The world doesn’t need another retread of the lawsuit itself. Plenty of those have already been written, including by the people who lived it. The facts are simple enough. There was a tape of Hogan, real name Terry Gene Bollea, having sex. Gawker posted a brief portion of it online. Bollea, with $10 million in backing from Thiel, a Silicon Valley nut with a grudge, sued in a friendly Florida court where a jury eventually awarded the wrestler $140 million in damages, more than DuPont is currently paying for polluting an entire town’s water supply with forever chemicals. A $50 million appeal bond all but prevented the company from continuing to fight the lawsuit, even after evidence that may have helped it on appeal later leaked publicly. The entire affair ended up being a prescient window into the current cultural moment in two ways. For one, it emboldened rich people to exploit the legal system to settle scores with media members they didn’t like over unflattering or embarrassing coverage. What some critics considered just deserts for an irreverent website caught out over its skis now forms the basis for media companies and others speedrunning settlements with people like President Trump to avoid making life harder for themselves. Secondly, the trial forecasted just how stupid things were about to get. One clip from it circulating around this week following Bollea’s death shows him trying to explain to a jury why Hulk Hogan had a 10-inch penis but Bollea himself did not. There was the moment when the judge in the case allowed one of the jurors to ask the then-Editor-in-Chief of Jezebel whether she had slept with Gawker owner Nick Denton to get the job. It was unclear what bearing that would have had on the case. Also, Denton is gay. Every day in our political life is now this stupid, and with way more at stake for everyone involved.

Video from Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, 18, puts fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used to reach the Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement targets

More than two-thirds of Texas’ 100 prisons don’t have air conditioning — that can mean the difference between life and death.

Armed clashes set off by a century-old border dispute mark the worst fighting in decades between Thailand and Cambodia.

[just here for the headline]

Our study reveals that the extreme morphologies seen in animals such as treehoppers may increase their sensitivity to electrical stimuli. We show that treehoppers can likely detect the electric fields of their predators and that sufficient electrostatic information exists in the ecology of treehoppers that they may even distinguish these predators from friendly bees using electrical cues alone. This introduces a level of sophistication not previously ascribed to the electrostatic sense. Furthermore, by demonstrating that the extreme morphology of treehoppers increases the strength of electric field stimuli around these animals, we suggest that the enigmatic function of their spectacular pronota is partly as an electroreceptor and that natural selection for increased electrical sensitivity may have contributed to their diverse evolution.

A Quebec man says he is outraged after the U.S. Coast Guard accused him of fishing in American waters and then arrested him before putting him in a jail cell for nearly two hours.

Tech industry hotshots are speaking out after a prominent OpenAI investor appeared to have a ChatGPT-induced mental health breakdown.

TPD spokesperson Jerome Maples confirmed the legitimacy of the photos and said that TPD arrested a man on three felonies.

A Chinese man with no medical training is injecting cancer patients with a toxic bleach solution; a full course of treatment runs $20,000. He’s now working to bring the unproven treatment to the US.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material she claimed proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory. As evidence, Gabbard cited newly declassified emails from Obama officials and a 5-year-old classified House report in hopes of undermining the intelligence community’s conclusion Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to boost Trump and denigrate his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Chuck Mangione, the Rochester jazz legend who created hits like "Feels So Good", has died, his attorney confirmed.

It's not a great precedent, that's for sure.

Wrestling legend Hulk Hogan has died at 71 years old, TMZ Sports has learned. Medics were dispatched to the WWE icon's Clearwater, Florida home early Thursday morning ... with operators stating it was regarding a "cardiac arrest."

POO, the short form of the new name for fare inspectors on Toronto’s transit service, TTC, sparks jokes. Boys react to taking the blame.

I do not think it will shock anyone to learn that big tech is aggressively pushing AI products. But the extent to which they have done so might. The sheer ubiquity of AI means that we take for ground the countless ways, many invisible, that these products and features are foisted on us—and how Silicon Valley companies have systematically designed and deployed AI products onto their existing platforms in an effort to accelerate adoption. It also happens to be the subject of a new study by design scholars Nolwenn Maudet, Anaëlle Beignon, and Thomas Thibault, who looked at hundreds of instances of how AI has been deployed, highlighted, and advertised by Google, Meta, Adobe, SnapChat, and others, and analyzed them for a study called “Imposing AI: Deceptive design patterns against sustainability.” They also present the results in a handy guide, with illustrated examples called, aptly: “How tech companies are pushing us to use AI.” (It’s translated from the French, hence the sometimes awkward phrasings.)

Welcome to the era of ‘gaslight driven development.’ Soundslice added a feature the chatbot thought it existed after engineers kept finding screenshots from the LLM in its error logs.

Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.

Powerhouse attorney Roy Black, who defended Jeffrey Epstein and William Kennedy Smith, is dead at 80. He’s remembered as a legal giant.

Nine men accused of breaking out of a New Orleans city jail in May after slipping through a hole behind a toilet and scaling a barbed wire fence pleaded not guilty to escape charges on Wednesday. Officials have repeatedly pointed to video surveillance of the brazen escape, one of the largest jailbreaks in recent U.S. history, and vowed to bring the inmates to justice. A 10th inmate, Derrick Groves, a convicted killer, is the lone fugitive still on the run. “Everyone is entitled to due process. But there’s a video of these detainees running out of the jail in the middle of the night. They were not heading to court hearings,” Attorney General Liz Murrill said on Wednesday. ”We will continue to hold everyone accountable for the escape.”