If you’ve recently been to Burning Man, the end-of-summer week-long music festival and temporary art community that sets up in the Nevada desert, you’ve most likely seen the Scorpion Art Car. Depending on the details of your encounter, you might have thought it simultaneously the most scary/crazy/bitchin’ awesome man-made machine ever — that is, once your adrenaline stopped pumping. So how’d you like to own it?
If you haven’t seen the Scorpion Art Car, well, imagine a gigantic mechanical scorpion, so large it would dwarf most of the vehicles in Mad Max Fury Road. And it does closely resemble its arachnid namesake, with eight articulated legs, two long extended claws, and a tail that rises up and shoots fire from seven flame throwers. The skin is steam punk-style with rivets and textures … and don’t forget the light show. So how about you? Wanna buy it?
Whether you’ve seen the Scorpion Art Car in person or not, here’s your chance. The 55-foot long, 45-foot wide, 45-foot tall (width and height when extended) is an exact replica of a female emperor and is up for auction on eBay. The current (and so far only) bid is $50,000. The auction closes this coming Thursday evening, so you’ve got a few days to get the money or some friends together and make your best offer.
Built for Burning Man 2011, Fluffy (a nickname from a pet scorpion) was built on a 1991, 28-foot-long International boom truck. In its current state, it’s not street legal — and never will be. Even when partially disassembled, the vehicle is 11.5 feet wide and must be hauled on a semi with oversized load signs, and in some states escorts.
If you buy Fluffy prior to Burning Man 2016, which runs August 28 to September 5, you can take possession at the event and work with the current owners learning how to set it up. They’ll also help you take it down and pack for transport at the end. Be prepared to take notes, because it requires six people and a whole day to set it up and another day to take it down — and we’re talking about the folks who designed and built it.
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.