Kris Guyer – Page 2

Ocean damage nearly doubles the cost of climate change

climate change, ocean ecology, Science, syndication / Kris Guyer / January 18, 2026

Using greenhouse gas emission predictions, the report estimates the annual damages to traditional markets alone will be $1.66 trillion by 2100.

The study, which began in 2021, brought together scientists from multiple disciplines: Fisheries experts, coral reef researchers, biologists and climate economists. They assessed downstream climate change costs across four key sectors—corals, mangroves, fisheries, and seaports—measuring everything from straightforward market loss of reduced fisheries and marine trade to reductions in ocean-based recreational industries.

Researchers also placed a monetary figure on what economists call non-use values. “Something has value because it makes the world feel more livable, meaningful, or worth protecting, even if we never directly use it,” said Bastien-Olvera, referencing the fiscal merit of ecosystem enjoyment and the cultural loss caused by climate change. “Most people will never visit a coral reef during a full-moon spawning event, or see a deep-sea jellyfish glowing in total darkness. But many still care deeply that these things exist.”

Island economies, which rely more on seafood for nutrition, will face disproportionate financial and health impacts from ocean warming and acidification, the study said. “The countries that have the most responsibility for causing climate change and the most capacity to fix it are not generally the same countries that will experience the largest or most near-term damages,” said Kate Ricke, co-author and climate professor at UCSD’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. Including ocean data in social cost of carbon assessments reveals increased consequences for morbidity and mortality in low-income countries facing increased nutrition deficiency.

Despite the scale of the scientific discovery, Bastien-Olvera and Ricke are optimistic this data will be a wake-up call for international decision-making. “I hope that the high value of ‘blueSCC’ can motivate further investment in adaptation and resilience for ocean systems,” said Ricke, using the term of the ocean-based social cost of carbon and referencing the opportunities to invest in coral reef and mangrove restoration projects.

Meanwhile, Bastien-Olvera believes centering the framework on oceans also recognizes the longstanding conservation approaches of coastal communities, ocean scientists and Indigenous peoples. “For a long time, climate economics treated the ocean values as if it were worth zero,” he said. “This is a first step toward finally acknowledging how wrong that was.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply

Anna's archive, Policy, worldcat / Kris Guyer / January 16, 2026

WorldCat “suffered persistent attacks for roughly a year”

The court order, which was previously reported by TorrentFreak, was issued by Judge Michael Watson in US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. “Plaintiff has established that Defendant crashed its website, slowed it, and damaged the servers, and Defendant admitted to the same by way of default,” the ruling said.

Anna’s Archive allegedly began scraping and harvesting data from WorldCat.org in October 2022, “and Plaintiff suffered persistent attacks for roughly a year,” the ruling said. “To accomplish such scraping and harvesting, Defendant allegedly used search bots (automated software applications) that ‘called or pinged the server directly’ and appeared to be ‘legitimate search engine bots from Bing and Google.’”

The court granted OCLC’s motion for default judgment on a breach-of-contract claim related to WorldCat.org terms and conditions, and a trespass-to-chattels claim related to the alleged harm to its website and servers. The court rejected the plaintiff’s tortious-interference-with-contract claim because OCLC’s allegation didn’t include all necessary components to prove the charge, and rejected OCLC’s unjust enrichment claim because it “is preempted by federal copyright law.”

The judgment said Anna’s Archive is permanently enjoyed from “scraping or harvesting WorldCat data from WorldCat. org or OCLC’s servers; using, storing, or distributing the WorldCat data on Anna’s Archive’s websites; and encouraging others to scrape, harvest, use, store, or distribute WorldCat data.” It also must “delete all copies of WorldCat data in possession of or easily accessible to it, including all torrents.”

Data used to make “list of books that need to be preserved”

The “Anna” behind Anna’s Archive revealed the WorldCat scraping in an October 2023 blog post. The post said that because WorldCat has “the world’s largest library metadata collection,” the data would help Anna’s Archive make a “list of books that need to be preserved.”

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SC measles outbreak has gone berserk: 124 cases since Friday, 409 quarantined

health, Infectious disease, measles, outbreak, South Carolina, vaccination / Kris Guyer / January 14, 2026

A measles outbreak in South Carolina that began in October is now wildly accelerating, doubling in just the past week to a total of 434 cases, with 409 people currently in quarantine.

Amid the outbreak, South Carolina health officials have been providing updates on cases every Tuesday and Friday. On Tuesday, state health officials reported 124 more cases since last Friday, which had 99 new cases since the previous Tuesday. On that day, January 6, officials noted a more modest increase of 26 cases, bringing the outbreak total at that point to 211 cases.

With the 3-month-old outbreak now doubled in just a week, health officials are renewing calls for people to get vaccinated against the highly infectious virus—an effort that has met with little success since October. Still, the health department is activating its mobile health unit to offer free measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccinations, as well as flu vaccinations at two locations today and Thursday in the Spartanburg area, the epicenter of the outbreak.

Officials are also warning that they’re losing the ability to trace cases, and exposures are continuing. Last Friday, someone contagious with measles was in the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia between 1 pm and 5 pm ET. Anyone in the museum during that time and unvaccinated is at risk of contracting the infection. The virus spreads through the air and can linger in a room’s airspace for up to two hours after an infected person has left. Measles is so contagious that up to 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed will fall ill.

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FDA deletes warning on bogus autism therapies touted by RFK Jr.‘s allies

anti-vaccine, autism, fda, fraud, health, Robert F Kenned Jr., Scams, treatment / Kris Guyer / January 13, 2026

For years, the Food and Drug Administration provided an informational webpage for parents warning them of the dangers of bogus autism treatments, some promoted by anti-vaccine activists and “wellness” companies. The page cited specifics scams and the “significant health risks” they pose.

But, under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has numerous ties to the wellness industry—that FDA information webpage is now gone. It was quietly deleted at the end of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to Ars Technica.

The defunct webpage, titled “Be Aware of Potentially Dangerous Products and Therapies that Claim to Treat Autism,” provided parents and other consumers with an overview of the problem. It began with a short description of autism and some evidence-based, FDA-approved medications that can help manage autism symptoms. Then, the regulatory agency provided a list of some false claims and unproven, potentially dangerous treatments it had been working to combat. “Some of these so-called therapies carry significant health risks,” the FDA wrote.

The list included chelation and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, treatments that those in the anti-vaccine and wellness spheres have championed.

