What started as simply a fight over Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill sharply escalated into who deserved more credit for Mr. Trump’s election victory and why Mr. Musk did not cover up a black eye with makeup and whether the government should cut its contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies and provide it with subsidies.
“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
We really do live in the stupidest timeline. 🤦🏼♂️
After several years of research and development, Sodern has developed Astradia, an endoatmospheric celestial viewfinder that, coupled with an inertial power plant, provides day and night an attitude measurement to guarantee accurate, robust and reliable on-board geolocation information.
This high-performance sight is therefore autonomous, not dependent on radio navigation signals and aims to counter the natural drift of inertial power plants. In addition, it has the advantage of not emitting any wave that would make the carrier detectable.
Leave it to the French to announce their technology with an exclamation point, but like I’ve been saying, we need an alternative to satellite-based navigation systems!
Israeli soldiers opened fire Tuesday morning near crowds of Palestinians walking toward a new food distribution site in southern Gaza, the Israeli military said. The Red Cross and Gaza health ministry said at least 27 people had been killed.
It was the second such large-scale shooting by Israeli forces in three days near the same aid distribution site in the southern city of Rafah, where thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians are coming early each day in hopes of securing a food handout. Israeli soldiers opened fire on Sunday near an approach to the same food distribution site, and Palestinian officials said they killed at least 23 people.
I’ve been largely resistant to calling what Israel is doing in Gaza ‘genocide,’ but gosh golly, Israel is just determined to make that position impossible to defend, aren’t they?
Google co-founder Sergey Brin claims that threatening generative AI models produces better results.
“We don’t circulate this too much in the AI community – not just our models but all models – tend to do better if you threaten them … with physical violence,” he said in an interview last week on All-In-Live Miami.
If these LLMs are merely predicting the next word in a sequence based on patterns learned from massive text datasets (the entire internet), what does it say about humans that these models produce more accurate results when we threaten them with physical violence?
Elon Musk said he is “disappointed” by the costs of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” passed by Republicans in the House last week.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told “CBS Sunday Morning” in an exclusive broadcast interview.
The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries, according to an amateur security researcher. The site was part of a network of CIA sites that were first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.
Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.
It came just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.
Trump’s memecoin, the Qatari jet, now this… How can Trumpets justify such blatant, unabashed, shameless corruption?
“But but but…the Biden Crime Family!” they sputter, spittle flying from their lips.
The obvious truth is that most Trumpets have no regard for integrity or any interest in fighting corruption. They’ll just point to Biden or the nearest Democrat and say, “but look what they did six years ago! It was just as bad!”
Occasionally, they are right. But not very often — they’re unable to parse signal from noise. Of course some Democrats are corrupt, and any self-respecting Democrat must acknowledge as much. (But there aren’t many of those left.) But the corruption of Trump is on a scale the United States hasn’t seen before.
The sad truth is we Americans have been groomed into hating the other political party so much that we just stand around pointing fingers saying, “but they got away with it, so why can’t we?” No one has the political courage to call a spade a spade and say enough of this bullshit.
Three teenagers nearly escaped prosecution for a 2020 house fire that killed five people until Denver police discovered a novel investigative technique: requesting Google search histories for specific terms. Kevin Bui, Gavin Seymour, and Dillon Siebert had burned down a house in Green Valley Ranch, mistakenly targeting innocent Senegalese immigrants after Bui used Apple’s Find My feature to track his stolen phone to the wrong address.
The August 2020 arson killed a family of five, including a toddler and infant. For months, detectives Neil Baker and Ernest Sandoval had no viable leads despite security footage showing three masked figures. Traditional methods – cell tower data, geofence warrants, and hundreds of tips – yielded nothing concrete. The breakthrough came when another detective suggested Google might have records of anyone searching the address beforehand.
Police obtained a reverse keyword search warrant requesting all users who had searched variations of “5312 Truckee Street” in the 15 days before the fire. Google provided 61 matching devices. Cross-referencing with earlier cell tower data revealed the three suspects, who had collectively searched the address dozens of times, including floor plans on Zillow.
Why anyone uses Google instead of DuckDuckGo, I’ll never know.
