MAROKO133 Breaking ai: One of 1,500 Cold War bunkers found in UK castle, was built to moni

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: One of 1,500 Cold War bunkers found in UK castle, was bui

Long thought to have been lost, archaeologists rediscovered a Cold War bunker in North Yorkshire, bringing to light a slice of British history, when tensions were on the rise between NATO countries.

In a castle of North Yorkshire, English Heritage archaeologists found a 15-foot shaft to a remarkably large bunker that was built between 1963-64. As it had been abandoned in 1968, its location was veiled until now.

But a radar-powered survey on the ground guided by analyzed historical records enabled pioneering archaeologists to take off on March 7 and find the long-lost monitoring post commissioned by the Royal Observer Corps (ROC), built to measure nuclear attacks and shield its occupants from the blasts.

As the BBC reported, about 1,500 of these underground observational posts were built throughout Britain. Heritage Daily continued that “20,000 volunteers were tasked with detecting nuclear blasts and reporting data…” Head of Collections at English Heritage, Kevin Booth, said that this rediscovery demonstrates “the strategic importance of the Scarborough headland… across thousands of years of history.”

Furthermore, it might encourage us to think about the rising tensions over the use of nuclear weapons, as the Cold War illustrates the hysteria, fear, and reality around the more-than-fatal consequences of nuclear warfare.

A Cold War bunker built at historic observation post

“Wherever you lived in Britain, you were probably no more than a few miles from an ROC post,” Booth said in the Independent UK, “yet few people knew they existed.”

At 15.6 feet long and 7.6 feet wide, Tim Kitching, a former ROC volunteer, told BBC that “cozy would be a diplomatic statement” to make about its cramped conditions.

But, as a covert operation, the ROC was successful in rendering it difficult to find. Archaeologists finally detected the spot, hidden under grass and soil, where the shaft entrance lay dormant and waiting, perhaps for an opportune moment to surface.

At first, Booth even admitted that it might appear strange for a Cold War bunker to have been built inside Scarborough Castle, but he went on to explain that the headlands had served as an observation post for thousands of years.

It was previously a Bronze Age settlement, a Roman signal station, a medieval castle, a Second World War gun battery, and then, finally, a Cold War bunker, also meant to monitor nuclear attacks in the case that the world tipped over into total loss of sense.

Bunker built to monitor nuclear blasts

As per the BBC, this bunker would have housed three ROC volunteers, whose objective was to map out the area where Soviet bombs dropped, so they could map it out, with rations to keep them for two weeks, though Hiroshima taught us that the destructive impact of nuclear bombs extends well beyond that mark.

Sadako, who still stands as a symbol of peace, famously contracted Leukemia ten years after being exposed to the radiation from the atomic bomb. Though, as a technical note, all atomic bombs are nuclear weapons, but not all nuclear weapons are atomic bombs.

The bunker would have housed a bomb indicator, or a measuring device, communication equipment, a camera, and bunk beds. There was a larger bunker in York that served as a home base, known as “20 Group Headquarters” in York, a tourist attraction. About 70 monitoring posts would have sent their data to them, as per the BBC.

For English Heritage, who spearheaded the project, they described it to the BBC as a completion of Scarborough Castle’s history, lining the Cold War with a long lineage of providing protection, so it’s even comical, not necessarily funny, that the bunker recently resurfaced as a real reminder of the real implications at stake in entertaining or provoking the use of nuclear weapons.  

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stu

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers.

The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid.

That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews.

"When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is."

Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it

Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale.

Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question… You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that."

The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks.

What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty."

The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud

Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud.

"Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud."

The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health."

Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus.

How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products

The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft.

With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours.

The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks.

Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer.

Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules."

The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit."

The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less

Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research ind…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com