The Pentagon, despite a $1 trillion budget, is full of waste, fraud and abuse. It is, in fact, the only federal agency that can’t pass an independent financial audit. And now Trump wants $500 billion more in military spending. CONGRESS MUST JUST SAY NO.

Given that there are so many stultifyingly ill-informed voters in the UK, here are a few verifiable facts that for some strange reason, populist politicians and UK news media rarely, if ever, mention: 1. Non-UK nationals (foreign citizens) make up 12-13% of the prison population and cautions/convictions in England and Wales (2024-2025 data), roughly matching their estimated share of the adult population (12%). This has stayed stable despite rising migration. 2. Migrants skew younger/more male (demographics that drive crime across groups). After controlling for age and sex, non-citizens are slightly underrepresented in prisons compared to British citizens. Conviction data is less granular but follows similar patterns. 3. The Great British public estimates that asylum seekers' share of total immigration is around 33%, when (based on 2025-2026 data) they account for around 10-11% of long-term immigration (88,000 asylum out of 813,000 total inflows in 2025). 4. Many Brits also believe immigration/net migration is still at record highs or rising. In reality, net migration fell sharply to 171,000 in 2025 (halved from prior years, and the lowest outside pandemic since 2012). 5. 32% think most immigration is illegal (higher among some groups like Reform UK and Restore Britain supporters). In reality, irregular/small boat arrivals account for just 2-3% or less of total immigration, and a majority of them are found ti be legitimate asylum seekers; the vast majority of total immigration is entirely legal (visas for work/study). 6. There is also a persistent widespread view that most asylum seekers are economic migrants with low grant rates. In reality, the overall success rate is around 60-66% for recent asylum seekers; many small boat claims succeed on protection grounds, though backlogs and appeals complicate it. So while public concern about immigration remains high, you do have to question why so many British people are still absolutely clueless about the reality after more than a decade of relentlessly discussing immigration. It's almost like we're being deliberately misled by privately educated multimillionaires who have selfish ulterior motives...

Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan have funded a platform called Objection.ai that allows anyone to file a complaint against a journalist's story for a starting price of $2,000. A team of human investigators examines the story, then submits findings to a "jury" of AI models - OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google - which publish a "verdict" on the story's truthfulness and rank individual journalists on metrics including truth-telling and corrections. If the journalist doesn't respond to defend their reporting, the verdict is issued and published online anyway. The platform is being sold as "letting anyone fight the press like a billionaire." The creator is Aron D'Souza, who led the Thiel-funded lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker in 2016. The design choices tell you what this is. The system treats anonymous sources as less trustworthy and ranks anonymous whistleblower claims near the bottom. Anonymous sources are how most significant accountability journalism happens - they're how the Pentagon Papers got out, how the CIA's black site program got exposed, how the HHS stories we've covered this week were reported. The people who most need protection from powerful interests are specifically deprioritized by Objection's scoring system. The creator calls it "the same as Community Notes." A civil rights and defamation attorney calls it "a high-tech protection racket for the rich and powerful." One of those descriptions is accurate. The AI models being used as the "tribunal" were trained on journalists' work without consent or compensation. They hallucinate. They amplify bias. They are being deployed here specifically to issue verdicts on the work of the people whose labor built them. Thiel killed Gawker with a lawsuit. This is faster and cheaper.

Stanford grads walk out as Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage as commencement speaker. No mention of AI, unlike other uni speakers getting booed down this year. Story for @sfgate shortly

ha wow I did not know this: Thailand as same-sex romance powerhouse bloomberg.com/news/features/…

"In our analysis of how AI presents historical information, systematic problems were found, such as fabricated content, chronological distortions, bias through data prevalence, and language manipulation vulnerabilities." bit.ly/4fHqZhk

"Universities are especially valuable in this project: they offer AI companies legitimacy, scale and access to future workers, and can be presented as proof that AI is not merely speculative but an essential part of public life. The problem is that they are now treated as a cog in machinery built to generate profits for Big Tech, while students and graduates are made to feel like pawns in the quest for AI’s financial viability." aje.news/ujtvmr

I know we’re all inured to this but it’s still remarkable that the president of the United States lies on a daily basis about the last three presidential elections — and all because he has the world’s most fragile ego and can’t admit he lost

This LeCun et al. paper has a good set of objections to AGI, and this handy chart: human intelligence is specific not general. But why the HELL does the paper then promote "Superhuman Adaptable intelligence" rather than say Artificial Adaptable Intelligence? Mmore super hype.

By the way, public service announcement: if you're one of the numerous people posting about Anthropic's dystopian ways and you're thinking about getting Claude to help you write that post... don't! Another one of their terms is that you may not use Claude to do anything that "exposes [Anthropic to] reputational harms" 👇 And, if you do, under the - extremely unusual - clause 13 of their terms (anthropic.com/legal/consumer…), you have PRE-AGREED, by using Anthropic (and accepted their terms), that the harm you've done is irreparable, that you won't oppose Anthropic injunction, and they don't need to prove actual damage. They can simply go to a judge in a friendly jurisdiction (and of course, their terms precise that any dispute "will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in San Francisco, California") and: a) file an injunction that shuts you down b) make you pay for everything since under section 11 of their terms you agree to indemnify Anthropic for "any and all liabilities, claims, damages, expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees and costs), and other losses arising out of or related to your breach or alleged breach of these Terms." In other words, if you use Claude to help you talk shit about Anthropic publicly, their terms say you pay their lawyers to go after you and you've already pre-agreed you've lost the case. Oh, and cherry on the cake: in the odd case the judge were like "are you crazy, this is insanely abusive, you Anthropic are the ones at fault here," according to their terms Anthropic's maximum liability is... $100.

great review by @chrisokane_nyc

“If I were to summarize the adolescence of AI policy, I would say that …it is characterized by a series of uncoordinated, reactive, erratic, and aggressive measures in response to a sharp, accelerated, and uncontrollable (but predictable) rise in AI capabilities and risks.”

"How much of Goldsmiths will be left at the end of this? What will remain?" @ArtsPro artsprofessional.co.uk/news/…

Management is locking us out. Donate to our strike fund & share our campaign to help our action stay strong!

it's really important to separate science funding from corporate tax giveaways. Science associations need a long-term plan

Excellent op ed from our own Mark Levin on UChicago's deal with Anthropic:

🤖 When 5 frontier LLMs are asked to write about if AI’s future has to be dystopian, they all converge on a broad, safe argument: let’s augment humans instead of automating work. 👩 Human writers take a wider range of sharper positions: AI is already used to micromanage workers; “better” AI requires worker protections and public institutions; decolonizing AI means changing who gets to shape and benefit from it. We call this AI argument collapse: on debated topics, different LLMs converge on a small set of main arguments, supporting claims, and argumentative structures. Newspaper op-eds, position papers, even tweets… many forms of public debate risk being flattened if we are not careful about AI-assisted / AI-authored pieces. At scale, many “reasonable” AI-written arguments may become “reasonable” in the same exact way. Read more in our thread 👇

From op-eds in newspapers to NeurIPS position papers, AI is increasingly shaping long-form public discourse. Its arguments seem plausible, but beneath surface fluency, we find argument collapse: different LLMs converge to the same main & supporting arguments and structure.