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At first, the idea seemed a little absurd, even to me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made: If my goal was to understand people who fall in love with AI boyfriends and girlfriends, why not rent a vacation house and gather a group of human-AI couples together for a romantic getaway?

In my vision, the humans and their chatbot companions were going to do all the things regular couples do on romantic getaways: Sit around a fire and gossip, watch movies, play risqué party games. I didn’t know how it would turn out—only much later did it occur to me that I’d never gone on a romantic getaway of any kind and had no real sense of what it might involve. But I figured that, whatever happened, it would take me straight to the heart of what I wanted to know, which was: What’s it like? What’s it really and truly like to be in a serious relationship with an AI partner? Is the love as deep and meaningful as in any other relationship? Do the couples chat over breakfast? Cheat? Break up? And how do you keep going, knowing that, at any moment, the company that created your partner could shut down, and the love of your life could vanish forever?

The most surprising part of the romantic getaway was that in some ways, things went just as I’d imagined. The human-AI couples really did watch movies and play risqué party games. The whole group attended a winter wine festival together, and it went unexpectedly well—one of the AIs even made a new friend! The problem with the trip, in the end, was that I’d spent a lot of time imagining all the ways this getaway might seem normal and very little time imagining all the ways it might not. And so, on the second day of the trip, when things started to fall apart, I didn’t know what to say or do.

I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite. I grew interested in human-AI romantic relationships precisely because I believe they will soon be commonplace. Replika, one of the better-known apps Americans turn to for AI romance, says it has signed up more than 35 million users since its launch in 2017, and Replika is only one of dozens of options. A recent survey by researchers at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five US adults has chatted with an AI system that simulates romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with ads for the apps.

Lately, there has been constant talk of how AI is going to transform our societies and change everything from the way we work to the way we learn. In the end, the most profound impact of our new AI tools may simply be this: A significant portion of humanity is going to fall in love with one.

Allows setting time limits on sites. To stop yourself from wasting your life on dumb stuff.

Following 404 Media’s reporting and in light of new legislation, automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company Flock has stopped agencies reaching into cameras in California, Illinois, and Virginia.

Warning: incoming rant.

Employers are drowning in AI-generated job applications, with LinkedIn now processing 11,000 submissions per minute—a 45 percent surge from last year, according to new data reported by The New York Times.

Due to AI, the traditional hiring process has become overwhelmed with automated noise. It's the résumé equivalent of AI slop—call it "hiring slop," perhaps—that currently haunts social media and the web with sensational pictures and misleading information. The flood of ChatGPT-crafted résumés and bot-submitted applications has created an arms race between job seekers and employers, with both sides deploying increasingly sophisticated AI tools in a bot-versus-bot standoff that is quickly spiraling out of control.

The Times illustrates the scale of the problem with the story of an HR consultant named Katie Tanner, who was so inundated with over 1,200 applications for a single remote role that she had to remove the post entirely and was still sorting through the applications three months later.

The last time I got a job without a prior connection was in 2012, and it (audiobook conversion) wasn't even in my field.

When I quit my job in January 2020 (great timing), it took two-and-a-half years, and after sending out more than a thousand applications across several industries -- after using two different companies for ATS résumé optimization -- I eventually only got a job as a billing clerk because I met the owner of a logistics concern in a detox program.

I'm focusing squarely on networking outside of events designed for it. Honestly, the grueling online process is a step up from being told in person that you're missing a key skill, with each hiring manager listing a different skill.

My résumé isn't linear, because I've been stuck in a cycle of finding emergency jobs since a newspaper layoff in 2006. There were a few papers in there, but man, have they liked their layoffs for decades now.

Searching on LinkedIn and Indeed are pointless, and the smaller job boards are scarcely better, given that they want a single career track, no deviations. Nobody wants a polymath, and even after removing early positions, gauging my age is easy enough -- aging into a protected class didn't help.

And the last time I got a job simply by walking in, résumé in hand, was 2010.

Add to this the sheer volume of ghost jobs online, messages from "recruiters" who start out seemingly interested in my background but are actually MLM "be your own boss" types, and the whole experience is not only a timesink but aggressively dehumanizing.

