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View More NewsA review of The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life after AI by Cory Doctorow; 240 pages; Verso (June 2026)In late August 2010, I was a senior Obama-appointed official in the office of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and I received a message informing me that the secretary wanted to see me right away. These encounters never start well and usually end with someone’s head on a pike. The nerve centre of a 400,000-person agency, that office works on dozens of projects at the same time, and I had no idea which one had just blown up.VA used to be a…
from the if-only-that-mattered dept I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that this second Trump administration has never shown much concern for the Hatch Act. If you’re not familiar with that particular law, it makes it illegal for most of the members of the executive branch of the federal government, and some state representatives, to engage in partisan political activity. Sometimes the question of whether something violates the Hatch Act can be tricky, or a matter of interpretation. And sometimes RFK Jr. rides in to provide a nakedly blatant example of a Hatch Act violation. Ron Wyden is calling…
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The rise and fall of Graham Platner, who has just withdrawn from the U.S. Senate race in Maine in which he was challenging Republican incumbent Susan Collins, makes one think of a fairy tale or myth in which a character of humble status is suddenly elevated to wealth and high status by some magical entity but is led astray by character flaws such as greed or hubris and is just as precipitously hurled back into lowly obscurity. In Graham’s case, the magical entities were progressive political operatives Dan Moraff, Leanne Fan and Moritz Katz, who thought they had found the…
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An American biotech company that specializes in stem cell therapy has been waiting for nearly three years for the Food and Drug Administration to…
The lack of an ethics provision remains one of the biggest sticking points. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), one of two Democrats who voted to…
Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the more outspoken voices in the US Congress associating digital assets with illicit activities, has called on President Donald…
In brief Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 on Thursday—a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that ranked alongside Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol. Semiconductor stocks…
Key takeaways:Bitcoin’s drop below $75,000 marks a sharp decoupling from a record-breaking stock market fueled by the AI boom.Crypto trader sentiment remains weak as…
In brief YouTube is moving AI disclosure labels into more visible positions on Shorts and long-form videos. The platform will automatically apply labels to…
The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to censor bad news about the Iran war. President Donald Trump even accused journalists…
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission wants to tear up the remnants of an old dispute with crypto exchange Gemini, with the agency insisting…
Tokenized commodities platform Streamex said it is launching a Solana-based marketplace for trading tokenized assets in partnership with Orca, a decentralized exchange built on…
In brief ElevenLabs licensed Stan Lee’s voice and likeness for AI-generated narration and comic-inspired visuals. The company also launched AI music filters and a…
A post jocularly characterizing AIs as our children reminded me of this stanza from Philip Larkin: They fuck you up, your mum and dad.…
Robinhood (HOOD) is giving retail traders a new way to automate investing: letting artificial intelligence make decisions and place trades on their behalf.Customers can…