from the holy-shit dept

The country is continuing to reel from multiple infectious disease outbreaks in America, even as childhood vaccination rates continue to fall. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough: you don’t actually need me to go on. With RFK Jr. using his position as Secretary of HHS to further muddy the waters on vaccines and their safety, some states are going even further than the federal government. Even as states like South Carolina have fielded proposals to end religious exemptions for public school inoculations, states like Florida have attempted to go the opposite direction and simply end all school vaccine requirements by law. While that attempt has so far failed, there are state laws that mandate schools accept religious exemptions for vaccines.

And not just public schools. This mandate is written to affect private religious schools as well and the irony here is thick. For example, Florida AG James Uthmeier wrote a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops warning them that they might not qualify for state scholarships and vouchers any longer. Why? Because Florida Catholic schools don’t accept religious exemptions for vaccine requirements.

As you can read for yourself in Uthmeier’s post, his letter did far more than issue that warning. It also went into great detail in explaining to a group of Catholic Bishops why they don’t have any legitimate religious reason to refuse those exemptions. Uthmeier did correctly identify that there is irony in all of this, but his targeting computer is off. The actual irony is in a government official, an Attorney General no less, telling religious elders what their own religion says, all while blatantly violating the First Amendment.

Here’s the First Amendment’s opening text, in case you need it.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If an AG can tell a religion what it means to express its faith, then there is no point to the opening of the First Amendment. They can’t. This is obvious.

But let it never be said that Florida Bishops aren’t a patient lot, I suppose. The FCCB took the time to respond to Uthmeier to demonstrate precisely their religious justification for refusing vaccination exemptions.

Florida’s Catholic schools do not accept religious exemptions for vaccines. In a letter to Attorney General James Uthmeier, made public last week, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops said Florida bishops don’t have to justify their position, but are doing so “out of respect for you and your office.”

The letter goes on to say that the position against religious exemptions for vaccines is rooted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that, “Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good.” 

A better justification for vaccinations in general this writer could not come up with. And the debunking of Uthmeier’s misguided attempt to tell Catholic leaders what they should believe is fairly easy, as well. The AG’s letter makes much of the idea that today’s vaccines include the cells of presumably newly aborted fetuses and, since the Catholic Church is very much anti-abortion, that means that they should I guess be anti-vaccine as well. Which, if you’re following along, isn’t an argument that Catholic schools should accept religious exemptions for students, but rather an argument that no Catholic anywhere should get vaccinated at all.

Except he’s wrong. Vaccines produced today, and even going back decades and decades, don’t contain any cells from newly aborted fetuses.

Vaccines do not contain fetal cells. As the American Academy of Pediatrics explains, some vaccines involve growing viruses in human cell cultures originally developed from two aborted fetuses in the 1960s: “These cell lines are still going, so no new aborted fetuses are ever needed. Purification processes filter the vaccine during production, and no fetal tissue remains.”

The Catholic Church says it’s morally permissible to receive these vaccines and that people who choose to vaccinate their children can do so with a clear conscience because, as the Florida bishops note, “the parent is not cooperating with the original immoral act.” 

Additionally, in 2021, Pope Francis told people to get the COVID-19 vaccine, calling it an “act of love,” even though fetal cell lines were used to develop both the Moderna and Pfizer shots. 

Does AG Uthmeier really intend to argue with the Pope, the vicar of Christ to Catholics, about what is permissible under Catholic dogma and what is not? This from the same party that absolutely adores playing religious victim when it suits their own political desires, or when they want to encroach on American secular society.

If the Uthmeier had any shame, he’d immediately apologize for disrespecting Florida Catholics, Catholic leadership, and for wildly overreaching in his attempt to carry out his state government’s stupid attempt to make everyone sicker. But he won’t. At best he’ll slink away and say no more on the topic at all.

But if we’re really lucky, there will be a conflict that pits the Florida government against the Catholic Church with the latter crying foul over an encroachment on its own religious liberty. Were I of a praying sort, that is what I would pray for.

Filed Under: fccb, florida, james uthmeier, religious exemption, vaccines

The game of musical chairs for AI executives continues. Barret Zoph, a co-founder of the AI startup Thinking Machines who left the company earlier this year to rejoin OpenAI, has found yet another job.

Zoph spent two years at OpenAI and left in October 2024 to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati, who had left the AI lab the month prior. In January, Zoph and another Thinking Machines co-founder, Luke Metz, quite dramatically departed from the startup to return to OpenAI. It was later revealed that Zoph had been fired.

His return didn’t quite stick. Zoph spent only five months at OpenAI, where he was tasked with heading AI enterprise sales. He left the company in June. And now we know where he landed.

Zoph has taken a position as vice president of research at Google (which happens to be another company where he previously worked). “We look forward to Barret returning to Google and bringing his RL and post-training expertise to Gemini,” a Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI and Google for more information.

It’s not always easy to divine why tech executives seem to be spending less time in their roles. The turnover rate in the AI industry is high, and it’s been especially high at OpenAI — a company that, despite readying itself for an IPO and being one of the most powerful presences in the tech world, has lost a lot of critical staff over the last eight months. The turnover of high-level executives — from the departure of its COO to the recent loss of one of its top data center execs — has left onlookers scratching their heads.

This story has been updated to include the fact that Zoph was fired from Thinking Machines.

