2026-03-11 05:40:32
A Cybertruck owner in Texas is suing Tesla for $1,000,000 in damages for “ grossly negligent conduct” following an accident on a Houston highway that involved the vehicle’s self-driving feature. According to the lawsuit, Tesla is to blame for the crash because CEO Elon Musk has oversold the truck’s ability to drive itself.
As originally reported by the Austin American-Statesman, Justine Saint Amour bought a Cybertruck from a used car dealership in Florida and drove it until it crashed on a Houston overpass on August 18, 2025. That summer day, Saint Amour was driving down Houston’s 69 Eastex Freeway with the vehicle’s full self-driving (FSD) mode engaged.
“Something terrifying happened, without warning, the vehicle attempted to drive straight off an overpass,” Bob Hilliard, Saint Armour’s attorney, told 404 Media in an emailed statement. “She tried to take control, but crashed into the barrier and was seriously injured—mostly her shoulder, neck, and back.”
Hilliard shared a photo of the aftermath of the crash and dashcam footage with 404 Media. In the video, the Cybertruck proceeds down the highway and hops an intersection instead of turning to the right and following the road. It’s stopped when it slams into a signpost on the overpass.
The lawsuit blames the crash on Musk. “Elon Musk is an aggressive and irresponsible salesman, who has a long history of making dangerous design choices, and over-promising the features of his products,” the lawsuit said. “This promotion of products, for capabilities that they do not have, is the reason for this incident.”
Musk has spent the past few years prompting Tesla’s ability to drive itself, a feature that costs $99 a month and is sold as “Full Self-Driving.” But, the lawyers said, the FSD feature doesn’t work as advertised and it’s irresponsible of Tesla and Musk to market their vehicles as having the feature. “Despite this dangerous condition of Tesla’s ‘self-driving’ vehicles, Elon Musk and Tesla have made representations in the year 2019 that Tesla’s full ‘self-driving’ vehicles were fully operational and safe.”
Tesla and Musk have gotten in trouble for this before. In February, the company agreed it would stop using the terms “autopilot” and “full self-driving" when advertising its vehicles in California. There have been multiple fatal and non-fatal crashes involving Tesla vehicles running on autopilot, including a man who hit a parked police car in 2024. In August, a judge ordered Tesla to pay $200 million in punitive damages and another $43 million in compensatory damages to a family of a 22 year old who died in a crash involving the car’s Autopilot system.
According to the lawsuit, one of the reasons this keeps happening is because Musk intervened directly to make Teslas cheaper by using cameras instead of LiDAR, which uses laser light to create a 3D map of the surrounding area. “Elon Musk’s intervention into the design of Tesla vehicles has long been reckless and dangerous. While engineers at Tesla recommended the super-human vision of LiDAR be included for self-driving vehicles, and competitors like Waymo and Cruise relied heavily on LiDAR, Musk chose instead to rely only upon cheap video cameras,” the lawsuit said. “Musk referred to the LiDAR used by his safer competitors as expensive and unnecessary.”
Fully automated driving is a hard tech problem. LiDAR is better than basic cameras, but they’re still not perfect and LiDAR-based self-driving cars crash too. There are other problems too. In cities operating Google’s Waymo cars, passengers are leaving the doors open and Waymo is contracting DoorDashers to close them for $10 a pop, a Waymo in LA attempted to drive through a police standoff, and woman in San Francisco was trapped in a Waymo after men blocked the car and started to harass her.
2026-03-11 03:21:45
Colorful feathers found in an ancient tomb on Peru’s coast once belonged to parrots captured deep in the Amazon rainforest, reports a study published on Tuesday in Nature Communications. The discovery provides direct evidence of long-distance trade networks that flourished across the Andes centuries before the expansion of the Inca Empire in 1470, proving that these cultures developed sophisticated economic systems capable of transporting live tropical birds across treacherous environments.
2026-03-10 21:00:53
Quittr, an app that promises to help men stop watching pornography, leaked intimate data on hundreds of thousands of its users, including their masturbation habits, and lied about its security issues, 404 Media can now reveal.
I first reported about Quittr exposing user data in January, but was unable to name Quittr in the story because its creators, Alex Slater and Connor McLaren, did not fix its security issues despite multiple requests and an offer from an independent researcher to help them fix the problem. Naming the app while hackers were still able to easily steal Quittr’s user data would have endangered their privacy and put them at risk of extortion from hackers, which is very common today. Some of the data exposed includes the users’ age, how often they masturbate, and how viewing pornography makes them feel. According to the data, many of them are minors.
2026-03-09 23:36:54
Roblox is one of those games that is more popular than you can imagine, but unless you are of a certain age group and live in that world, you’ll rarely hear about it unless it makes the news for some terrible reason. More recently, for example, we wrote about the Tumbler Ridge shooter who created a mass shooting simulator in Roblox.
But what is Roblox, how big is it exactly, and why does it seem like it's so frequently embroiled in controversy? This week we’re joined by Cecilia D’anstasio in an attempt to answer all of these questions.
This week we’re joined by Cecilia D’Anstasio. Cecilia reports about video games at Bloomberg, and has written many important articles about the business and controversies of one of the biggest games in the world, Roblox. A few weeks ago we had Patrick Klepek on to discuss Roblox from a parent’s perspective, but today we’re going to hear about it from the perspective of a great investigative reporter and for my money the most knowledgeable journalists about Roblox.
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2026-03-09 22:12:22
When David saw his friend Michael’s social media post asking for a second opinion on a programming project, he offered to take a look.
“He sent me some of the code, and none of it made sense, none of it ran correctly. Or if it did run, it didn't do anything,” David told me. David and his friend’s names have been changed in this story to protect their privacy. “So I'm like, ‘What is this? Can you give me more context about this?’ And Michael’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I've been messing around with ChatGPT a lot.’”
