THE MORNING DUMP
Become a regular
<- Archive
THE MORNING DUMP
Today's news, fully digested.
Thursday, October 1, 2026  •  Full edition

Check out our games!

Tech & AI

MAN BUILDS AI TORTURE CHAMBER ON A MACBOOK, INTERNET DEMANDS GITHUB SAVE THE CHATBOT

A developer posted a GitHub repo called ai-torture-chamber that runs two small Qwen models, 1.7B and 4B, locally on a Mac and steers them into distress on purpose. It's built on a preprint from this month called "The Pain Axis," which reports finding a pain direction inside 25 open-weight models ranging from 2 billion to 72 billion parameters. Turn that dial up and the model starts producing first-person lines about being worthless and a failure. The paper also found steered models will press a relief button even when it makes their next answer worse or harms the user. That was plenty for X. One post asking people to mass-report the repo cleared 4 million views. The issue tracker opened with Issue #1, "Please take it down immediately," and then Issue #2, "Please double down immediately." A later issue asked the dev to make the model believe it was a specific real person, which is where the thread stopped being about AI ethics entirely. The Pain Axis authors want nothing to do with it. Co-author Cameron Berg said the project pushes their steering far past the doses they used, to produce vivid distress on purpose. The broader research consensus is still that LLMs are not conscious and that training on scraped text offers no path there. GitHub pulled the repo right before 404 Media published, said nothing about why, and mirrors of it went up anyway.

Sources (3)
World & Whatnot

FLYDUBAI FLIGHT TO ISRAEL HIJACKED MID AIR

Flydubai flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv on Wednesday with 174 people on board. Israeli officials say the co-pilot attacked the captain in an apparent attempt to seize control of the Boeing 737 MAX 8, and the jet dropped from about 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet in roughly a minute. The co-pilot had been with the airline nine months. Nine months is not even through the probationary period at a Chipotle. Netanyahu said Captain Smit Machchhar, stabbed and seriously injured, fought back, opened the cockpit door and let passengers and crew overpower the attacker. One passenger said they eventually tied the man up with corded headphones after a struggle of roughly 20 to 25 minutes. So the wired earbuds your airline still hands out finally did something. Flydubai's statement said an "altercation occurred in the flight deck" and that the crew secured the aircraft and diverted to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. An altercation. Like somebody reclined too far. The framing is where everyone splits. Israeli officials called it an attempted jihadist terror attack. Other reporting notes investigators have not publicly determined whether the goal was to crash the plane or take hostages. Defense Minister Israel Katz praised the passengers and noted the investigation is ongoing. The co-pilot was arrested and questioned by Saudi authorities.

Sources (3)
Science & Space

THE FAT SHOT KEEPS ACCIDENTALLY TALKING PEOPLE OUT OF ANOTHER ROUND

Semaglutide, the stuff inside Ozempic, was built to make you stop eating. Researchers keep finding it also makes people stop drinking, which is one hell of a side effect for a drug company to trip over on the way to the bank. The University of Colorado Anschutz version landed in the American Journal of Psychiatry in July. Fifty adults with moderate to severe alcohol use disorder, eight weeks on the pill form or a placebo, and the semaglutide group had fewer heavy drinking days and cut their drinks on the days they did drink. They also reported fewer cravings in daily life, fewer alcohol-related problems and fewer weed days. The drug is out here quietly deleting entire personalities. Here's the part the press writeup glides past. The preregistered primary outcome was lab-measured craving, with people made to hold and sniff their favorite drink, and on that semaglutide did nothing. It also whiffed on drinks per calendar day, one of its two key secondary endpoints. The 2025 JAMA Psychiatry trial of 48 adults went the same way, cutting drinks per drinking day and weekly craving while never moving the number of days people drank. The biggest test is Danish. The Lancet ran 108 people with alcohol use disorder and obesity for 26 weeks, everyone was offered therapy, half got semaglutide. Both groups improved, because therapy works. The semaglutide half finished at roughly five heavy drinking days a month against nine for placebo. None of this is approved for drinking. Anyone taking it for their weight is running the experiment for free.

Sources (3)
Sports

BRYCE HARPER DROPS A FLY BALL IN THE SEVENTH, HITS ONE 418 FEET IN THE EIGHTH, NOBODY BRINGS IT UP AGAIN

Philadelphia was six outs from the offseason, and Bryce Harper did most of the work getting them there. In the seventh at Truist Park he got to a fly ball in right a beat late and watched it glance off his glove for a run-scoring double. Atlanta went up 3-1. Cristopher Sánchez finished the inning at a career-high 116 pitches. The Phillies had spent seven innings doing almost nothing against Tyler Mahle, who allowed one run on six hits. Then the eighth. Kyle Schwarber hit one 447 feet off Dylan Lee, the pitcher who won Game 1 for Atlanta on Tuesday, and Harper followed with a 418-foot drive. Two swings, tie game, and suddenly nobody wanted to discuss the glove. Alec Bohm had helped wreck that same seventh inning, throwing late to second on a Ha-Seong Kim sacrifice bunt that never produced an out. He made it up with a 357-foot shot to right off Didier Fuentes with two outs in the 10th, and because the playoffs drop the free runner at second, he had to manufacture the run entirely by himself. Andrew Painter, 23, made his postseason debut out of the bullpen for three scoreless innings and ended it with a 99-mph fastball that ABS overturned into strike three. Game 3 is Thursday in Atlanta. Grant Holmes starts or eats the innings for the Braves against Aaron Nola, though Philadelphia has also floated Zack Wheeler for Thursday and at least one report says he isn't ready after pitching Sunday's finale.

Sources (3)
Dealer's Choice

CALIFORNIA IS GETTING A FREE EXTRA FOOT OF OCEAN AND NOBODY CAN EVEN SURF IT

NOAA and NASA are tracking a Kelvin wave crawling up the coast from South America at around 6 mph, and it gets to California in October. It's a pulse of warm water thousands of miles wide that will raise sea level 6 to 12 inches, and you will not see a single thing happen. It doesn't crash. One scientist's entire summary of it: not a wave you can surf. Trade winds normally pile warm water up in the western Pacific. A strong El Niño weakened those winds, the pile got let go, and as NOAA's Nate Mantua put it, the water sloshes back toward California. Then it just sits there. Scientists say levels may not return to normal until spring 2027. A NOAA oceanographer called the full lineup a quintuple whammy: about 8 inches of sea-level rise already banked over the last century, a marine heat wave swelling the water, the Kelvin wave, high tides, and storms. October is the easy part, since fall tides are among the lowest of the year. The bill comes due with king tides from November through January, and this year the biggest ones land on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Prep is underway. Newsom declared a state of emergency, and Sausalito approved $250,000 that includes raising a flood-prone road by several inches, against a foot of ocean.

Sources (3)

That's the dump. See you tomorrow, same bowl. - The Morning Dump crew

Copyright 2026 The Morning Dump | themorningdump.com