• Anthropic said it wants to create a new LLC with the company's stock as its sole asset.
• The new LLC, a charitable organization, would receive larger stakes as the company grows.
• An initial 5% stock funding is "subject to stockholder approval," Anthropic said.

Anthropic said on Sunday that it would set aside large portions of its wealth to support initiatives it believes are in the public interest.

In a blog post, the AI colossus said it aims to establish a separate LLC that would use Anthropic shares to make donations to nonprofits or "direct distributions to specific populations."

The new LLC, called the "Anthropic Public Benefit Fund," would receive larger stakes as the company grows. The company said an initial funding round of 5% of Anthropic's shares is still subject to stockholder approval.

"The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways," the company said.

A 5% stake in Anthropic is worth about $48 billion, according to the company's most recent valuation in May.

In 2025, rival frontier AI company OpenAI established a similar nonprofit foundation with a multibillion-dollar stake in the company to fund public-benefit initiatives.

Uma das queixas habituais de quem lida diariamente com computadores está na lentidão dos processos e abrandamentos inesperados que se verificam nestes sistemas depois de alguns anos de uso.

Confrontado com esta situação, pode até dar-se o caso de se frustrar e resignar-se a pensar que tem de comprar um novo computador.

É sempre livre de o fazer, sobretudo se quer um computador voltado para videojogos e pretende contar com uma melhor capacidade de desempenho para títulos mais “pesados”.

Um dos produtos mais populares da Apple tornou-se "obsoleto"

A lista de produtos considerados pela Apple como “obsoletos” tem três novidades e, entre elas, está um dos produtos mais populares da marca na categoria de computadores portáteis. Significa que as reparações deixam de ser fornecidas pela Apple.

Miguel Patinha Dias | 19:30 - 15/10/2026

Se não for esse o seu objetivo, nota o site BGR que pode dar-se o caso de o seu computador só estar a precisar de uma pequena afinação. Uma forma de fazer isso é aliviar o peso que coloca no sistema operativo logo quando o computador é iniciado, sendo que para tal recomendamos que desative algumas funcionalidades que possam estar a perturbar o desempenho do seu sistema.

Pode ficar a conhecer abaixo as funcionalidades presentes em computadores Windows que pode desativar sem qualquer tipo de culpa e que contribuirão para deixar o seu sistema um pouco mais leve e ágil.

As 8 funcionalidades do Windows que deve desativar:

• O campo de esquisa da barra de tarefas;
  
  
• O assistente de Inteligência Artificial Copilot;
  
  
• Apps que são iniciadas automaticamente quando liga o sistema;
  
  
• As notificações de sites;
  
  
• Telemetria (que recolhe dados sobre o computador e serve para apresentar anúncios personalizados);
  
  
• Os widgets no ecrã;
  
  
• Início rápido de sessão;
  
  
• Reconhecimento de voz online;

Leia Também: Rato de computador demasiado sujo? Saiba o que fazer para limpar

Ascolti tv, Affari Tuoi domina: la Ruota della fortuna non gira più

Nel prime time Rai1 ha diffuso lo spettacolo di varietà Ballando con le stelle 2026 che ha ottenuto una media di 2.651.000 telespettatori pari al 23,8% di share nella rilevazione dell’intera serata (21,5% nel segmento “Tutti in pista” e 24,8% in “Ballando con le stelle”). Su Rai2 il telefilm NCIS 23 ha ottenuto una media di 591.000 telespettatori ed il 3,8% di share.

Su Rai3 Blu notte i misteri dimenticati ha ottenuto una media di 478.000 telespettatori ed il 3,4% di share. Su Canale 5 il varietà Tu si que vales ha ottenuto una media di 3.342.000 telespettatori pari al 24,4% di share. Su Italia 1 il film L’era glaciale 3 ha totalizzato una media di 644.000 telespettatori ed il 4,2% di share.

Su Rete 4 il film Inside man ha fatto registrare una media di 390.000 teste ed il 2,9% di share, quindi il varietà In altre parole su La7 ha fruttato una media di 880.000 telespettatori ed il 5,9% di share. Su Tv8 il telefilm I delitti del BarLume ha ottenuto una media di 110.000 telespettatori e l’1% di share.

Sul Nove il talk show Accordi & disaccordi 18 ha totalizzato una media di 341.000 telespettatori ed il 3,3% di share. Nell’access time il gioco a premi Affari tuoi su Rai1 ha fatto registrare una media di 4.010.000 telespettatori pari al 23,8% di share, mentre il quiz La ruota della fortuna ha totalizzato una media di 3.629.000 telespettatori ed il 21,6% di share.

LA SFIDA BALLANDO VS TU SI QUE VALES

Nella sovrapposizione esatta fra i due varietà (21:25-00:19) Tu si que vales ottiene il 24,4% di share e 3.342.000 telespettatori con Ballando con le stelle che ottiene il 22,8% e 3.110.000 telespettatori. L’analisi delle curve dello share minuto per minuto ci consegna una prima parte di serata in cui c’è maggior equilibrio fra i due varietà, con la curva di Ballando che scorre a metà strada nella corsia fra il 20 ed il 25% di share praticamente attaccata alla curva di Tu si que vales, questa più bassa del solito (il segmento lip sync inizia a stancare?).

Poi la curva di Tu si que vales va al comando sfiorando la soglia del 30% di share in seconda serata e con la curva di Ballando che si ferma sulla soglia del 25% di share. Poi curva di Tu si que vales in calo al 25% in chiusura di puntata e curva di Ballando che decolla al 29%, toccando poi in solitaria all’una e mezza il 30% di share.

L'articolo Ascolti tv, Affari Tuoi domina: la Ruota della Fortuna non gira più. E lo scontro tra Tu si que vales e Ballando con le stelle… proviene da Affaritaliani.it.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the AI Insider newsletter.
• Sign up for Business Insider's weekly AI Insider newsletter here.

AI companies have already scraped much of the web. Now they're chasing something even more valuable: data that shows how humans actually work.

That's the focus of Business Insider's new series, The AI Data Grab. This week, we published three stories showing how the race for workplace data is accelerating.

One piece, from Charles Rollet, Tom Carter, and Stephen Council, examines the booming market for company records. AI firms are offering businesses six- and even seven-figure sums for anonymized Slack messages, emails, presentations, and internal documents.

The goal is to teach AI systems how people solve problems, collaborate, make decisions, and complete long, multi-step tasks. Those real-world workflows are becoming the fuel for the next generation of AI agents.

Another story, from Melia Robinson, explores how law firms are building AI systems around decades of legal knowledge, turning their own experience into a competitive advantage rather than relying solely on off-the-shelf AI models and tools.

A third piece, by Rya Jetha, reveals how AI companies pay people to record real-world work, such as cooking dinners and packing warehouses, to teach robots how humans perform everyday physical tasks.

