They See Your Photos
“Your photos reveal a lot of private information. In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo. See what they see…”
A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID
The Handbasket:” Whistleblower says Trump officials thought USAID did ‘just abortions,’ asked for ‘Barney-style’ slides before gutting agency, per new book. One of the first acts by the second Trump administration was the complete gutting of the US Agency for International Development, a workforce of more than 10,000 people that had administered humanitarian aid and …
Content Authenticity and Provenance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
“Released in February 2026 as a product of the C2PA for G+LAM Community of Practice, the white paper “Content Authenticity and Provenance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Call-to-Action for the LAMs Community” advocates for libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) to take proactive and pragmatic steps to ensure that digital collections content, especially content …
FOIA Files: DOJ says Trump need not comply with records law
Jason Leopold, Bloomberg – “Welcome back to another edition of FOIA Files. I thought it was a cruel April Fool’s joke when on April 1, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel publicly released a bombshell 52-page opinion. It said that the Presidential Records Act is “unconstitutional” and that President Donald Trump “need not …
The 2026 AI Index Report
“AI’s influence on society has never been more pronounced. – At Stanford HAI, we believe AI is poised to be the most transformative technology of the 21st century. But its benefits won’t be evenly distributed unless we guide its development thoughtfully. The AI Index offers one of the most comprehensive, data-driven views of artificial intelligence. …
The United States is destroying itself
The Guardian: “The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, …
I built an explorer of 25+ years of New York Times coverage – 1.5B words and 2.2M articles
Below the Fold: “I used New York Times API/archive data to build an explorer of the paper’s coverage over the last 25+ years: 1.5 billion words across 2.2 million articles by about 26,000 reporters. You can use it to look at: which reporters covered which beats who shared bylines with whom article frequency and length …
Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space
Phiresky: “Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do – collect and share as many books as possible. One shadow library, Anna’s …
Meta builds AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff
FT.com – no paywall: “Meta is building an artificial intelligence version of Mark Zuckerberg that can engage with employees in his stead, as part of a broader push to remake the Big Tech company around AI. The $1.6tn group has been working on developing photorealistic, AI-powered 3D characters that users can interact with in real …
The Internet’s Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril
Wired [no paywall] – “This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under …
Forecasting the Economic Effects of AI
We completed the most comprehensive study of how economists and AI experts think AI will affect the U.S. economy. Forecasting Research Institute. Mar 31, 2026. “There is widespread disagreement over the impact that AI will—or won’t—have on the U.S. economy: some prominent voices warn of a transformative upheaval and large-scale job losses, while others predict …
Anthropic Asks Christian Leaders for Help Steering Claude’s Spiritual Development
Washington Post via MSN: “Anthropic recently “hosted about 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and the business world” for a two-day summit: Anthropic staff sought advice on how to steer Claude’s moral and spiritual development as the chatbot reacts to complex and unpredictable ethical queries, participants said. The wide-ranging discussions also covered …