An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI released new data on Monday illustrating how many of ChatGPT’s users are struggling with mental health issues and talking to the AI chatbot about it. The company says that 0.15% of ChatGPT’s active users in a given week have “conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.” Given that ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly active users, that translates to more than a million people a week.

The company says a similar percentage of users show “heightened levels of emotional attachment to ChatGPT,” and that hundreds of thousands of people show signs of psychosis or mania in their weekly conversations with the AI chatbot. OpenAI says these types of conversations in ChatGPT are “extremely rare,” and thus difficult to measure. That said, the company estimates these issues affect hundreds of thousands of people every week. OpenAI shared the information as part of a broader announcement about its recent efforts to improve how models respond to users with mental health issues. Further reading: Parents Sue OpenAI Over ChatGPT’s Role In Son’s Suicide

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NextEra Energy and Google have partnered to restart Iowa’s long-shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear plant, marking the first major U.S. attempt to revive a decommissioned reactor. “We expect Duane Arnold to be back online in early 2029, and the plant will provide more than 600 MW of clean, safe, ‘always-on’ nuclear energy to the regional grid,” said Google in a blog post. Reuters reports: Under the 25-year agreement, the tech giant will purchase power from the 615-MW plant for its growing cloud and AI infrastructure in the state, while also driving significant economic investment to the Midwest region. One of the plant’s minority owners, Central Iowa Power Cooperative (CIPCO), will purchase the remaining portion of the plant’s output on the same terms as Google, NextEra said. The utility added that it had also signed agreements to acquire CIPCO and Corn Belt Power Cooperative’s combined 30% interest in the Duane Arnold plant, bringing NextEra’s ownership to 100%.

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A new study from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna finds that as people’s close social circles expanded from two to five friends around the rise of social media (2008-2010), polarization in society spiked. “The connection between these two developments could provide a fundamental explanation for why societies around the world are increasingly fragmenting into ideological bubbles,” reports Phys.org. From the report: The researchers’ findings confirm that increasing polarization is not merely perceived — it is measurable and objectively occurring. “And this increase happened suddenly, between 2008 and 2010,” says [says Stefan Thurner from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH)]. The question remained: what caused it? […] The sharp rise in both polarization and the number of close friends occurred between 2008 and 2010 — precisely when social media platforms and smartphones first achieved widespread adoption. This technological shift may have fundamentally changed how people connect with each other, indirectly promoting polarization.

“Democracy depends on all parts of society being involved in decision-making, which requires that everyone be able to communicate with each other. But when groups can no longer talk to each other, this democratic process breaks down,” emphasizes Stefan Thurner. Tolerance plays a central role. “If I have two friends, I do everything I can to keep them — I am very tolerant towards them. But if I have five and things become difficult with one of them, it’s easier to end that friendship because I still have ‘backups.’ I no longer need to be as tolerant,” explains Thurner.

What disappears as a result is a societal baseline of tolerance — a development that could contribute to the long-term erosion of democratic structures. To prevent societies from increasingly fragmenting, Thurner emphasizes the importance of learning early how to engage with different opinions and actively cultivating tolerance. The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Because yesterday it was September and I blinked and Halloween is four days away, these are a couple videos of musician Jer of Youtube channel Ska Tune Network performing all the instruments (including plenty of brass) for ska covers of the Ghostbusters and Addams Family themes. *licking fingers* Those were some tasty jams. “What was on your fingers?” Would you believe me if I told you it was actually tasty jam? “Not at all.” It was cat treat dust.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Mozilla is testing a new Firefox feature that delivers direct results inside the address bar instead of forcing users through a search results page. The company says the feature will use a privacy framework called Oblivious HTTP, encrypting queries so that no single party can see both what you type and who you are. Some results could be sponsored, but Mozilla insists neither it nor advertisers will know user identities. The system is starting in the U.S. and may expand later if performance and privacy benchmarks are met. Further reading: Mozilla to Require Data-Collection Disclosure in All New Firefox Extensions

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The number of victims paying ransomware threat actors has reached a new low, with just 23% of the breached companies giving in to attackers’ demands. With some exceptions, the decline in payment resolution rates continues the trend that Coveware has observed for the past six years. In the first quarter of 2024, the payment percentage was 28%. Although it increased over the next period, it continued to drop, reaching an all-time low in the third quarter of 2025.

One explanation for this is that organizations implemented stronger and more targeted protections against ransomware, and authorities increasing pressure for victims not to pay the hackers. […] Over the years, ransomware groups moved from pure encryption attacks to double extortion that came with data theft and the threat of a public leak. Coveware reports that more than 76% of the attacks it observed in Q3 2025 involved data exfiltration, which is now the primary objective for most ransomware groups. The company says that when it isolates the attacks that do not encrypt the data and only steal it, the payment rate plummets to 19%, which is also a record for that sub-category.

The average and median ransomware payments fell in Q3 compared to the previous quarter, reaching $377,000 and $140,000, respectively, according to Coveware. The shift may reflect large enterprises revising their ransom payment policies and recognizing that those funds are better spent on strengthening defenses against future attacks. The researchers also note that threat groups like Akira and Qilin, which accounted for 44% of all recorded attacks in Q3 2025, have switched focus to medium-sized firms that are currently more likely to pay a ransom. “Cyber defenders, law enforcement, and legal specialists should view this as validation of collective progress,” Coveware says. “The work that gets put in to prevent attacks, minimize the impact of attacks, and successfully navigate a cyber extortion — each avoided payment constricts cyber attackers of oxygen.”