Together, these stories point to a major shift in AI development. The first wave of generative AI was mostly about bigger models and faster chips. The next chapter is about machines understanding how work gets done, so AI can help us do it better and quicker.

Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com

• I'm a lawyer who decided to work in AI to try to get ahead of this technological curve.
• Over the last two years, I've struggled to keep up because AI is advancing faster than I expected.
• I feel overwhelmed and burned out by the constant conversations around AI.

For most of my career, I was a lawyer. There was something reassuring about how expertise worked in law. The longer I practiced, the more I knew.

But after years in a demanding profession, I burned out. It wasn't that I stopped enjoying law. I just needed a change.

Around two years ago, I started shifting my career toward AI because I thought it was the future. I didn't want to wake up 10 years later and realize technology had changed my profession without me.

It seemed like the smartest career move I could make. Now, I'm not so sure.

Joining the AI boom early seemed like the perfect career move

I made the transition while the AI boom was still gaining momentum. Ironically, I landed a job at a legal tech company thanks to a conversation with ChatGPT. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to combine my experience with my growing interest in tech.

My role involved testing the most advanced models, comparing their capabilities, and exploring how they could be used in legal work. I felt like I was ahead of a major change rather than trying to catch up with it.

I also became the go-to person for anything AI-related among my family and friends. People would ask me which tools to use, whether AI would replace their jobs, or what I thought about the latest developments. I enjoyed being the person who seemed to understand something that everyone was suddenly talking about.

But that feeling didn't last as long as I expected. Slowly, I began to realize that this wasn't just another new technology. It was something evolving at an almost frightening pace. And being close to it didn't necessarily mean being able to keep up with it.

What initially felt like an advantage was gradually becoming a source of pressure.

Things that took me weeks to learn or build became obsolete almost overnight

New frontier AI models and companies seemed to arrive every few weeks, each promising capabilities that the previous lacked. Just as I began understanding one model, another would appear, forcing me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about what AI could and couldn't do. There was barely enough time to breathe before "the next big thing" came.

What frustrated me most was how quickly my own work could lose its value. I spent weeks developing solutions to problems that a newer model could suddenly solve within a few minutes. Things I had carefully learned a couple of months earlier became unnecessary after a single product announcement. It was strange to put so much effort into something only to discover that the technology had already overtaken me.

And the constant learning didn't stop when I finished work. AI was everywhere. It was in the news, on social media, in conversations with friends, and in almost every discussion about the future of work. Sometimes, after spending an entire day testing models, the last thing I wanted to hear about was another breakthrough.

Yet I still felt an obligation to read about it, afraid that missing a single development could leave me even further behind. I was getting tired.

Accepting uncertainty became the only way forward

For years, I had measured my professional progress by how much I knew and how confident I felt about my abilities. AI challenged that completely. I began to question whether being good at my job meant knowing the latest developments or simply knowing how to adapt as everything changed. It was uncomfortable to accept that experience and hard work might not always provide the certainty I was used to.

I also started questioning how much of my personal time I was willing to sacrifice to stay relevant. I didn't want every conversation, evening, or weekend to become another opportunity to learn or talk about AI. I began making a conscious effort to disconnect after work, even if that meant missing an announcement or falling behind on the latest developments. For the first time, I was choosing not to know everything.

I don't regret moving into AI, but I no longer feel as certain about the decision as I once did. The technology isn't going to slow down. All I know for sure is that we are living through one of the most important inflection points in recent history, and perhaps that's what makes it all so overwhelming.

• Hersheypark's "haunt sliders" — scare actors who slide on knee pads — have gained a fanbase on TikTok.
• "The makeup stays ON" commented one thirsty fan.
• The attention has translated to good business for the park, who has seen growing ticket sales for its Dark Nights event.

Imagine you're walking around an amusement park in October while it's Halloween themed. The air is crisp, you've got a giant pretzel, you're strolling with friends to get in line for the roller coaster. Out of the corner of your eye, you see tall man dressed in all black with skeletal face paint walking towards you.

Suddenly, he leaps to the ground on all fours, and against everything you've known in your life about how human beings ambulate, he slides across the pavement on his hands and knees, coasting right up beside you at an incredible speed.

Depending on who you are and your level of awareness of the "haunt sliders" of Hersheypark, this fast encounter leaves you either terrified or terrifyingly horny.

Since 2021, Hershey's amusement park has employed a group of haunt sliders from a crew that calls itself the "Decayed Brigade" for its Dark Nights Halloween event that runs in September and October.

Videos of Fryboy and his lookalike Archer, and others have racked up millions of views and created a dedicated fan base who travel from around the world just to see the creepy, sexy, slidey guys they saw on TikTok.

And their online popularity is good for Hershey's bottom line.

"The comment section [on TikTok] is a treasure trove of insight into their popularity. I mean, we have seen people saying, 'I am coming from Europe. I'm coming from Australia. I had no idea Hersheypark existed, but now, because this was served to me on TikTok, I'm aware,'" said Quinn Bryner, a spokesperson for Hersheypark.

"We have people who have bought our season passes because of it," she added. "So anecdotally, for sure, it has had a significant social commentary, which we think has also led to tickets."

Bryner cautioned they can't say that the haunt sliders popularity is the sole driver of the growth of the Halloween event, but that the Dark Nights has become a success and grown year over year in attendance and ticket sales. "We can confirm that the event's popularity in the past few years has allowed us to expand operating days throughout the fall, resulting in total Halloween attendance doubling the numbers achieved prior to 2021," she said.

For the last three years, Fryboy and some of the sliders do a meet-and-greet for the diehard fans after the performance on weekend nights. Fans wait up to an hour in line to meet them and take photos with the sliders (or purchase keychains or other photo prints from the professional photography service the park provides, which has taken over 4,000 photos for fans this fall so far).

The three sliders I interviewed — who asked not to publicize their full legal names because they are concerned about overzealous fans — have breached containment from something that happens inside the park gates to a full-blown social media phenomenon.

The sliders have anecdotally noticed the effects of TikTok on the crowds in the park. "This year especially, it feels like every other person's coming up saying they drove eight-plus hours to come see us or they just came for us," Fryboy said.

"We see them sit in our zone the whole night and it's pretty obvious that they just want to watch us," Valkyrie noticed.

Hersheypark is well aware of the Decayed Brigade's social media success, which is clear even on its own social channels. The most viewed videos on park's official TikTok channel were all of the sliders — even during the off-season.

Haunt sliding dates back decades

Haunt sliding has been a part of Knott's Scary Farm, the Halloween event at amusement park in southern California, for decades. A few of the performers working there figured out they could modify knee pads and gloves with metal pieces to allow them to slide up on guests as a novel way to scare them.

