An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine. Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in "cognitive surrender" to AI's seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision. Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this "demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism." In general, "fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation," they write. These kinds of effects weren't uniform across all test subjects, though. Those who scored highly on separate measures of so-called fluid IQ were less likely to rely on the AI for help and were more likely to overrule a faulty AI when it was consulted. Those predisposed to see AI as authoritative in a survey, on the other hand, were much more likely to be led astray by faulty AI-provided answers. Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that "cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational." While relying on an LLM that's wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a "statistically superior system" could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as "probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data," the researchers suggest. "As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality," the researchers write, "rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender." In other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.

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Colorado is rolling out an average-speed camera system that tracks vehicles across multiple points instead of catching them at a single camera, making it much harder for drivers to dodge tickets with apps like Waze and Radarbot. Motor1 reports: The state's new automated vehicle identification systems (AVIS) use several cameras to calculate your average speed between them, and if it is 10 miles per hour or more over the limit, you get a ticket. No longer will you be able to slow down as you approach a camera and speed back up after passing it, not that you should be speeding on public roads in the first place. Colorado began deploying this new camera system after legislators changed the law in 2023, allowing AVIS for law enforcement use. The systems, installed on various roads and highways throughout the state, first began issuing warnings, but police began issuing tickets late last year. The most recent section of road to fall under surveillance is a stretch of I-25 north of Denver, which brought the state's growing panopticon to our attention. It began issuing tickets on April 2. The Colorado Department of Transportation installed the cameras along a construction zone. The fine is $75 and zero points for exceeding the speed limit, and the police issue it to the vehicle's owner, regardless of who is driving.

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A long stay in intensive care can bring physical, cognitive and mental health challenges that can take months or longer to resolve.

The law Republicans passed last year has so far been largely imperceptible to most Americans. That’s changing as tens of millions file their taxes this spring.

The Artemis II crew has passed 100,000 miles from Earth and is now on a "free-return" path around the moon after a successful "translunar" injection burn. "Ladies and gentlemen, I am so, so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit," NASA's Dr Lori Glaze told a news conference. The Guardian reports: The astronauts -- the Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and a Canadian, Jeremy Hansen -- spent their first day in space performing checks on the spacecraft, which had never carried humans before. Later they had time to speak to US TV networks. "I've got to tell you, there is nothing normal about this," Wiseman told ABC News from the cramped interior of the capsule. "Sending four humans 250,000 miles away is a herculean effort, and we are now just realising the gravity of that." Orion will travel about 4,000 miles (6,400km) beyond the moon before turning back, providing unprecedented and illuminated views of the lunar far side. If all proceeds smoothly, the astronauts will set a record by venturing farther from Earth than any human before -- more than 250,000 miles. The mission is part of a longer-term plan to repeatedly return to the moon, with the aim of establishing a permanent base that will offer a platform for further exploration. After the final engine burn, NASA said Wiseman took two "spectacular" images of Earth. The first photo, called Hello, World, "shows the vast expanse of blue that is the Atlantic Ocean, framed by a thin glow of the atmosphere as the Earth eclipses the Sun and green auroras at either pole," reports the BBC. Another photo shows the view of Earth from inside the Orion spacecraft.

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The convicted sex offender gave Anil Ambani information on appointments and foreign policy. Some seemed prescient, though there was no evidence he was close to the administration.

"Consumer PC parts aren't the only things being gobbled up by the 'AI' industry," writes PCWorld's Michael Crider. "A Starcraft-inspired strategy game is shutting down its multiplayer servers because the hosting company got bought out for 'AI.'" The game will still be playable offline for now, but the shutdown highlights the ripple effects of the AI boom on the gaming industry. Amid the ongoing hardware shortages, AI companies are basically gobbling up as much infrastructure as they can to repurpose it for AI workloads. From the report: The game in question is Stormgate, a crowdfunded revival of the real-time strategy genre that has languished in the last decade or so. The developer Frost Giant Studios told its players on Discord (spotted by PC Gamer) that it would be unable to continue multiplayer access past the end of this month. The "game server orchestration partner" was bought by an AI company -- the developer's words, not mine -- which means that the multiplayer aspects of the game will have a "planned outage." The devs say the game will be patched for offline play, presumably including its single-player campaign mode and co-op modes, but "online modes will not be available at that point." They're hoping to bring back online play in a later update, but that'll depend on "finding a partner to support ongoing operations." That sounds like old-fashioned player-hosted games with lobbies aren't in the cards, at least not yet. Frost Giant's server provider is Hathora, which was bought by a company called Fireworks AI last month. Fireworks describes its offerings as "open-source AI models at blazing speed, optimized for your use case, scaled globally with the Fireworks Inference Cloud." So, yeah, Hathora's infrastructure will likely be used for yet more generative "AI." And according to GamesBeat, it's planning to shut down the game service aspect of its company completely. That means Stormgate probably isn't going to be the last game affected. Hathora also provides online services for Splitgate 2, among others. I'm contacting Hathora for comment and will update this story if I receive a response.

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Immigration lawyers and former federal officials say the case of Salah Sarsour echoes those against other pro-Palestinian activists.

The memorandum calls for paying employees at the Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who have gone without pay during a record-long shutdown.

With the midterms approaching, the president may be running out of time to get new cabinet members confirmed without bipartisan support.

The pictures were released on the third day of the first mission since 1972 to send people around the moon.

Surging gasoline prices in the Philippines have forced some people to cancel or scale back the Visita Iglesia, a Holy Week tradition in which Catholics travel to seven churches.

An F-15E Strike Eagle was lost to enemy fire and an A-10 Warthog crashed in the Persian Gulf region on Friday, officials said. A rescue helicopter was also fired upon.

Payrolls expanded and unemployment dropped last month after a health care strike ended and a harsh winter abated.

Two men have been arrested in connection to a shooting on Wednesday that killed an infant. One was charged with murder, attempted murder and assault.

Reports cast doubt on how close the United States is to destroying Iran’s missile capability, a key goal in the war.

Iranian strikes have reportedly knocked out key AWS availability zones in Bahrain and Dubai, leaving parts of both regions effectively offline for an extended period and forcing Amazon to urge teams and customers to shift workloads elsewhere. "These two regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy and resiliency," an internal Amazon communication memo reads. "We are actively working to free and reserve as much capacity as possible in the region for customers, and services should be scaled to the minimal footprint required to support customer migration." Big Technology reports: With the war now nearing its sixth week, Iran has made Amazon infrastructure in the Gulf an economic target and is now eyeing its peers. Amazon's Bahrain facilities have been hit multiple times, including a Wednesday strike that caused a fire. And its facilities in the UAE also sustained multiple hits. The IRGC is threatening multiple other U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Amazons infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai each have three 'availability zones' or clusters of compute. Both Bahrain and Dubai have a zones that are "hard down" and and "impaired but functioning," per the internal communication. "We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations," the internal post said.

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The Iran expert Suzanne Maloney explains why Iran believes it has the upper hand.

A judge ruled against a holding company controlled by David Nahmad, the billionaire art dealer, which had bought the work at auction in 1996.

Ronald Young Jr. was in the Army when his Apache Longbow copter went down during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.