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Apple is preparing to roll out a new Apple Wallet feature that lets U.S. users create digital IDs linked to their passports, usable at select TSA checkpoints. TechCrunch reports: The feature, previously announced as part of the iOS 26 release, comes on the heels of Apple’s expansion of Wallet as more than a payment mechanism or ticket holder, but also a secure place to store a user’s digital identity. Currently, support for government IDs in Apple Wallet has rolled out to 12 states and Puerto Rico, or roughly a third of U.S. license holders. However, the passport-tied Digital ID feature didn’t arrive with the debut of iOS 26, as Apple said it would come in a future software update. […]

The coming launch of passport-associated Digital IDs was announced on Sunday by Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, at the Money 20/20 USA conference, where the exec also shared other stats about Wallet’s adoption.

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Grokipedia, the encyclopedia powered by xAI’s assistant Grok briefly went online Monday, before it promptly crashed. At the time of this writing, the website appears to be working, and contains more than 885,000 articles, according to a counter on its homepage.   

Musk, who has previously railed against Wikipedia, has described the project as a “a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.” Musk and his allies have long claimed that Wikipedia is biased. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has called Musk’s claims about the crowd-sourced encyclopedia “factually incorrect.” 

Musk said last week that Grokipedia’s launch had been delayed in order “to do more work to purge out the propaganda.” Notably, some articles are nearly identical to their entries in Wikipedia, though Grokipedia doesn’t contain in-line links to sources in the same format. Such entries do have a small disclaimer that “the content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”

In other cases, social media users have already spotted instances where Musk’s worldview is more obvious in the “AI-powered encyclopedia.” Here’s an excerpt from the entry for “university,” as captured by Bluesky user Jeremy Cohen. 

Bluesky

And here’s a screenshot of Grokipedia’s entry for Musk, which was captured by Bleusky user Miles Lee. 

Bluesky

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/xs-grokipedia-is-online-after-it-briefly-crashed-out-231108836.html?src=rss

Turbochargers have been injecting more power into engines for over 100 years, but never before have they been so prevalent in our cars. A little boost can add a lot of power and efficiency, too, making a turbocharger a great solution to eke maximum performance out of today’s engines. Usually, though, that comes with the penalty of throttle lag: You put your foot to the floor, and nothing much happens for a beat or two.

As we’ve recently seen in our review of the new 911 GTS, Porsche’s engineers have worked some magic to create a turbocharger that provides all the power and fun of forced induction but with none of the throttle response penalty. If adding one high-tech, high-voltage turbocharger is good, surely two would be better, right? Indeed, it is, if you can afford the cost of entry. Meet the 701 hp (523 kW) 2026 911 Turbo S, Porsche’s new most powerful 911 ever.

Twinning the T-Hybrid

For Porsche’s first hybrid 911, the GTS, the company didn’t simply add an electric motor and bigger battery into the mix and call it a day. It also inserted another high-speed motor into the turbocharger, enabling it to spin up to maximum speed in less than a second, nearly eliminating turbo lag.

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Qualcomm has entered the AI data center chip race with its new AI200 and AI250 accelerators, directly challenging Nvidia and AMD’s dominance by promising lower power costs and high memory capacity. CNBC reports: The AI chips are a shift from Qualcomm, which has thus far focused on semiconductors for wireless connectivity and mobile devices, not massive data centers. Qualcomm said that both the AI200, which will go on sale in 2026, and the AI250, planned for 2027, can come in a system that fills up a full, liquid-cooled server rack. Qualcomm is matching Nvidia and AMD, which offer their graphics processing units, or GPUs, in full-rack systems that allow as many as 72 chips to act as one computer. AI labs need that computing power to run the most advanced models.

Qualcomm’s data center chips are based on the AI parts in Qualcomm’s smartphone chips called Hexagon neural processing units, or NPUs. “We first wanted to prove ourselves in other domains, and once we built our strength over there, it was pretty easy for us to go up a notch into the data center level,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s general manager for data center and edge, said on a call with reporters last week.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As you’re hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. In the corner of the video, a smiling real estate agent narrates the walk-through of your dream home in a soothing tone. It looks perfect — maybe a little too perfect. The catch? Everything in the video isAI-generated. The real property is completely empty, and the luxury furniture is a product of virtual staging. The realtor’s voice-over and expressions were born from text prompts. Even the camera’s slow pan over each room is orchestrated by AI, because there was no actual video camera involved.

Any real estate agent can create “exactly that, at home, in minutes,” says Alok Gupta, a former product manager at Facebook and software engineer at Snapchat who cofounded AutoReel, an app that allows realtors to turn images from their property listings into videos. He said that between 500 and 1,000 new listing videos are being created with AutoReel every day, with realtors across the US and even in New Zealand and India using the technology to market thousands of properties. This is one of many AI tools, including more familiar ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, that are quickly reshaping the real estate industry into something that isn’t necessarily, well, real. “People that want to buy a house, they’re going to make the largest investment of their lifetime,” said Nathan Cool, a real estate photographer who runs an educational YouTube channel. “They don’t want to be fooled before they ever arrive.”

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