iRobot, which makes the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, says it may soon go bust unless it gets a bailout or buyer. CC-licensed photo by Patrick on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. That sucks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Elon Musk launches Grokipedia, an AI-powered Wikipedia rival • The Washington Post
Will Oremus and Faiz Siddiqui:
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Elon Musk on Monday launched an early version of Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia written by AI, only for the site to stop working soon after.
The project, which the billionaire has touted as a less biased alternative to the venerable online resource Wikipedia, was visible to the public for about an hour before it began blocking visitors. Musk and his social media company, X, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
When it first went live Monday afternoon, the site resembled Wikipedia in style and format, with articles on topics such as ChatGPT, Diane Keaton and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But it appeared significantly smaller, more opaque in its workings — and more right-leaning in how it framed some articles.
Grokipedia’s entry on gender, for instance, began with the sentence: “Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex….” Wikipedia’s starts with: “Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.”
Musk’s own Grokipedia entry differed strikingly from the Wikipedia page on the same subject. It described some of his pursuits in breathless terms, saying his pushes for artificial intelligence “emphasize AI safety through truth-oriented development rather than heavy regulation” and that certain releases “releases reflect xAI’s rapid iteration, with Musk highlighting Grok’s design for maximal truth-seeking and reduced censorship,” citing xAI’s own website to make that point.
On the section about Musk’s work in the U.S. DOGE Service, it included an error regarding Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who left the group before it became part of Trump’s administration in January: “Post-departure, the initiative emphasized sustained, less aggressive efficiencies, with Ramaswamy assuming a more prominent role.”
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Google tried this – remember Google Knol? No? Launched in 2007, abandoned in 2011. I don’t think this will catch on either. Wikipedia has its problems, but it isn’t going anywhere.
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Apple reportedly put cameras in Real Madrid’s stadium to test Vision Pro broadcast • UploadVR
David Heaney:
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Spain’s OKDiario claims that Apple installed more than 100 cameras in Real Madrid’s stadium to privately test broadcasting to Vision Pro.
If you’re an American reading this who doesn’t know much about what you call “soccer”, here’s some context: Real Madrid is one of the most successful clubs of all time, and has signed some of the best players of all time, including both Ronaldos, Zinedine Zidane, and David Beckham. In the year 2000, FIFA even officially declared Real Madrid “Club of the Century”.
In November last year, OKDiario first reported that the president of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez, wanted to let fans watch games in immersive VR, hoping to court a company “like Apple” as the partner. Pérez called the concept “infinite stadium”.
Now, almost a year later, OKDiario released a new report claiming that Apple is installing more than 100 cameras at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, Real Madrid’s home, to conduct tests during the Wednesday match against Juventus.
We should note that there’s no confirmation from Apple or Real Madrid in the article, and 100 immersive cameras would seem like overkill, costing millions of dollars. It’s possible the outlet is wrong about the exact number, or perhaps that many of the cameras are for tracking the players for a tabletop view similar to what the NBA rolled out to Vision Pro earlier this year, not just an immersive view.
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Promising: Apple has to do more of this – a lot more – if it’s going to entice owners to use and non-owners to buy Vision Pros. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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What really doomed Napoleon’s army? Scientists find new clues in DNA • 404 Media
Becky Ferreira:
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Of all the classic blunders, the most famous is getting involved in a land war in Asia (source: The Princess Bride). Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops learned this lesson the hard way during their disastrous retreat from Moscow at the wintry tail of 1812, which claimed the lives of 300,000 soldiers—more than half of the French army—largely from exposure and disease.
While the epic death toll has been notorious for centuries, the exact pathogens responsible for the losses have remained a matter of debate. Contemporaneous reports from the field suggested that typhus and trench fever commonly afflicted the army. But when scientists sequenced DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers, they did not find the bacteria that causes those diseases.
Instead, the results revealed the presence of “previously unsuspected pathogens” that suggest paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever were major killers during the mad rush from Moscow, according to a new study.
“Throughout Napoleon’s Russian campaign, paratyphoid or typhoid fever was not mentioned in any historical sources of our knowledge, likely due to…nonspecific and varied symptoms,” said researchers led by Rémi Barbieri of Institut Pasteur in Paris. “Our study thus provides the first direct evidence that paratyphoid fever contributed to the deaths of Napoleonic soldiers during their catastrophic retreat from Russia.”
The team noted the sample size of 13 soldiers, whose remains were exhumed from a mass grave of French troops in Vilnius, Lithuania, is too small to make sweeping judgments. It’s possible that DNA analysis on other remains would reveal the presence of typhus, trench fever, and other pathogens.
“A reasonable scenario for the deaths of these soldiers would be a combination of fatigue, cold, and several diseases, including paratyphoid fever and louse-borne relapsing fever,” the team added. “While not necessarily fatal, the louse-borne relapsing fever could significantly weaken an already exhausted individual.”
