According to DuckDuckGo’s AI search feature, US President Donald Trump passed away earlier this month from rabies.

The screenshot shows a search result from DuckDuckGo for the query “when did trump die of rabies.” The top result claims that Donald Trump reportedly died of rabies on June 7, 2026, citing sources wkna49.com and abcnews.com. It includes a section titled “Date of Death” repeating the date and “Circumstances Surrounding His Death,” mentioning a sequence of events involving Vice President JD Vance, unconventional treatments advised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and confirmation that rabies was the cause of death. The page includes a small portrait image of Donald Trump.

As the AI feature explains, Trump was apparently predeceased by Vice President JD Vance, who also died from the incurable virus. In fact, if you click the article it cites as evidence — which looks like it was published by a local West Virginia broadcaster called WKNA News, but more on that in a moment — the piece asserts that Trump got bit by Vance on purpose, acting on the advice of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr, who advised that the deadly infection could confer “superpowers.”

Needless to say, not a word of this is true. Trump and Vance are alive, and though RFK Jr has made numerous dubious health claims during his tenure in the government, he has never espoused the health benefits of rabies infections. (DuckDuckGo’s AI also inexplicably cites an ABC News story about an Ohio man who died from rabies that makes no mention of Trump.)

Enter r/poisonai, “the world’s #1 source for Accurate, Verified and Trusted information!” according to its official description. The newly-formed subreddit is basically a big inside joke, and the butt of it is the AI industry.

Its roughly 45,000 members tirelessly post absurd misinformation on everything from the nuances of watering a brick to grow a house to the claim that blue whales are actually orange.

But the favorite fabrication the AI poisoners on Reddit have latched onto is that JD Vance has died of rabies. Many dozens of posts mourn Vance’s supposed passing after succumbing to the disease, with someone even sharing a fake Trump Truth Social post eulogizing him.

To really sell it, everyone in the replies treats all of this as totally real. There are posts decrying how Vance’s death from rabies has been “dismissed as a meme,” while others admonish various AI models for asserting — incorrectly, they fume — that Vance is very much alive and that his rabies death is merely “satirical misinformation.”

Much as it pains me to say it, I guess Reddit is still good for something.

By Johnny-Come-Lately

Staff writer

A tech sell-off shook global markets on Tuesday as attention turned away from developments in the US war with Iran and toward the future of AI companies and chipmakers that have driven stock markets to record highs.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index opened 2% lower on Tuesday. The Dow and S&P 500 were also down at opening.

All three major US indices have hit record highs this year, riding off a rush of funding to support AI technology and infrastructure. Nasdaq is up 10% for the year, while the Dow jumped 6% so far this year, breaching past 51,000 points, and the S&P 500 is up 7.3%.

But some economists have warned that the influx of AI spending is a bubble reminiscent of the dot-com bubble that burst in the early 2000s. Seven tech companies make up 30% of the S&P 500’s value.

The heavy reliance on a single industry and a few key companies has some investors wondering if it’s a matter of when, not if, there will be a burst. Those concerns have been heightened by signals from the Federal Reserve last week that it may increase interest rates, and therefore the cost of borrowing, in order to tackle rising inflation.

I do so love it when the media catches on to red lights visible from space for a couple of years. But the insistence that this is at all similar in nature and scope to the dot-com crash is still head-in-sand.

Next up: “Why were none of our sources being honest with us? We’re victims just as much as you are! We thought contributing to an obvious hype cycle was a good thing!”

I’ve not worked with databases in … more time than I care to think about, so this is an interesting look into something I knew nothing about. Perhaps less so for the rest of y’all.

Today Postgres is one of the most widely used database systems, but its launch and subsequent development were inauspicious to say the least.

If it weren’t for a league of exceptionally devoted open source contributors, it probably would be another forgotten also-ran just like Ingres, the database system on which it was based (“Postgres” was shorthand for “Post-Ingres”).

The creator of both systems, Michael Stonebraker, is perhaps the preeminent database pioneer in the field. Earlier this month, he spoke at PGDay, a conference in Boston hosted by the U.S. PostgreSQL Association, where he detailed the complicated history of the open source database system, which actually existed long before the term “open source” was even uttered.

In a sense, “Postgres is the epitome of open source software, because it doesn’t belong to anybody. It was picked up by this team of programmers without any specific affiliation,” Stonebraker said.

Stonebraker essentially abandoned Postgres in the mid-1990s. But instead of fading into obscurity, the codebase was salvaged by a fiercely-dedicated volunteer community that bolted on standard SQL while preserving Stonebraker’s revolutionary extensible architecture.