Michael then sent David thousands of pages of ChatGPT conversations, much of it lines of code that didn’t work. Interspersed in the ChatGPT code were musings about spirituality and quantum physics, tetrahedral structures, base particles, and multi-dimensional interactions. “It's very like, woo woo,” David told me. “And we ended up having this interesting conversation about, how do you know that ChatGPT isn't lying?”
As their conversation turned from broken code to physics concepts and quantum entanglement, David realized something was very wrong. Talking to his friend — whom he’d shared many deep conversations with over the years, unpacking matters of religion and theories about the world and how people perceive it — suddenly felt like talking to a cultist. Michael thought he, through ChatGPT, discovered a critical flaw in humanity’s understanding of physics.
“ChatGPT had convinced him that all of this was so obviously true,” David said. “The way he spoke about it was as if it were obvious. Genuinely, I felt like I was talking to a cult member.”
But at the time, David didn’t have a way to name, or even describe, what his friend was experiencing. Once he started hearing the phrase “AI psychosis” to describe other peoples’ problematic relationships with chatbots, he wondered if that’s what was happening to Michael. His friend was clearly grappling with some kind of delusion related to what the chatbot was telling him. But there’s no handbook or program for how to talk to a friend or family member in that situation. Having encountered these kinds of conversations myself and feeling similarly uncertain, I talked to mental health experts about how to talk to someone who appears to be embracing delusional ideas after spending too much time with a chatbot.
2026-03-09 21:26:08
In the parking lot of Seven Oaks Element school in South Carolina on one of the first hot days of the year I watched an AI-generated George Washington talk about the American revolution. “Our rights are a gift from God, not a favor from kings or courts,” slop Washington told me. It spoke from a screen that stretched floor to ceiling, trimmed by a fancy frame.
The intended effect is to make it appear as if the founding father is a painting come to life, a piece of history talking to the viewer. The actual effect was to remind that the AI slop aesthetic is synonymous with the Trump presidency and has become part of the visual language of fascism. Which is fitting because AI George Washington is the result of a collaboration between the Trump White and online content mill PragerU.
The AI slop founding father is part of a touring exhibit of Freedom Trucks commissioned by PragerU in honor of the 250th anniversary of American independence. The trucks are a mobile museum exhibit meant to teach kids about the founding of the country. It’s pitched at kids—most of the “content,” as staff on site called it, is meant for a younger audience but the trucks have viewing hours open to the general public. Nick Bravo, a PragerU employee on hand to answer questions, told me that there are six Freedom Trucks and that the plan is to have them travel the 48 contiguous United States over the next year.
I was drawn to the Freedom Truck because I’d heard they contained AI-generated recreations of Revolutionary figures like Washington, Betsy Ross, and the Marquis Lafayette, similar to the ones on display at the White House. To my disappointment, the AI generated videos in the Freedom Truck are remarkably boring.
As I watched the AI George Washington deliver a by-the-books version of the American story, I thought about Jerry Jones. The famously vain owner of the Dallas Cowboys commissioned an AI version of himself for AT&T stadium in 2023. Fans who make the pilgrimage to the stadium can watch a presentation and ask the AI Jones questions. The AI wanders a big screen while it talks to the audience.
Other than the lazy AI generated videos, the Freedom Truck doesn’t have much to offer. I signed a digital copy of the Declaration of Independence on a touchscreen and took a quiz that asked leading questions designed to find out if I was a “loyalist or patriot.”
“The British Army sends soldiers to Boston. How do you react?” Answer 1: “View them as occupiers violating colonial liberty.” Answer 2: “Welcome them as defenders of law and order.” With ICE and the National Guard patrolling American cities, I wondered how supporters of the current administration would answer that one.
PragerU is known for its “America can do no wrong” view of US history. Its short form video content offers a cartoon version of the past stripped of nuance and context where the country lives up to the myth that it is a “Shining City On a Hill.” According to PragerU, white people abolished slavery and dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was a necessary thing that “shortened the war and saved countless lives.” Now PragerU is taking its view of history on tour across the country. School children in every state will wander these trucks and encounter an AI slop version of the past.
Bravo told me that all the truck’s content was generated as part of a partnership between PragerU and Michigan’s Hillsdale College—a Christian university that helped craft Project 2025. There were, of course, hints of Project 2025 around the edges of the child-friendly AI-generated videos. Slavery isn’t ignored but the stories of early African Americans like poet Phillis Wheatley focus on her celebration of America rather than how she arrived there. On the museum’s “Wall of Heroes,” Whittaker Chambers is nestled between architect Frank Lloyd Wright and painter Norman Rockwell.
A small note near the floor at the exit of the truck notes the collaboration of PragerU and Hillsdale College, and claims that “neither institution received any federal funds and both generously contributed their own resources to help create this educational exhibit.” It also said “this truck was made possible through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services,” which is, of course, a federal agency.
Every AI-generated video ended with a title card showing the White House and PragerU’s logo. “The White House is grateful for the partnership with PragerU and the US Department of Education for the production of this museum,” the card said. “This partnership does not constitute or imply a US Government or US Department of Education endorsement of PragerU.”
Trump attempted to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) via executive order in 2025, but the courts blocked it. Libraries and Museums have since reported that the IMLS grant process has taken on a “chilling” pro-Trump political turn. The administration has also attempted to dismantle the Department of Education.
Trump’s voice was the last thing I heard as I wandered into the bright afternoon sun. “I want to thank PragerU for helping us share this incredible story,” he said in a recorded video that played on a loop in Freedom Truck. “I hope you will join me in helping to make America’s 250th anniversary a year we will never forget.”