a full size guillotine went around the loucks auditorium on a trailer while the meeting ran long inside it. verrus was there to pitch oakline, a data centre at mill creek, and the room did not want it. during a break the crowd cornered the company's representatives, who said it no longer felt safe to stay, and police walked them out of the building.

a week later the council voted to start a pause, which is not the same as passing one. under state law a moratorium needs forty five days notice to the state, a hearing and written findings first, and the city attorney put the earliest hearing in late september. then governor tina kotek terminated the sale of the state owned plot the project sits on.

google put a prompt box on satellite imagery and called it create image. a reporter at 404 media typed a bomb blast onto a los angeles street and got a crater seated in the real block, correct in shadow and grain. the same box put a homeless encampment into a politically contested part of the city, skyscrapers onto rural land, and a crowd of protesters outside google's own offices. forbes got a fabricated nuclear plant in iran.

the tool launched on a thursday and was gone the next day. google says the imagery carries synthid, a watermark embedded in the pixels rather than stamped in a corner, which means it is there and nobody can see it. the company said it was rolling back the feature while it worked on stronger guardrails, and it has not said the feature comes back.

cindy prinsloo wrote to a little brother she had never met, in cursive, from gqeberha, when she was a teenager. jay lin was in taiwan, and had known since childhood that he had an older sister there. he could not read english and he could not read her handwriting, so he never wrote back, and he kept every letter she sent.

on 26 june he asked an ai tool to find him a local facebook group, and it pointed him at people of port elizabeth. he uploaded one of her old photographs and asked whether anyone knew the girl in it. thousands shared it within hours. claire kilroe-smith recognised herself in the same picture and messaged him privately. by the end of that day he had found her, and cindy thought it was a scam.

daisuke namikawa is anakin skywalker in japanese, and copies of his voice kept turning up saying things he never said. the courts are an option and they are slow. a fellow voice actor, kenjiro tsuda, sued the operator of tiktok in november and the case is still undecided, with the defence arguing that the narration in question is a generic male voice.

so namikawa spent over a year in a booth reading into a microphone and built a licensed clone of himself. in july he put it on sale as polyphony. the unapproved copies did not stop existing. they now compete with the one namikawa owns.

judy skene, a retired pharmacist, watched mark carney on facebook explain an investment backed by the bank of canada. carney never said a word of it. she started small, a caller told her the money had already tripled, and she went back with her retirement fund, a mortgage on her condo and a cash advance on a credit card.

her own branch at cibc told her she was being scammed. she had already been handed the answer to that: the scammers had told her not to tell anyone, because her friends would be angry that she was making so much money. she believed the video. about $900,000 is gone. skene went public with every part of it so the next person hears the warning before the script does.

ron ambrozaitis, the police chief of chetek, put two flock safety cameras up on second street and dallas street in late may. mayor jeff martin was not told. neither was the council. martin found out after they were already reading plates and had to run a search to learn what a flock camera does.

at the july meeting residents objected, the chief lost his temper and later apologised, and martin then said the chief had been within his rights: the cameras came out of the operating budget, and the operating budget does not need a vote. the cameras stayed up, and martin told weau the city had no plans to cover them.

song, an investor in beijing, paid for a human shaped robot that will not cook, will not clean and will not arrive until september. the maker, ubtech of shenzhen, sells the u1 pro for companionship. it makes faces and it holds a conversation. song bought the female version.

more than thirteen thousand people ordered one inside a month of pre sales opening, before anyone had watched one walk through a front door. asked why he paid, song said the happiest part is often the waiting.