An Xbox PC gaming handheld might be coming sometime this year, according to sources.

Both Lightway and OpenVPN protocols just got a performance boost. Here's all you need to know.

In late February, the federal government abruptly cut funding to dozens of organizations that fight housing discrimination across the country, threatening their survival and dealing a setback to civil rights enforcement efforts in the United States, fair housing advocates say.More than 160 groups nationwide rely on federal funding to investigate and file complaints on behalf of people who think they have been denied housing because of disability, race, sex, national origin, religion, or because they have children. In some states, including California, fair housing organizations also represent people who suspect theyve been discriminated against because they pay rent with government housing assistance, like Section 8 vouchers.I was shocked, said Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, who received notice that her organizations grant funding had ended abruptly.Housing discrimination is illegal under the landmark Fair Housing Act of 1968. But the law has no teeth if advocates dont have the resources to enforce it, Peattie said. The current administration appears to have targeted fair housing programs for deep cuts, despite their relatively low cost. Housing advocates worry the cuts will mean they wont be able to pursue discrimination cases and that some fair housing groups will have to cease operating altogether.Peattie received a notice from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development that said HUD is terminating this award because it no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.This affects us, and our ability to be a viable organization that can provide housing services to communities that we serve, Peattie said. There was no warning whatsoever.Last month, Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California was among 78 grantees that got sudden notice that theyd no longer receive funding, said Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Association, whose members include fair housing groups nationwide.The total cost of the canceled grants is estimated at $12.1 million, Bailey said, or less than a half-percent of Housing and Urban Developments total $255 billion budget for fiscal 2025.A HUD spokesperson wrote in an email, The Department is responsible for ensuring our grantees and contractors are in compliance with the Presidents Executive Orders. If we determine they are not in compliance, then we are required to take action.Trumps executive orders have targeted programs that mention diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility across the federal government. However, fair housing advocates arent sure how their programs conflict with the orders.The HUD spokesperson didnt explain why the canceled grants might have violated executive orders and didnt answer a follow-up email asking for specific examples of noncompliance on the part of the agencies whose contracts were canceled. Peattie said she had not been notified that her organization was noncompliant.Housing discrimination is especially common in cities like New York and Los Angeles where vacancy rates are low and competition for apartments is stiff. So our concern, Peattie said, is that as things get tighter in the rental markets, we will start to see more cases of housing discrimination.The budget cuts send a message, said Jasmine Perry, a home health aide in the San Francisco Bay Area, who was denied housing and filed a discrimination complaint through Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California nearly two years ago.It gives the people who denied me the okay to keep doing what theyre doing and to do it more. Its really sad, Perry said.Landlords repeatedly rejected Perrys rental applications as she searched for an apartment in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco. Perry, who is Black, suspected discrimination based on her race or because she planned to use a Section 8 rent subsidy to pay her rent.Section 8 is the nations largest housing assistance program for low-income peopleit provides a subsidy that tenants can use in any apartment, provided rents dont exceed limits set by local housing authorities.Perry finally obtained the voucher after 11 years on a waiting list, and she had just 90 days to use it before it expired. She turned to Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, which investigated and found that the management of one apartment building where she was rejected welcomed applicants without subsidies while discouraging those with them.Perry won a $37,000 settlement from the building management. She said her experience with filing a discrimination complaint showed her that I have rights. I can exercise my rights.Bailey of the National Fair Housing Association would not say how her group would respond to the funding cuts. However, some members of the organizations leadership are currently appealing to members of Congress to restore the funding.Even groups that have not received notices of grant cancellations are on edge. In Southern California, the Long Beach-based Fair Housing Foundation told Capital & Main in an email that its funding remained intact. Likewise, funding had not been cut at the Fair Housing Council of Orange County. But the groups David Levy wrote, We are still monitoring the situation as we believe we could still get a notice of cancellation. And Levy worries about funding for the coming year. The grant cancellations have now called into question whether the new administration will fund [fair housing] grants at all.In an email to Capital & Main, a HUD spokesperson said, The Department will continue to serve the American people, including those facing housing discrimination or eviction. When the Department puts out a notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) any eligible organization is invited to apply.But the administration has given other indications that fair housing programs could be on the chopping block at Housing and Urban Developmentand employees of the department are also stressed.An internal documentobtained by the American Federation of Government Employees Council 222, which represents HUD workers, and viewed by Capital & Mainshows the agency plans to slash fair housing staff positions within the agency by more than 75%. Union president Antonio Gaines said the document is unofficial, and is derived from multiple sources that have proven to be reliable in the past.In early February, a web page describing the types of discrimination covered under the Fair Housing Act disappeared from the HUD website. It was replaced with a page not found message but the page is currently accessible on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.There is a perpetual state of fear, anxiety, fear of retaliation or reprisal, anxiety, every other distressful terminology that you can use can be applied to the environment, Gaines said.By Robin Urevich, Capital & MainThis piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.