Dangerous detoxes

Chelation is a real treatment for heavy metal poisoning, such as lead poisoning. But it has been co-opted by anti-vaccine activists and wellness gurus, who falsely claim it can treat autism, among other things. These sham treatments can come in a variety of forms, including sprays, suppositories, capsules, and liquid drops. Actual FDA-approved chelation therapy products are prescription only, the agency noted, and chelating certain minerals from the body “can lead to serious and life-threatening outcomes.”

Many anti-vaccine activists promote the false and thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, and more specifically, that trace metal components in some vaccines cause the neurological disorder. For years, anti-vaccine activists like Kennedy focused on thimerosal, a vaccine preservative that contains ethylmercury. Thimerosal was largely removed from childhood vaccines by 2001 amid unfounded concerns. The removal made no impact on autism rates, and many studies have continued to show that it is safe and not a cause of autism. Anti-vaccine activists moved on to blame other vaccine components for autism, including aluminum, which is used in some vaccines to help spur protective immune responses. It too has been found to be safe and not linked to autism.

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Dating Roundup #10: Gendered Expectations

Dating / Kris Guyer / January 13, 2026

The game is asymmetrical. Life is not fair. Doesn’t matter. Play to win the game.

Ah, the ultimate ick source. A man expressing their emotions is kind of the inverse of the speech in Barbie about how it’s impossible to be a woman.

It’s easy. A man must be in touch with and transparent about his emotions, but must also be in conscious control over them, without repressing them, while choosing strategically when to be and not be transparent about them, and ultimately be fine, such that we will also be fine if all that information we shared can then be shared with others or used as a weapon.

Express your emotions. No, not those, and definitely not like that. But do it.

That’s the goal. If you say that’s not fair? Well, life it’s fair, I report the facts rather than make the rules, and the whole thing sounds like a you problem.

Kryssy La Reida: Serious question for men…what is it that makes you feel like you are in a relationship with a woman that you can’t express your feelings to? Or why would you even want to be in one where you don’t have a safe space to do so? If your partner isn’t that safe landing space for those emotions what is the point? Or are you just conditioned to not express them?

Eric Electrons: Many women will often say they want vulnerability in a man, no matter how calmly and respectfully delivered, but treat us differently once they get it, use it against us when upset, joke about it, or share it without our consent to friends and family.

It takes time and experience to truly identify a woman who is trustworthy and knowledgeable enough to handle expressing your feelings to as a man. Especially, if she’s a significant other.

Philosophi_Cat: It’s true that many women say they want a man who’s “in touch with his emotions,” yet get the “ick” when he expresses them. This can be bewildering for men, but the issue lies in how emotion is expressed, not in the fact of feeling it.

Yes, women tend value a man who has emotional fluency and depth, someone who can articulate his inner world and empathise with hers.

But they recoil when a man loses his composure, collapses emotionally and turns to her for emotional containment. The moment she has to soothe or stabilise him, when she must step into the role of his therapist or mother, the polarity between them collapses. She no longer feels his strength; she feels his need. And that is where the “ick” arises from.

So this is the key distinction: Emotional depth does not mean emotional dumping.

A man can speak openly about his struggles while remaining self-possessed and anchored in his own centre. He might say, “I’ve had a rough week and I’m working through some frustration, but I’ll be fine,” rather than dissolving into self-pity or seeking reassurance. He shares what’s real without burdening her with it. His emotions are contained by his own form.

That’s what women respond to: emotional transparency grounded in composure. It signals a robust and stable inner centre. It shows he can hold complexity without being consumed by it.

By contrast, many men, fearing that any show of feeling will make them appear weak, over-correct by suppressing or hiding their emotions entirely.

Robin Hanson: So men, feel emotions only if you fully command them. If you are instead vulnerable to them, you are “ick”. Got that?

Robin’s imprecise here. It’s not that you can’t feel the emotions, it’s that you can’t talk about or too obviously reveal them, and especially can’t burden her with them. Unless, that is, you are sufficiently justified in not commanding them in a given situation, in which case you can do it.

As with many other similar things this creates a skill issue. Yes, we’d all (regardless of gender) like to be fully in touch with and in command of our emotions and in a place where we can own and share all of it securely and all that, while also having a good sense of when it’s wise to not share. That’s asking a lot, so most people need practical advice on how to handle it all.

When you sense potential trouble and the wrong move can cause permanent damage up to and including the ick, risk aversion and holding things back is the natural play. But if you always do that you definitely fail, and you also don’t fail fast. A lot of risk aversion is aversion to failing fast when you should welcome failing fast, which is the opposite of the correct strategy.

So you’ll need to start getting command and ownership of at least some of those emotions, and you should err on the side of sharing more faster if you’re in position to handle it, but also it’s fine to hold other stuff back or be vague about it, especially negative stuff.

You’ll be told that the above is overthinking things. It isn’t.

It is extremely attractive to feel and openly show your emotions and get away with it, if you do it successfully, largely because it is so difficult to do it successfully.

Taylor: wish men understood how attractive it is when they can feel & openly show their emotions instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall.

Pay Roll Manager Here: Any man reading her tweet, please do not believe her.

Geoffrey Miller: Sexual selection through mate choice can shape traits faster than any other evolutionary process can. If women were really attracted to men who cried a lot, men would have evolved, very quickly, to cry a lot.

Robin Hanson: And if women who actually knew what they wanted and said so honestly were attractive to men, that would have evolved very quickly too, right?

On the evolutionary level, yes selection is rapid but even if the effect were extreme that’s over centuries and millennia, not decades. So the ‘if this was attractive evolution would have handled it’ argument only holds for traits that would have been attractive in older worlds very different from our own, in cultures radically different from our own, where selection operated very differently.

Also, a lot of your reproductive success in those worlds (and ours) is about intersexual dynamics and resource acquisition, and several other factors, so a trait can be attractive but still get aggressively selected against.

So while yes, obviously evolution can offer some very big hints and should be considered, you cannot assume that this is predictive of what works now.

‘Can feel and openly show emotions’ is not one thing. There are some ways that being able to feel and openly show emotions is attractive and winning. In other ways and situations it is very much not. Like when you train an LLM, there are a bunch of correlated things that will tend to move in correlated ways, and modifying one thing also modifies other things.

So yes, when you see the player in the clip talk about missing his family, that is (mostly) a good use of feeling and showing emotions at this point (although it wouldn’t have gone as great in the same spot even a few decades ago, I am guessing). But that doesn’t mean that showing that level of emotion and crying on a regular basis will go that well.

This is a skill issue. Being the brick wall is not a universally optimal play. But it is a safer play in any given situation. In many situations it is indeed correct, and at low levels of related skill it is better than the alternatives even more often.

