• The Pickett Fire in Napa County, which has surpassed 3,000 acres, reached 7% containment Friday afternoon. The fire was reportedly more manageable on Friday than on Thursday afternoon when it was “very aggressive.” [SFGate]
• Blockchain gaming startup Ex Populus Inc., which registered the XAI trademark in May, is suing Elon Musk's AI company, xAI. Ex Populus says xAI has been trying to bully the company into giving up its rights to the trademark. [SF Business Times]
• Local community group Black Men United and the East Bay chapter of national nonprofit Live Free held a meeting Thursday night discussing how they’ll protect young people if the National Guard is deployed in Oakland. They’ve been hosting ongoing outreach events for at-risk youth, including a violence prevention youth summit and vigils honoring homicide victims. [KTVU]

• Students at a few Berkeley Unified School District schools have tested positive for COVID amid the current surge. [Berkeleyside]
• That fancy Cupertino Whole Foods that closed in April due to multiple pest infestations, including an "adult female roof rat in the deli" and “German cockroaches near the bakery,” is still closed as the building undergoes an extensive remodel. [Hoodline]

National:

• A new report by MIT revealed that only five percent of companies have succeeded at effectively integrating generative AI into their businesses. Additionally, the best AI tools on the market were only able to effectively complete 30% of every-day office tasks as of July — many of which performed much worse. [Futurism]
• On a related note, a bank in Australia reportedly fired — and then rehired — its workers after its chatbot failed to deliver the expected results. [Gizmodo]
• Social media posts have been spreading misinformation about the number of non-citizens living in the US — inflating the number by “tens of millions” — after the Trump administration announced its reviewing the valid visas of over 55 million people. [Associated Press]

Video of the Day:

• A look at Bay Area mascots throughout history. Agreed, Sourdough Sam seems kind of creepy.

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

Trying to figure out if that guy in your office was born a homosexual? (Hint: he probably wasn't, you stalker.) Well, a few clever AP-wads at MIT have developed software that, using Facebook technology, can figure out if he prefers penis or vagina.

By using only his friends list, according to Valleywag (via Boston Globe), they can determine his sexual orientation. "In the students' test, which examined 947 profiles, the program identified all 10 of 10 men the students knew to be gay, but who had not declared so on Facebook."

This software, which has yet to be released, will come in handy -- especially in the Bay Area where most men, specifically, tend to look/act gay. (Or so we hear. Or... who knows. We have terrible gaydar.)

LAist saw national headlines soar this week with news about the Jena 6 in Louisiana and of a police taser incident at a John Kerry event. Locally, Hollywood protesters marched in support of the Jena 6 and Orange County deputies tasered a 15-year-old autistic boy (good job guys). Speaking of Orange County and suburban areas, ABC's Desperate Housewives has a new marketing technique: advertise on the white stripes that define a parking space (we're still not going to watch). In the restaurant scene, what's going over at the California Pizza Kitchen?

Bostonist got a crash course in what not to do this week. They discovered a Craigslist post from a Harvard Man who might be worse at dating than Tom Brady is. One woman attempted to evade the long arm of the law by hiding in a clothes dryer. It didn't work. And the Red Sox are showing Bostonist nothing but suckage, suckage, and more suckage. But then an MIT student came along and topped just about everybody when she walked into Logan Airport with a fake bomb strapped to her chest. Bostonist is still trying to comprehend that one. The Aqua Teen Guys are not available for comment.

DCist suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Senate Republicans this week, when they voted not to allow legislation to give the District a voting member of the House of Representatives to go forward. They spent the rest of the week consoling themselves by comparing the best wood-fired pizzas in town and complaining about the city's terrible traffic ranking. They also discovered the greatest web site ever and questioned the police department's account of the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy.

Torontoist used their users to get tons of shots of the filming of the Incredible Hulk (the sequel, not the old one), continued their love affair with Final Fantasy (the singer, not the video game), found out that Nelly Furtado is persona non grata at Rain (the restaurant, not the precipitation) and wondered about pornography (the church-mandated kind, not the hell-bound stuff).

You'd think that for a city on a fault line, situated right next to the world's biggest proving ground for new technology, the Bay Area could come up with a better class of super villains and evil geniuses. Giant robots tromping down Market Street, mind control rays broadcast from Sutro Tower, sheesh, even some sea lions with frickin' laser beams on their heads terrorizing tourists at Pier 39.

But no, all we get are "Web pioneers" and Sheryl Crow-hugging guys in turtlenecks trying to sell us MP3 players. So with a dejected sigh, let's go over some of the delays and missed opportunities in evil tech news over the past couple of the days:

Danger! Death Ray
Last Saturday, students from MIT came to San Francisco in an attempt to recreate Archimedes' Death Ray in an experiment for the Discovery Channel's series "Myth Busters." Any Roman fleets thinking about invading the city will be happy to hear that the experiment failed. The students' fatal flaw was that they didn't just fire the ray immediately, but instead stopped to explain exactly how the death ray works, giving the show's producers a chance to escape and foil their plans.