Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Imagine walking into your pharmacy, handing over your prescription and having it denied. Now imagine that the reason is not insufficient insurance coverage or the wrong dose, but a pharmacist who personally objects to your medication. What right does a pharmacist have to make moral decisions for their patients?Lawmakers have wrestled with this question for decades. It reemerged in August 2025 when two pharmacists sued Walgreens and the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy, saying they had been punished after refusing to dispense gender-affirming care medications that go against their religious beliefs.According to the pharmacists, Walgreens refused their requests for a formal…
OpenAI offers app integrations in ChatGPT to allow you to connect your accounts directly to ChatGPT and ask the assistant to do things for you. For instance, with a Spotify integration, you can tell it to create personalized playlists that will show up right in your Spotify app. To get started, make sure you’re logged into ChatGPT. Then type the name of the app you want to use at the start of your prompt, and ChatGPT will guide you through signing in and connecting your account. If you want to set everything up at once, head over to the Settings…
A dad’s colon cancer spread to lungs. He says was happened next was a miracle.Spencer Laird first noticed blood in his stool when he was 25. His doctor thought it was hemorrhoids caused by his work as a mechanic. Eighteen months later, a colonoscopy found colorectal cancer, which was treated with a surgery that removed 16 inches of his colon.Two years passed, and Laird began to believe the worst was behind him. He returned to work and treasured time with his young daughter. Then his wife CarleyAnn Laird raised a concern at a routine follow-up appointment in December 2024.”They had…
Another tech billionaire has left California for Texas.In an interview on “TBPN” on Friday, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told show hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays that he moved to Texas at the end of 2025, when asked if Kalanick would like to come back to San Francisco and “Go back to being the king.””Well, here. So, first let’s just be clear,” said Kalanick. “On December 18th, I moved to Texas.””So I’m a primary resident of Texas,” Kalanick added.Kalanick was born and raised in the Los Angeles area. He attended UCLA and maintained residences in Los Angeles. He co-founded…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Pavi Theva, 31, a career coach who lives in Austin. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… The first time I visited San Francisco, I fell in love with it.A year later, around June 2018, I went back for a work trip. From the Golden Gate Bridge to the coastal views, the city was stunning, and the hustle and bustle in the air made me feel like I’d never get bored there.I started planning how I could work there one day. In October 2018, I left…
OpenAI may be in a race to build the best AI coding agent, but its chairman is still happy to do things the old-fashioned way.”I am trying to get to a world where I’m not writing code,” Bret Taylor told Stripe cofounder John Collison during a recent episode of Collison’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast. “It’s hard, emotionally, if that makes any sense. I have a hard time not caring.”Taylor’s struggle mirrors some others in AI and tech who are seeing the building blocks of their careers bulldozed by advancements in agentic AI. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, recently said…
Meta is gearing up for possible layoffs as it pours billions into AI, two senior employees familiar with the matter told Business Insider. Loading audio narration… The sources said that some managers have been asked to prepare cost-cutting plans but were not told their scope or timing.Reuters, which first reported about the potential layoffs on Friday, said that up to 20% of Meta employees could be let go. As of the end of 2025, Meta employed nearly 79,000 people, so a potential cut of 20% would mean roughly 16,000 jobs eliminated. That would be Meta’s most significant reduction since 2022,…
And then there were two: Of the original 11 co-founders who kickstarted xAI with Elon Musk three years ago, only two remain as the deep learning lab continues a personnel overhaul to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. That rebuilding, insists Musk, is by design. “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk said Thursday on his social media platform, X. By most measures, it isn’t going all that smoothly. The most immediate pressure is competitive. This week, xAI co-founders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang left the outfit after Musk complained that…
In the lead up to the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada last month, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar spoke to ChatGPT about her feelings of isolation and an increasing obsession with violence, according to court filings. The chatbot allegedly validated Van Rootselaar’s feelings and then helped her plan her attack, telling her which weapons to use and sharing precedents from other mass casualty events, per the filings. She went on to kill her mother, her 11-year-old brother, five students, and an education assistant, before turning the gun on herself. Before Jonathan Gavalas, 36, died by suicide last October, he got…
AI agents are expected to soon start making autonomous purchasing and scheduling decisions on behalf of humans. But Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, argues that these agents are currently missing a critical piece of the puzzle: the full context required to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve. Fanous claims that machines currently struggle to discern whether a person’s professional profile on LinkedIn, their activity on Instagram, and their public government records all belong to the same human being. To solve this, he teamed up with his father,…