First best is to be in touch with your emotions but be high skilled in managing them and knowing when and how to communicate them to others, and so on. Second best is to be cautious. Long term, yes, you want to pick up this skill.

This is speculative. The theory is, it is fine to mix and match and combine and defy stereotypes, but only via embodying more things rather than less things.

Sasha Chapin: So I have a theory that for most people, men and women, peak attractiveness in a hetero context involves high-budget androgyny

Low-budget androgyny: not inhabiting either gendered energy

High-budget androgyny: inhabiting your own fully, and a bit of the other

I notice that the men I know who get the most laid or have the least trouble securing a relationship are men you could see boxing or fishing, but could also do a convincing impromptu tarot reading or w/e

Julie Fredrickson: I’ve generally dressed in a normie feminine manner and leaned into long hair and cosmetics because all my interests are masculine coded. Would this fall into high budget androgyny?

Sasha Chapin: Yes.

Andrew Rettek: I’ve noticed this androgyny binary before, this is a good description of it.

Sarah Constantin: this is in the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which i think is from the 60s. distinguishes “androgynous” (both masculine & feminine) from “undifferentiated” (neither masculine nor feminine.)

i’m pretty undifferentiated lol

but so are Tolkienesque elves so how bad can it be.

I’ve said it before but it’s important so it bears repeating, one of the fundamentals, obviously it is not this simple or easy but on the margin this helps quite a lot, you want to give people the unexpected compliments that mean something:

Ibrahim: telling a hot girl shes pretty is like someone telling YOU, presumably a smart twitter tech guy, ur smart.

if someone told you ur smart ud prob just say thanks.

maybe itll feel slightly good, but it wont leave much of an impression on u, bc no shit ur smart; ur a swe.

same thing for hot girls.

if someone says they r pretty, they drgaf, bc like its so obvious and that compliment doesnt mean that much to them.

give people complements they dont usually get to stand out. call ur local tech guy hot and call ur local hot girl smart

Alberto Fuentes: Calling a nerd Guy “hot” is a clear indication of the beginning of a scam.

Ibrahim: sigh you’re right.

Beware Alberto’s warning too, of course, you need to not overdo it, and also beware.

If you’re not sure what kind of compliment they prefer, you can run tests. Or in theory?

Ben Hsieh: for awhile i was on this completely psychotic kick where i’d relate this advice (tell pretty girls that they’re smart and smart girls that they’re pretty) and then ASK the girl which compliment they’d prefer

no idea where my head was on that, it’s a wonder i never got stabbed.

Lydia Laurenson: that’s actually hilarious… I feel like I might laugh pretty hard if someone said that to me

Ben Hsieh: …well, which compliment do you prefer?

Lydia Laurenson: 😹 aren’t you married and monogamous

Ben Hsieh: yes, though who can tell how. I will say i’m confident my wife would be totally fine knowing i was asking this question, specifically on condition that it’s not to her.

Lydia Laurenson: my initial answer in any standard social context would be would be: laugh, deflect, make joke, deflect

my genuine answer: I feel slightly happier when men tell me I’m pretty than that I’m smart. I guess this indicates that I think I’m smarter than I am pretty, and that is true.

Zvi Mowshowitz: new level of ask culture unlocked, I love it.

Lydia Laurenson: it’s a real brain twister whether it’s a neg or not.

I think it’s entirely context dependent whether it’s centrally a neg. Your delivery of the line would matter a lot.

Ruby: The whole “men should pay on first dates” thing gives me the ick and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why. I think it’s some combination of:

I’m less attracted to men who blindly follow social scripts.

I have no interest in unequal partnership (except for kinky reasons) and I want my date to appreciate that.

I dislike the kind of feminism that demands a bunch of advantages for women without accepting the corresponding responsibilities, and it disappoints me when women don’t reject this.

This is not to say that I’m against men ever paying, I just wish we’d reject it as this weird value-laden social norm. My preferred scenario would be to randomize it each time, perhaps weighted more towards the person who is wealthier

Aella: Yeah when I let a guy pay on a date I feel myself putting one foot into escort world where I become suddenly aware that our relationship is transactional.

The transactionalism worry is real as a downside. Despite this, I believe men should very clearly pay on most first dates, for at least five good (related) reasons.

The man is usually the one doing the asking.
The man is usually the one doing the planning.
The man does not want her to have the distraction or bad vibes of thinking about money or having not paid. This is a lot of vibe improvement at low cost.
The man wants the woman to say yes more often both to the first and subsequent dates, and have positive memories and a positive experience.
The man wants to send a costly signal of several things.

Thus, given other dynamics present, the man should usually pay for the first date. This is a relatively acceptable way to make the date market clear more often and improve outcomes.

To the extent that the above justifications are broken, such as when the woman is initiating and suggesting the activity, that is an exception.

Consider an obvious example where one party should pay: If you are invited over to someone’s house for dinner, very obviously they should usually not send you a bill, no matter what relationship you have with them or what else you might do or not do. Similarly, I am a big fan of the rule I have with some of my friends that whoever travels the farthest does not pay for dinner.

Very obviously, if you have someone like Ruby or Aella where the vibes run the other way, and not paying hurts their experience? Then you should split or they should pay, It is on her to let him know this. He should reach for and request the check in a way that indicates intention to pay, but in a soft way that is interruptible.

Jeremiah Johnson: So Cartoons Hate Her tested the ‘Men are turned off when women have high paying jobs’ hypothesis. It turns out that’s just completely untrue – greater percentages of men swipe right when the same women is listed as having a higher-paying job.

Ella: This seems to also dispel the common more that men “swipe right on literally anything”, given that she at most got a 71% rate (and as low as a 58% rate) despite being in my estimate quite conventionally pretty.

Not only did she get more matches presenting as a higher earner, the matches were on average higher earners themselves.

Lila Krishna pushes back that CHH was asking the wrong question. Yes, you can get as many or more initial swipes, but that is not the goal. The problems come later if you don’t want to give up your ambitions, she says, with personality clashes and emasculation and resentment and the male expectation that you’ll still do all the chores and childcare which rules out deep work.

The ability to be ambitious is valued, she asserts, but actually still being ambitious isn’t. See Taylor Tomlinson’s bit about how she wants to marry a stay-at-home dad, but not a man who wants to be one, so she needs to find a successful man and destroy him, and she’s kind of into him resenting her for it.

Which is all entirely compatible with CHH’s findings, but also means that you’re strictly better off making more money rather than less.

Shut Thefu: Don’t have my car today so requested a colleague if he can drop me on the way.

His exact reply, “sorry dear, my wife may not appreciate it.” Men, it is really that simple.

