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First Branch Forecast – “The House of Representatives is poised to inflict catastrophic damage on its own institutional capacity. Today, the House Appropriations Committee released its proposed funding levels for the Legislative Branch, which would slash the Government Accountability Office’s budget by 50 percent and the Library of Congress by 12 percent from FY 2024 …
Poynter: “AI, video games and old clips flooded social media after the June 21 attacks. Here’s how to tell what’s real. Images and videos of explosions, fires, protests and weapons went viral after the United States’ June 21 attacks on three Iranian nuclear sites — but many of them didn’t show what was actually happening. …
Anthropic Paper – Highlights We stress-tested 16 leading models from multiple developers in hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviors before they cause real harm. In the scenarios, we allowed models to autonomously send emails and access sensitive information. They were assigned only harmless business goals by their deploying companies; we then tested whether …
Bloomberg – no paywall: “Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to prepare a memo on how to abolish itself and create a re-branded, radically smaller disaster response organization, according to a copy of the document reviewed by Bloomberg News. As recently as last week, President Donald Trump and Noem said …
“To aid in wildfire preparedness, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has released a publicly accessible online database of wildfire mitigation plans. The new resource offers a centralized, searchable collection of more than 400 publicly available wildfire mitigation plans developed by 170 utilities across 19 U.S. states. These plans span from 2019 through 2028 and provide …
The Verge: “Google Earth will now let you look at historical imagery from Street View. The update, which comes as part of the tool’s 20th anniversary, allows you to see how a location has changed over time. Google Earth already offers the ability to switch to Street View while viewing satellite imagery, but now you …
“The IPIE’s landmark assessment reveals that the greatest barrier to climate action is the global spread of misinformation about climate science. The IPIE’s Scientific Panel on Information Integrity about Climate Science latest assessment, Information Integrity about Climate Science: A Systematic Review, and its accompanying Summary for Policymakers, represents the most comprehensive analysis yet of how …
Fast Company: “Want to save pages on the web for later? You could always bookmark them in your browser of choice, of course. But that’s a quick way to end up with a messy bookmarks toolbar. And organizing your browser’s bookmarks isn’t exactly a pleasant experience. Services like Pocket solved this problem in their own …
Politico.eu: “Donald Trump’s return to the White House is forcing Europe to reckon with a major digital vulnerability: The U.S. holds a kill switch over its internet. As the U.S. administration raises the stakes in a geopolitical poker game that began when Trump started his trade war, Europeans are waking up to the fact that …
Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide – “Which AIs to use, and how to use them. Every few months I put together a guide on which AI system to use. Since I last wrote my guide, however, there has been a subtle but important shift in how the major AI products work. Increasingly, it …
The Pentagon Pizza Orders Conspiracy Theory Explainer. The bigger the crisis and the more time government staffers are stuck in their offices, the more pizza they eat. At least that’s what the internet thinks according to the “Pizza Meter” theory, which some believe could even predict the beginning of a possible World War III. The …
SkyViewer: “This data visualization is a product of NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This groundbreaking new observatory, located on Cerro Pachón in Chile, will revolutionize the way we explore the cosmos. Using the largest camera ever built, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years and create the greatest cosmic movie ever made. To …
