national affairs

T he grand ballroom at Cipriani Wall Street is bathed in purple and red. There are red and white lights and blue curtains and a massive Christmas tree all underneath the glow of two jumbotrons. There’s a bald man with a ruddy dome and a senator in a scarlet waistcoat. A pool of wine vomit appears in a bathroom sink in between the risotto course and the filet mignon.  I’m in the corner with the rest of the press, crammed up against a riser where photographers grumble because they cannot actually see shit…

As ChatGPT’s first birthday approaches, presents are rolling in for the large language model that rocked the world. From President Joe Biden comes an oversized “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” And UK prime minister Rishi Sunak threw a party with a cool extinction-of-the-human-race theme, wrapped up with a 28-country agreement (counting the EU as a single country) promising international cooperation to develop AI responsibly. Happy birthday!Before anyone…

“The defense forces and the startup communities are different worlds,” Nataliia Kushnerska, Brave1’s project lead, says. “In this project, everybody receives what they need. The general staff and Ministry of Defense receive really great solutions they can actually use. The Ministry of the Economy receives a growing ecosystem, an industry that you could use to recover the country.”It’s been a balmy spring in Kyiv. Café crowds spill out onto street-side tables. Couples walk their dogs under the blossoms in the city’s…

Wrote Doughty, “Defendants ‘significantly encouraged’ the social-media companies to such extent that the decisions (of the companies) should be deemed to be the decisions of the government.”Doughty’s ban, which is now on hold as the White House appeals, attempts to set the bounds of acceptable conduct for government IRUs. It provides an exemption for officials to continue notifying social media companies about illegal activity or national security issues. Emma Llansó, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center…

While negotiations started with Young and Schumer, they didn’t end there. Rather, the pair heard input from other congressional committees and worked that into the final package.“That was the most utilization I’ve seen of the committee process since I’ve been in Congress, and I think this has an opportunity to be even more inclusive,” Young says. “Senator Schumer and I started off with legislation, but then we drew extensively from different committees of jurisdiction. I think that this effort will be even more…

You believe those laws will come?Will we get the laws we need in the next two years? Very unlikely. But I think we’ll get the laws we need in the next five to 10 years.Meanwhile, Meta has refocused on the metaverse and generative AI. I worry about the rise of those. Do not make fun of virtual reality. Because all the problems people are flagging—the masks are too heavy, the images are pixelated, the batteries don’t last long enough—are going to get solved in five to 10 years. I worry that we’re going to put grandma in a…

Gillibrand is sponsoring an amendment she hopes to attach to this year’s must-pass National Defense Authorization Act to mandate that no money can be spent on SAP’s unless it's been reported to Congress. “So if there are SAPs out there that are somehow outside of the normal chain of command and outside the normal appropriations process, they have to divulge that to Congress,” Gilibrand says.As for whether she thinks there’s any veracity to the whistleblower’s claims? “I have no idea,” Gillibrand says. “So I'm going to do…

In a declaration in federal court in 2021, Quentin Van Meter, the president of the American College of Pediatricians, described the organization as a “secular, scientific medical association,” whose “views are not religious as such.” The College has also targeted donors, physicians, and other clinicians based solely on their political leanings, documents show. The group maintains a list of more than 5,000 “conservative doctors,” for instance, and records reveal they have been routinely targeted with mailers designed to…

While the material is not expressly religious, it is clearly aimed at painting same-sex marriage as aberrant and immoral behavior. Physicians lobbied by the group are also told to urge patients to purchase Christian-based parenting guides, including one designed to help parents broach the topic of sex with their 11- and 12-year-old kids. The College suggests telling parents to plan a “special overnight trip,” a pretext for instilling in their children sexual norms in line with evangelical practice. The group suggests…

On March 19, Donald Trump Jr. sent an email via the firm that manages his father’s email list, Campaign Nucleus, announcing “a HUGE advance in the culture war.” That culture war, Trump wrote, is “coming to corporate America.” He added that conservatives have a “new” tool to fight back against “woke” workplaces: the “free to work” job board RedBalloon. As an incentive to create an account on the website, Trump offered 20 autographed copies of his latest book, Triggered.“The big job boards like Indeed and ZipRecruiter are…