Light a small spirit lamp of ethanol and heat finds one end of a sealed brass cylinder. Air inside expands, a piston moves, a flywheel gathers speed, and a cheap electric motor wired as a dynamo starts feeding current into a wooden box. An analog voltmeter on the front climbs. A 2.42-inch monochrome screen flickers to life. Sixteen hex keys wait for input. For as long as the flame holds, YouTuber PickentCode has a working computer.

In 1816, Robert Stirling patented a heat engine as a safer alternative to steam boilers, which had a bad history of blowing up. Two centuries later, the identical concept has been simplified and now sits on a desk. Pickencode took approximately a month to get the build started after designing the layout in Blender using a computer. The case is composed of wood and finished with a rich dark Victorian oil. A handmade blue-laser engraver was used to make a portrait of Stirling as well as a sketch of his original engine for the side panels. This allowed the image to be etched into the wood as a succession of tiny burnt dots, a brilliant approach that allows a photograph to be printed directly onto the wood. The housings and keycaps were created using a 3D printer, and old shower tubing painted gold hides the wiring while also adding a decorative touch to the frame with its ‘pipes’.

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The power output is insanely low, at 150 milliwatts, and is only useful if every watt is treated as if it were gold dust. To make the best use of this limited amount of power, the ESP32-C3 has been directed to turn down its radio and keep the screen brightness as low as possible. While the computer is rendering pixels or executing opcodes, the clock speed reduces to 80 MHz, then to 10 MHz when idle. Several tiny capacitors were added to smooth out the dynamo’s stuttering output. The panel has two toggle switches that control both the main circuit and the meter.

The software had to be designed with these limitations in mind. CHIP-8, a virtual machine from the 1970s, was an ideal match because it is built for a box with a sixteen-key keypad and a 64-by-32 monochrome display that scaled up nicely to a 128-by-64 OLED screen. The interpreter itself contains sixteen 8-bit registers, four kilobytes of RAM, a call stack, two timers, and a staggering thirty-four two-byte opcodes. Preloaded ROMs include Tetris, Snake, and Pong, and if you’re feeling daring, there’s also a built-in editor that allows you to type raw opcodes into the keypad and run them right away. One homebrew test draws random pixels and clears the screen after ten of them

This small computer’s “fuel” is merely ethanol in a spirit lamp. Heat one end of the cylinder while keeping the other cool to create rotation from a displacer that transfers hot and cold air around. A power piston then converts that into motion, which is stored in a flywheel and continues to function as long as there is a temperature difference. When the lamp is turned off, the computer shuts down. The main purpose of this exercise is that you can get some practical work out of 150 milliwatts, enough to play a game or even enter a few lines of machine code while watching the voltmeter tick away, all thanks to a flame from a spirit lamp performing the function of a wall wart. Stirling never saw a microcontroller, but would most certainly recognize his engine.
[Source]

YouTube announced on Thursday that eligible creators in the U.S. can now tag Amazon products in their content and receive a cut of sales. Creators can link Amazon products in their shorts, long-form videos, and livestreams.

The update turns product recommendations into a more direct revenue stream for creators, and for Amazon, the move puts its massive online marketplace inside one of the most popular video platforms.

Although YouTube already runs a Shopping affiliate program with participating retailers, the addition of Amazon’s vast catalog essentially allows creators to recommend a variety of products through a native integration. By bringing Amazon into the Shopping Affiliate Program, creators no longer need to paste Associates links in the video’s description, then hope viewers copy the link when they make a purchase.

Instead, YouTube says Amazon will provide it with a curated catalog of highly requested and trending products that creators can tag in their videos. If a creator can’t find a specific product that they want to tag, they can request to add it by reaching out to YouTube Support.

The feature also includes auto-tagging support. If enabled, YouTube’s systems can automatically review a creator’s recent uploads to identify and tag eligible Amazon products.

YouTube notes that creators won’t see breakdowns for specific products or individual videos in their analytics, but that they’ll see their overall daily earnings in YouTube Studio. If a viewer ends up returning an item, that commission will be deducted from the creator’s balance.

While only eligible U.S. creators can currently tag Amazon products, those tags can be seen globally. YouTube says it may automatically match a tagged product with a trusted local merchant offer to allow creators to earn commissions on eligible international purchases. If a local merchant isn’t available, the tag will route viewers to the Amazon U.S. website, where commission will be earned if a purchase is finalized on the U.S. site.

To be eligible, creators must be enrolled in YouTube’s Partner and Shopping Affiliate programs, have an active Amazon Influencer or Associates account, and link it to their YouTube channel. 

• New research shows 64% of people feel confident challenging professional advice after checking it with AI
• Over 45s are less likely to question professional advice
• An “expertise recession” has been identified by the survey, conducted by Use.AI

AI is helping many of us call time on taking professional advice without further research, concerning new reports have found.

Research by Use.AI has claimed professional advice from doctors and teachers is now researched further, with nearly two-thirds (64%) of people are now more confident challenging what they have been told.

The judge barred certain federal agencies from enforcing Trump’s order to stop using Anthropic’s tools.

Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.

The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an emerging convention websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site’s content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the robots.txt standard that instructs search engines how to index the site’s content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more here. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are here and here.

How the researchers found it

Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

“The trust model is broken,” Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. “Agents treat vendor docs as ground truth and don’t question them—and neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layer—SaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and today’s guards don’t cover it.”