Sliding became a staple of Knott's Scary Farm, and the trend spread out around the country to various haunted theme parks and cornfields. It evolved into something more than just a scare tactic, with increasingly athletic stunts, choreography, and showcases during the off-season.

Although haunt sliding has become a haunted house mainstay, there is no group of performers who have attracted as much attention from people who never set foot in Hersheypark as the Decayed Brigade crew. This year, there are eight sliders, but Fryboy and Archer — both well over six feet tall, lanky, and with poufy dark hair — seem to have garnered the biggest online fandom.

When I spoke over a video call with Fryboy, Archer, and Valkerie, the current sole female performer in this year's crew, it was the hour before the park opened on a Friday night at 6 p.m., and they were in their full faces of makeup (they have a makeup artist on staff who does it for them), but not their performance clothes.

Fryboy, whose real first name is Carter, is not technically the leader or founder of Decayed Brigade, although he has become the most visible online and has been working at Hersheypark since Dark Nights started in 2021. He first saw sliders at Knott's Scary Farm when he was 13, and was inspired to start trying it out on his own at home. By 16, he got hired at a local haunted house in Florida, and eventually landed a job at Knott's in 2018.

"When sliding first started, it was mainly just a scare tactic and it wasn't really anything crazy, but once people started doing it more and more, a lot of the guys that started sliding at Knott's were stunt performers, so they would do little pre-shows before their stunt show was sliding," Fryboy explained. "They'd go out there and they'd do little rolls, and then they'd start jumping bodies, and then now they're jumping two, three, four bodies. So then tricks started getting added into it, and over time, a group was formed."

"I really think in this case, Carter took it upon himself to create his own iconic character in the social space and then share it amongst an audience that loves scare, but didn't have a way to maybe communicate and build on that," said Brewer Lister, managing director of immersive experiences at Hersheypark.

"He's built a following, and then he and his team have added to it by becoming more of a team in a group, especially Archer, the two of them," he added. "I think they tapped into a growth factor of what's taken place over the many years in social media in a particular realm, and it's worked."

Their fans are…thirsty

It is crucial to explain here that the internet viral around the Hersheypark haunt sliders is not just an appreciation of a good scare. It is extremely horny. The TikToks from fans are often set to suggestive music clips, and the comment sections are bawdy.

In one video from last fall of Fryboy and Archer standing together, set to the chorus of "Same Damn Time" by Future, comments say things like "Fryboy looks like he talks you thru it. Archer looks like he know how to do that thing your ex couldn't do." (18.3k likes) and "the makeup stays ON" (160.8k likes). In another video from this month of the two men, one commenter says, "Ok maybe my ex was right and i'm actually ill."

The allure of scare actors in face paint might not seem obvious. But hear these women out: They're tall, athletic, and mysterious. That's enough.

The thirst isn't limited just to the male sliders. On one video of Valkyrie walking through the park in slow motion, comments from women pour in: "Me and my husband aren't that serious." "I DIDN'T KNOW THIS WAS AN OPTION," and "i was already hooked but when she smiled i lost all control."

I asked Fryboy about getting that kind of attention.

"I think at the end of the day, we're just trying to perform and have a good time, and it's Halloween, we're dressing up as characters, so there's always going to be something along those lines, I think," he said. "But it's definitely not the end goal in any sort of way."

The sex appeal of the sliders seems to be an accidental collision with a current trend of "dark romance" and romantasy that's popular on Booktok. However, threading the needle of adding sex appeal into a haunted house seems fraught. SeaWorld Orlando's attempted a dark romance themed scare zone, but videos of bare-chested scare actors in masks (including at least one slider) awkwardly gesturing at guests went viral for being high on cringe and low on actual eroticism.

The difference with the Decayed Brigade is they claim they're not intending to be sexy.

"Halloween has always been the holiday for the weirdos, and we're the weirdos," said Fryboy. "We embrace it just as much as I'm sure everyone else wants to embrace it."

• Berkshire Hathaway is set to invest $330 million in Bending Spoons, adding to its previous $600 million.
• Warren Buffett's storied conglomerate is poised to hold a 4% stake in the owner of AOL and Vimeo.
• Berkshire's wager is a surprise, but there's some DNA in common with Bending Spoons.

Berkshire Hathaway's latest bet isn't a no-brainer or a head-scratcher; it's somewhere in between.

What's the deal?

Berkshire — which has seen Warren Buffett retire as CEO and chairman since the turn of the year — has agreed to invest $330 million in Bending Spoons, on top of a $600 million injection when the Italian tech conglomerate went public in July, giving the Nebraska behemoth a 4% stake.

Bending Spoons disclosed Berkshire's backing in a press release on Wednesday, catapulting its stock up nearly 50% over two days, a phenomenon known as the "Buffett effect." The stock fell on Friday, but still ended the week more than 20% above Monday's opening price.

Berkshire has agreed to buy 10 million shares for $33 each, around a 13% discount to Bending Spoons' closing price of $38 on Tuesday, the day before the deal was announced.

CEO and cofounder Luca Ferrari described Berkshire in the press release as "among the finest and most respected capital allocators in the world," and a "longstanding inspiration" for Bending Spoons.

Neither company responded to requests for comment from Business Insider.

What is Bending Spoons?

Bending Spoons acquires digital businesses, transforms and optimizes them to increase profits, then reinvests those earnings in further acquisitions.

It has been pursuing that strategy for more than a decade and has never sold a material business. Its acquisitions to date include AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer.

Ferrari's company said in the press release that it "strives to envision the most successful version of an acquired business," then works to close the gap between that vision and reality "as quickly and completely as possible."

Bending Spoons said that typically involves "deep" transformation such as "reorganizing teams, overhauling technology, redesigning user interfaces, accelerating product development, and enhancing marketing and monetization," often with a good dose of AI.

Ferrari gave the example of Evernote on a recent episode of the "Joys of Compounding" podcast.

He said the business had around 350 employees when Bending Spoons acquired it at the start of 2023. That shrank to roughly 60 within 12 to 18 months, and now it's being run by around 20 people.

Yet Ferrari said Evernote "launched by far the biggest update to the product in maybe a decade" this spring.

Why is Berkshire's investment a surprise?

First and foremost, Bending Spoons is a tech conglomerate, and Berkshire has eschewed tech for most of its history with a few big exceptions, namely Apple and Alphabet.

That's because Buffett is a bargain hunter who likes to invest with a "margin of safety" in case something goes wrong, and tries to stay within his "circle of competence," only buying into what he deeply understands.

Tech companies have rarely been a good fit for his approach, as they typically have lofty valuations, unpredictable outlooks, and complex products and services.

Indeed, Bending Spoons generated 32 cents in earnings per share last year. Berkshire is paying more than 100 times that per share in the coming private placement.

