AI Is Telling Bedtime Stories to Your Kids Now - WIRED   

The problem with Bluey is there's not enough of it. Even with 151 seven-minute-long episodes of the popular children's animated show out there, parents of toddlers still desperately wait for Australia’s Ludo Studio to release another season. The only way to get more Bluey more quickly is if they create their own stories starring the Brisbane-based family of blue heeler dogs.

Luke Warner did this—with generative AI. The London-based developer and father used OpenAI's latest tool, customizable bots called GPTs, to create a story generator for his young daughter. The bot, which he calls Bluey-GPT, begins each session by asking people their name, age, and a bit about their day, then churns out personalized tales starring Bluey and her sister Bingo. "It names her school, the area she lives in, and talks about the fact it's cold outside," Warner says. "It makes it more real and engaging."

The main version of ChatGPT has, since its launch last year, been able to write a children's story, but GPTs allow parents—or anyone, really—to constrain the topic and start with specific prompts, such as a child's name. This means anyone can generate personalized stories starring their kid and their favorite character—meaning no one needs to wait for Ludo to drop fresh content.

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Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound - WIRED   

Off the two-lane highway that winds along the northeast side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, on a quiet stretch of ranchland between the tourist hubs of Kapaa and Hanalei, an enormous, secret construction project is underway.

A 6-foot wall blocks the view from a nearby road fronting the project, where cars slow to try to catch a glimpse of what's behind it. Security guards stand watch at an entrance gate and patrol the surrounding beaches on ATVs. Pickup trucks roll in and out, hauling building materials and transporting hundreds of workers.

Nobody working on this project is allowed to talk about what they're building. Almost anyone who passes compound security—from carpenters to electricians to painters to security guards—is bound by a strict nondisclosure agreement, according to several workers involved in the project. And, they say, these agreements aren't a formality. Multiple workers claim they saw or heard about colleagues removed from the project for posting about it on social media. Different construction crews within the site are assigned to separate projects and workers are forbidden from speaking with other crews about their work, sources say.

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Blood, Guns, and Broken Scooters: Inside the Chaotic Rise and Fall of Bird - WIRED   

In a minivan with the rear seats ripped out, John is chasing one of his 250 electric scooters down a California highway. He finds it 10 miles away, hiding in a bush—a run-and-dump tactic that he says thieves use to test whether anyone will come after them before they take a scooter home. John, not his real name, always gives chase, because his livelihood depends on it. “If I come in too soft, then they say, ‘Oh, this guy, he's a pussy. I could kick his ass.’ So I have to be a little aggressive,” says John, who is well past the age where it’s safe to fist-fight. He spends the next hour hunting down other scooters from his fleet that have been knocked over or need recharging. John is a contractor for scooter rental company Bird Global and looks after all the scooters in a particular area in return for a cut of rental fees paid by riders. Fleet managers, as they are called, are technically their own bosses, but John spends his days at the beck and call of the company’s app. Bird requires him to maintain several productivity scores that, to John, feel nonnegotiable. Each scooter lit up in red in the fleet manager app knocks his score down. That warning can signal that a scooter has been stolen, fallen over due to sloppy parking or vandalism, or simply sat idle for too long—situations largely outside of John’s control.

For Bird to offer convenient rides at the tap of an app, John and other fleet managers must handle the grinding logistics of scattering scooters around cites. It takes street smarts, plenty of guts, hours of driving, and sometimes strongly implied threats of violence. If more than 10 percent of his fleet turns red, John can get chewed out by a Bird manager, and he has been told he could lose some scooters for breach of contract.

“The only reason I continue to do this is to pay off the vans I purchased when I still believed in the American Dream.”

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The Spy Who Dumped the CIA, Went to Therapy, and Now Makes Incredible Television - WIRED   

“Did you learn things in CIA training about withstanding interrogation that are going to make it harder for me to interview you?” I asked Joe Weisberg, creator of the TV espionage drama The Americans and onetime CIA agent. He looked momentarily startled, as though he’d expected this to be easier. Good, I had him where I wanted him: off-balance. I saw him taking my measure. Then he laughed affably, but I mistrusted the affability, since I knew from his own books that affability is among the qualities the CIA recruits for: people who can get other people to trust them, or at least want to have lunch with them.

I suppose I had certain fantasies about interviewing an ex-spook (was he equally profiling me? more skillfully?), no doubt the result of having read too many John le Carré novels. As it happens, reading le Carré had a lot to do with propelling Weisberg himself to spycraft. Sure, he knew it was a fantasy world being depicted, but it was still a world he felt he belonged in. There was also his consuming obsession with bringing down the Soviet Union, which unfortunately for his career aspirations was soon to collapse on its own.

Weisberg, who is 57 and on the short side, has a sharp, possibly even hawkish visage along with an invitingly squishy-liberal midsection, which in combination externalize the essential duality in his being, one that’s both shaped his life story to date and yielded one of the most complex married couples in television history, the Russian sleeper agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings. The Americans aired on FX from 2013 to 2018, but everyone I know seems to be compulsively binge-streaming it lately—maybe the fear that your neighbors are plotting to bring down democracy somehow resonates again with the mental state of the country? Loosely based on the FBI’s 2010 arrest of a network of Soviet spies living under assumed identities in the US, the series springs at least as much from the depths of Weisberg’s psyche. Elizabeth, a cold warrior to her core, is, Weisberg says semi-jokingly, him pre-therapy; the détente-curious Philip is him after.

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