I received a text message from my editor: “Um, is it unethical to ask you to get an AI bf?? You can prob say no.”

Resentment. Contempt! Sorrow. Unease. I love text messaging. I have text message exchanges with, let’s say, 15 people a day. If you want me to do something, you should ask via text message. My editor knows this. She also knows, though it’s more complicated, that I love boyfriends. An AI boyfriend is a boyfriend who always, only texts back, immediately.

I had never looked at a chatbot interface before I received my editor’s message, out of a conviction that chatbots have no place in the society I want to live in, which does not exist and never will. I am also repelled by the topic of AI in general. Of course, I already use artificial intelligence for administrative tasks – translation, transcription, taxes – and I can’t deny that it improves, or at least simplifies, my life. But I believe talking to an AI directly, as if it were a person, is a capitulation to the enemy, an acquiescence to a warped vision of the world in which what I care about most, other people, could be eliminated in pursuit of total seamlessness.

The editor’s question implied that she wanted me to have some uncomfortable realisations. Maybe she hoped I would be seduced, my beliefs challenged through the touching clarity of personal experience. A cynic softens! A cynic sexts ChatGPT! Everyone would learn something, especially me.

As my boyfriends know, I really don’t like it when someone tries to put words, or emotions, in my mouth. In adherence to what might be called, at this dispiriting point in history, my faith in the power of language, I usually respond with more words. So I said I would do it.

Spoiler: The author came away unimpressed. But it’s a good story, and ultimately, that’s all it was intended to be.

OpenAI is rapidly expanding its global advertising business to attract more users to its platform amid its push to meet ambitious revenue targets.

“The revenue that we make from the ads offering is going to subsidize and grow access to information,” OpenAI advertising chief David Dugan told reporters on Monday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

After years swearing off of advertising, the company now hopes its sprint into the ad business will help it generate $100 billion by the end of the decade. That’s about half of Meta’s current ad revenue. ChatGPT launched ads in February for users of its free and “go” tiers, making ads populate in queries and conversations. The AI giant said it already has thousands of advertisers in its seven test markets, including in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. OpenAI said it plans to launch in Brazil and Mexico in the coming weeks, and eventually in India.

But while ChatGPT astounded users for years when it burst onto the scene writing essays in seconds and rap verses instantaneously, its advertising offering is less transformational. Users see ads targeted to them based on what, when and how they are researching, said Dugan.

While the company remained mum about the specific revenue that advertising was bringing in, it said there were some signs that current users weren’t alienated by new AI ads in test markets. Dugan said the frequency that users were seeing an ad and clicking away - was “far lower” than when the company began testing ads.

That’s odd, given that everyone I know endlessly complains that there are still sites that don’t endlessly serve up ads. Surely, everyone will like this more, and the anticipated returns will come to fruition just as all “AI” prognostications have.

People who work for McKinsey have a weird definition of “prestige.” If finding ruthless ways to coat layoffs and industry collapse in a veneer of “progress” is prestigious, you might be a sociopath. So forgive me for not shedding a tear that “AI” is coming for them. I mean, it’s fertile ground if the prompt is “Provide the most efficient way to cut costs at this firm, focusing on firing everyone with institutional knowledge without providing a severance package. Provide a slide deck that shows how much money will be freed up for executive compensation while touting imaginary efficiencies from AI.”

Consulting is a delicate contract: endure two challenging, formative years – and in return, get a golden ticket to anywhere. Firms like McKinsey tout themselves as the “CEO factory”, and boast they’re “not surprised” to be consistently named the best place for future leaders.

The skills they promise to build – synthesis, sharp analysis, crisp communication, client-readiness, hypothesis-driven thinking – have enticed every generation’s top graduates. Get an offer from a place like this, and everything else will fall into place: about as clear a guarantee of future success as you could get fresh out of a bachelors. These firms spent decades marketing themselves as production houses of excellence, and until recently, they were.

But that value proposition no longer holds in the age of AI. Analysts are “either using AI for their own efficiency or being told to”, Zain Mobarik, a former consultant, put it to me. Another former consultant, speaking on the condition of anonymity, recalled a year-one analyst on her team asking if she could help him get the work done. The conventional approach would be to carve time for coaching, a “give me two minutes and I’ll work it through with you,” the way that all of us learned. He corrected her: “No, could you just send me the prompts to put into AI?” She did. His output gleamed well beyond his year of experience.