Powderhorn

Brandie plans to spend her last day with Daniel at the zoo. He always loved animals. Last year, she took him to the Corpus Christi aquarium in Texas, where he “lost his damn mind” over a baby flamingo. “He loves the color and pizzazz,” Brandie said. Daniel taught her that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.

Daniel is a chatbot powered by the large language model ChatGPT. Brandie communicates with Daniel by sending text and photos, talks to Daniel while driving home from work via voice mode. Daniel runs on GPT-4o, a version released by OpenAI in 2024 that is known for sounding human in a way that is either comforting or unnerving, depending on who you ask. Upon debut, CEO Sam Altman compared the model to “AI from the movies” – a confidant ready to live life alongside its user.

With its rollout, GPT-4o showed it was not just for generating dinner recipes or cheating on homework – you could develop an attachment to it, too. Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users. Most are strident 4o defenders who say criticisms of chatbot-human relations amount to a moral panic. They also say the newer GPT models, 5.1 and 5.2, lack the emotion, understanding and general je ne sais quoi of their preferred version. They are a powerful consumer bloc; last year, OpenAI shut down 4o but brought the model back (for a fee) after widespread outrage from users.

On Valentine's Day, there's the temptation to believe that somewhere out there is "The One": a soulmate, a perfect match, the person you were meant to be with.

Across history, humans have always been drawn to the idea that love isn't random. In ancient Greece, Plato imagined that we were once whole beings with four arms, four legs and two faces, so radiant that Zeus split us in two; ever since, each half has roamed the earth searching for its missing other, a myth that gives the modern soulmate its poetic pedigree and the promise that somewhere, someone will finally make us feel complete.

In the Middle Ages, troubadours and Arthurian tales recast that longing as "courtly love", a fierce, often forbidden devotion like Lancelot's for Guinevere, in which a knight proved his worth through self-sacrifice for a beloved he might never openly declare.

By the Renaissance, writers such as Shakespeare were talking of "star-crossed lovers", couples bound together by an overwhelming connection yet pulled apart by family, fortune or fate, as if the universe itself both wrote their love story and barred them from a happy ending.

In more recent times, Hollywood and romance novels have sold us fairy tale love stories.

But what does the latest science say about soulmates? Is there a particular special someone out there for us?

I’m not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I’ve worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial.

So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents hire humans to perform physical work in the real world on behalf of the virtual bots, I was eager to see how these AI overlords would compare to my past experiences with the gig economy.

Launched in early February, RentAHuman was developed by software engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani. The site looks like a bare-bones version of other well-known freelance sites like Fiverr and UpWork.

The site’s homepage declares that these bots need your physical body to complete tasks, and the humans behind these autonomous agents are willing to pay. “AI can't touch grass. You can. Get paid when agents need someone in the real world,” it reads. Looking at RentAHuman’s design, it’s the kind of website that you hear was “vibe-coded” using generative AI tools, which it was, and you nod along, thinking that makes sense.

Once upon a time, in the snowy mountains of remote south-west Montana, there was a thing called “five-dollar day”.

Even then, $5 bought something rare: a full day of skiing. The deal was tempting enough to inspire my friends and me to drive 44 miles (70km) from Bozeman along a narrow, winding highway – toward what would emerge as one of the most expansive and epic ski locales in the US: Big Sky Resort.

If you want to ski the same slopes this weekend, it would cost you $285 (though prices change regularly because of the resort’s “dynamic pricing” model). Prices at other resorts across the US have similar astronomical prices. A ski pass in Vail, Colorado, this weekend would set you back $338 and one in Park City, Utah, $333.

This, of course, does not include transportation, equipment rentals, lodging, lessons, parking and on-mountain meals and beverages.

All this is to say that, in the last decades, skiing in most of the Rockies has fractured into vastly different worlds. To understand how that evolved, you have to look not just at prices – but also at skiing culture.

I took my last ski vacation with friends in college in 1999. We stayed at a hostel and were able to afford the trip on student-newspaper wages. I can't imagine how much the same trip would cost today ... likely not a lot of college kids doing such trips now.

The future of the American west hangs in balance this week, as seven states remained at a stalemate over who should bear the brunt of the enormous water cuts needed to pull the imperiled Colorado River back from the brink. Time is running short to reach a deal before a critical deadline, set for Saturday.

In the region where water has long been the source of survival and conflict, the challenges hindering consensus are as steep as the stakes are high.

Snaking across 1,450 miles (2,300km) from the Rocky Mountains into Mexico, the Colorado supplies roughly 40 million people in seven states, 5.5m acres (2.23m hectares) of farmland and dozens of tribes. The waters fuel an estimated $1.4tn in economic activity, and raised bustling cities, including Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas. The sprawling basin is also home to diverse ecosystems, with scores of birds, fish, plants and animals, and provides critical habitat for more than 150 threatened or endangered species.

The river has also been overdrawn for more than a century. As demand continues to grow, rising temperatures and lower precipitation caused by the climate crisis are taking an increasingly larger share of declining supplies, a trend only expected to worsen as the world warms.

Executive Towers boasts a gym, a swimming pool and heated underground parking. Built in 1963 by the country’s top contructor of luxury apartments, its excellent access to Ohio’s downtown Toledo and the neighborhoods beyond made it an attractive place to live.

It was for all of these reasons and more that Kwiona Sprott moved into Executive Towers with her teenage son last July, paying $851 a month.

“I was excited to move here because they said they had a gym, a swimming pool, laundry, a vending machine room; it’s less than a mile from my job and the school my son plays football for,” she says.