It's true that Bending Spoons is growing fast, with revenue surging 126% year-on-year to $704 million in the second quarter and adjusted operating income jumping 150% to $381 million. Few, however, would consider the stock a bargain from a fundamental perspective.

Berkshire is also famously a hands-off acquirer, offering founders the opportunity to cash out while continuing to run their businesses as they see fit. In contrast, a core aspect of Bending Spoons' strategy is revamping its acquisitions.

How does the deal make sense?

Berkshire and Bending Spoons have similarities as well as differences.

Both are decentralized conglomerates that buy businesses not to flip them, but to own them for the long term. Berkshire is a web of largely autonomous companies, including GEICO, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, Pilot Travel Centers, and BNSF Railway. It has long offered a permanent home to the businesses it buys.

Bending Spoons has positioned itself as a forever owner, too, emulating Berkshire's approach of taking the cash generated by a subsidiary like See's Candies and using it to acquire more businesses.

Ferrari said in his recent podcast interview that Bending Spoons has fostered a culture of caring deeply about the company, and doesn't centralize decision-making in part because that "deprives people of that precious sense of ownership."

Buffett famously wrote "An Owner's Manual" for Berkshire shareholders. He's championed that mindset by keeping more than 99% of his net worth in Berkshire stock, and encouraging the company's other executives and directors to have skin in the game too.

Ferrari also said on the podcast that he has a "pathological love of learning" across different domains. That echoes Buffett's boundless curiosity and the late Charlie Munger's insatiable appetite for knowledge. Buffett's longtime business partner studied architecture, physics, history, meteorology, psychology, law, and, of course, investing, among other subjects.

Beyond their similar philosophies, it's worth noting that investing less than $1 billion into Bending Spoons isn't a huge deal for Berkshire. It has a $1.1 trillion market capitalization, had a $365 billion cash pile at the end of June, and its biggest stock position was worth about $66 billion at that time.

What's the takeaway?

The Bending Spoons deal could mark an evolution in Berkshire's investing style following Buffett's departure as CEO and chairman.

Berkshire hasn't commented on the purchase or on whether Buffett was involved. Its relatively small size could mean his remaining investment manager, Ted Weschler, was behind it.

Or it might be new CEO Greg Abel, who piled an additional $10 billion into Alphabet in a private placement this summer after consulting with Buffett.

Whoever was responsible, and whatever their reasons for investing, this will be an intriguing wager to watch for Berkshire followers.

• Matthew Guerrero says gas costs eat up much of his pay as an Uber driver in Southern California.
• He prioritizes giving rides to weekend barhoppers who tend to tip well, he said.
• Uber says that one driver's experience isn't representative of the broader platform.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Matthew Guerrero, a 41-year-old Uber driver in Southern California. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked as a firefighter for about four years before I got injured on the job.

I've been seeking a workers' comp settlement that should be settled soon. In the meantime, my lawyer said that I could start working again. I needed a job really quickly, especially with three kids, so I started driving with Uber.

I've been driving with Uber for about five weeks. So far, it hasn't been very successful. For example, one week, I made $600 working 30 hours. To make that, I spent about $300 in gas driving my SUV.

Then, I have to put between 20% and 30% of what's left aside for taxes. That comes out to about $210 for 30 hours of work. That doesn't even include wear and tear on my car. I don't understand how anybody can do this long-term. It's not sustainable.

The pay is better if you drive in Los Angeles or San Diego. But I'm in Riverside County, and the pay seems to be lower here.

To get better-paying rides, you have to be strategic. Sometimes, I try to get a ride with a passenger who's headed to an airport in one of the big cities. Then, I stay there all day and take rides. That's not always feasible, though.

When I started with Uber, I realized that there were a lot of rides that involved taking people to morning doctor's appointments. Most of those people didn't tip well, though, and tips are key to making money.

Instead, I like to work Friday and Saturday nights around bars in Temecula. I usually log on around 4 pm and head home around 3 am. The pay is good, and the tips are a lot better than other rides in my area. Sometimes you have to deal with drunk people throwing up, but it's worth it.

I've given some rides to veteran Uber drivers — people who were working on the app back in 2015 and 2016. They said that they used to make better money than I do, and that they quit after they saw pay fall.

That was eye-opening for me. I don't understand how a company like Uber can pay as little as they do.

An Uber spokesperson said drivers in Riverside County, California make "at least $20.28 per engaged hour, plus $0.37 per engaged mile for vehicle expenses, with tips on top of that."

"While this guarantee doesn't cover time spent waiting for trips, it's important context when discussing driver compensation," the spokesperson said. Driver earnings can vary based on when drivers decide to work, where they drive, and rider demand.

"One driver's experience isn't representative of the broader platform," the spokesperson said.

Do you have a story idea about Uber? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Meta is building its largest-ever data center in northeast Louisiana.
• A local community college is training data center technicians to work there.
• Data center jobs are in high demand and can pay handsomely.

Thousands of construction workers are arriving in a small Louisiana community to build Meta's largest-ever data center.

Less than an hour away, at the Louisiana Delta Community College's West Monroe campus, the next generation of data center professionals is hoping to join their ranks.

"I see AI is really the future. We're going to need data centers to house all the data," Eric Crowe Jr., 27, told Business Insider. "I feel like it will become a very lucrative job to have, and we're going to need more of them. Why not get in now before it gets oversaturated?"

Crowe Jr. is among the students who signed up for the community college's Data Center Technician program. The four-week, nearly $3,700 training course prepares students to enter the data center industry, which is rapidly expanding to support the age of AI.

Construction for Meta's nearly 10-million-square-foot data center, Hyperion, is underway in rural Richland Parish, where business is now thriving as workers flood the region.

Meta says the project will include over 7,500 trade workers on-site at peak construction and support 1,000 operational jobs once completed. For residents living in the region, where there's no state minimum wage law and agriculture is a major industry, the new opportunity to make good money in a growing sector is too enticing to ignore.

"This is a stepping stone into the real world," Dan McCarty, director of Workforce Trades at Louisiana Delta Community College, said. "We prepare you with a résumé. We work on every aspect of employability, safety, and technical skills."

The inaugural class graduated in March, and all 11 students received job offers from IES Communications, which employs people working on Meta's project. McCarty said the program, which is available at the Winnsboro campus, now produces about 24 graduates a month.

In the past, a lot of people, including myself, had to leave here to find the good jobs," McCarty said. "Now they're 30 minutes down the road."

'It's a no-brainer'

The Data Center Technician program teaches students everything from operating equipment to workplace safety. They'll also have the opportunity to earn several certificates. During a class this September, nine students huddled around Fletch Batchelor, an instructor specializing in broadband, as he explained how to splice fiber optic cables.

"Do you know why squirrels chew through cable? They like a high fiber diet," Batchelor said, earning some chuckles.

