Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Iowa’s largest school district said Tuesday that it revised its conflict-of-interest policy after an audit found its former superintendent awarded district business to a consulting firm he worked for, affirming findings first reported by The Associated Press in the weeks after federal immigration officers detained him.Ian Roberts, a native of Guyana in South America, worked for two decades as an educator and administrator in urban districts across the U.S. His Sept. 26 arrest in Des Moines, Iowa, shocked the community and drew national attention to his history of criminal charges and falsified credentials. He pleaded…
On Tuesday, Red Hat principal software engineer Sally O’Malley released a new open source tool called Tank OS to make it easier to deploy and manage OpenClaw agents more safely. “This was a fun project that I put together on the weekend that I knew would be a really good fit for AI and where we’re going,” she told TechCrunch, adding that she wanted to give it “to the masses.” Tank OS is geared toward power users looking to run OpenClaw on their own computers and toward IT pros managing fleets of corporate OpenClaw agents. It makes OpenClaw safer and…
Startups using AI agents have a new problem to worry about: “vibe deletion.” Loading audio narration… Jer Crane, the founder of PocketOS, a startup that provides software for car rental companies, said in a Friday X post that a Cursor AI agent accidentally deleted the company’s production database and backups, causing disruption for customers.Crane said the crisis was sparked by the agent, which was running on Anthropic’s Claude Opus model, making a single nine-second API call to the company’s cloud infrastructure provider, Railway. He added that the AI agent produced a written confession outlining how it caused the chaos.”I violated…
My phone rang in the middle of the afternoon. My teenage daughter was calling, but she was supposed to be in class. I answered quickly and heard her sniffling on the other end. Something was wrong. At 17, it could be anything. I said her name again. More sniffling. Loading audio narration… Trying not to panic, I took a deep breath. I didn’t ask if she was OK; her crying said enough.”Where are you?” She explained that she was walking down the hall at school and having a hard day. She wanted to talk to me.It’s moments like these that…
AI meeting notetaker apps have realized that transcribing meetings and providing summaries alone is not enough to justify their business models and valuations. They now want to act as a full workspace where users bring in data from different sources, search across all of it, and make decisions about their business. Following notetakers like Read AI, Fireflies.ai, and Fathom, Otter is now launching enterprise search by acting as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client. That means it can connect to and pull data from outside apps and services using a common standard that AI tools are rapidly adopting. Otter has…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Santiago Fernández de Valderrama Aparicio, a 42-year-old head of applied artificial intelligence at a software company who is based in Seville, Spain. It’s been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… After founding a retail phone repair company 16 years ago, I realized my favorite part of the job was using software to automate operations and provide better value to our customers.I decided that for the next chapter of my career, I’d go all in on AI. I started learning more about it and using it for my business before…
Amazon is stepping up its push to make AI central to its engineering culture. Loading audio narration… As part of that effort, its massive retail business, known as “Stores,” has formalized how teams build with AI, distilling its approach into a set of internal “AI-native engineering tenets,” according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.The internal guidelines outline a pragmatic playbook. Rather than forcing AI into every use case or adopting every new model, Amazon emphasizes balancing speed, cost, and control, with clear expectations around transparency.The tenets are central to Amazon’s broader “AI-native” strategy, aimed at scaling usage across…
In 2012, Sam Newell worked on a project that would help define his career in energy consulting, advising Texas policymakers on investment incentives to ensure grid reliability. Rather than advocating for a single solution, Newell said he laid out the full range of options and their trade-offs for policymakers and stakeholders.His report became widely cited and sparked a wave of follow-up assignments, but it also taught him a key lesson he’s carried through his career: The role of a consultant is not to prescribe answers, but to deliver rigorous, objective analysis that helps decision-makers navigate complex choices.Now, Boston-based Newell is…
Don’t pursue computer science just for the money, says Replit’s CEO. Loading audio narration… On an episode of the “20VC” podcast released on Saturday, Amjad Masad said that young people who are not deeply interested in CS should not study it.”If you don’t feel like you’re drawn to it like a fly drawn to a light, then don’t go into it because someone told you you’re going to make a boatload of money working for Google,” he said. “It’s pretty dumb to tell people to go into computer science if they’re not really intrinsically interested in it.”Masad cofounded Replit, an…
A New Yorker magazine investigation detailing concerns about Sam Altman’s leadership resurfaced on X feeds on Monday, at the behest of the social media platform’s billionaire owner. Loading audio narration… A post from Ronan Farrow, an investigative reporter, linking to his New Yorker profile of the OpenAI CEO titled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?” showed up on the X “For You” page for some users on Monday, three weeks after it was initially posted on April 6.The post was labeled as “Boosted” and said, “This organic post was boosted by @elonmusk.” Ronan Farrow’s post linking his…