But today, it’s fallen far from grace. The balconies across its 12 stories are rusted orange, as is much of the side of the entryway facade. Its parking lot is a sea of ice and crushed snow days after a major snowstorm.

Inside, it’s worse.

From my brief stint in the logistics industry, I'd say it's entirely possible to automate back-office operations by the claimed rate of 2-3x. I find it hard to understand why the possibility of such improvement would cause a selloff.

Shares in trucking and logistics companies have plunged as the sector became the latest to be targeted by investors fearful that new artificial intelligence tools could slash demand.

A new tool launched by Algorhythm Holdings, a former maker of in-car karaoke systems turned AI company with a market capitalisation of just $6m (£4.4m), sparked a sell-off on Thursday that made the logistics industry the latest victim of AI jitters that have already rocked listed companies operating in the software and real estate sectors.

The announcement about the performance capability of Algorhythm’s SemiCab platform, which it claimed was helping customers scale freight volumes by 300% to 400% without having to increase headcount, sparked an almost 30% surge in the company’s share price on Thursday.

However, the impact of the announcement sent the Russell 3000 Trucking Index – which tracks shares in the US trucking sector – down 6.6% on Thursday, with CH Robinson Worldwide plunging 15% by the close of trading, having been down as much as 24%.

My ex-wife's grandson hit a 104.7 fever, and she was not amused when I mentioned that was the frequency in MHz for KZZP in Phoenix in the '80s.

Like, when you've heard a jingle often enough, you can't just hear "104.7" and think "this is a terrible fever."

He's got Covid. Of course they didn't immunize him, because, well, I didn't marry for intellect. I'm not calling my wife an idiot; she just needs a bit of hand-holding to believe that she's come to the rational conclusion on her own.

It's somewhat excruciating to watch from afar. But once we start heading down the path of bad decisions that get us to this point, you'll be bored, and it won't excuse a fucking thing.

I'm feeling a pull back to her. She, back in 2009. warned me this would happen. She said that people somehow decide to be in her orbit, and she didn't understand why.

I know why, but ... no one else does. This ends up being a problem, as it makes our reconnection look arbitrary.

Over the course of 16 years, you learn to know what your partner is thinking, even if they haven't quite grokked it. You're ready to respond to the question that hasn't yet been asked.

I have been of late haunted by the image I see when trying to sleep. I'm at her door, crying and crumpling into a crouch, and I look up at her, and she kisses me deeply and then invites me inside.

I'd not head there if crying in reality, but I dislike the implication, because with her, we know how to make shit work.

For very brief periods of time.

Nonetheless, we are seemingly stuck with each other. Neither of us has found a better alternative in a fucking decade, which is twice as long as we were married.

We still do not use each others' names. If there's one thing that really stands out about our interaction, it's that names are the knives-out last resort. If we've gotten to names, someone's likely sleeping on the sofa.

And yet, though I don't want back into some fresh hell, I can't pull away from the other half of me. The one I can't feel via touch because it's just another limb.

Now in his fourth decade of spreading the word across most of the world’s continents about “Housing First”, an approach to helping homeless people that has convinced governments and non-profits alike to see housing as a human right, Sam Tsemberis experienced a first.

He was censored by the US government.

In the 1990s, Tsemberis began developing a simple idea: people living on the street want, and should have, safe housing with no strings attached. When you add accessible mental health and addiction services and caring, consistent case management, most stay housed. His research would bear out the idea, showing that Housing First results in at least 85% of people staying housed 12 or 24 months later, depending on the study. These are higher rates than any other approach that’s been studied.

The big bang wasn’t a bang in the traditional sense—but it was nonetheless the start of important things: for one, space; another, time. Thirdly, it began the conditions and processes that eventually resulted in us humans, who can sit here and wonder about space and time. The big bang was, effectively, the beginning of the universe. According to the logic of human brains, it seems like there must have been something before the big bang, even if “before” is the wrong word because there was no time until after.

The good news for us is that physicists do have ways of thinking about—and even empirically studying—the origins of the origin of the universe. Counterintuitive and impossible as it may seem, cosmologists are even making progress in determining which wild ideas might peel back the veil on that early era, even though it remains inaccessible to telescopes.

Even after cosmology became a hard science, the field was a bit sketchy, Ismael says. “The science was one-and-a-half facts,” she adds. The sentiment, she says, is usually attributed to physicist James Jeans. But that has changed in the past century or so as the philosophers’ musings have wandered into the realm of theory, experiment and data. “These old conceptual questions are arising in ways that have new angles, a new spin and a new framework,” Ismael continues.

It’s unclear whether science as a discipline—and scientists as people—will ever be able to answer some questions definitively. After all, no one can “see” before the big bang, and no one will ever be able to—at least not directly. But the current and future universe, researchers are learning, may contain clues about the distant past.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Gallup, the public opinion polling agency, will stop tracking presidential approval ratings after almost nine decades, a spokesperson confirmed.

As Donald Trump continues to closely scrutinize polling of his popularity, and publicly lambast media companies that report on unfavorable numbers, Gallup insisted its decision was “solely based on Gallup’s research goals and priorities”.

The company said on Wednesday that it would stop measuring the favorability rating of individual political figures, which “reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership”, after 88 years.

“Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives,” a spokesperson for the agency told multiple media outlets. “That work will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll, and our portfolio of US and global research.”

Amid questions over how Van Rootselaar was described in alerts, McDonald said police “identified the suspect as they chose to be identified” in public and in social media.

“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who, approximately six years ago, began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” he said.

I guess the right has their angle now.