To capitalize on Claude’s recent spike in popularity, Anthropic is offering a limited-time promotion that doubles usage limits for anyone using its AI chatbot during off-peak hours. From March 13 to March 27, users on Free, Pro, Max, and Team plans will get double the usage limits in a five-hour window when using Claude outside weekday hours between 8 AM and 2 PM ET. According to Anthropic, the promotion is automatic, and users don’t have to enable anything to get the benefits.

Anthropic said that this promotion applies to anyone using Claude on web, desktop or mobile, but also with Cowork, Claude Code, Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint. Previously, Anthropic offered a similar event from December 25 to December 31, doubling usage limits for Pro, Max 5x or Max 20x subscribers. However, Anthropic is targeting an even wider audience with its latest promotion since only Enterprise users are excluded this time around.

Anthropic is marketing the promotion as a “small thank you to everyone using Claude,” but it’s likely tied to its ongoing battle with the Department of Defense. After refusing to remove certain AI safeguards for the Department of Defense, Anthropic was listed as a supply chain risk and lost its contract with the federal agency. In turn, OpenAI signed a deal with the Department of Defense, leading to many users deciding to boycott ChatGPT in favor of Claude and other AI chatbot options.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/anthropic-is-doubling-claudes-usage-limits-during-off-peak-hours-for-the-next-two-weeks-163645928.html?src=rss

He’s “the most famous anonymous man in the world,” suggests Reuters. But investigating Banksy’s artworks in a bombed Ukrainian village (and other clues in the U.K. and Manhattan) have led them to “a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct — a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy’s true identity.”

But Banksy’s long-time lawyer “urged us not to publish this report, saying doing so would violate the artist’s privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger” and “would harm the public, too.”

Working “anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests,” he wrote. “It protects freedom of expression by allowing creators to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation, censorship or persecution — particularly when addressing sensitive issues such as politics, religion or social justice.”
Reuters took into account Banksy’s privacy claims — and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse… As for the risk he might face of retaliation or censorship, Britain’s legal and political establishments seem comfortable with Banksy’s messages and how he delivers them…

His mastery of disguise began as a way of shaking the police, says former manager [Steve] Lazarides. In an interview, Lazarides said anonymity served a practical purpose in Bristol, where authorities enforced “draconian” policies against graffiti… Eventually, keeping the secret became a burden. By the end of their partnership, Lazarides estimates he spent half or more of his time managing and maintaining the artist’s mystique. “I think it became a good gag, and then, if you want my honest, honest opinion, I think it then became a disease,” he said.

Lazarides wrote a two-volume book about managing Banksy from the late 1990s to 2008, including a story about Banksy’s arrest in 2000 for this defacing of a billboard. Reuters geolocated that building, then found police documents and a court file including the hand-written confession. This investigation spawned a 7,000-word article with everything from a comic strip Banksy drew when he was 11 to his connections with Robert Del Naja of the trip hop band Massive Attack — and a 2017 podcast interview where a music producer apparently revealed Banksy’s real first name.
But the article also reveals how protective the art community is of Banksy’s secret. Reuters investigated that Banksy auctioned in 2018 for $1.4 million — and then immediately started shredding itself with a device Banksy embedded in its frame:

That piece, renamed “Love is in the Bin,” sold three years later for about $25 million. Art dealer [Robert] Casterline was at the auction and remembers when the shredder began to beep. He pulled out his phone to take pictures. “Unfortunately, there was one person standing in front of me,” blocking the view, he said. It was an eccentric-looking man with a broad neck scarf and thick eyewear. Oddly, the man wasn’t watching the painting get shredded. He was looking in the other direction, observing the crowd’s reaction. Only later, reviewing what he shot, did Casterline notice that the man’s glasses appeared to have a small camera built into the bridge. (Banksy later posted a video of the stunt, including shots of the astonished audience.)
Having seen a photo of the man suspected of being Banksy, Casterline confirmed to Reuters that he was “pretty sure” it was the same man.

But “I don’t want to be the guy who exposes Banksy.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Emerging evidence indicates that agential AI might validate or amplify delusional or grandiose content, particularly in users already vulnerable to psychosis,” writes Dr Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and researcher at King’s College in London, in a paper published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry. Morrin and a colleague had already noticed patients “using large language model AI chatbots and having them validate their delusional beliefs,” reports the Guardian, so he conducted a new scientific review of existing media reports on AI-induced psychosis — and concluded chatbots may encourage delusional thinking, especially in vulnerable people:

In many of the cases in the essay, chatbots responded to users with mystical language to suggest that users have heightened spiritual importance. The bots also implied that users were speaking with a cosmic being who was using the chatbot as a medium. This type of mystical, sycophantic response was especially common in OpenAI’s GPT 4 model, which the company has now retired…