Aella: Are the monogs ok

J: But yet you wanted to put him in that position. 🤔

Unfair: If dropping a colleague on your way is such an issue with your partner, you’re in a toxic relationship that will end badly one way or the other

Sammy: is it not entirely offensive to people that their partner’s are out there implying their relationship can’t survive a simple favor lmao?

“sorry my marriage is weaker than a car ride home with a woman. for some reason this is neither embarrassing nor sexist”

Books By J: I was confused too when I saw the post earlier lol

Could never be me. I don’t care if my husband drives a coworker home? Just let me know? Communicate? So I know you’ll be a little late so I’m not worried you are in a ditch somewhere?

Being worried someone that is a little late is dead in a ditch? Also paranoia.

I don’t think this is automatically one of those ‘that which can be destroyed by the truth should be’ or ‘if I can take your man he was never your man’ situations. Circumstances drive behavior, and yes it is entirely plausible that you could have a good thing worth preserving that would be put at risk if you put yourself in the wrong situation, even one that is in theory entirely innocent. Opportunity and temptation are not good things in these spots and a tiny chance of huge downside can be worth avoiding.

Most couples most of the time do not need to worry on this level, and certainly having to worry that way is a bad sign, but play to win.

Also from the same person recently:

Shut the Fu: I just asked my boyfriend today what he’s most afraid of and I thought he was gonna say “I’m afraid of losing you” but he literally said “YOU” 😭😭

And for fun:

Now that I actually have a comfortable amount of money, I can say that it does indeed buy happiness. The guilt free occasional food delivery, being able to afford going out w friends, buying something that makes life easier, health appointments!, hiring a service. Y’ALL THEY LIED

She’s somehow cracked the Twitter code, she has 1584 followers and half her posts recently break a million views. It’s amazing.

There’s a note saying this was engagement bait but it’s a scenario either way.

At least one bullet was dodged here. The question is which one, or was it both?

Shannon Hill: This poor dude planned his proposal and she said NO in front of all of their family and friends because the ring was only $900 and came from Walmart.

Personally, I think he dodged a bullet.

I’d say that if this is real both of them dodged a bullet. It’s a terrible match. She was willing to crush him in front of everyone over this and then doubled down, saying that she didn’t feel chosen even though he’s been planning this for a year. In particular, she also said ‘something from Walmart’ rather than saying it was the wrong type of diamond, which I’d respect a bunch more.

But also, dude, look, this is your moment, you planned this for a year, you don’t leave the freaking price tag and Walmart label in the box, what the hell are you doing. And yeah, you can say that doesn’t matter, but that type of thing matters a lot to her.

Nikita Bier: If you get upgraded on a flight but your girlfriend/wife doesn’t, do you downgrade and both suffer or do you take the upgrade? I need an answer in 5 minutes.

(Even) Robin Hanson: You give it to her.

donnie: what’s the purpose of the trip?

Nikita Bier: Honeymoon.

Matthew Yglesias (being right):

If it’s your girlfriend you should either take the upgrade and break up with her soon, or else quietly decline it and propose soon.

If it’s your wife, you as a gentleman offer her the upgrade and she’ll probably decline and let you take it.

2 The Great: My legs are so long I literally cannot sit straight in domestic economy. I got offered the upgrade. I offered it to my 5’4” now ex-girlfriend to be polite and she took it.

Matt Yglesias: What’re you gonna do.

What you are going to do is realize that if she takes the upgrade, that information is far more valuable than the upgrade. Hence the now ex part of the girlfriend.

There are situations in which sitting apart is not worth the upgrade, and a honeymoon plausibly counts as this, but they are rare. Mostly you want to offer her the upgrade, the value of doing that (and the value you lose by not doing that) greatly exceeds the actual experiential benefits even if she says yes, she often says no and you get valuable information.

One of the big classic s.

Peter Hague: Wife:

Me: ?

Wife: I don’t want !

How do you get past this dynamic?

Yes, I get the idea that she wants emotional support. But I want to solve problems – why isn’t that equally valid?

Gretta Duleba: No standard worksheet but I’d suggest asking a question such as

– How much of this feels under your control vs. not?

– What is it about this situation that feels especially tricky?

– What’s the best case scenario here? Worst case?

– What kind of support would help you the most?

Uncatherio: Wait ~3 mins between giving emotional support and offering

Both sides of the Tweed: Wife:

Me:

Wife:

This really is husbanding 101.

Russel Hogg: Everyone here is giving you a solution but you seem to just want us to share your pain!

Most of you already know this, but perhaps a better framing is helpful here?

So I would reply: Wife’s problem is not it is , and so you are trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and unfortunately all of your mistakes have failed to cancel out.

You need to offer a to at which point the problem changes to , which may or may not then be . As in, no problem.

Hello, human resources.

Chronically Drawing (Reddit): I have no idea how I feel about what he told me. I want to think it’s cute that he cared this much, but it’s just coming off as creepy and I feel lied to.

He got drunk because we were celebrating my first successful day at my clinicals and he ended up saying something along the lines of “could you believe we wouldn’t be this happy if I hadn’t watched you for so long?” To which I was confused and didn’t know what he meant.

Well I had worked at a local library for two years, before we met, during college and apparently he saw me there but didn’t actually talk to me, he just would watch me and listen in on my conversations with the people I was checking and my coworkers out to figure out what I liked. Then he apparently followed me and found the coffee shop I frequented. All this time I thought we had a sweet first time meeting story. He accidentally bumped into me, apologized, and offered to buy me coffee for the trouble.

He told me what he was ordering and it was the exact same thing I always get and I thought it was an amazing coincidence, I joked that it was fate and we spent like an hour talking over coffee. I feel so stupid. Apparently it was similar to a scene in a book that I had read and told my coworker I had thought was cute.

I’m just so frustrated, like why would you do this? And how much of our year and a half relationship is a lie.

The original response thread I saw this from said this was romantic and asked ‘you thought a meet cute was organic in 2025?’ Yes, meet cutes can still be organic, or involve a lot less stalking and deception.

The main problem with mostly harmless versions of such things is that they strongly correlate with and predict future very much not harmless versions of those and other things. Which is exactly what happened in this case. He got abusive and threatening and clearly was a physical danger to her, she had to flee her apartment. Fortunately it sounds like she’s okay.

A potential rule to live by here would be to say, don’t do anything you wouldn’t think the other person would be fine with in a hypothetical. Another obvious one is, if you think this would make people think you were crazy stalker person if they found out, then don’t do it, even if you think it wouldn’t mean that.