For the first time in more than 40 years, a new hormone-free intrauterine device (IUD) is coming to market in the U.S.and its designed with patients comfort in mind, both during the insertion process and once its in place.The new IUD, called Miudella, comes from the pharmaceutical company Sebela Womens Health Inc. It was approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) in late February, and is the second hormone-free IUD to be approved since 1984, when the copper-based option Paragard first became available. With the addition of Miudella, there will now be six IUD options available in the U.S.Not only does this advancement provide patients seeking a hormone-free IUD with more than one option, it also marks a potentially major improvement in IUD design. By reducing insertion pain and post-insertion bleeding and cramping, Miudella is addressing two potential side effects of IUD placement that many women feel have long been overlooked.A new option in an ultra-limited marketAccording to Kelly Culwell, a board-certified OB-GYN and head of research and development at Sebela Womens Health, bringing an IUD to market, especially in the U.S., is a very expensive and time consuming proposition. Because of those barriers, she says, many pharma companies simply choose not to invest as much in studying womens health.There really isnt a generic IUD, and the reason for that is its a very time-intensive and cost-prohibitive development process, especially for companies that arent really putting a lot of money or time or effort into womens health development, Culwell explains. A lot of the bigger pharma companies are focusing on things that could bring in a lot more money; things like oncology or neurologyso there just hasnt been a lot of innovation [in womens health overall].These factors have resulted in a limited selection of IUD options in the U.S. compared to places like Europe, Culwell saysdespite the fact that IUDs are considered to be one of the most effective forms of birth control, preventing pregnancy 99% of the time or more. Currently, there are four hormonal IUDs on the market (three of which were made by the same company) and one hormone-free IUD.Hormonal IUDs work by releasing a progestin hormone into the body, which thickens the cervical mucus and prevents sperm from entering the uterus. For patients who are sensitive to hormones, though, this might not be the best option. These patients may want to opt for a hormone-free IUD, which uses copper to prevent pregnancy. The metal is toxic to sperm, killing them before they can make it through the uterus. The only currently available hormone-free IUD, Paragard, has a copper wire wound around the entire T-shaped structure of the device.But theres a major drawback to that design: Copper can initiate an uncomfortable inflammatory response in the patient, resulting in side effects like cramping and heavy bleeding. Miudella, which has been in development for about 15 years, seeks to improve on both this existing hormone-free IUD model and the construction and delivery of IUDs more generally.[Image: Sebela Womens Health Inc.]Designing a more flexible IUDTo start, Miudellas developers wanted to find a way to decrease the amount of copper on the device in an attempt to lessen the side effects caused by the metal. In the past, Culwell says, other companies have attempted a similar strategy, but found that lowering the dose of copper reduced the IUDs effectiveness. After extensive trial and error, the Miudella team found that placing copper strategically on three key points of the device could maintain effective pregnancy prevention rates while lowering the copper dose to less than half that of Paragard.The Miudella has copper placed right at the bottom of the IUD, which is at the internal part of the cervix, and then at the top of the arms, which is at each of the tubal openings, Culwell says. You dont necessarily need copper throughout the entire uterine cavity, you just really need copper at the key places where the sperm will be going by, to basically prevent them from making their way to the egg.Miudella also bucks the standard material construction of IUDs. Currently, all of the IUDs on the market in the U.S. use a rigid, plastic T-frame that holds one stiff position. To account for the varying anatomies of the uterus, Miudella has swapped that plastic frame for one made of nitinol, an ultra-flexible metal alloy commonly used for procedures like cardiac stents and orthopedic implants.Nitinol is super elastic, Culwell says. It has shape memory properties, so it actually can conform nicely to varying sizes and shapes of uterus. A uterus can be narrow, it can be short, it can be wide, and so having something thats not just a rigid T allows for some conformity there.Aiming for a less painful insertion processThe nitinol frame allowed Miudellas developers to make some changes to the actual IUD insertion process, which can be painful for some womenso much so that, in 2022, TikTok saw an outpouring of stories from women who felt that their pain during the procedure had not been properly addressed. Just last August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its first-ever recommendation that patients should actually be counseled on pain management before the procedure, as well as permitting the use of topical lidocaine during the process.To increase patient comfort, Miudellas developers invented a new insertion tube designed for more gentle insertion. Because of nitinols compressive properties, the tube can be manufactured about a millimeter narrower than Paragards insertion tube. Additionally, while other IUD insertion tubes have a flat, blunt end, the Miudella tube comes with a tapered tip.