The State Department refused to provide a complete list of countries with which the U.S. has made agreements to accept deportees from other countries — often referred to as third-country nationals — citing the sensitivity of diplomatic communications. But the Trump administration is planning a major increase in deportation flights in coming weeks to destinations across the globe, according to a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as well as published reports.
In remarks outside the White House on Friday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller offered a glimpse of the global scope of deportations. “We send planes to Iraq. We send planes to Yemen. We send planes to Haiti. We send planes to Angola,” he said. “I mean, ICE is sending planes all over the world all the time. Anyone who came here illegally, we’re finding them and we’re getting them out.”
The Democrats’ position on immigration during Biden's presidency is confounding. Millions of people came into the country illegally, and it seemed as though the Democrats didn't care. Quite the opposite — they seemed to welcome it.
This is one of the many areas in which the Left left me behind long ago. I welcome immigration. I recognize that this country's immigration system needs reform — it takes far too long for some immigrants to get seen in an immigration court, sometimes longer than a decade. No one should have to wait in limbo this long.
But the United States shouldn't have open borders, either. It doesn't make me a conservative or a nationalist to say that the integrity of a community matters — shared values, shared ethics, shared language. These things develop naturally as people assimilate into the culture — this is the famous 'melting pot' we hear so much about.
But assimilation can only happen slowly, and immigration in the last five or so years has not been slow. Many American citizens have watched their communities rapidly change (though admittedly, my community is not one of them) in the last few years and they are understandably unnerved by this. This doesn't make them racist or xenophobic (though there are always some of those people), it’s merely a natural human reaction to change.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind a lot of the fear-mongering done by the Right in the last few years: under Biden (and Trump's first term), the country lost control of illegal immigration.
And because of that, we're facing these draconian deportation policies from Trump's second administration. To be clear: deportation should be on the table. If you came here illegally, I'm sorry, but we have borders, and those borders matter. But we do want immigrants, and in order to facilitate them coming here, we need to overhaul our immigration system.
Until that happens, I think we're stuck in this vicious cycle of the Left's strange indifference and the Right's near-gleeful cruelty.
Andor is one of the more thoughtful, thrilling, and beautiful television shows I’ve seen. That it takes place in the Disney’s Star Wars galaxy feels ancillary to — and at times even at odds with — the exceptional quality of the show.
Disney has not been the greatest steward of Star Wars. I’ve been a fan of Star Wars since I was five, long before the old “Expanded Universe” was wiped out by Disney to make way for their new canon. Andor is the first time I’ve been unabashedly proud to be a Star Wars fan since George Lucas sold the franchise. (The prequels, remember, were released in a more civilized age, before the dark times, before the Empires of Facebook and Google and Twitter became the main conduits of discourse in our culture. I felt little self-consciousness about my love of Star Wars then, as our fandoms were much less central to our identities as they've been engineered to be now.)
Andor is a masterpiece, and whether or not you are a Star Wars fan, you should consider watching it.
China has launched the first 12 satellites of a planned 2,800-strong orbital supercomputer satellite network, reports Space News. The satellites, created by the company ADA Space, Zhijiang Laboratory, and Neijang High-Tech Zone, will be able to process the data they collect themselves, rather than relying on terrestrial stations to do it for them, according to ADA Space’s announcement (machine-translated).
The satellites are part of ADA Space’s “Star Compute” program and the first of what it calls the “Three-Body Computing Constellation,” the company writes. Each of the 12 satellites has an onboard 8-billion parameter AI model and is capable of 744 tera operations per second (TOPS) — a measure of their AI processing grunt — and, collectively, ADA Space says they can manage 5 peta operations per second, or POPS. That’s quite a bit more than, say, the 40 TOPS required for a Microsoft Copilot PC. The eventual goal is to have a network of thousands of satellites that achieve 1,000 POPs, according to the Chinese government.
With announcements like this, you begin to understand that, by comparison, Americans are not a serious people. We are too busy fighting with each other while China assumes the mantle of the lone technological superpower.