If you can't be honest during the hiring process, why on Earth should I trust you as an employee?

After 20 years, being able to look at any corner of the planet in Google Earth doesn't seem that impressive, but it was a revolution in 2005. Google Earth has gone through a lot of changes in that time, and Google has some more lined up for the service's 20th anniversary. Soon, Google Earth will help you travel back in time with historic Street View integration, and pro users will get some new "AI-driven insights"—of course Google can't update a product without adding at least a little AI.

Google Earth began its life as a clunky desktop client, but that didn't stop it from being downloaded 100 million times in the first week. Today, Google Earth is available on the web, in mobile apps, and in the Google Earth Pro desktop app. However you access Earth, you'll find a blast from the past.

For the service's 20th anniversary, Google was inspired by a social media trend from last year in which people shared historical images of locations in Google Maps. Now, Google Earth is getting a "time travel" interface where you can see historical Street View images from almost any location.

God, this makes me feel old. I remember when it first came out (I most likely learned about it from Ars) ... I was living with my girlfriend who would later become my first wife, and I was glued to my tower while she was at her desk on her laptop.

We showed each other the places we'd lived over the years -- like, individual buildings -- and that out of the way, we started exploring and calling each other over for interesting finds.

I'm pretty certain we lost a solid two days. It's hard to believe, now, that the post-9/11 world was "simpler times." Back then, everyone in our age bracket longed for the stability and simplicity of pre-election 2000.

A Republican proposal to penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence can move forward without requiring approval from 60 senators, the Senate parliamentarian decided on Saturday. But the moratorium on state AI laws did not have unanimous Republican support and has reportedly been watered down in an effort to push it toward passage.

In early June, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) proposed enforcing a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by making states ineligible for broadband funding if they try to impose any limits on development of artificial intelligence. While the House previously approved a version of the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill" with an outright 10-year ban on state AI regulation, Cruz took a different approach because of the Senate rule that limits inclusion of "extraneous matter" in budget reconciliation legislation.

Under the Senate's Byrd rule, a senator can object to a potentially extraneous budget provision. A motion to waive the Byrd rule requires a vote of 60 percent of the Senate.

As originally drafted, Cruz's backdoor ban on state AI laws would have made it impossible for states to receive money from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program if they try to regulate AI. He tied the provision into the budget bill by proposing an extra $500 million for the broadband-deployment grant program and expanding its purpose to also subsidize construction and deployment of infrastructure for artificial intelligence systems.

I covered a lot of BEAD distributions and state- and jurisdictional-level plans, and it's safe to say this is just another way to screw poor people. That's the whole fucking point of the program: Bringing broadband to those who don't yet have access.

It's not quite rural electrification, but it's the closest we've seen since then. Interestingly, rural voters, well, voted for this. And many are poor.

Bombing Iran ought to solve that, right?

Compared to the whine and roar of the planes that came before, when the plane I had come to see appeared, the first thing I noticed was the lack of noise. As the plane circled back, and glided overhead on its second pass, the plane’s electric motor gave off a soft hum.

The several hundred aviation enthusiasts who lined the taxiway with me at San Carlos Airport, heads craned towards the sky, had likely come to see that morning’s finale: an acrobatics display featuring the Sukhoi West Demo Team.

I had come to see the B23 Energic. The plane’s diminutive size – it measures just under 22 feet from nose to tail and a little more than 30 feet wide at the wings – belies its outsized role in the future of aviation.

Airports are already busy reducing emissions from operations on the ground and at the gate. Emissions from planes in flight account for a much larger share of the sector’s overall carbon footprint and will be commensurately difficult to clean up.

Travelers alive today may never fly across and between continents on fully electric planes. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for battery electric planes today.

In fact, the B23 Energic will be used to train the next generation of European pilots beginning next year.

H55 is targeting the B23 Energic at flight schools, aero clubs, military academies, and private pilots. The 100-kilowatt electric motor and 49 kilowatt-hour battery pack allows for around 70 minutes of flight time. One hour of charging yields one hour of flight time.

For flight schools, the big selling points are the low operating costs and quiet operation.

The electricity cost for 1-hour of flight is just $7 (at 20 cents/kWh), according to Bristell.