New York City police are investigating after officers were pelted with snowballs while responding to a massive snowball fight at Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

A video of the fracas shows two uniformed officers pacing a walkway in the park Monday as snowballs fly at them from all directions, hitting the officers and covering them in snow.

The officers, growing visibly frustrated, shoved at least two people to the ground as snowballs continued to whizz by. At one point, a person runs up behind an officer and mushes some snow onto his head. One of the officers can be seen rubbing his eye toward the end of the video.

In a statement Tuesday, the New York Police Department said multiple uniformed officers were struck in the face with snowballs and were "removed by EMS in stable condition" to a nearby hospital, but did not disclose additional information on their injuries.

The USS Gerald R. Ford has been at sea since June last year. The Republican leader's decision to extend its deployment for a second time has snowballed into a growing list of problems, such as blocked toilets and sewage troubles.

If you were watching the State of the Union address, and you’re an iPhone user, then toward the end of the speech, during President Trump’s recounting of the story of Chief Warrant Officer Eric Slover, you might have had Siri triggered—assuming you have voice activation turned on.

This feature once required the user to say “Hey Siri” but now only requires “Siri.”

At least one other Bluesky user confirmed that she experienced the same thing. A user on X said the erroneous Siri trigger word was “serious” not “searing,” but the timing of the post suggests it was the same moment.

Another Bluesky user (whose posts are off-limits to those who are not logged into Bluesky), posted a Google results page Siri pulled up following the Siri-triggering line, featuring a bunch a results about bullets going through legs.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55839289

A Financial Times report suggested that the 'Board of Peace' established by Donald Trump is considering stablecoins as part of its efforts claiming to help rebuild Gaza.

According to a Monday Financial Times report, the board is in the preliminary stages of discussing whether a stablecoin could be used to help rebuild Gaza’s economy. A person familiar with the project reportedly said the stablecoin would not be a meme coin or a replacement for fiat currency, but rather “a means to allow Gazans to transact digitally.”

Original article (paywalled)

cross-posted from: https://lemmings.world/post/41792313

It is their juvenile form that has turned an odd-looking, slippery fish into an expensive commodity. Elvers are now Canada’s most valuable fish. Driven by demand in Asia, glass eels can fetch thousands of dollars per kilogram (approximately a one-litre bottle full)—even sometimes more than $5,000 per kilogram. In 2022, fishers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick earned $39 million from 7,557 kilograms of elvers harvested, according to DFO.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth jokingly said any surge in takeout deliveries to the Pentagon — a phenomenon that has accurately predicted the start of major geopolitical events — could be him ordering pizza “just to throw everybody off.”

Asked about the “Pentagon Pizza Report,” an account on X that tracks activity at local pizza joints near the U.S. military hub, Hegseth said he was aware of the account.

“I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off,” he said Sunday on Fox News. “Some Friday night when you see a bunch of Dominos orders, it might just be me on an app, throwing the whole system off so we keep everybody off balance. We look at every indicator.”

Last week’s surprise departure of Phil Spencer from Microsoft led to the promotion of Asha Sharma, who comes to head Microsoft’s gaming division after two years as president of the company’s CoreAI Product group. Despite that recent history, Sharma says in a new interview that she has “no tolerance for bad AI” in game development.

...

Meanwhile the head of another Soulless Tech Corporation Hellbent On Dehumanizing Game Development In Every Sense Of The Word "Dehumanize" Possible reminds us...

CEO Tim Sweeney says requiring developers to disclose their use of AI tools is as relevant as disclosing “what shampoo brand the developer uses,”

Israeli political commentator Rachel Gur said her son is refusing to study for his math test as he's certain that the exam is going to get canceled due to an Iran attack or counterattack.

"I told him a strike is unlikely before Wednesday," Gur said, adding that Wednesday is also the exam day.

Archive link https://archive.is/7TfMT

“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman said. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”

So in his view, the fair comparison is, “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”

A couple were told they faced a $200,000 (£146,500) medical bill when their baby was born prematurely in the US, despite them having travel insurance which covered her pregnancy.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials this week reported that the death of a 55-year-old Cuban man at a detention facility in El Paso was the result of the staff’s “spontaneous use of force” to “prevent him from harming himself.” Officials quietly updated the cause of death after previously declaring last month that the man died of “medical distress.”

kuh-yoon-t

Planetesimals start out as collections of pebble-sized objects that are bound together by gravity into a rotating cloud. But sometimes the cloud may collapse inward, self-destructing and forming two separate planetesimals. The new study’s simulations show that after this gravitational collapse happens, the planetesimals’ orbits bring them closer to each other until they gently come into contact. They then stick together, solidifying the snowman shape.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43434668