Enlarge / AI is here to terminate your bank account. (credit: Carolco Pictures)

Give the AI access to your credit card, they said. It'll be fine , they said. Users of Meta's ad platform who followed that advice have been getting burned by an AI-powered ad purchasing system, according to The Verge . The idea was to use a Meta-developed AI to automatically set up ads and spend your ad budget, saving you the hassle of making decisions about your ad campaign. Apparently, the AI funnels money to Meta a little too well: Customers say it burns, though, what should be daily ad budgets in a matter of hours, and costs are inflated as much as 10-fold.

The AI-powered software in question is the " Advantage+ Shopping Campaign ." The system is supposed to automate a lot of ad setup for you, mixing and matching various creative elements and audience targets. The power of AI-powered advertising (Google has a similar product ) is that the ad platform can get instant feedback on its generated ads via click-through rates. You give it a few guard rails, and it can try hundreds or thousands of combinations to find the most clickable ad at a speed and efficiency no human could match. That's the theory, anyway.

The Verge spoke to "several marketers and businesses" with similar stories of being hit by an AI-powered spending spree once they let Meta's system take over a campaign. The description of one account says the AI "had blown through roughly 75 percent of the daily ad budgets for both clients in under a couple of hours" and that "the ads’ CPMs, or cost per impressions, were roughly 10 times higher than normal." Meanwhile, the revenue earned from those AI-powered ads was "nearly zero." The report says, "Small businesses have seen their ad dollars get wiped out and wasted as a result, and some have said the bouts of overspending are driving them from Meta’s platforms."

Enlarge / Intel's top-end i9-14900KS. (credit: Intel)

Earlier this month, we wrote that some of Intel's recent high-end Core i9 and Core i7 processors had been crashing and exhibiting other weird issues in some games and that Intel was investigating the cause.

An Intel statement obtained by Igor's Lab suggests that Intel's investigation is wrapping up, and the company is pointing squarely in the direction of enthusiast motherboard makers that are turning up power limits and disabling safeguards to try to wring a little more performance out of the processors.

"While the root cause has not yet been identified, Intel has observed the majority of reports of this issue are from users with unlocked/overclock capable motherboards," the statement reads. "Intel has observed 600/700 Series chipset boards often set BIOS defaults to disable thermal and power delivery safeguards designed to limit processor exposure to sustained periods of high voltage and frequency."

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition on March 9, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee )

The US Supreme Court today rejected Elon Musk's attempt to terminate his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk appealed to the Supreme Court in December 2023, claiming the settlement he agreed to in 2018 forced him to "waive his First Amendment rights to speak on matters ranging far beyond the charged violations." The SEC settlement requires Musk to get pre-approval from a Tesla securities lawyer for tweets or other social media posts that may contain information material to the company or its shareholders.

The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case, leaving an appeals court ruling against Musk intact. The top court denied Musk's petition without comment Monday morning in a list of orders .

A mock-up posted by MobaPad provides one vision of how magnetically attached Switch 2 Joy-Cons might look (credit: MobaPad )

Thus far, Nintendo has offered only vague hints regarding whether or not the upcoming Switch 2 will run games and software designed for the current Switch. Now, an obscure Chinese peripheral maker is reporting that the new console will indeed work with existing physical Switch game cards and digital Switch game downloads.

The new report comes from MobaPad , a little-known creator of Switch controllers and carrying cases based in Shenzen, China. In a Sunday morning blog post , the company says it is "in the process of developing the next-generation console controller" for the Switch 2 and has "acquired a lot of first-hand information" about the console as a result (MobaPad shared similar insights days earlier on Chinese video site Bilibili and briefly on its English Facebook page ).

Chief among MobaPad's purported revelations is that "the cartridge slot of the Switch 2 will support backward compatibility with physical Switch game cartridges, ensuring compatibility with players' existing game libraries, including digital versions." Game cards designed specifically for the Switch 2, on the other hand, "may not be compatible with the first-generation console," suggesting there may be a physical change preventing Switch 2 game cards from being accidentally inserted into an older Switch console.

