Aatube

In a revelation that overturns much of previous investigation into the devastating Pacific Palisades Fire, the Department of Justice today said the blaze was a “holdover” fire from a blaze that had been set a week prior which, federal prosecutors said today, was the result of the actions of a 29-year-old Uber driver.

an “agitated” Rinderknecht walked up Skull Rock Trailhead on NYE after dropping off Uber passengers

“People do evil things for whatever reason,” Special Agent in Charge Kenny Cooper of the LA. Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives bluntly said at a press conference this morning after Rinderknecht’s arrest. “I’m not going to speculate or go into anything of that, like we have evidence of that, that will be addressed in trial, but evil people do evil things.”

Or, "Florida man accused of starting New Year's Day fire that became deadly Palisades Fire days later"

Other stories I considered posting for this event:

Palisades firebug Jonathan Rinderknecht listened to disturbing French song repeatedly before setting ‘malicious’ fire: court docs —NYPost

Lyrics from the song include, “Daily life is killing me,” “I feel like I’m nowhere,” and “too much bitterness in my head, I think about the mistakes we made.”

“Google records indicate that Rinderknecht had listened to the same song nine times in the previous four days,” it states. He watched the corresponding fiery music video four times.

Officials arrest man in Florida on suspicion of starting devastating Palisades Fire —CNN

Rinderknecht asked the chatbot for a “dystopian painting divided into distinct parts that blend together seamlessly. On the far left, there is a burning forest. Next to it, a crowd of people is running away from the fire, leading to the middle. In the middle, hundreds of thousands of people in poverty are trying to get past a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it. On the other side of the gate and the entire wall is a conglomerate of the richest people. They are chilling, watching the world burn down, and watching the people struggle.”

While Rinderknecht was attempting to contact authorities, he used ChatGPT again to ask, “Are you at fault if a fire is lift (sic) because of your cigarettes,” the complaint says.

Investigators later ruled out cigarettes as a possible cause based on weather conditions at the time, according to the complaint.

Mr. Trump's perseverance as a peacemaker is unpredictable.

He wielded it as a sword when he abused his access to classified information and he relied on it as a shield to hide his criminal activity. The dualism of secrecy inherent in Defendant’s job is another reason why it is important to send a strong message at sentencing and deter other former members of the intelligence community from breaking the law to make some extra money.

Unilever shares rose 0.9% on Wednesday.

may i say that i did not know this man was alive

The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack.

On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named "Sam" told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats documented on Hacker News and Reddit.

the latest incident has led to more questions for the MTA and police, who so far have not said why this keeps happening. [...] Some riders have theorized that it could be a runaway string from local kite fighting contests

Instead of [...] a license that requires derivatives and other uses of the licensed material to retain the same license[,] Wikidata utilizes a license that has no requirements. This might sound ideal for “freedom,” but in reality, Wikidata seems to appropriate that particular FOSS imaginary of sharing while instead delicensing information into data by assigning it a CC0 license—allowing companies to extract, commodify, and otherwise use these data in ways to create systems without requirements to honor the license or reference the works that were utilized.

—quoted by the second part of the article

Coders spent more time prompting and reviewing AI generations than they saved on coding. On the surface, METR's results seem to contradict other benchmarks and experiments that demonstrate increases in coding efficiency when AI tools are used. But those often also measure productivity in terms of total lines of code or the number of discrete tasks/code commits/pull requests completed, all of which can be poor proxies for actual coding efficiency. These factors lead the researchers to conclude that current AI coding tools may be particularly ill-suited to "settings with very high quality standards, or with many implicit requirements (e.g., relating to documentation, testing coverage, or linting/formatting) that take humans substantial time to learn." While those factors may not apply in "many realistic, economically relevant settings" involving simpler code bases, they could limit the impact of AI tools in this study and similar real-world situations.

I pulled the NC10’s motherboard out, stuck it in the oven — 200 degrees Celsius, five minutes, no fan — and baked it. Not metaphorically.

Bing has terminated all of its search syndication and API services, and will likely be removed completely in a future version. As it is a struggle to monetise Waterfox Private Search with an ad-supported free version, it’s unlikely it will ever be default and instead will be a subscription-only based service.

The default search engine has been changed to Startpage.

According to the FBI, a Texas man talked about killing christians on Roblox and searched for ‘are suicide attacks haram in islam’ on his iPhone.

Roblox gave authorities Crazz3pain’s email address, name, physical address, and IP address and it all pointed back to James Wesley Burger. The FBI searched Burger’s home on February 28 and discovered that someone in his family had put on a keylogger on the laptop he used to play Roblox and that they’d captured a lot of what he’d been typing while playing the game. They turned over the records to the feds.