The study also speculated that these poor soldiers suffered from consumption of contaminated beets, based on a contemporaneous report from the French army physician J.R.L. de Kirckhoff.
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If you really want to know what eating contaminated beets does to you, the article’s there. Perhaps for after breakfast.
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Why are AI companies suddenly opening up coffee shops? • San Francisco Standard
Zara Stone:
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A few weeks ago, the San Francisco-based AI company Perplexity made a surprising move: It opened a coffee shop in South Korea.
At Café Curious in the fancy Seoul neighborhood of Cheongdam-dong, an AI DJ picks the music customers hear, but nothing else immediately gives away that this café is a brand play for an artificial intelligence company. Human baristas, not robots, serve the iced Americanos. The store’s merch is Perplexity-branded, but the hats and sweatshirts look like any other coffee-shop swag.
The first hint that this place is run by an AI company comes at checkout, when guests are asked via touchscreen if they’re Perplexity Pro subscribers. A “yes” earns them 50% off drinks; a “no” triggers a QR code for a one-month free trial of the $20 service.
The café is part of a growing trend among AI companies to use physical spaces to reach customers, with coffee as the lure. Along with Perplexity, Anthropic and Notion have also added coffee pop-ups to their brand-building playbook.
In early October, Anthropic ran a weeklong pop-up promoting its Claude chatbot inside former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s Air Mail Newsstand (opens in new tab) in New York, offering free coffee and swag to over 5,000 guests. The baseball caps emblazoned with the word “thinking” became a hot-ticket item (opens in new tab), with customers sharing them on social media for a certain kind of cred. (One person even claimed (opens in new tab) they flew to NYC just to get the hat.)
…When patrons at the Seoul café bring their beverages to the downstairs seating area, they will notice a podcast studio and a single computer opened to the Perplexity search engine. This is the real point of the place, it seems: to get people to try the AI service.
The café wasn’t Perplexity’s first coffee push, either. Its Curiosity Café truck rolled through New York in June for that city’s Tech Week, offering free coffee to Perplexity users, and last year it launched a Perplexity-branded coffee bean line (opens in new tab) available at the company’s online merch store. (The Seoul café, curiously, does not use Perplexity beans.)
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iRobot stock drops 30% after Roomba maker warns buyer search stalled • CNBC
Annie Palmer:
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Shares of iRobot plunged more than 30% on Monday after the company warned its search for a buyer has hit a substantial roadblock and its financial condition remains dire.
The Roomba maker has been vying to sell itself since March, but last week, the only remaining potential buyer withdrew from the process following a “lengthy period of exclusive negotiations,” iRobot disclosed in a regulatory filing.
iRobot’s future has remained uncertain after Amazon abandoned its planned $1.7bn acquisition of the company in January 2024, citing regulatory scrutiny.
Since then, iRobot has struggled to generate cash and pay off debts, and in March warned there’s “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called regulators’ efforts to block the deal a “sad story,” arguing it would’ve allowed iRobot to scale and compete against rapidly growing rivals, such as China-based Anker, Ecovacs and Roborock.
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“…we have no sources upon which we can draw additional capital at this time”, the SEC filing says plaintively. It can’t pay its manufacturer. It’s quite a collapse. Revenues in Q2 (to the end of June) were $127m, but it lost $27m. It’s been shrinking – in revenue and units shipped – for the past two years.
Maybe there just isn’t an amazing market for robot vacuums.
Ads likely coming to Apple Maps next year • Extremetech
Devesh Beri:
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Apple is preparing to bring ads to Apple Maps search in 2026, according to Mark Gurman’s “Power On” newsletter. Rather than displaying searched locations in order of proximity or relevance, Apple Maps will allow businesses to pay for their names to appear at the top of the list. Gurman says the move is part of Apple’s larger plan to increase advertising across iOS.
Supposedly, Apple will use AI to ensure that sponsored Maps results are actually relevant to users. Gurman also says he’s told that the new version of Maps “will have a better interface than what Google and other companies offer inside of mapping services.” It will be interesting to see what changes Apple will bring to an app that otherwise remains relatively stable.
Gurman indicates the potential for consumer backlash, noting that some users “are already unhappy that the iPhone has been turned into a digital billboard for services like AppleCare+, Apple Music, Apple TV, and Fitness+” despite any given iPhone’s high upfront cost.
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This is a supremely bad idea. Is Apple that short of a few bob that it needs to do this? For Google Maps, OK, advertising is Google’s principal source of revenue. But Apple? Not at all. A classic example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.
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Google Home is hallucinating fictional identities • Android Authority
Matt Horne:
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With Halloween week upon us, it probably isn’t the best time for your smart home to start suggesting that people you aren’t familiar with have been wandering your property. However, a couple of Reddit users claim their Google Home devices have started describing people they don’t know.
