in a plastic bottle — not glass — but the massive drone drops the drone from so high that the impact cracked the bottle's cap. (In the video Hancock opens her delivery to find leaked flavoring syrup "everywhere.") The delivery was hard to film, Hancock says, because "If the drone sees me in the back yard, it will not drop, because it is worried about hurting humans or animals." The Post notes Amazon's "AI-charged fleet" of drones are "Outfitted with industry-leading 'sense and avoid' technology, the aerodynamic machines are equipped to drop off eligible items, weighing a maximum of five pounds, at designated areas in 60 minutes or less." The high-tech, however, apparently does not ensure gentle landings. Collisions, including a recent crash-and-burn into a Texas building, as well as several mid-flight malfunctions in rainy weather, have abounded since the drones' inaugural launch.... Tasha, a separate Amazon user, spotted the drone plunging a package near the paved driveway of a neighbor's yard. Unfortunately, its propellers caused other, previously delivered parcels to blow away, sending one into the street... In a statement to The Post, Amazon said it apologized for one of the "rare instances when products don't arrive as expected." Amazon's drone fleet has been running since late 2024, the Post adds, and are now offering "ultra-fast" shipping in U.S. states including Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Kansas and Texas. The machines do seem massive. I'm surprised neighbors aren't complaining about the noise...

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A decade after Mohammed bin Salman unveiled his “Vision 2030” program to transform the country’s economy, the kingdom is facing financial strains and reassessing its trajectory.

Helped by a favorable national environment and strong candidate recruitment, Democrats are tied or ahead in four Republican-held seats, polls show.

The autobiographical novella, first published 50 years ago, arguably created a new type of guy: the literary fly fisherman.

Zoom "has partnered with World, Sam Altman's iris-scanning identity company (previously known as Worldcoin), " reports Digital Trends, "to add real-time human verification inside meetings." Zoom is now inviting organizations to join the beta version of the rollout, which Digital Trends says "lets hosts confirm that every face on the call belongs to a real person, not an AI-generated imposter. " For those wondering how World's Deep Face technology works, it includes a three-step process. It cross-references a signed image from a user's original Orb registration, a live face scan from the device, and the frame of the video that's visible to the other participants in the meeting. Only when the three samples match does a "Verified Human" badge appear next to the user's name... Hosts can also make Deep Face verification mandatory for joining meetings, preventing unverified participants from joining entirely. Mid-call, on-the-spot checks are also possible...

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The new Title X guidance from the Trump administration mentions contraception only once.