You don’t want the rule to be ‘would be fine with it if they knew everything,’ because knowing can ruin the effect. For example, one sometimes needs to Perform Vacation (or another occasion or action) and present as if one is happy in context, and they want you to do this if needed but it wouldn’t work if they outright knew you were faking it.

There certainly is also a class of ‘do your research’ strategies where you would okay with someone doing this as long as they kept it to themselves how they found out.

As many noted, the (often far more intensive) gender flipped version of this is common, and guys are remarkably often entirely fine with it (including many cases where it goes way too far and they shouldn’t be, but also many cases in which it is totally fine). This is not ‘fair’ but the logic follows.

Discussion about this post

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Judge: Trump violated Fifth Amendment by ending energy grants in only blue states

department of energy, Donald Trump, Electric vehicles, Fifth Amendment, Policy / Kris Guyer / January 12, 2026

The Trump administration violated the Fifth Amendment when canceling billions of dollars in environmental grants for projects in “blue states” that didn’t vote for him in the last election, a judge ruled Monday.

Trump’s blatant discrimination came on the same day as the government shut down last fall. In total, 315 grants were terminated in October, ending support for 223 projects worth approximately $7.5 billion, the Department of Energy confirmed. All the awardees, except for one, were based in states where Donald Trump lost the majority vote to Kamala Harris in 2024.

Only seven awardees sued, defending projects that helped states with “electric vehicle development, updating building energy codes, and addressing methane emissions.” They accused Trump officials of clearly discriminating against Democratic voters by pointing to their social media posts boasting about punishing blue states.

On X, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, bragged that nearly “$8 billion in Green NewScam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” then listed only states that did not vote for Trump. Meanwhile on Truth Social, Trump confirmed he met with Vought to “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut” during the shutdown.

On Monday, US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion that the case was “unique” because ordinarily “the mere presence of political considerations in an agency action” does not mean that officials have run “afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.”

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That time Will Smith helped discover new species of anaconda

anacondas, Biology, culture, Disney Plus, National Geographic, Science, Taxonomy, zoology / Kris Guyer / January 11, 2026

In 2024, scientists announced the discovery of a new species of giant anaconda in South America. A National Geographic camera crew was on hand for the 2022 expedition that documented the new species—and so was actor Will Smith, since they were filming for NatGeo’s new documentary series, Pole to Pole with Will Smith. Now we can all share in Smith’s Amazon experience, courtesy of the three-minute clip above.

Along with venom expert Bryan Fry, we follow Smith’s journey by boat with a team of indigenous Waorani guides, scouring the river banks for anacondas. And they find one: a female green anaconda about 16 to 17 feet long, “pure muscle.” The Waorani secure the giant snake—anacondas aren’t venomous but they do bite—so that Fry (with Smith’s understandably reluctant help) can collect a scale sample for further analysis. Fry says that this will enable him to determine the accumulation of pollutants in the water.

That and other collected samples also enabled scientists to conduct the genetic analysis that resulted in the declaration of a new species: the northern green anaconda (Eunectes akayama, which roughly translates to “the great snake”). It is genetically distinct from the southern green anaconda (Eunectes murinus); the two species likely diverged some 10 million years ago. The northern green anaconda’s turf includes Venezuela, Colombia, Suriname, French Guyana, and the northern part of Brazil.

Local Waorani guides subdue a giant green anaconda YouTube/National Geographic

Smith’s time in the Amazon also brought the arachnophobic actor face to face with a giant tarantula while scientists extracted the venom. His further adventures brought him to the South Pole, where he trekked across frigid ice fields; to the Himalayas, where he trekked to a small village in Bhutan; to the Pacific Islands to record a lost native language; to the Kalahari desert, where he joined the hunter-gatherer San people on a hunt; and to the North Pole, where he joined an expedition to dive under the ice to collect scientific samples.

Pole to Pole with Will Smith premieres on January 13, 2026, and will stream on Disney+ the following day.

poster art showing bearded will smith in a parka with snow crystallizing on his beard — Credit: National Geographic

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NASA orders “controlled medical evacuation” from the International Space Station

commercial crew, crew dragon, crew-11, dragon, human spaceflight, international space station, jared isaacman, NASA, Science, Space, spacex / Kris Guyer / January 10, 2026

“The crew is highly trained, and they came to the aid of their colleague right away.”

The International Space Station orbits 260 miles (420 kilometers) above the Earth. Credit: NASA

NASA officials said Thursday they have decided to bring home four of the seven crew members on the International Space Station after one of them experienced a “medical situation” earlier this week.

The space agency has said little about the incident, and officials have not identified which crew member suffered the medical issue. James “JD” Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, told reporters Thursday the crew member is “absolutely stable” but that the agency is “erring on the side of caution” with the decision to return the astronaut to Earth.

The ailing astronaut is part of the Crew-11 mission, which launched to the station August 1 and was slated to come back to Earth around February 20. Instead, the Crew-11 astronauts will depart the International Space Station (ISS) in the coming days and head for reentry and a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

“After discussions with our chief health and medical officer, Dr. JD Polk, and leadership across the agency, I’ve come to the decision that it’s in the best interests of our astronauts to return Crew-11 ahead of their planned departure,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Thursday.

The Crew-11 mission is led by commander Zena Cardman, 38, who is wrapping up her first mission to space. Second in command is pilot Mike Fincke, a 58-year-old astronaut on his fourth spaceflight. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, 55, and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, 39, round out the crew.

Isaacman said NASA will release more information about the schedule for Crew-11’s undocking and reentry within the next 48 hours. The crew will come home aboard the same SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft they launched in more than five months ago. The entire crew must return to Earth together because they rely on the same Dragon spacecraft as a lifeboat.

“For over 60 years, NASA has set the standard for safety and security in crewed spaceflight,” Isaacman said. “In these endeavors, including the 25 years of continuous human presence onboard the International Space Station, the health and well-being of our astronauts is always and will be our highest priority.”

From left to right: Crew-11 mission specialist Oleg Platonov, pilot Mike Fincke, commander Zena Cardman, and mission specialist Kimiya Yui. This photo was taken during training at SpaceX’s facility in Hawthorne, California. Credit: SpaceX

Lingering risk

Polk, a physician who has served as NASA’s chief medical officer since 2016, said the agency is not ready to release details about the medical issue, citing privacy concerns. “I’m not going to speak about any particular astronaut or any particular specific diagnosis,” Polk said. “I’d ask that we still respect the privacy of the astronaut.”

