Kiwibank unveiled its new mascot Buck this year, hoping the adorable cartoon sheep would convince people to move their accounts there. Now the New Zealand-based bank is struggling to contain Buck's success as consumers make deposits of a different kind. — Read the rest

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A man who broke into a tech company in Tempe, Arizona, made off with what he "likely" thought were Apple computers. But the Mac Mini boxes were empty, and he left the computers on the desks there.

"I come in, the window was smashed to pieces," employee Curran Rose told Fox 10 news in Phoenix. — Read the rest

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No longer will Americans have to go without delicious and inexpensive industrial dyes in their foodstuffs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly to allow additives to be added to food without safety review so long as they aren't proven to be carcinogenic and introduced at levels below 0.5 parts per billion. — Read the rest

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Doom, the classic first-person shooter, brought PCs to their knees in 1993. But now it runs on toothbrushes and earbuds and has even been implemented on the Commodore 64. Now it has been ported to SQL, the structured query language used by many relational databases. — Read the rest

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AI detection is a difficult job, made worse for everyone by it being such a delicious ingredient in academic snake oil. But one service has clearly outperformed the others in tests: Pangram. It went beyond obvious characteristics of LLM output such as perplexity and ngram distance, training its own classifiers on large collections of human text and generative imitations. — Read the rest

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France's Académie Goncourt has withdrawn Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien's novel C'était ça ou mourir (It Was That or Die) from consideration for its top literary prize. The book shows signs of being written by AI, reports The Guardian.

A lyrical first-person account of how a history and geography teacher flees a home country mired in gang violence… Published in France by Grasset in August, it has sold about 35,000 copies and won the Prix du roman Fnac, with translation rights sold to more than 20 countries.

— Read the rest

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A school principal is on leave after voicemail caught her making ill-considered remarks about the parents of a 5-year-old girl who reported that she was inappropriately touched by a classmate. The parents of the girl, attending Grand Oaks Elementary school in Harris County, Texas, called to report the incident on September 25. — Read the rest

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Cocaine worth more than $10m was stored as evidence at a courthouse in Fiji, but at some point in the long-running drug trial was replaced by flour. Authorities admit that about 87 pounds of cocaine is "effectively missing;" ABC News in Australia describes it as "yet another apparent example of internal corruption that has plagued Fiji's authorities." — Read the rest

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House leader Mike Johnson ended congress early to avoid a vote on impeaching Pete Hegseth, President Trump's crusader-tattooed "Secretary of War," and opinion polls show why. Never popular in the first place, Hegseth is now among the administration's most widely-disliked personalities, an outcome downstream of his frattish machismo, documented ineptitude and the dismal grind of the war on Iran. — Read the rest

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Sharon Jacks of Washington County, Ohio, went into surgery to have part of her right leg amputated. The surgical team prepared and draped her leg, applied a tourniquet, and removed it. Unfortunateley, they did all this to the left leg, and Jacks is now suing the hospitals and physicians involved. — Read the rest

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A truck-mounted crane tipped over onto a house in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday morning, and then a second crane brought in to lift the first one toppled while trying to right it. It too fell onto the house, reported Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue spokesman Frank Guzman. — Read the rest

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Newcastle University in the United Kingdom has a new Professor of Sustainability: Anant Ambani, the heir to an Indian fossil fuels fortune and owner of an enormous zoo. Ambani earned the professorship for "his work in conservation, biodiversity protection, animal welfare and environmental stewardship" (he owns an enormous zoo) and "significant contributions to advancing a more sustainable future" (biggest oil company in India), reported The Guardian, to howls of laughter and derision. — Read the rest

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DLSS 5 is Nvidia's AI-powered tech for dynamically repainting video game scenes in real-time, with more realistic lighting, textures and geometry. Controversial enough on recent games, where it succeeds on a technical level, the real fun is to be had applying it to old ones. — Read the rest

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A24, the independent studio famed for horror movies with perfect aesthetics, is following up its success with The Backrooms with a feature based on the SCP Foundation, another online mythos of unclear origins and extremely diverse authorship. Unfortunately, the SCP Foundation Wiki reports that it has nothing to do with the project and that it has received no response to its inquiries, from the filmakers or A24 itself. — Read the rest

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