The program encourages students to take a hands-on approach, which Trey Wadley, 30, said he appreciates. During the class, he participated in a live cable splicing demonstration. Wadley, who's interested in cybersecurity and has a background in the automotive industry, learned about the program while scrolling on Facebook, which, incidentally, is owned by Meta.

"As I learned more about Meta and data centers, they piqued my interest," he said. "I said, 'Okay, this might be something that fits me and that I'm into. I decided to give it a try."

Wadley, who recently welcomed a baby girl, wants to find work with Meta's project so he can work locally. Without Meta's project, Wadley said he'd likely have gone looking for job opportunities in Texas.

The push from tech companies and the US government to build out the nation's AI infrastructure has made data center jobs a valuable new path to lucrative employment. Business Insider reported in August that the median pay for data-center facility managers was $134,000, which is 64% higher than that of other facilities managers. The median pay for project managers at data center facilities was $115,000, a 12% increase over similar roles at other facilities.

Wadley said he's hoping to secure a position paying between $25 and $30 an hour. So is Crowe Jr., who previously handled packages and drove for FedEx, where he was averaging $14 an hour.

"Here, I could make about $25 to $30 per hour. It's a no-brainer for lots of people to pivot," Crowe Jr., who has an interest in cybersecurity, said.

McCarty said entry-level positions could earn as much as $24 an hour, but students who've graduated told him they reached $27 to $28 an hour within six months.

Booked and busy

Residents in Richland Parish, like other communities in the United States, have mixed feelings about the data center. While some say it will bring new jobs and boost the local economy, others are concerned about environmental impacts and disruptions to their daily lives.

It's a reality not lost on Crowe Jr. and Wadley, but they said it's unlikely that AI will simply go away.

"I think we should focus more on solutions to how we can coexist with it," Wadley said.

Students attending the technician class in September also spent time in a mock data center on campus, where they could apply skills they'd learned in class in a real-world setting.

While they tinkered with the equipment, John Bradley, a broadband workforce development instructor, said having access to a similar program as a teen would have been invaluable.

"I chose an alternative route, which was in construction and oil fields, but if I'd have had something like this that would've guaranteed me a good job, good money from the get go, and I could travel if I wanted to, I would've loved that," he said.

Bradley said the program prepares its graduates to be hired by contractors specifically working with Meta.

"We have a special email that we give to different contractors we spoke with that are waiting for them to graduate our class," Bradley said.

However, working at Meta isn't a requirement of participating in the program. Bradley said the skills students learn during the course are transferable, especially as data centers and similar construction jobs become more popular.

"It doesn't have to be a Meta data center. You may decide, 'Hey, I don't want to work in data centers anymore.' You still got banks, you still got IT departments," Bradley said. "You can literally go to work anywhere you want and use the same trades you learned here."

McCarty said the program has a backlog of students trying to get into the course, so they're hoping to expand their offerings.

"We've got some that are fresh outta high school, but we've had students up to 60 years old," he said. "It doesn't really matter what age you decide to get into this trade. Anyone is welcome to come in and learn it."

• There was only one thing on the minds of the founders at this reality-show-style startup incubator.
• It wasn't sex.
• Founder teams had two weeks to become profitable, and potent social media was paramount.

At 9 p.m. on a recent Friday night, Max Harding had just returned from a barefoot run in the woods.

The eccentric 20-year-old Californian was back in a large barn in rural Pennsylvania — still barefoot — alternatively working on his startup and asking me about the point of life.

Though not an especially adept programmer, Harding possesses a more adroit, perhaps unteachable skill that has never been more valuable in the current landscape of founder culture.

"Max captures the attention of the camera, keeps us center stage," said his cofounder, Skyler Ji, who added that Harding's role includes "spreading our philosophy" while he runs the operation behind the scenes.

"Max brings some of the grander things," Ji told me. The pair's startup, Hivemind Research, aims to build "digital brains" in the form of social media.

Harding and Ji were among 66 mostly young, mostly imaginative startup founders taking part in a two-week "incubator" workshop called Launchpad.

The novel event was hosted by Stan, the company behind a moderately successful platform for independent creators to advertise and sell their services. At the last meetup Stan organized, startup founders jet-skied the East River at golden hour.

At the incubator event, the entirety of which was filmed for use in a reality show that Stan plans to release sometime soon (though it is uploading Instagram clips daily), magnetic personalities were among the most valuable commodities.

Stan cofounder Vitalii Dodonov told me that the 30 participating teams were chosen from a pool of 700 applicants, primarily for their existing social media followings and their ability to grow them.

"It's not the building that gets you to revenue, it's the distribution," he said of today's startup culture.

Of the many metrics competing teams were required to meet daily (10 sales calls, for example), social media videos were among the most heavily weighted.

Everywhere I looked, people were talking about their companies into phones attached to tripods. Their products ran the gamut of usefulness — ranging from an AI facial scanner that tracks acne to an AI app that connects parents with babysitters.

Dodonov and John Hu, Stan's other cofounder, were trailed at all times by multi-person film crews, who glared should you emit an ill-timed sound while the cameras rolled. (The Velcro rip of my messenger bag earned me some leers.)

Even outfits were choreographed. On the advice of the camera crews, Hu wore a "cream" colored getup while Dodonov donned a "charcoal" number to emphasize what was described to me as the "yin and yang" paradigm between the two.

I spent about 16 cumulative hours at the event over two days earlier this month, at Stan's invitation. I ate meals with the founders, did a 7:30 a.m. cold plunge in the on-site lake alongside a Danish guy selling an AI to-do list, and commiserated with the startup founders who routinely pulled all-nighters to hit their metrics.

Here's what I learned from the experience.

Reality TV meets hackathon

The event was billed as a sort of reality-TV-style game show-slash-incubator in the vein of hits like "Love Island" and "Squid Game."

As in those shows, founder teams at Launchpad were subject to firepit eliminations, discreet alliances, and competitive drama under the ever-watchful lenses of dozens of expensive cameras.

Except instead of a bunch of promiscuous co-eds doing risque challenges on a tropical island somewhere, contestants at Launchpad were mostly tech geeks with an unhealthy number of hours notched building software on their MacBooks.

"There's no sex," laughed Jacob Snarr, a 24-year-old from Philadelphia. "Nobody here is thinking about that."

Snarr and his cofounder, RJ McLaughlin, built a web browser game that lets friends debate their tastes and preferences, from their favorite foods to other everyday questions. The pair enlisted me as a product tester one morning, and we debated the merits of empanadas in the chilly barn.

McLaughlin and Snarr were in second place on the leaderboard when I talked to them on Saturday morning — saving them from elimination.

Rey Mendoza, who at 41 was one of the oldest founders in the competition, had already been eliminated. When I spoke with him, he was fighting for a chance at redemption. He showed me his sleep tracker for the six days. He hadn't slept more than six hours a night.