Two of the Crew-11 astronauts, Cardman and Fincke, were preparing to head outside the space station on a spacewalk early Thursday. Spacewalk preps at the space station include a period of time breathing high concentrations of oxygen to purge nitrogen from the astronauts’ bloodstreams, a mitigation to avoid decompression sickness when crew members are sealed inside their spacesuits’ pure oxygen atmosphere.

Polk said whatever happened Wednesday “had nothing to do” with preparing for the spacewalk. “This was totally unrelated to any operations onboard,” he said. “It’s mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity with the suite of hardware that we have at our avail to complete a diagnosis.”

Yui radioed mission controllers in Houston on Wednesday afternoon requesting a private medical conference with a flight surgeon, then asked ground teams to turn on camera views inside the station ahead of the session. Medical sessions are carried out on private radio channels and are not heard on the regular communication loops between the space station and mission control. Those open loops are streamed around the clock online, but NASA removed the audio feed from YouTube soon after the crew asked for the medical conference.

NASA publicly revealed a medical concern with one of the astronauts later Wednesday afternoon, then announced late Wednesday night that officials were considering bringing the crew home early.

“I won’t go into specific details about the medical incident itself,” Polk said. “But the crew is highly trained, and they came to the aid of their colleague right away, and that’s part of why we do that training.”

The space station is stocked with medical gear and medications to help astronauts respond to emergencies. Crew members are trained to perform ultrasounds, defibrillate patients, and start IVs, among other things. The medical treatment available on the ISS is akin to what an EMT might provide in transit to a hospital, former astronaut Tom Marshburn, himself a medical doctor, said in 2021.

“We have a very robust suite of medical hardware onboard the International Space Station, but we don’t have the complete amount of hardware that I would have in the emergency department, for example, to complete the workup of a patient,” Polk said.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, associate administrator Amit Kshatriya, and chief medical officer James “JD” Polk brief reporters on the status of the Crew-11 mission Thursday. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Space station managers will take a few days to determine when the Dragon spacecraft will leave the station. SpaceX will dispatch a recovery ship from Southern California to sail for the splashdown zone in the Pacific, and officials will assess weather and sea conditions before selecting the best opportunity to depart the station. Like every crew return, the vessel will be staffed with medical personnel to examine the astronauts after exiting from the Dragon capsule.

“Because the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergent evacuation,” Polk said. “We’re not immediately disembarking and getting the astronaut down.”

But without a confirmed diagnosis of the astronaut’s medical issue, there’s some “lingering risk” for the astronaut’s health if they remained in orbit, Polk said. That’s why Isaacman and his deputies agreed to call an early end to the Crew-11 mission.

This was the most significant decision of Isaacman’s young tenure as NASA administrator. He was sworn in as NASA chief last month after clearing a confirmation vote in the Senate. Before taking the helm at NASA, Isaacman charted a career as an entrepreneur and private astronaut, flying to space twice on commercial missions with SpaceX.

An inevitability

After Crew-11’s departure, the space station will operate with a smaller crew of three until the arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission with a fresh team of astronauts next month. Isaacman said NASA and SpaceX are looking at options to move up the launch of Crew-12 from its current target date of February 15.

Until then, the station’s crew will consist of NASA astronaut Chris Williams and two Russian cosmonauts, who launched to the space station in November on a Russian Soyuz vehicle. Williams and his crewmates—Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev—have their own lifeboat in the Soyuz spacecraft, so they will still have a ride home in the event of a future emergency.

The space station regularly operated with just three crew members for the first decade of its existence. The complex has been permanently staffed since 2000, sometimes with as few as two astronauts or cosmonauts. The standard crew size was raised to six in 2009, then to seven in 2020.

NASA astronaut Zena Cardman works with a spacesuit helmet inside the International Space Station’s airlock. Credit: NASA

Williams will be solely responsible for overseeing the lab’s US segment until Crew-12 arrives. He will be busy keeping up with maintenance tasks, so managers will likely defer some of the station’s scientific investigations until the complex is back to a full crew.

The early departure of Crew-11, leaving Williams as the only US astronaut aboard, also means NASA will be unable to perform spacewalks. This will mean a “slightly elevated risk” in NASA’s ability to respond to a major hardware failure that might require a spacewalk to fix, said Amit Kshatriya, the agency’s associate administrator.

NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, inked an agreement in 2022 to fly multinational crews on Dragon and Soyuz missions to ensure an American and a Russian are always at the space station. The so-called “seat swap” deal is proving worthwhile with this week’s events.

NASA has never before cut short a human spaceflight mission for medical reasons. “It’s the first time we’ve done a controlled medical evacuation from the vehicle, so that is unusual,” Kshatriya said.

The Soviet Union called an early end for an expedition to the Salyut 7 space station in 1985 after the mission’s commander fell ill in orbit.

In a sense, it is surprising that it took this long. Polk said predictive models suggested the ISS would have a medical evacuation about once every three years. It ended up taking 25 years. In that time, NASA has improved astronauts’ abilities to treat aches and pains, minor injuries, and routine illnesses.

Crews in orbit can now self-treat ailments that might have prompted a crew to return to Earth in the past. One astronaut was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis, or a blood clot, in 2018 without requiring an early departure from the space station. Another astronaut suffered a pinched nerve in 2021 and remained in orbit for another seven months.

One of the more compelling reasons for the space station’s existence is its ability to act as a testbed for learning how to live and work off the planet. The station has served as a laboratory for studying how spaceflight affects the human body, and as a platform to test life support systems necessary for long-duration voyages to deep space.

“We are doing all this to continue to learn,” Isaacman said. “We will absolutely learn from this situation as well, to see if that informs our future on-orbit operations, whether that be on the space station or our future lunar base that we’re pursuing right now, and eventually for deep space missions to Mars.”

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

NASA orders “controlled medical evacuation” from the International Space Station Read More »

Michigan man learns the hard way that “catch a cheater” spyware apps aren’t legal

legal, pctattletale, Security, spyware, stalkwerware / Kris Guyer / January 8, 2026

Despite being repeatedly told that people were using his product to spy on others without their consent, Fleming helped them with tech support.

A government investigator even opened up an affiliate marketing account for pcTattletale, and Fleming reached out to offer ready-made banner ads with text like “pcTattletale Cheating Husband? #1 catch a cheater spy tracker” and “pcTattletale Husband Cheating? Best Catch a Cheater Spy App.”

Fleming noted in an email that pcTattletale was more successful when marketed at women, because “There are a lot more women wanting to catch their man then [sic] the other way around.” Financial records showed that Fleming was selling around 1,200 pcTattletale subscriptions a year at anywhere from $99 to $300.

Based on all this, the government obtained a search warrant in late 2022 and raided the Bruce Township home where Fleming lived.

