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Category: Technology

Roger Stone, Trump, the libertarian fantasy of Próspera, and the release of a convicted drug lord

Roger Stone, Trump, the libertarian fantasy of Próspera, and the release of a convicted drug lord

Reuters reports: President Donald Trump, who has cast himself as a relentless foe of illegal drugs, pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, freeing him from a 45-year sentence for conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the United States. Trump’s extraordinary move undermines decades of U.S. efforts to combat transnational drug networks, potentially damages Washington’s credibility in Latin America, and signals to corrupt actors that political connections can outweigh criminal accountability. Trump signed the pardon for Hernandez on Monday…

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DOGE has ‘burrowed into the agencies like ticks’

DOGE has ‘burrowed into the agencies like ticks’

Wired reports: To one member of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the last few months have been “crazy.” In a slideshow of photos and videos posted to Instagram last month, Yat Choi—who joined DOGE this spring—posted clips of Trump administration officials dancing on the White House lawn to“Y.M.C.A”; people loading into what appears to be a private jet; and house parties decorated with American flags and attendees donning red, white, and blue hats holding red Solo cups and…

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Flock uses overseas gig workers to build its surveillance AI

Flock uses overseas gig workers to build its surveillance AI

Wired and 404 Media report: Flock, the automatic license plate reader and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the United States, according to material reviewed by 404 Media that was accidentally exposed by the company. The findings bring up questions about who exactly has access to footage collected by Flock surveillance cameras and where people…

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China’s JUNO observatory shows promise in solving neutrino mysteries

China’s JUNO observatory shows promise in solving neutrino mysteries

Scientific American reports: Trillions of neutrinos whiz through our bodies every day, pulsing from the sun, outer space and deep beneath Earth. Yet these elusive subatomic particles have proven difficult to study. That could soon change, however. Buried 700 meters beneath the rolling hills of southern China, an enormous neutrino observatory called JUNO has released its first results after a mere 59 days of operation. And so far, they are very promising, physicists say. “The physics result is already world-leading…

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Inside the White House, David Sacks represents the ‘technocratic oligarchy’

Inside the White House, David Sacks represents the ‘technocratic oligarchy’

The New York Times reports: In July, David Sacks, one of the Trump administration’s top technology officials, beamed as he strode onstage at a neoclassical auditorium just blocks from the White House. He had convened top government officials and Silicon Valley executives for a forum on the booming business of artificial intelligence. The guest of honor was President Trump, who unveiled an “A.I. Action Plan” that was drafted in part by Mr. Sacks, a longtime venture capitalist. In a nearly…

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‘The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis

‘The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis

Rolling Stone reports: In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for his four ranch dogs. Healthy adults that these people knew were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly. “It was kinda grim,” Doherty says. Sixty years old, broad-chested, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Doherty…

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Colleges are preparing to self destruct by inserting AI into the educational process

Colleges are preparing to self destruct by inserting AI into the educational process

Michael Clune writes: After three years of doing essentially nothing to address the rise of generative AI, colleges are now scrambling to do too much. Over the summer, Ohio State University, where I teach, announced a new initiative promising to “embed AI education into the core of every undergraduate curriculum, equipping students with the ability to not only use AI tools, but to understand, question and innovate with them—no matter their major.” Similar initiatives are being rolled out at other…

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AI-powered surveillance firms are gunning for a share of the Gaza spoils

AI-powered surveillance firms are gunning for a share of the Gaza spoils

Sophia Goodfriend writes: Since mid-October, some 200 U.S. military personnel have been working out of a sprawling warehouse in southern Israel, around 20 kilometers from the northern tip of the Gaza Strip. The Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) was ostensibly set up to facilitate the implementation of President Donald Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” — whose stated aims are to “disarm Hamas,” “rebuild Gaza,” and lay the groundwork for “Palestinian self-determination and statehood” — which last week received the endorsement of the…

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MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce

CNBC reports: Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, or as much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services. The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The index simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected…

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David Sacks’ power play to become America’s AI policy gatekeeper

David Sacks’ power play to become America’s AI policy gatekeeper

The Verge reports: On Wednesday, a rumor began popping up in Washington about a momentous policy change: the White House, it was said, would issue an executive order on Friday that would finally preempt state AI laws, handing over those regulatory powers to the federal government. The minute it leaked online, lawyers and policymakers began to scour every sentence of it. There was a lot about it that seemed politically unfeasible; there was even more that seemed overbroad, possibly illegal….

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Judge’s footnote on immigration agents using AI raises accuracy and privacy concerns

Judge’s footnote on immigration agents using AI raises accuracy and privacy concerns

The Associated Press reports: Tucked in a two-sentence footnote in a voluminous court opinion, a federal judge recently called out immigration agents using artificial intelligence to write use-of-force reports, raising concerns that it could lead to inaccuracies and further erode public confidence in how police have handled the immigration crackdown in the Chicago area and ensuing protests. U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis wrote the footnote in a 223-page opinion issued last week, noting that the practice of using ChatGPT to…

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Border Patrol is monitoring millions of drivers across the U.S. and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns

Border Patrol is monitoring millions of drivers across the U.S. and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns

The Associated Press reports: The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found. The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and…

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‘Big Short’ investor betting $1 billion against the AI bubble says Meta and Oracle’s accounting is hiding the brutal truth

‘Big Short’ investor betting $1 billion against the AI bubble says Meta and Oracle’s accounting is hiding the brutal truth

Fortune reports: “It’ll happen slowly, and then all at once.” That’s how Jim Morrow, founder and chief investment officer of Callodine Capital, describes the eventual – inevitable – unwinding of what he calls “the most crowded trade in history.” Of course, he isn’t just paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway—he’s talking about the AI race, and the trillion-dollar deals so overstretched they’re better described as knots than trades. And he’s not alone in sounding alarms. Michael Burry—the investor of Big Short fame who…

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Scott Galloway warns of ‘nowhere to hide’ in markets if the OpenAI story unravels

Scott Galloway warns of ‘nowhere to hide’ in markets if the OpenAI story unravels

  Fortune reports: Tech analyst and professor Scott Galloway has issued a stark warning regarding the highly inflated valuations of the Magnificent 10 mega-cap companies, asserting a financial collapse at generative AI leader OpenAI would trigger a systemic shock leaving “nowhere to hide” for investors across the global markets. Galloway, speaking on his Prof G Markets podcast, characterized the current market reliance on AI as precarious, noting AI has been responsible for 80% of the stock market returns since the…

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Tesla shareholders approve $1 trillion pay package for part-time CEO, Elon Musk

Tesla shareholders approve $1 trillion pay package for part-time CEO, Elon Musk

electrek reports: Tesla shareholders have voted once again to approve an absurd, biggest-in-history pay package for Tesla’s part-time CEO, Elon Musk. In doing so, they’ve voted to relinquish any control they could have had over the company, and instead to put it deeper into the hands of its largest saboteur. Tesla’s shareholder meeting is happening today, with several consequential proposals which shareholders have been voting on in the last several weeks. In that time, Tesla has been campaigning hard and…

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Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen bet big on Trump and it’s paying off for Silicon Valley

Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen bet big on Trump and it’s paying off for Silicon Valley

By Jake Pearson This story was originally published by ProPublica For more than a decade, Silicon Valley venture capitalists have poured enormous sums of money into newfangled technology companies seeking to disrupt, and even supplant, the traditional financial system and sidestep its burdensome regulations. At the same time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has policed that effort, going after such businesses for deceiving, overcharging or otherwise taking advantage of their customers by enacting rules, filing lawsuits and shutting down the…

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