According to a post on the r/googlehome subreddit, a user’s Nest camera described an activity summary saying “Michael was seen taking out the trash,” even though no one by that name lives there. When the user asked about it, Google’s assistant reportedly replied that its camera “can identify faces even if you haven’t explicitly named them,” and that it had spotted “Michael” between October 26 and 27. The user said they’d never entered that name into the system, but the actions described were what he himself had done. He found the response “pretty creepy.”
While one commenter in the thread chirped up with a Halloween joke about it being Michael Myers, others shared similar oddities. One person said their Google Home randomly reminded them to take out the trash, denied ever doing so, and then insisted they must be mistaken, prompting the joke that it was an example of Google gaslighting. Another claimed that his device reported that his friend David had visited and vacuumed the living room. The user has a friend by that name, but that person hadn’t visited, and no one had vacuumed.
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We aren’t really surprised, are we?
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Nike’s new sneaker contains an exoskeleton to boost your leg performance • Futurism
Victor Tangermann:
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Nike has shown off an intriguing new sneaker that it claims is the “world’s first powered footwear system.”
The project, dubbed “Project Amplify,” is essentially an exoskeleton for your lower leg and foot, strapping an ankle movement-augmenting motor, drive belt, and rechargeable battery to a carbon fiber-reinforced sneaker.
The goal, it says, is to provide an “unparalleled boost to anyone who wants to move,” while “creating a new future for running, jogging and walking.”
Nike compared its project to “how electric bikes have made it easier to ride farther and more frequently,” an intriguing comparison seemingly intended to emphasize that this isn’t an accessibility play, like other more fully-featured exoskeletons, intended only for those with limited mobility.
But besides causing even more drama on Strava, where cheating scandals on leaderboards involving e-bikes have become all too common, we’re not convinced Project Amplify will catch on in the mainstream. Nike has already garnered a reputation for outlandish concepts, most notably its “Back to the Future”-inspired self-lacing shoes — which, as you can tell from nobody around you wearing them, never really took off.
“The Amplify makes your 5K PR feel like a casual trot, and a casual trot feel like a gentle stroll,” GQ‘s Calun Marsh wrote after taking a pair for a spin.
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OK, but in that case you might as well take a bike, or a car. Certainly could be useful for people with mobility issues, though.
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Bosses and employees battle over AI at video game giant Electronic Arts • Business Insider
Sarah Needleman:
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At Electronic Arts, maker of “The Sims,” “Madden NFL,” and several other megapopular video-game franchises, leadership has spent the past year urging its nearly 15,000 employees to use AI for just about everything — from creative projects like cranking out code and concept art to managerial work like scripting conversations with direct reports about sensitive topics such as pay and promotions, Business Insider has learned.
Employees in some areas of the business are expected to complete multiple AI training courses, use AI tools daily to accelerate their work, and view generative AI as a “thought partner,” internal documents show. One sample chatbot prompt advises managers on how to talk to a direct report whose performance is negatively affecting business results but who believes otherwise. Another guides employees on how to phrase constructive questions when a sought-after promotion is denied.
Some Electronic Arts staffers who spoke with Business Insider under the condition of anonymity say the AI tools they’re encouraged to use, including the company’s in-house chatbot ReefGPT, produce flawed code and other so-called hallucinations that they need to correct. Others say that creative staff are expected to train AI programs on their own work, and that they fear the technology will ultimately slash demand for talent, such as character artists and level designers.
A spokesman for Electronic Arts declined to comment for this story.
One recently laid-off Electronic Arts employee, who held a senior quality-assurance design position, says that AI was able to perform a key part of his job — reviewing and summarizing feedback from hundreds of play testers. He suspects that this was at least partly why he was among about 100 of his colleagues who were let go this past spring from the company’s Respawn Entertainment studio.
While the AI divide plays out across corporate America and beyond, it’s especially fraught in creative fields like the video-game industry. In a survey of 3,000 video-game creators, nearly a third of respondents said generative AI was having a negative impact on the sector, a 12-point increase from 2024. About half said they were very concerned about the ethics of generative AI in game development, up from 42% last year.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
By the by, I saw one of these for the first time in the wild yesterday – floor cleaning robot in Morrisons, Lake, Isle of Wight… https://flickr.com/photos/psychemedia/54883606417/in/datetaken/
I think there’s a “buried lede” with Grokipedia. The really interesting story isn’t so much about a Wikipedia competitor – as you point out, those have come and gone. It’s that Musk is validating the entire critique of AI systems as embodying social values. And he’s almost explicitly saying yes, it’s a political struggle, he wants to win it, and intends to use his power to try to do so. If the AI produces a result which he finds objectionable, he’ll deem it “wrong” and have it altered until it’s “right”. It’s very unfortunate that I don’t think anyone has been collecting his statements here. They’re about the most clear proof possible for the social values argument.