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WSJ via MSN no paywall + alternate free link: “White House officials are preparing an executive order targeting tech companies with what they see as “woke” artificial-intelligence models, their latest effort to go after diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, people familiar with the matter said. The order would dictate that AI companies getting federal contracts …
MakeUseOf: “While our phones’ screens are their main draw, phone backs have many tricks of their own. In fact, you have plenty of reasons to look at the back of your phone other than cleaning fingerprints…”
ProPublica: “The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data. ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport. Last month, in …
Follow up to Unlawful Orders: How Libraries Became the Front Line in the Fight for Democracy – See also The New York Times / no paywall – Proposed legislation would pressure publishers to adjust borrowing limits and find other ways to widen access. “It’s hard to imagine a library that doesn’t carry “Fahrenheit 451.” But …
The Augmented Educator: “After decades of playing cat-and-mouse with academic dishonesty, we’ve reached an inflection point. I strongly believe that the old definition of cheating is obsolete and pretending otherwise helps no one. As I reflect on the rapid transformation of educational assessment over the past two years, I’m struck by how fundamentally generative AI …
The New Yorker [no paywall] – For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end. What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing industry, in the nineteenth century. In a …
NextGov/FCW: “Days after President Donald Trump took office again in January, thousands of government pages with critical data were taken down as agencies rushed to comply with executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, as well as what the administration calls “gender ideology.” That day activated a community, said Denice Ross, the government’s former …
The Cambridge University Press & Assessment Handbook of the Law, Ethics and Policy of Artificial Intelligence (2025), edited by Nathalie Smuha, KU Leuven – is a comprehensive 600-page resource that brings together 30+ leading scholars across law, ethics, philosophy, and AI policy [Open Access – PDF and HTML]. It’s structured into three parts: AI, Ethics & …
“The historical tech tree is a project by Étienne Fortier-Dubois to visualize the entire history of technologies, inventions, and (some) discoveries, from prehistory to today. Unlike other visualizations of the sort, the tree emphasizes the connections between technologies: prerequisites, improvements, inspirations, and so on. These connections allow viewers to understand how technologies came about, at …
Follow up to Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI model and Copyrighted books to train AI? Fair. Storing them? See also The Atlantic – no paywall – Can AI companies keep stealing books to train their models? What Two Judicial Rulings Mean for the Future of Generative AI – “Should tech …
Micah Lee: “Things are heating up. Millions of people are taking to the streets against Trump’s rising authoritarianism. Communities around the US are organizing to defend against ICE raids, to protest Israeli genocide, for mutual aid, and for other forms of fighting fascism. Signal can help people safely organize in all of these contexts. Signal …
404 Media: “…Despite the fact that generative AI has been a destructive force against their businesses, their industry, and the truth more broadly, media executives still see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say this, …