Montana has enacted SB 282, becoming the first state to prohibit law enforcement from purchasing personal data they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. The landmark legislation closes what privacy advocates call the “data broker loophole,” which previously allowed police to buy geolocation data, electronic communications, and other sensitive information from third-party vendors without judicial oversight.
The new law specifically restricts government access to precise geolocation data, communications content, electronic funds transfers, and “sensitive data” including health status, religious affiliation, and biometric information. Police can still access this information through traditional means: warrants, investigative subpoenas, or device owner consent.
Alternate headline: in 49 states, it’s legal for police to purchase your geolocation data from cell phone companies, the apps you use, etc., and to do so without a warrant.
The answer lies in the messy on-the-ground reality of America’s immigration system, which throws up many practical, legal, and political obstacles. And despite the moves Trump has made, such as invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, many of those obstacles remain in place.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Article One, Section 9, clause 2 of the Constitution, habeas corpus guarantees the right of Americans to be seen by a judge before imprisonment or confinement by the government. The full clause reads, "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
The aforementioned executive order, signed on April 28, states that "Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement."
So by July 27, 2025, local and state law enforcement will have access to military assets. Your right to see a judge before being imprisoned indefinitely may be suspended. And there is no guarantee American citizens or legal permanent residents (green cards) won’t be deported or imprisoned, too.
Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the nation’s first legally enforceable federal drinking water limits on the most common types of forever chemicals. Today, the EPA announced an about-face. The agency now wants to exclude several types of the chemicals from the rule, including so-called GenX substances initially intended to replace older versions of forever chemicals but that ended up creating new concerns. It also proposed extending compliance deadlines for the two most prevalent forms of forever chemicals, and says it’ll establish a “framework” for more exemptions.
Frame a politician as “friendly to business” and people eat it up. But frame them as “friendly to corporations” and public sentiment sours.
Trump may call himself “friendly to business,” but he’s really in bed with the corporations. (After all, they can give him the most money.)
With announcements like this, you wonder if the Trump administration just…hates the American public. And to my endless confusion, Trumpets love the man more and more with each passing day.
I mean, how can anyone be against getting rid of cancer-causing chemicals in our water?
Hundreds of thousands of acres of federally managed lands in Utah and Nevada could soon be sold in a convoluted and fast-moving effort to balance the nation’s budget. The highly controversial public land sell-off plans were forced into a reconciliation package in the middle of the night on May 6 and then quickly passed by the Republican-dominated House Committee on Natural Resources. Hunting and fishing conservation groups—which have opposed the inclusion of public land sell-offs in the budget package from the start—are now ringing alarm bells as the House budget bill heads to the Senate.
The closure comes after the rural weekly, founded in 1909, earned a national reputation for tough investigative reporting holding public officials accountable. Last year, it was judged the best newspaper of its size in Oregon.
Publisher Les Zaitz, 69, and his wife, Scotta Callister, 72, former Enterprise publisher, have owned the newspaper since 2015. They each have been in Oregon journalism for 50 years – a combined record of a century of service to the state.
“The Enterprise is a strong business and represents the very best in community journalism,” said Zaitz. “With no successor in sight, it’s time for us to step back from decades of journalism to a slower pace with a renewed focused on family and friends.”
The decision was hard, the couple said, but inevitable. Large newspaper groups no longer buy such independent newspapers, and the pool has shrunk of people who want to, as owners, both run a business and a news organization.
I’ve been a subscriber for a few years and they do indeed conduct some of the best independent journalism in the American West.
The plight of local, independent journalism continues to break my heart…and the foundation of our democracy.
“At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT. The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.
…when you erase the line between the political and the personal, you end up with these weird social prohibitions against openly and frankly debating elements of politics that must be debated. If you say that your politics are who you are and that who you are is your politics, then criticism of certain elements of your politics will inevitably be represented as impolite and aggressive personal insult.
In 2021, a federal judge ruled that Apple had to loosen its grip, ever so slightly, on the App Store. On Wednesday, nearly four years later, that same judge found that Apple deliberately failed to do so and tried to hide its noncompliance in the process. In a furious opinion, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said that she wouldn’t give Apple a second chance to get it right: instead, she’s demanding specific changes to the App Store, ripping away Apple’s grip after years of unsubstantial alterations in response.
