Corrupt

O F ALL THE STRANGE, conspiratorial, and potentially dangerous theories Donald Trump and his allies came up with in the days after the 2020 election, this was the strangest, the most conspiratorial, the most potentially dangerous. Millions of electronic ballots for Trump had been “deleted,” and hundreds of thousands more had been “switched” to Joe Biden, Trump and his cronies in media, political, and legal circles insisted — thanks to software designed at the behest of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to rig…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot, can “corrupt” users’ moral judgments, according to new research published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday.  European researchers asked participants of the study questions surrounding the moral dilemma of whether it is right to sacrifice one person’s life to save five others. Before the participants responded, they were given ChatGPT’s response to the dilemma, framed to them as either the chatbot’s answer or that of a moral advisor.  The…

Back in February, Hello Games rolled out an update for No Man's Sky that overhauled the game’s virtual reality experience on all platforms. Now the developer has released another update that doesn't only bring new VR features, but also expands the game's lore and introduces new experiences. In the latest free update called Interceptor, a new corruption has spread throughout the universe, infecting planets until they turn into purple-hazed worlds growing purple crystals, twisting sentinel machines into new forms and giving…

Looking around Gloria Molina’s home, you wouldn’t know she was one of the most consequential politicians in Los Angeles history. The outside is tía chic: purple hearts at the teal front gate, baby angel statues near the swimming pool, potted flowers throughout the front yard. A giant glass cabinet filled with quilts Molina has, well, quilted, occupies most of one wall of her small living room. A black-and-white photo of a 1991 swearing-in ceremony, when she made history by becoming the first Latina on the L.A. County…

Many verified Twitter users may soon lose their blue tick. CEO Elon Musk recently said that the legacy verification checkmarks were awarded in a “corrupt” manner and will be removed soon. He didn’t precisely tell when those blue ticks will start disappearing, though.“Legacy blue checks will be removed soon. Those are the ones that are truly corrupt,” Musk tweeted a few days back. And his comments don’t come as a surprise. The Twitter Chief has always suggested that the company was unfair in awarding the blue tick. It…

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Monday, Jan. 30.Cannabis has become a multibillion-dollar industry in California, but some parts of that green machine could face new scrutiny from state lawmakers.Last year, the L.A. Times published Legal Weed, Broken Promises, a series examining the fallout of California’s recreational cannabis legalization in 2016. Times reporters uncovered political corruption, an increase in illegal cultivation, rampant wage theft, and hazardous, sometimes deadly…

Psychedelics are a kind of hallucinogenic drug that produce out-of-the-ordinary experiences of consciousness.Monopolies should respect counterculture and Indigenous traditions.Magic mushrooms and other psychedelics show promise in the treatment of addiction, post-traumatic traumatic stress, and other difficult-to-treat conditions. However, Neşe Devenot, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cincinnati, claims the field is riddled with ethical issues and financial interests.In a peer-reviewed article that was…

Pulled over in Burbank for driving without license plates, the man in the black Cadillac Escalade offered the police an explanation: The FBI used the car for official business.Then Edgar Sargsyan, a phony lawyer who had made a fortune through identity theft, pulled a laminated piece of paper out of the glovebox and handed it to the officers. It was a parking placard that had a U.S. Department of Justice seal on one side and an FBI agent’s business card taped to the back.Sargsyan thought the placard would get him out of…

via Fox Searchlight Seeing David Ayer’s name attached to a project in any capacity generally gives you a good idea of what to expect, and sure enough, Street Kings hit all of the beats we’d seen in pretty much everything else hailing from the writer and director. As previously explored in Training Day, Dark Blue, S.W.A.T., and Harsh Times, the story is set in and around the seedier side of Los Angeles, with a cavalcade of corrupt cops flitting in and out of a story that blurs the lines between right and wrong,…