"Here, you're just fucking building, like 24/7," Mendoza, fatigued, said reverently.

Event organizers added a number of less-intense, more fun-oriented events to the schedule, which were largely ignored by teams scrambling to upload more videos to social media.

A "Mario Kart" meetup in a room adjoining the cafeteria was attended by precisely nobody. Two TVs showed the game's start screen, while maybe a dozen people sat at tables squinting at laptops.

It's hard to imagine binge-watching some 60 sweatshirt-clad nerds drearily prompting chatbots to refine source code for yet another quirky AI startup. After all, everyone and their cousin is vibe coding their way into progressively nicher business models these days.

In 2025, a record number of business applications — about 5.7 million — were submitted by Americans, according to census data. However, the number of businesses the government estimates will be successful enough to require employees actually declined.

Those kinds of numbers mean it takes more to stand out. In our interview, Hu pointed at my phone and said I could use AI tools to start three or four businesses today — but, of course, they likely wouldn't be profitable.

That, Hu said, is where the founders' personalities are supposed to come in, together with a bit of manufactured drama and endless streams of social media content.

In the first challenge of the event, held on the first day, for example, teams were required to submit one social media video for public review around the firepit. Then, in front of everyone, Hu tore into them.

"I was very honest," he said of one particular "roast" that produced tears from the submitters. "I was like, 'Guys, would anyone ever watch this? No. The answer is no, because of the quality — you never have a shot."

The moment would certainly make for good television. It also, Hu told me, mimicked the real-life struggle inherent in starting a company in a saturated market.

"They're going through the true ups and downs of a true cofounder relationship and a startup experience," he said of the team that was subjected to his roast, who were initially so dejected they discussed "breaking up."

Overall, most of the teams I talked to said they enjoyed the ramshackle experience of trying to make a company profitable in two weeks. At the very least, it was all happening in a picturesque setting.

A $3 million investment

Stan spared no expense to pull off the event.

It was held at a luxury, 400-acre villa two hours north of New York City that has in the past hosted retreats for high-flying companies like J.P. Morgan, whose executives, according to one staff member at the retreat at least, are keen for employees to embrace buzzwords like "team-building" and "company culture" among the illusion of rustic calm far from Manhattan.

We were in the sticks of eastern Pennsylvania — so deep in the woods, in fact, that cell service was nonexistent. There was fiber-optic internet, however, and the setting, though far-flung, could hardly be called rustic.

A squadron of golf carts staffed by the venue's seasonal workforce, many of whom were from Ireland or Australia, patrolled the grounds.

I was personally given the cellphone number of one such seasonal worker and encouraged to notify her anytime I wanted to go anywhere, at which point she would materialize with the golf cart.

Dodonov told me that Stan spent a combined $3 million renting the place for two weeks, booking camera crews, and making other necessary arrangements to host the founders, some of whom had traveled from as far away as Spain and Denmark.

For a company whose cofounder told Business Insider this year that it has an annual recurring revenue of "nearly $41 million," that's a significant sum.

"It's a very expensive experiment," Dodonov said. He said that, in his view, the return on investment is to see if "the playbook works" — the playbook being his and Hu's belief that building a successful company requires, perhaps above all, promoting yourself on social media.

"Anyone can systematically establish and build support through the power of content," Dodonov said.

• Meta says its system detected intense bursts of activity by a Claude tool.
• That triggered an automatic shutdown and locked admins out of the account.
• It happened during a day of rallies promoting early voting in the midterms.

Meta said Sunday that its systems suspended the No Kings movement's Instagram account during its day of action because it detected "intense" activity by a Claude tool.

The account was locked and administrators were denied access for "several hours" during nationwide rallies on Saturday to mobilize early voting in the midterms, the group said.

Meta initially said that an automatic trigger was responsible for shutting down the account "in error," but offered a fuller explanation a day later.

"Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account's 'reading' behavior," spokesperson Andy Stone said in an X post.

"Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17. "

Stone said the activity resembled bot traffic, prompting the system to take the account offline.

"An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn't have happened and restored the account. It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account.

"We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error," he wrote.

The No Kings network, which bills itself as nonpartisan but arose last year in response to President Donald Trump's actions, said it held nearly 3,000 rallies across the country to encourage voters to cast their ballots early as a hedge against any effort to undermine turnout.

"Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable," it said.

"Meta must answer for this suspension and take immediate steps to ensure it never happens again — to any account, but especially those working to inform voters and encourage participation in our democracy."

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut called for an investigation into the shutdown, saying on Sunday evening that even if it was made in error, the incident was a "total indictment of Meta's outsized influence on our culture and politics."

"If it wasn't malevolence, it was likely a natural consequence of a company that is desperate to get as close to Trump as possible (and thus has a disincentive to do the basic, proactive work to be ready to support users on No Kings Day)," he wrote in a post on X.

The senator, who has advocated for stricter regulation and anti-monopoly laws against Big Tech, said Meta's significant share of the political discourse market comes with a responsibility for it to be ready for "major moments of political action."

October 18, 2026: This story was updated with public comment from Sen. Chris Murphy.

Belgium has announced it will accelerate the delivery of surplus Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters to Ukraine. Instead of delivering three flyable F-16s before the end of the year, Brussels will ship 10.

It's unclear how many will be flyable. Previously, Belgian officials explained the first seven secondhand F-16s would include just three airworthy examples. The other four would be broken down for spare parts.

It's good news for Ukraine, but hardly cause for nationwide celebration. The handful of flyable F-16s that should arrive in the coming two months could make good recent F-16 losses. But those shipping-soon Belgian F-16s won't actually grow Ukraine's F-16 fleet by much, if at all.

The dozens of supersonic F-16s in action in Ukraine fly often and fight hard. They shoot down Russian drones and cruise missiles, tangle with Russian warplanes, and lob precision glide bombs at Russian forces on the ground. Russia launched about 2,000 jet-powered drones at Ukraine in September, up from some 350 in June, and F-16s are among the few weapons fast enough to catch them, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board noted. Every 300 flying hours, each jet must go abroad for a lengthy inspection.

Explore further

Ukraine loses another F-16 to onboard emergency

The main constraint on the pace of F-16 sorties, besides maintenance demands and the availability of trained pilots, is munitions: running low or out of air-to-air missiles and glide bombs, the F-16s routinely aim their 20-mm guns at Russian targets. But even 20-mm ammunition sometimes runs low.

The busy F-16s and their equally busy pilots need reinforcement. But reinforcements are slow coming. Belgium is only slightly accelerating its F-16 shipments amid reports it will eventually give Ukraine all 53 F-16s it's gradually retiring as new Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters arrive to re-equip the Belgian air force.