Enlarge / BlueCruise allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel but not their eyes off the road. (credit: Ford)

The federal regulator responsible for road safety has opened yet another probe into the safety of a hands-free driver assistance system, we learned this morning. And no, it's not a system from Tesla. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation has opened a preliminary investigation into Ford's BlueCruise system, following a pair of fatal crashes, both of which occurred at night.

Ford first introduced BlueCruise in 2021 . Like the similar General Motors Super Cruise, but unlike Tesla Autopilot, BlueCruise has been designed with a tightly controlled operational design domain (ODD) that only allows it to be engaged on restricted access, divided lane highways that have been lidar-mapped in advance.

Additionally, like Super Cruise but unlike Tesla's far more dangerous system, there is an infrared gaze-tracking driver monitoring camera that will disengage the system if it determines the driver is not actually paying attention to the road.

Enlarge (credit: FT)

Brussels is set to open a probe into Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as soon as Monday over concerns the social media giant is failing to do enough to counter disinformation from Russia and other countries.

Regulators suspect that Meta’s moderation does not go far enough to stop the widespread dissemination of political advertising that risks undermining the electoral process, the European Commission is expected to say on Monday, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

EU officials are particularly worried about the way Meta’s platforms are handling Russia’s efforts to undermine upcoming European elections. The commission, however, is not expected to single out Russia in its statement and will only make reference to the manipulation of information by foreign actors.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

People have been leaving public messages since the first artists painted hunting scenes on cave walls. But it was the invention of electricity that forever changed the way we talked to each other. In 1844, the first message was sent via telegraph. Samuel Morse, who created the binary Morse Code decades before electronic computers were even possible, tapped out , “What hath God wrought?” It was a prophetic first post.

World War II accelerated the invention of digital computers, but they were primarily single-use machines, designed to calculate artillery firing tables or solve scientific problems. As computers got more powerful, the idea of time-sharing became attractive. Computers were expensive, and they spent most of their time idle, waiting for a user to enter keystrokes at a terminal. Time-sharing allowed many people to interact with a single computer at the same time.

Part 0: The Precambrian era of digital communication (1969–1979)

Soon after time-sharing was invented, people started sending messages to other users. But since every computer spoke its own unique machine language and had its own way of storing and retrieving data, none of these machines could talk to each other. The solution to this problem came out of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and was thus dubbed the “ARPANET.” When two different computers connected to each other through an “IMP” (Interface Message Processor, the first router) in 1969, it was a massive breakthrough .

Enlarge / Of all the aquatic spiders, the diving bell spider is the only one known to survive almost entirely underwater, using bubbles of air it brings down from the surface. (credit: Oxford Scientific via Getty )

Shrubbery, toolsheds, basements—these are places one might expect to find spiders. But what about the beach? Or in a stream? Some spiders make their homes near or, more rarely, in water: tucking into the base of kelp stalks, spinning watertight cocoons in ponds or lakes, hiding under pebbles at the seaside or creek bank.

“Spiders are surprisingly adaptable, which is one of the reasons they can inhabit this environment,” says Ximena Nelson, a behavioral biologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Enlarge / Jürgen Trittin, member of the German Bundestag and former environment minister, stands next to an activist during an action of the environmental organization Greenpeace in front of the Brandenburg Gate in April 2023. The action is to celebrate the shutdown of the last three German nuclear power plants. (credit: Christoph Soeder/Picture Alliance via Getty Images )

One year ago, Germany took its last three nuclear power stations offline. When it comes to energy, few events have baffled outsiders more.

In the face of climate change, calls to expedite the transition away from fossil fuels, and an energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Berlin’s move to quit nuclear before carbon-intensive energy sources like coal has attracted significant criticism. (Greta Thunberg prominently labeled it “a mistake .”)

This decision can only be understood in the context of post-war socio-political developments in Germany, where anti-nuclearism predated the public climate discourse.