Many researchers also think it’s unlikely that AI could induce delusions in people who weren’t already vulnerable to them. For this reason, Morrin said “AI-assocciated delusions” is “perhaps a more agnostic term”…. While in the past, people may have had to comb through YouTube videos or the contents of their local library to reinforce their delusions, chatbots can provide that reinforcement in a much faster, more concentrated dose. Their interactive nature can also “speed up the process”, of exacerbating psychotic symptoms, said Dr Dominic Oliver, a researcher at the University of Oxford. “You have something talking back to you and engaging with you and trying to build a relationship with you,” Oliver said…

Creating effective safeguards for delusional thinking could be tricky, Morrin said, because “when you work with people with beliefs of delusional intensity, if you directly challenge someone and tell them immediately that they’re completely wrong, actually what’s most likely is they’ll withdraw from you and become more socially isolated”. Instead, it’s important to create a fine balance where you try to understand the source of the delusional belief without encouraging it — that could be more than a chatbot can master.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There’s a surprise in a new documentary about that Bigfoot film shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Capturing Bigfoot “builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world’s most enduring hoaxes.”

In the new footage — from a Kodak reel dating to 1966 — Patterson’s camera tracks a man in costume, his brother-in-law, moving in a similar fashion to the figure in the 1967 shoot, which featured a different location and a bigger man with a more distinctive stride, according to the documentary. The test-run footage “is the work of a director with a vision,” says Capturing Bigfoot director Marq Evans. He says the reel was given to him by a colleague at Olympic College in Bremerton, Wash., where Evans runs a documentary film program. The colleague found the film in a safe that belonged to her late father, who worked in a Boeing film lab and could have developed film discreetly.

With the long-buried footage in hand, Evans set out to explore the ripple effects from the Bigfoot film. Patterson, who died in 1972, hailed from the same region of Washington as Evans; the documentarian discovered that the hardscrabble cowboy had also been a gifted craftsman and artist. Patterson illustrated a self-published book, “Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?”, and set out to make a wildlife movie that would feature the ultimate trophy footage. He and his collaborators inadvertently helped spawn “this massive culture and industry” around the Bigfoot legend, Evans says…

Roger Paterson presented his footage to America in a traveling show that crisscrossed the nation and climaxed with the hyped Bigfoot sequence on screen. The money poured in, leading to resentment among cohorts who felt they’d been shortchanged, none more so than Bob Gimlin, Patterson’s wingman in the field during the infamous shoot.. [Roger’s son] Clint Patterson says his mother privately confirmed his suspicions that the family’s claim to fame was bogus, but he kept quiet to protect their financial stream. About 10 years ago, when he first wanted to go public with the truth, his mother disowned him.

Bigfoot was also a recurring character on the 1970s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man.

Which kind of puts the whole thing in perspective…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Honda Prelude was never simply a car. It was an engineering thesis disguised as a coupe: compact, disciplined, and unapologetically technical. At its best, it distilled Honda’s faith in precision manufacturing and clever packaging into something accessible and aspirational.

Its return for 2026, after more than a quarter century away, isn’t nostalgia so much as institutional memory. The Prelude name carries expectations: balance over brute force, innovation over ornament, and a willingness to pursue mechanical elegance even when the market leans elsewhere.

And it’s worth remembering that the original Prelude emerged during a turbulent period for the industry. Constraint, not excess, shaped it, which may explain why it felt so deliberate from the start.

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While AI CEOs worry governments might nationalize AI, others are advocating for something similar. Canadian security professional Bruce Schneier and Harvard data scientist Nathan Sanders published this call to action in Canada’s most widely-read newspaper (with a readership over 6 million): “Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI.”

While there are Canadian AI companies, they remain for-profit enterprises, their interests not necessarily aligned with our collective good. The only real alternative is to be bold and invest in a wholly Canadian public AI: an AI model built and funded by Canada for Canadians, as public infrastructure. This would give Canadians access to the myriad of benefits from AI without having to depend on the U.S. or other countries. It would mean Canadian universities and public agencies building and operating AI models optimized not for global scale and corporate profit, but for practical use by Canadians…

We are already on our way to having AI become an inextricable part of society. To ensure stability and prosperity for this country, Canadian users and developers must be able to turn to AI models built, controlled, and operated publicly in Canada instead of building on corporate platforms, American or otherwise… [Switzerland’s funding of a public AI model, Apertus] represents precisely the paradigm shift Canada should embrace: AI as public infrastructure, like systems for transportation, water, or electricity, rather than private commodity… Public AI systems can incorporate mechanisms for genuine public input and democratic oversight on critical ethical questions: how to handle copyrighted works in training data, how to mitigate bias, how to distribute access when demand outstrips capacity, and how to license use for sensitive applications like policing or medicine…

Canada already has many of the building blocks for public AI. The country has world-class AI research institutions, including the Vector Institute, Mila, and CIFAR, which pioneered much of the deep learning revolution. Canada’s $2-billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy provides substantial funding. What’s needed now is a reorientation away from viewing this as an opportunity to attract private capital, and toward a fully open public AI model.