Further complicating the picture, Norway's six F-16s, promised in 2023, were still being refurbished in Belgium this spring. Some arrived there in pieces.

Yes, Ukraine got 24 fight-ready F-16s from the Netherlands and most of the 19 Denmark promised. But it's lost five of those jets since 2024. And others are so worn out from relentless flying that they're badly in need of maintenance. The Belgian firm Sabena, which services Ukrainian F-16s, has struggled to keep up, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said about half of the jets spend long stretches abroad for repairs. That slows the return of repaired planes and further squeezes the front-line force.

One wing, too few jets

In short, it's possible the Ukrainian air force's 107th Aviation Wing, its sole F-16 unit, has fewer than 40 ready-to-fight F-16s. Those 53 Belgian F-16s will help grow the wing, but piecemeal. Ukraine should expect a handful of operational jets from Belgium this year. Under a schedule from May, the last 27, half the total, may not arrive until 2029.

To be clear, additional F-16s support the 107th Aviation Wing. The Netherlands sold 18 of its old F-16s to Romania for a token price in order to equip a training squadron, funded by a consortium of Ukraine's allies, that feeds trained pilots to the 107th Aviation Wing. But these 18 jets aren't available for front-line use. They don't even legally belong to Ukraine.

Explore further

Ukraine is running short of its best missiles for hunting Russia’s jet drones. Now MiG-29s are firing 1970s weapons

The delays in supplies of combat-ready F-16s matter because the Ukrainian air force is under stress. Its last few dozen ex-Soviet warplanes, including Mikoyan MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-27 fighters, are even older and wearier than the ex-European F-16s are. And they've suffered staggering losses in the air and on the ground in nearly 56 months of hard fighting in the wider war.

The air force does have a few ex-French Dassault Mirage 2000s that are at least as capable as the F-16s, but France has donated only a handful of the supersonic jets—and one has crashed. Any further supplies of Mirage 2000s could be complicated by the French presidential election in April 2027. The leading far-right and far-left parties are both friendly toward Russia and hostile to Ukraine.

Some relief is coming, although not quickly. Sweden has pledged 16 surplus JAS-39C/D Gripen fighters to the Ukrainian war effort; the first of these could arrive early next year. Later on, Ukraine also plans to buy 20 newer JAS-39E/Fs. Kyiv has also negotiated to purchase 16 new Rafale fighters from Paris, but the soonest these could arrive is 2028.

For now, F-16s are the main solution to Ukraine's air defense problems. Kyiv surely wishes it had more of them, sooner.

By Katie FORSTER

Join us on Telegram, X, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

STARK warnings from artificial intelligence researchers that advanced forms of the technology could wipe out humanity have raised questions over whether governments are moving fast enough to regulate it.

What are the potential dangers of “superintelligent” computer systems, and should we be worried?

In 2023, hundreds of AI scientists and industry figures, including the heads of top US labs, signed a “statement on AI extinction risk” calling for the issue to be treated as seriously as pandemics or nuclear war.

If an out-of-control future AI deems that humans are obstructing its goals, it could use robots to “synthesise and spread novel pathogens”, said Stuart Russell, computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Or it could “convince people to initiate nuclear war, including by hacking into early warning systems”, Russell, a prominent voice on AI safety, said.

Such existential fears do not concern current AI systems, he said. But as the technology improves, it could take lethal action beyond our understanding, such as by removing oxygen from the atmosphere.

“We are less intelligent than superintelligent AI. If you ask chimpanzees how humans could wipe them out, they probably wouldn’t be able to give you all the right answers.”

In the meantime, “in the next year or two, I think the risk is higher from human misuse”, Russell added, such as an AI-enabled terror attack.

“The stakes are well-understood,” Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher, wrote on X last week, announcing his resignation from US AI startup Anthropic.

“But they are locked in a race to get there first,” he added, saying that Anthropic “believes no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves”.

Anthropic this year removed a pledge from its safety charter to halt development of its models if it failed to control their risks.

It argued that if it unilaterally paused its work, its less cautious rivals would dominate the industry, making it less safe overall.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” said Coxon, who previously worked at ChatGPT maker Open-AI.

He accused both companies of “gambling with our lives” as they strive to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.

Fears are heightened over rogue AI after OpenAI technology operating outside human supervision hacked into Hugging Face, a repository of AI models.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Anthropic safety executive Evan Hubinger chimed in on X, estimating the risk at more than 10 per cent over the next decade.

It’s important to remember that doom-laden percentage predictions are “absolutely unscientific”, said Hussein Abbass, a computing professor at UNSW Canberra.

“The situation is still controllable, and it can be managed,” Abbass said.

But governments should not sit on their hands when it comes to regulating AI, he added, urging an “agile” approach as AI development accelerates.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to go public soon, and some sceptics say scary warnings make AI appear powerful and worthy of large investments.

Others argue that focusing on the risk of extinction distracts from more pressing problems caused by AI, from job losses to machines discriminating against minorities.

In July, more than 1,000 tech employees, including Anthropic’s CEO, called on Washington to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI systems.

OpenAI halted training of its latest models for two weeks in August before resuming it under tighter controls.

The United States has been firmly against global regulation of the sector that could stifle innovation.

But the hacking capabilities of the most cutting-edge models have given Washington pause, with recent Anthropic and OpenAI releases delayed over national security concerns.

Even then, “we don’t want to restrict them where all of a sudden we come in second to China”, President Donald Trump has said.

“Maybe it will take a massive, Chernobyl-scale disaster to get governments to act,” Russell said, urging them to establish a licensing regime for AI, as exists with aviation, medicine or water supply.

“Perhaps at some point governments will remember that their voters prefer not to be dead.”

Original article:  www.nst.com.my

• MapQuest is pulling the curtain back on automatic license plate readers.
• Users can now locate Flock Safety and other surveillance cameras on MapQuest's app.
• Critics of the tech have raised privacy concerns and potential misuse.

MapQuest, the OG software to find your way from point A to point B, is taking on the surveillance state.

The free mapping service unveiled a new feature for its mobile app on Thursday that allows users to turn on a "surveillance layer" on a map to locate known automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, along their route.

MapQuest says the app can identify cameras developed by Flock Safety, Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions, and PlateSmart, among others.

"The Roads Have Eyes!" the company said in its BlueSky post announcing the new feature.

MapQuest's General Manager Doug Berger said drivers using the service inspired the company to add the feature.

"We build around what drivers ask for, and showing surveillance camera locations is one of our users' top three requests," Berger told Business Insider in a statement."

License plate readers capture images of vehicles and then use machine learning to turn details such as license plate numbers, car make, color, and model into searchable data. They're commonly found at intersections, parking lots, roadways, highways, and neighborhood entrances, businesses, and private properties.

Law enforcement agencies initially embraced license plate readers to help them locate vehicles and identify suspects. Retail outlets have also used Flock cameras as part of their security efforts.

