Buried in the House GOP’s massive budget reconciliation bill is a seemingly simple provision about AI regulation. The idea appears straightforward enough: stop states from regulating AI companies for the next decade. To do this, they quietly added language preventing states from regulating “artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems.” This is, […]
Support us on Patreon » We’ve written a lot about how understanding the playbook Elon Musk used at Twitter is key to understanding his current playbook with DOGE. The people who literally wrote the book on said playbook are New York Times journalists Ryan Mac and Kate Conger (the latter of whom joined the podcast last […]
It’s hardly a secret that Meta is an unpleasant company. That’s reflected both in terms of what happens behind closed doors, and its actions in the market. Some of its attempts to bully nations or even large economic blocks are well documented. But its threats outside Western markets are just as reprehensible, though less well […]
Progressive streamer Hasan Piker’s recent detention by CBP at the Chicago airport has generated widespread outrage — and rightfully so. No US citizen should be interrogated about their political beliefs when re-entering their own country. But while CBP’s behavior was egregious, Piker’s response was potentially even more dangerous: he chose to engage in a two-hour […]
Edit with the magic of AI, create with stylish effects and templates, and be creative on the go. With Adobe Photoshop Elements, it’s never been easier to fix flaws, fine-tune specific areas, and add motion to quickly bring your vision to life. A 3-year license is on sale for $100. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]
We’ll have to see if NSO Group has this sort of cash just laying around. Seems unlikely, what with its financial backers pulling out in response to a steady stream of negative headlines, as well as the company considering exiting the highly-profitable offensive malware market. Sure, this will be appealed and NSO will try to […]
The Trump administration has illegally declared the Digital Equity Act of 2021 “racist and unconstitutional,” and called for it to be dismantled. The grant program had been helping push affordable fiber optic broadband into communities long neglected regions by regional telecom monopolies, be they minority, low-income, rural, suburban, or urban. It’s the latest effort by […]
The nightmare that is Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts continues. The program, originally billed as a method for identifying all kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse within government spending, has shown itself to be more about giving Musk’s DOGE kiddos access to all kinds of data they shouldn’t have and something of a creative writing exercise […]
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon tried to fire the Department of Justice prosecutor leading an investigation into the president’s involvement in wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters. Since then, the DOJ has generally been run as an impartial law enforcement agency, separated from the executive office and partisan politics. Those guardrails are now being severely tested under the Trump […]
As this post explains, we have issues with the third installment of the Copyright Office’s report on AI. The rest of this post discusses them, but we note here that, while the report is due criticism, the criticism does not warrant or justify the firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter from her duly-appointed position. […]
The mass renditioning of migrants hasn’t gone exactly as planned. Sure, it’s resulted in extreme amounts of stupid cruelty, which is very much on-brand for Trump administrations, but the mass deportation efforts have also met with considerable resistance from federal court judges. The administration hoped to keep the courts from doing anything to protect migrants […]
The Trump administration last week fired one of the most respected librarians in America because she allegedly put “inappropriate books” in a library that basically gets copies of nearly all books and doesn’t even allow children to check out books. Carla Hayden, the astoundingly effective Librarian of Congress for the past nine years, was abruptly […]
Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. The tools within this suite have […]
You can believe any version of this story you want, but there’s no version that makes ICE and the DHS look like heroes protecting themselves from an actual threat. Let’s first take a look at the local reporting from where ICE is putting boots on the ground: Newark, New Jersey. Three House of Representatives members […]
We recently noted how device maker Garmin had decided to follow in the footsteps of Google’s Fitbit, and begin putting basic features behind an annoying subscription paywall to goose revenues. Garmin’s new “premium” Garmin+ tier takes several features users already enjoyed for free, put them behind a $7 per month paywall, and called it innovation. Users […]
This week, we’ve got a double winner taking first place for both insightful and funny. It’s Strawb with a comment about Darren Beattie embracing the Twitter Files playbook: Trump: “We will stop waste, fraud and abuse in the goverment!” Beattie: ‘Starts a project that wastes government time and money, and creates a fraudulent narrative that […]
This is a brief detour in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and Best Adaptation, but before we move on to the last two categories (Best Analog Game and Best Digital […]
The state of American health is in crisis at the moment due to a confluence of things entirely created by the current administration. Putting RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services (HHS) never felt like anything other than a move designed to troll Trump’s detractors and it shows. As the measles outbreak that […]
Gavin Newsom’s rightward shift represents not just a strategic miscalculation but a profound moral abdication based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both democratic principles and political reality. Newsom appears to have convinced himself that the path to defeating Trumpism lies in adopting its language, accepting its framing, and finding “common ground” with an administration actively dismantling constitutional […]
Correction/Update: In this original article, I included a quote from DHS that I thought was in response to today’s order, which implied DHS believed they could still detain Ozturk, but it appears it was in response to the earlier ruling on Wednesday when she was first ordered to be transferred. We have removed that quote […]
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