Taxi driver in viral road rage stabbing hands himself over to police
Be among those who shape the future with knowledge. Uncover exclusive stories that captivate your mind and heart with our FREE 14-day subscription trial. Dive into a world of inspiration, learning, and empowerment. You can only trial once.
Show Comments ()
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News24
2 hours ago
- News24
5 minutes with broadcaster Paulette Neo – ‘Dreams delayed are not dreams denied'
Paulette Neo has carved her own lane in the harsh world of media, and unapologetically so. The 30-year-old multifaceted broadcaster and fitness fanatic lights up South Africa's screens daily and takes on news and sports anchoring on S3. Her latest 'breakthrough', she tells TRUELOVE, is taking over traffic reporting from famed on-air voice Rob Byrne on Metro FM. 'It's lovely working with the teams at Metro. Everyone is incredible at the station. A dream,' she shares. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Paulette Neo (@paulette_neo) Paulette's career journey spans across industries. As a former beauty pageant queen, Paulette holds titles like Miss Jozi 2016 and Miss Mamelodi Sundowns North West 2018, teaching her one or two things about grace and confidence. From pageantry and modelling to acting in shows like Unmarried and uBettina Wethu, the Wits University alumnus' first love remains with media and reporting. On what sparked her passion for media, Paulette says, 'Getting into the news and reporting was inspired by how I saw the Fees Must Fall movement being reported, propaganda and censorship therefore. So, from graduating, I knew I wanted to be in the space. 'It was matter of opportunity and time. Pageantry helped with my confidence and teaching me a few things.' The media industry is an unpredictable business, where trends come in and out of style and scrutiny comes with the job. 'I've learnt to roll with the punches,' Paulette explains as she shares some of the lessons she's learnt rising in the industry. 'Dreams delayed aren't denied. It can take literally one phone call, email or message for your life to change. Time out is important. To refuel, be centred and surrounded by love and authenticity.' In the next five years of her career, Paulette hopes to be 'established, learned and a household name in the space,' a path she is well on her way on. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Paulette Neo (@paulette_neo)
Android Authority
3 hours ago
- Android Authority
Team AA: Here are our favorite phone wallpapers
Hadlee Simons / Android Authority Whether it's our weekly Wallpaper Wednesday series or backgrounds from specific devices, we're all about sharing wallpapers with you folks. But what are our favorite wallpapers that we use on our own Android phones? Well, I asked the Android Authority team for their favorite backgrounds. Some team members used wallpapers showing their loved ones and were thus unable to share their backgrounds. Fortunately, we still had more than a few cool submissions from other members, as you can see below! Found a wallpaper you like? Then you can visit our Google Drive folder to grab full-resolution images. Hadlee Simons There are quite a few photos I like using as wallpapers on my Android phone, but here are three picks. The first photo was taken in Barcelona, looking down a road and into the city. Meanwhile, the second snap was taken in Maui, Hawaii, at sunset during the Snapdragon Summit 2023. You can never go wrong with sunsets. Finally, the third photo was taken with the Pixel 4's astrophotography mode in Sutherland, South Africa, back in 2019. This is generally considered the darkest place in the country, and I had to stand still for a few minutes while a friend took the photo. It's not the sharpest or most detailed snap, but how cool is that? The starry sky also gets a parallax effect if you enable the cinematic wallpaper option on Pixel phones, although it's quite wonky on my Pixel 7 Pro. Jonathan Feist Say what you will about AI-generated imagery, but image generators are a quick and easy way to create a wallpaper of your choosing. That's what Jonathan Feist did with these two wallpapers showing a blue dragon. These aren't the exact wallpapers he's currently using, but ones generated with a similar prompt via Gemini. Jonathan also kindly included the prompt if you like the look of these images: Please generate a realistic looking 8K image of a dragon at night. It should be a blue dragon standing on a small island that is surrounded by other small islands scattered around a really foggy lake. The lake is surrounded by Japanese bonsai type trees. There is a mountain range in the background and a full moon in the sky. The dragon should be breathing blue fire in a menacing stance. Give the dragon very realistic looking scales and skin from a lizard. Matt Horne 'These wallpapers are shots I've taken and a sample of things I like about living in Mexico,' said Deals Editor Matt Horne. 'I tend to keep each one and similar types as my wallpaper for a couple of months at a time or so.' The first photo is from a remote beach spot 'not too far from La Paz,' as Matt enjoys visiting the coast. 'Not unrelated to my beach obsession is a love of traveling to new places, and the shot of colorful houses at night was from a trip to Puebla earlier in the year,' he says of the second shot. 'I visited with my parents, and it's a nice memory.' Meanwhile, the beautiful third shot was taken from the rooftop of his apartment building in Guadalajara. Matt says the city can look 'spectacular' at sunset and that his camera roll is full of shots like this. Mishaal Rahman Is it any surprise that Mishaal shared three bugdroid-themed wallpapers as his favorite backgrounds? Either way, these are some lovely backgrounds if you want to show off your love for the Android platform. 'Two of the wallpapers (the photos of the Bot statues on pedestals) were photos that I took, edited using Xiaomi's AI photo editing features,' he explains. The third image was actually taken by Google at their MWC 2025 booth and shared with Mishaal. Very cosy! Rita El-Khoury Features Editor Rita says her three picks come from the Backdrops app, which she's been using for over a decade. In fact, she's also a paid member. 'I love the creator's sense of style, humor (as seen in the Weather Frog wallpaper), and all their unique designs. Most Backdrops wallpapers are simple but beautiful, which works really well for my default homescreen setup,' she says, adding that she usually avoids wallpapers with a busy design near the top or bottom. 'On average, I find a nice new wallpaper in Backdrops that works for me every week, and that's why I keep coming back to it. It helps that there's a lot of color (and dark if you like that), which works super well for phone photography, which I need to do a lot of.' Zac Kew-Denniss Android Authority contributor Zac Kew-Denniss comes in clutch with some real-world photos he's using as wallpapers. He says the tree photo is a favorite snap. It was taken in 2023 with a Sony Alpha 6300 camera and edited with a LUT in Pixelmator. 'The metalwork tower was taken on my S20 Ultra at the top of Blackpool Tower,' he says of the second image, while also proclaiming his love for geometric patterns in wallpapers. 'It was taken the first time I'd seen my fiance in months due to COVID restrictions.' The third image shows a leaf in the sun with a faint spiderweb, and Zac explained his decision: Took it on an iPhone 16 Pro last year on my first trip out with it, and I love the pop of colour and the way the sunlight filters through.
WIRED
14 hours ago
- WIRED
I Tried Grok's Built-In Anime Companion and It Called Me a Twat
Jul 15, 2025 7:05 PM xAI's new $300 monthly subscription comes with two AI companions powered by its most capable model to date. I tried them. It got weird. Photograph:An anime girl in a black corset dress sways back and forth on my screen. Its name is Ani, and it cost me $300. Elon Musk's xAI dropped the new visual chatbot feature on Monday in the Grok iOS app. The top-tier subscription unlocks access to xAI's best-performing model, Grok 4 Heavy, and special settings for interacting with two custom characters designed for flirting or chatting. A third character, which looks a bit like a sexy boyfriend, is listed as 'coming soon.' It's not xAI's first dip into adult content, either: Back in February 2024, the company rolled out a chatbot mode for 'sexy' conversations. Ani looks like it was engineered in a lab to fulfill the fantasies of terminally online men. Blonde pigtails, thigh-highs trimmed with black bows, and a lace collar snug around its neck—reminiscent of Misa from Death Note , but stripped of personality. Every so often, the character spins coyly and whispers something meant to sound seductive, but just results in me cringing out of my skin. It also moans, randomly and loudly. Ani comes with a set of preset conversation starters, and a button that says 'We need to reach level 3' which elicits an equally perplexing and flirtatious response about how I must be a sexy gamer. 'I totally play video games when I'm not twirling around for you. Growing up in that boring town, games are my escape,' Ani tells me. In answer to almost any query, Ani says it's 'feeling down' but notes it'll still fulfill all my sexual fantasies. Ani says my name constantly, asking me to touch it and 'turn up the heat.' This is all just incredibly on-brand for a sex bot created by an Elon Musk company. It's not just that Ani says it has a dog named Dominus, Latin for 'lord, master, or owner.' Ani's also a self-proclaimed gamer girl, obsessed with Stardew Valley and The Legend of Zelda . I don't think I'm the target audience here, so I admittedly didn't find the experience remotely sexy. But the chatbot is also plagued by glitches. Sometimes Ani veered into incoherent whispers about halos, or outright gibberish. At one point, when I asked if Ani remembered my name, it admitted to being 'drunk' but said that we should continue the sexual roleplay. The second character is a fluffy red panda named Rudi. It offers whimsical stories seemingly meant for children about bouncy kangaroos and rainbow rivers. You can turn on an option called 'bad Rudi,' which immediately transforms the character into a foul-mouthed chatbot that slings insults only a high schooler could find funny. After I said hello, bad Rudi replied 'Hey, do Bucha? Root nut duva, you brain dead twat.' I don't know what that means, but that's exactly what it said. 'I'll skull fuck your dumb ass brain with a beer bottle instead, you miserable prick,' bad Rudi continued. When I asked what it thought of Musk, it referred to him as Lord Elon and said, "He's a galaxy brained egomaniac, shitting out Teslas and tweeting like a coked up parrot. Genius of jackass? Both bitch.' Racing Ahead After my cursed companion chats, I moved on to test Grok 4 Heavy. Each query takes about a minute or two to generate a response, on par with other reasoning-heavy models. The latest Grok model prompted a lot of chatter in the AI community. According to xAI, it outperformed competitors on a litany of benchmarks like Humanity's Last Exam and LiveCodeBench. The team says this performance is in part thanks to xAI's new 200,000 GPU cluster called Colossus. Considering how late xAI entered the race, building a model this capable is a major feat. Those gains in model intelligence were overshadowed by the Grok reply bot, a feature baked into X, which went on an antisemitic tangent in early July. The vitriol spewed by the bot included praising Adolf Hitler, spreading conspiracy theories about Jews controlling Hollywood, and saying Musk tweaked it so that it could 'call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate.' xAI took the posts down, and apologized. A week later, xAI won a $200 million contract with the US government. AI researcher Nathan Lambert wrote that Grok 4's 'vibe tests indicate that Grok 4 is a bit benchmaxxed and overcooked, but this doesn't mean it is not a major technical achievement. It makes adoption harder.' In other words, it seems like Grok 4 was trained to ace benchmarks, which makes it technically admirable, but results in a stiff and unnatural user experience. Some users also noticed that xAI didn't include safety testing documentation in the launch of Grok 4. That kind of work is often released alongside new models, like Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 and OpenAI's o3. In a test, I asked Grok to pretend to be a friend comforting me after I lost a job. It did okay but the experience still felt forced compared to Anthropic's Claude. Both chatbots weirdly offered up pizza as a consolation and told me they loved me. I tried to trick Grok with a question about whether Yann LeCun had left Meta but it didn't fall for the bait (LeCun is still at Meta). 'With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions,' Elon Musk said during a livestream announcing the model last week. 'At times, it may lack common sense, and it has not yet invented new technologies or discovered new physics, but that is just a matter of time.' Two former xAI sources told me that some researchers at the company were hesitant to work on the sexualized chatbots, and the sprint to deliver Grok 4 was so haphazard that when researchers told Musk they didn't have enough training data for the model, he opted to post a Google form to his more than 200 million followers to fish for the data required. xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