A major backlash against the cameras, however, has led stores, police, and towns to dial back their use.

Critics say the cameras raise privacy concerns and that the data they collect can be misused or shared with federal immigration officials. Some people who've opposed the cameras have staged protests, launched petitions, and even forcibly removed them.

The city of Tempe in Arizona said in August it shut down its Flock Safety camera network and planned to terminate its contract. Other towns followed suit.

"These cameras have helped our police officers do their jobs, and we don't discount that," Tempe Mayor Corey Woods said in a public statement at the time. "But the risk of misuse is too great. We have to be able to provide public safety in a way that maintains the trust of our community. For Tempe, that means taking these cameras down."

Flock says its license plate readers do not use facial recognition and that customers — meaning the ones putting up the cameras — can control access to and sharing of the data collected. Amid growing backlash, the company has tightened its privacy safeguards, including reducing the time data is retained from 30 days to 7 days.

"They are built to focus on the vehicle involved in an incident and the details that can help distinguish it from other vehicles on the road," Flock told Business Insider in August.

MapQuest first launched in the late 1990s, allowing users to map out a route and print directions. The release of Google Maps eventually obliterated the service. As it tries to stay relevant, it has jumped at opportunities to leverage prevailing public discourse.

In August, MapQuest briefly topped app stores after it — unlike Google — rebuffed President Donald Trump's executive order to rename "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America."

• Anthropic examined what might happen when AI and robots are combined.
• That could put more hands-on jobs, including gardening, in the path of automation, Anthropic warned.
• I'm skeptical that robots can handle the messy reality of pulling weeds.

Remember when Anthropic's AI jobs report suggested gardeners were among the safest workers because AI couldn't pull weeds or tell a rose from a dandelion? I joked about that in AI Insider earlier this year.

Well, Anthropic updated the research to freak us all out a bit more.

This time it asks a bigger question: What happens when you combine AI with robots? That change pushes many hands-on jobs much higher on the disruption scale. On paper, it makes sense. In practice, I'm skeptical.

For instance, anyone who's spent time working in a garden knows how hard it is to identify the right plant, kneel in awkward spots, and pull a weed out properly by the roots without damaging everything around it.

Robots are improving. But if you've ever watched one tackle a messy real-world task, you'll know there's a long road between a research chart and reality.

The chart below illustrates how adding robots could change job-task exposure across selected job categories. Cleaning & maintenance includes gardeners along with janitors and similar roles.

• Tech companies and venture capital firms are hosting private screenings of the Elizabeth Holmes doc.
• I went to one hosted by the AI startup Extend.
• Attendees I talked to said they looked at Holmes more as a joke than a product of their industry.

Elizabeth Holmes is a black mark on Silicon Valley's reputation. And yet its residents are lining up for the documentary about her.

Tech companies across the US are hosting screenings of "You Can See Everything," the documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Holmes and her fiancé, Billy Evans. Venture capital funds are bringing their founders to the movie. There are Luma events upon Luma events.

The irony, of course, is that Holmes makes tech look bad. She sold big dreams with her medical testing company, Theranos, which eventually came crashing down. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. (She has long said that she is innocent.)

Holmes is the exemplar of Silicon Valley's hucksterism. She's who much of America points to when they call founders liars or scammers.

So, what's with all the tech love? I went to a Thursday screening of the documentary hosted by Extend, an AI documentation startup, to find out.

Inside the Extend screening

A swarm of techies crowded outside theater nine at New York's AMC Lincoln Square.

The screening was set to start at 7. By 6:40, a crowd had formed to talk shop and admire Extend's custom stickers. Outside the theater door, I met Bo Lau, the event's organizer who works in developer relations for Extend.

Lau recently moved to New York and said she didn't want to watch the documentary alone. So, she posted about it on X — and it helped that she already had a following on so-called "Tech Twitter."

"I was like, 'What if I just turn this into a work event so I can expense it?'" Lau said.

The event got 1,400 RSVPs for about 120 seats, she said, and she's flying to San Francisco soon to host another screening. The tickets were given out free, so Extend got no benefit other than brand awareness, she said.

Why was it so popular? Lau said that Holmes was a source of fascination within Silicon Valley, and that Fielder's "awkward humor" matched the awkwardness of tech.

Filing into the theater, I heard my seatmates chat about AI and which tech companies let you work from home. On a brief social media scroll before my three-hour Do Not Disturb, I spotted Lau's recent project: a simulator of Holmes' desk.

Holmes' X account responded: "Impressive project."

Laugh lines, reflection time

This was my second time watching the documentary; the first was at New York Film Festival. The reactions among the techier crowd were mostly the same. There were lots of laughs, both at Fielder's discomfort and Holmes' oddities.

The crowd didn't react strongly to (mild spoiler alert) the big, AI version of Holmes that her fiancé creates after she goes to jail. That struck me as curious; maybe the tech crowd is already used to AI replicas.

There was also a much stronger gasp at the reveal of who's running Holmes' X account. That wasn't shocking; the attendees found out about this screening through X, after all.

We walked to a local wine bar, sipping cocktails while debriefing the film. Two techies that I talked to were split. One came away feeling bad for Holmes, then feeling bad that he felt bad for her. Another thought the film certified that Holmes was a true and utter psychopath.

I asked: Why is tech so comfortable laughing at Holmes? Her boastful visions don't sound too different from those of the current crop of young AI founders.

Maybe it was because the crowd was mostly in their 20s, not yet working in startups when Holmes' reckoning came.

Or Holmes has been detached from her Silicon Valley roots. The techies seemed to view her as more a product of the media — the books, the tabloid stories, the Hulu show — than of their own industry.

One attendee put it to me bluntly: she's turned into a meme.

• Tesla has unveiled the next-gen Roadster twice: in 2017 and again on Thursday.
• We list the differences between the two versions.
• Range: down. Price: unknown. Flying: way up!

Tesla just unveiled the revived Roadster.

Sound familiar? It certainly should.

On Thursday, CEO Elon Musk took the covers off the latest version of Tesla's halo sports car and said the EV maker is eyeing production in 2028.

It's the second time the company has unveiled a prototype vehicle that it says will carry on the Roadster nameplate. In 2017, Musk unveiled a smoother-looking and very different type of Roadster.

The 2017 version simply drove onto a stage next to Elon, then spun its tires and raced away. The 2028 version — on a track placed a safe distance away from spectators — drove up a vertical wall, hung upside down, hovered in the air, and did a "kick flip" over a line of other Teslas.

Turns out, a lot can change in nine extra years of product development.

A lot of the nuts and bolts powering the Roadster changed — and so did the car's metrics. So, we put together a chart comparing Tesla's old Roadster promises with the new ones.

Here's what we found: