A Bitcoin believer on Reddit put his money where his mouth is – or, rather, put his hat where his mouth is – after losing a bet that the price of a Bitcoin would remain at $1,000 “come January 1st.”
“I’ll eat a hat on video with ketchup if we’re below $1,000 come January 1st,” redditor “Anndddyyyy” said back in late November. Unfortunately for him, Bitcoin only managed to jump to about $750 on New Year’s Day 2014, and now sits at less than $600.
On Wednesday, Anndddyyyy made good on his promise – he ate his own freakin’ hat. On video. Holy sh*t.
WARNING: Video contains some (completely understandable) NSFW language.
“I was so sure of my drunken predictions that I offered to eat a hat on video with ketchup if I was wrong,” wrote Anndddyyyy in a follow-up post on Wednesday. “Well, I was wrong. Bitcoins and alcohol don’t go well together. Lesson learned.”
Anndddyyy goes on to explain in later comments that he ate the cotton beanie “in 3 phases,” to help alleviate any health issues that may have resulted from eating a goddamn hat.
“I had every intention of doing it all in one meal until a friend of mine who’s in nursing school expressed genuine concern because the digestive system doesn’t break down cotton,” he said. “My stomach definitely felt ‘off’ after each time and it gave me a weird headache.”
Anndddyyyy’s bad bet teaches us some valuable life lessons. First, as he says, don’t drink and make insane bets about volatile virtual currencies. That’s just asking for trouble. Second, if you do happen to drink and make dumb bets, do the right thing and follow through – it’ll build character, assuming you don’t die in the process.
As Anndddyyy says, “I may be an idiot, but I like to think I’m an idiot with integrity.”
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.