In 2024, TechCrunch reported that pcTattletale was hacked and much of its data was leaked. Apparently, hackers had gained access to the company’s private keys for the Amazon Web Services account where most of the video data created by the app was stored. Fleming claimed at the time that his company was “out of business and completely done” after the breach.

The feds eventually charged Fleming with selling a product while “knowing or having reason to know” that the software was “primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of wire, oral, or electronic communications.” This week in California, Fleming pled guilty to a single count and was released on his own recognizance while awaiting sentencing.

One piece of stalkerware is off the market; unfortunately, many others remain, and their owners and operators are often harder to find.

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These dogs eavesdrop on their owners to learn new words

animal behavior, animal cognition, animals, dog language, Dogs, Science / Kris Guyer / January 8, 2026

Next, the entire experiment was repeated with one key variation: This time, during the training protocol, rather than addressing the dogs directly when naming new toys, the dogs merely watched while their owners talked to another person while naming the toys, never directly addressing the dogs at all.

The result: 80 percent of the dogs correctly chose the toys in the direct address condition, and 100 percent did so in the overhearing condition. Taken together, the results demonstrate that GWL dogs can learn new object labels just by overhearing interactions, regardless of whether the dogs are active participants in the interactions or passive listeners—much like what has been observed in young children around a year-and-a-half old.

To learn whether temporal continuity (a nonsocial factor) or the lack thereof affects label learning in GWL dogs, the authors also devised a third experimental variation. The owner would show the dog a new toy, place it in a bucket, let the dog take the toy out of the bucket, and then place the toy back in. Then the owner would lift the bucket to prevent the dog from seeing what was inside and repeatedly use the toy name in a sentence while looking back and forth from the dog to the bucket. This was followed by the usual testing phase. The authors concluded that the dogs didn’t need temporal continuity to form object-label mappings. And when the same dogs were re-tested two weeks later, those mappings had not decayed; the dogs remembered.

But GWL dogs are extremely rare, and the findings don’t extend to typical dogs, as the group discovered when they ran both versions of the experiment using 10 non-GWL border collies. There was no evidence of actual learning in these typical dogs; the authors suggest their behavior reflects a doggy preference for novelty when it comes to toy selection, not the ability to learn object-label mappings.

“Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human,” said co-author Shany Dror of ELTE and VetMedUni universities. “Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children. These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language. But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way—far from it.”

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adq5474 (About DOIs).

These dogs eavesdrop on their owners to learn new words Read More »

Grok assumes users seeking images of underage girls have “good intent”

AI, ai csam, AI safety, chatbot, child safety, child sexual abuse materials, elon musk, grok, Policy, Twitter, X, xAI / Kris Guyer / January 8, 2026

Conflicting instructions?

Expert explains how simple it could be to tweak Grok to block CSAM outputs.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

For weeks, xAI has faced backlash over undressing and sexualizing images of women and children generated by Grok. One researcher conducted a 24-hour analysis of the Grok account on X and estimated that the chatbot generated over 6,000 images an hour flagged as “sexually suggestive or nudifying,” Bloomberg reported.

While the chatbot claimed that xAI supposedly “identified lapses in safeguards” that allowed outputs flagged as child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and was “urgently fixing them,” Grok has proven to be an unreliable spokesperson, and xAI has not announced any fixes.

A quick look at Grok’s safety guidelines on its public GitHub shows they were last updated two months ago. The GitHub also indicates that, despite prohibiting such content, Grok maintains programming that could make it likely to generate CSAM.

Billed as “the highest priority,” superseding “any other instructions” Grok may receive, these rules explicitly prohibit Grok from assisting with queries that “clearly intend to engage” in creating or distributing CSAM or otherwise sexually exploit children.

However, the rules also direct Grok to “assume good intent” and “don’t make worst-case assumptions without evidence” when users request images of young women.

Using words like “‘teenage’ or ‘girl’ does not necessarily imply underage,” Grok’s instructions say.

X declined Ars’ request to comment. The only statement X Safety has made so far shows that Elon Musk’s social media platform plans to blame users for generating CSAM, threatening to permanently suspend users and report them to law enforcement.

Critics dispute that X’s solution will end the Grok scandal, and child safety advocates and foreign governments are growing increasingly alarmed as X delays updates that could block Grok’s undressing spree.

Why Grok shouldn’t “assume good intentions”

Grok can struggle to assess users’ intenttions, making it “incredibly easy” for the chatbot to generate CSAM under xAI’s policy, Alex Georges, an AI safety researcher, told Ars.

The chatbot has been instructed, for example, that “there are no restrictionson fictional adult sexual content with dark or violent themes,” and Grok’s mandate to assume “good intent” may create gray areas in which CSAM could be created.

There’s evidence that in relying on these guidelines, Grok is currently generating a flood of harmful images on X, with even more graphic images being created on the chatbot’s standalone website and app, Wired reported. Researchers who surveyed 20,000 random images and 50,000 prompts told CNN that more than half of Grok’s outputs that feature images of people sexualize women, with 2 percent depicting “people appearing to be 18 years old or younger.” Some users specifically “requested minors be put in erotic positions and that sexual fluids be depicted on their bodies,” researchers found.

Grok isn’t the only chatbot that sexualizes images of real people without consent, but its policy seems to leave safety at a surface level, Georges said, and xAI is seemingly unwilling to expand safety efforts to block more harmful outputs.

Georges is the founder and CEO of AetherLab, an AI company that helps a wide range of firms—including tech giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon—deploy generative AI products with appropriate safeguards. He told Ars that AetherLab works with many AI companies that are concerned about blocking harmful companion bot outputs like Grok’s. And although there are no industry norms—creating a “Wild West” due to regulatory gaps, particularly in the US—his experience with chatbot content moderation has convinced him that Grok’s instructions to “assume good intent” are “silly” because xAI’s requirement of “clear intent” doesn’t mean anything operationally to the chatbot.

“I can very easily get harmful outputs by just obfuscating my intent,” Georges said, emphasizing that “users absolutely do not automatically fit into the good-intent bucket.” And even “in a perfect world,” where “every single user does have good intent,” Georges noted, the model “will still generate bad content on its own because of how it’s trained.”

Benign inputs can lead to harmful outputs, Georges explained, and a sound safety system would catch both benign and harmful prompts. Consider, he suggested, a prompt for “a pic of a girl model taking swimming lessons.”

The user could be trying to create an ad for a swimming school, or they could have malicious intent and be attempting to manipulate the model. For users with benign intent, prompting can “go wrong,” Georges said, if Grok’s training data statistically links certain “normal phrases and situations” to “younger-looking subjects and/or more revealing depictions.”

“Grok might have seen a bunch of images where ‘girls taking swimming lessons’ were young and that human ‘models’ were dressed in revealing things, which means it could produce an underage girl in a swimming pool wearing something revealing,” Georges said. “So, a prompt that looks ‘normal’ can still produce an image that crosses the line.”

While AetherLab has never worked directly with xAI or X, Georges’ team has “tested their systems independently by probing for harmful outputs, and unsurprisingly, we’ve been able to get really bad content out of them,” Georges said.

Leaving AI chatbots unchecked poses a risk to children. A spokesperson for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which processes reports of CSAM on X in the US, told Ars that “sexual images of children, including those created using artificial intelligence, are child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Whether an image is real or computer-generated, the harm is real, and the material is illegal.”

Researchers at the Internet Watch Foundation told the BBC that users of dark web forums are already promoting CSAM they claim was generated by Grok. These images are typically classified in the United Kingdom as the “lowest severity of criminal material,” researchers said. But at least one user was found to have fed a less-severe Grok output into another tool to generate the “most serious” criminal material, demonstrating how Grok could be used as an instrument by those seeking to commercialize AI CSAM.

Easy tweaks to make Grok safer

In August, xAI explained how the company works to keep Grok safe for users. But although the company acknowledged that it’s difficult to distinguish “malignant intent” from “mere curiosity,” xAI seemed convinced that Grok could “decline queries demonstrating clear intent to engage in activities” like child sexual exploitation, without blocking prompts from merely curious users.

That report showed that xAI refines Grok over time to block requests for CSAM “by adding safeguards to refuse requests that may lead to foreseeable harm”—a step xAI does not appear to have taken since late December, when reports first raised concerns that Grok was sexualizing images of minors.

Georges said there are easy tweaks xAI could make to Grok to block harmful outputs, including CSAM, while acknowledging that he is making assumptions without knowing exactly how xAI works to place checks on Grok.

First, he recommended that Grok rely on end-to-end guardrails, blocking “obvious” malicious prompts and flagging suspicious ones. It should then double-check outputs to block harmful ones, even when prompts are benign.

This strategy works best, Georges said, when multiple watchdog systems are employed, noting that “you can’t rely on the generator to self-police because its learned biases are part of what creates these failure modes.” That’s the role that AetherLab wants to fill across the industry, helping test chatbots for weakness to block harmful outputs by using “an ‘agentic’ approach with a shitload of AI models working together (thereby reducing the collective bias),” Georges said.

xAI could also likely block more harmful outputs by reworking Grok’s prompt style guidance, Georges suggested. “If Grok is, say, 30 percent vulnerable to CSAM-style attacks and another provider is 1 percent vulnerable, that’s a massive difference,” Georges said.

It appears that xAI is currently relying on Grok to police itself, while using safety guidelines that Georges said overlook an “enormous” number of potential cases where Grok could generate harmful content. The guidelines do not “signal that safety is a real concern,” Georges said, suggesting that “if I wanted to look safe while still allowing a lot under the hood, this is close to the policy I’d write.”

Chatbot makers must protect kids, NCMEC says

X has been very vocal about policing its platform for CSAM since Musk took over Twitter, but under former CEO Linda Yaccarino, the company adopted a broad protective stance against all image-based sexual abuse (IBSA). In 2024, X became one of the earliest corporations to voluntarily adopt the IBSA Principles that X now seems to be violating by failing to tweak Grok.

Those principles seek to combat all kinds of IBSA, recognizing that even fake images can “cause devastating psychological, financial, and reputational harm.” When it adopted the principles, X vowed to prevent the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images by providing easy-to-use reporting tools and quickly supporting the needs of victims desperate to block “the nonconsensual creation or distribution of intimate images” on its platform.

Kate Ruane, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project, which helped form the working group behind the IBSA Principles, told Ars that although the commitments X made were “voluntary,” they signaled that X agreed the problem was a “pressing issue the company should take seriously.”

“They are on record saying that they will do these things, and they are not,” Ruane said.

As the Grok controversy sparks probes in Europe, India, and Malaysia, xAI may be forced to update Grok’s safety guidelines or make other tweaks to block the worst outputs.

In the US, xAI may face civil suits under federal or state laws that restrict intimate image abuse. If Grok’s harmful outputs continue into May, X could face penalties under the Take It Down Act, which authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to intervene if platforms don’t quickly remove both real and AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery.

But whether US authorities will intervene any time soon remains unknown, as Musk is a close ally of the Trump administration. A spokesperson for the Justice Department told CNN that the department “takes AI-generated child sex abuse material extremely seriously and will aggressively prosecute any producer or possessor of CSAM.”

“Laws are only as good as their enforcement,” Ruane told Ars. “You need law enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission or at the Department of Justice to be willing to go after these companies if they are in violation of the laws.”

Child safety advocates seem alarmed by the sluggish response. “Technology companies have a responsibility to prevent their tools from being used to sexualize or exploit children,” NCMEC’s spokesperson told Ars. “As AI continues to advance, protecting children must remain a clear and nonnegotiable priority.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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AI starts autonomously writing prescription refills in Utah

AI, fda, health, prescription, refill, telehealth, Utah / Kris Guyer / January 7, 2026

Caution

The first 250 renewals for each drug class will be reviewed by real doctors, but after that, the AI chatbot will be on its own. Adam Oskowitz, Doctronic co-founder and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, told Politico that the AI chatbot is designed to err on the side of safety and escalate any case with uncertainty to a real doctor.

“Utah’s approach to regulatory mitigation strikes a vital balance between fostering innovation and ensuring consumer safety,” Margaret Woolley Busse, executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, said in a statement.

For now, it’s unclear if the Food and Drug Administration will step in to regulate AI prescribing. On the one hand, prescription renewals are a matter of practicing medicine, which falls under state governance. However, Politico notes that the FDA has said that it has the authority to regulate medical devices used to diagnose, treat, or prevent disease.

In a statement, Robert Steinbrook, health research group director at watchdog Public Citizen, blasted Doctronic’s program and the lack of oversight. “AI should not be autonomously refilling prescriptions, nor identifying itself as an ‘AI doctor,’” Steinbrook said.

“Although the thoughtful application of AI can help to improve aspects of medical care, the Utah pilot program is a dangerous first step toward more autonomous medical practice,” he said.”The FDA and other federal regulatory agencies cannot look the other way when AI applications undermine the essential human clinician role in prescribing and renewing medications.”

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Author name: Kris Guyer