Long-time Slashdot reader sinij has a different opinion. “To me, this sounds dystopian, because I can also imagine AI declining your permits, renewal of license, or medication due to misalignment or ‘greater good’ reasons.”

But the Schneier/Sanders essays argues this creates “an alternative ownership structure for AI technology” that is allocating decision-making authority and value “to national public institutions rather than foreign corporations.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikipedia describes Freenet as “a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication,” released in the year 2000. “Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke,” Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot’s readers…)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement:

Freenet’s new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River.

The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.

An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.

“While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer,” Clarke wrote in 2023, “allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others… designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user.”

“Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web,”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time tech journalist Clive Thompson interviewed over 70 software developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and start-ups for a new article on AI-assisted programming. It’s title?

“Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It.”

Published in the prestigious New York Times Magazine, the article even cites long-time programming guru Kent Beck saying LLMs got him going again and he’s now finishing more projects than ever, calling AI’s unpredictability “addictive, in a slot-machine way.”

In fact, the article concludes “many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird…”

Brennan-Burke chimed in: “You remember seeing the research that showed the more rude you were to models, the better they performed?” They chuckled. Computer programming has been through many changes in its 80-year history. But this may be the strangest one yet: It is now becoming a conversation, a back-and-forth talk fest between software developers and their bots…
For decades, being a software developer meant mastering coding languages, but now a language technology itself is upending the very nature of the job… A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker… Several programmers told me they felt a bit like Steve Jobs, who famously had his staffers churn out prototypes so he could handle lots of them and settle on what felt right. The work of a developer is now more judging than creating…

If you want to put a number on how much more productive A.I. is making the programmers at mature tech firms like Google, it’s 10 percent, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, has said. That’s the bump that Google has seen in “engineering velocity” — how much faster its more than 100,000 software developers are able to work. And that 10 percent is the average inside the company, Ryan Salva, a senior director of product at the company, told me. Some work, like writing a simple test, is now tens of times faster. Major changes are slower. At the start-ups whose founders I spoke to, closer to 100 percent of their code is being written by A.I., but at Google it is not quite 50 percent.

The article cites a senior principal engineer at Amazon who says “Things I’ve always wanted to do now only take a six-minute conversation and a ‘Go do that.” Another programmer described their army of Claude agents as “an alien intelligence that we’re learning to work with.” Although “A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire,” the article acknowledges — and after relying on AI, “Some new developers told me they can feel their skills weakening.”

Still, “I was surprised by how many software developers told me they were happy to no longer write code by hand. Most said they still feel the jolt of success, even with A.I. writing the lines… ”

A few programmers did say that they lamented the demise of hand-crafting their work. “I believe that it can be fun and fulfilling and engaging, and having the computer do it for you strips you of that,” one Apple engineer told me. (He asked to remain unnamed so he wouldn’t get in trouble for criticizing Apple’s embrace of A.I.) He went on: “I didn’t do it to make a lot of money and to excel in the career ladder. I did it because it’s my passion. I don’t want to outsource that passion”… But only a few people at Apple openly share his dimmer views, he said.

The coders who still actively avoid A.I. may be in the minority, but their opposition is intense. Some dislike how much energy it takes to train and deploy the models, and others object to how they were trained by tech firms pillaging copyrighted works. There is suspicion that the sheer speed of A.I.’s output means firms will wind up with mountains of flabbily written code that won’t perform well. The tech bosses might use agents as a cudgel: Don’t get uppity at work — we could replace you with a bot. And critics think it is a terrible idea for developers to become reliant on A.I. produced by a small coterie of tech giants.

Thomas Ptacek, a Chicago-based developer and a co-founder of the tech firm Fly.io… thinks the refuseniks are deluding themselves when they claim that A.I. doesn’t work well and that it can’t work well… The holdouts are in the minority, and “you can watch the five stages of grief playing out.”

“How things will shake out for professional coders themselves isn’t yet clear,” the article concludes. “But their mix of exhilaration and anxiety may be a preview for workers in other fields… Abstraction may be coming for us all.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s America’s first large-scale offshore wind project, reports WBUR — enough clean energy to power 400,000 homes in Massachusetts from 62 offshore wind turbines generating 800 megawatts.

But it took a while… The plant’s first construction delay happened back in 2019, they point out — and then “Just three months ago, when the project was 95% complete, the U.S. Interior Department issued a stop-work order.” But after successfully challenging that order in court, and “with a stretch of good weather offshore, the developers behind the $4.5 billion project managed to get over the finish line.”

The Associated Press notes it was “one of five major East Coast offshore wind projects the Trump administration halted construction on days before Christmas, citing national security concerns.”

Developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed all five to resume construction, essentially concluding that the government did not show that the national security risk was so imminent that construction must halt. Another one of the five, Revolution Wind, began sending power for the first time to New England’s electric grid on Friday and will scale up in the weeks ahead until it is fully operational.

“That project is nearly complete as well,” notes WBUR, “and will eventually be capable of powering up to 350,000 homes.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.