Mission Everywhere

Rudrojas Kunvar built Evion, an AI farm tool, while in high school. Rudrojas Kunvar Rudrojas Kunvar, 16, built Evion, an AI tool that helps farmers analyze crop health. The tool collects aerial crop data from drone-captured images. Kunvar created Evion to make that data more accessible to small and midsize farms. While meeting with a venture capitalist last year, 16-year-old Rudrojas Kunvar received an offer that would excite even the most nonchalant teens: accept $300,000 to drop out of high school and run his AI startup full-time. "It was definitely a rough couple of weeks of contemplating," Kunvar, who lives in Germantown, Maryland, told Business Insider. "That's a lot of money." Kunvar had spent the summer before building Evion, a free AI crop-analysis tool that uses images taken by basic camera drones that farmers can purchase themselves. The AI model analyzes images and generates a crop health map that farmers can integrate into their existing...

Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal : AI tools like Claude Code have transformed coders' lives, and AI labs are now eyeing a bigger goal: automating everyone's lives and winning the non-coder market   —  The AI sprint is hurtling toward a world where anyone can build personal concierges to do everything from executive presentations to March Madness brackets from Techmeme https://ift.tt/Q2zNiT1

TSA agents are working without pay during the partial government shutdown. Adam Gray/Getty Images Trump said he will send ICE agents to replace TSA at US airports on Monday. The largest federal workers union said ICE agents aren't trained for aviation security. More than 400 TSA officers have quit since mid-February amid the partial government shutdown. America's largest federal employee union says ICE agents are unqualified to replace TSA officers at US airports . "ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security. TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats specifically designed to evade detection at checkpoints — skills that require specialized instruction, hands-on practice, and ongoing recertification," Everett Kelley, president of American Federation of Government Employees, said on Sunday in a statement posted online. "You cannot improvise that. Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does...

Passengers had to wait for as long as 75 minutes at JFK on Sunday morning. Courtesy of Jason Ursaner. Many TSA agents are working without pay during the partial government shutdown. Many others have stopped showing up for work. Over 400 have quit since mid-February. The result is long lines at airports. One traveler called their experience at JFK Airport a "complete disaster." One thing became clear to Jason Urasner as he waited over 90 minutes at a TSA checkpoint on Sunday: He was going to miss his flight. "It is actual chaos," Urasner, 40, told Business Insider. "I've never seen anything like it." Urasner had arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City that morning to board a JetBlue flight to Salt Lake City, but his plans were derailed by what he called a "complete disaster." "There is nobody directing anyone or managing the line. There are a few port authority officers standing around letting people in one by one ...

Alistair Barr (right) winning the Oscar ballot at a friend's party Alistair Barr/Business Insider A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here . I tried something different at my friends' annual Oscars party this year: I outsourced my ballot to Anthropic 's Claude . It beat around the bush at first, so I asked it to just give me the winners. Claude obliged, delivering confident picks across nearly every category. And it worked. I won the pool and walked away with a box of chocolates and bragging rights. Alistair Barr used Anthropic's Claude to make Oscar picks Alistair Barr/Business Insider But here's the twist: Claude didn't even complete the assignment fully. It failed to pick a winner for Casting, a new Oscar category this year. Maybe the model didn't register the addition? And in a couple of other award categories, Claude picked candidates who weren't...

Kevin Roose / New York Times : A look at “tokenmaxxing”, a status game where employees at a number of companies compete on leaderboards to show how much AI they're using   —  An engineer at OpenAI processed 210 billion “tokens” — enough text to fill Wikipedia 33 times — through the company's artificial intelligence models … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/6cSNoR0