[Photo: Sebela Womens Health Inc.]To have it more tapered so that it would be more comfortable for the insertion process is actually a challenge, Culwell says. Its a bit difficult to create this tapered tip that you could reproduce consistently, because then you also have to be able to get the IUD out without much resistance and force. There was a lot of experimentation on getting the tip of the insertion tube to be able to be nice and tapered, but also to allow easy passage of the IUD. In fact, theres a proprietary way that that tapered tube is designed: It has slits in the side that decrease friction during the deployment process.Most other IUDs, due to the rigidity of their plastic frames, have to be loaded by the practitioner within five minutes of placement to hold their shape. In the case of Paragard, the device has to be manually loaded with the fingers by pushing the two arms of the IUD down into a tubetypically while the patient is actively waiting in the stirrups.The added benefit of Miudellas unique tube and nitinol frame is that the device can be pre-loaded before it even arrives at the doctors office.Currently, Miudella has been approved for use up to three years, whereas Paragard is approved for up to 10. Culwell notes that the team at Sebela is in the process of studying Miudellas effectiveness for up to eight years of use. In her own practice as an OB-GYN, Culwell says, shes glad to see that the CDC has started to offer more guidance on pain management during IUD placement. Still, she believes that women have historically not been listened to when it comes to pain in particular, and that the pharma industry needs to invest more in innovating with patient comfort in mind.Were continuing, as a community, to do more and more research on pain management for IUD inserts, Culwell says. I think it lagged behindfor way too long, but there was no research done on IUD pain. So, I think continued innovation and then continued informed consent and making sure that we really offer patients pain management techniques are key, because IUDs are terrific methods for people who want them, but it cant be torture to get them in. That shouldnt be the trade-off.

Our desks might be designed for work, play, or other purposes, but in reality, they are veritable battlegrounds that witness humanitys never-ending war against clutter. Even the most pristine and most minimalist desks eventually become a landmine of stuff that foil our path towards productivity and clarity. Fortunately, veterans who have triumphed over these struggles have shared the secret to success: put everything in their proper place.Desk organizers dont just provide storage, though. Theyve also become lifestyle choices and reflections of our aesthetic tastes. Thats why theres an almost limitless variety of designs in the market, simply because there are just as many tastes and interests. Coming up with your own set of containers and decorations can become an adventure on its own, but this modular organizer is trying to make that journey easier by providing the building blocks to create your own sanctuary of tidiness on your desk. Designers: Andrey Dalakishvili, Roman GauzModular desk organizers are admittedly nothing new, but while they do offer some level of flexibility, they lock people into a set arrangement or set color options. After all, manufacturers are constrained by factory pipelines and contracts, so they try to cast their nets as wide as they can when it comes to design options.Thankfully, 3D printing is changing the way products can be made and sold on demand, creating more wiggle room for customization. This DESKO organizer set, for example, comes in seven color options, and thats when you only choose a single color for all eight parts of the set. You can also choose different colors for each, and, in an ideal world, you can even request colors not available on the list. Even better, the 3D printing process can eventually become more sustainable by not only using more eco-friendly materials but also reducing waste associated with mass production.The modular design also lets you combine different parts on the three-hole tray, depending on your needs or mood. The other tall containers can be placed anywhere on your desk by themselves or you can place them inside the general-purpose tray if you have no need for that. Youre only constrained by your imagination and circumstances, not to mention the amount of space you have on your desk for these items.DESKO leaves the door open for more components but also leaves some room for improvement. The arched MagSafe charger, for example, could probably be more space-efficient, though it also serves as a decorative piece. Unfortunately, its uneven feet mean that it has to be used with the tray, already taking up one slot if you do decide to use its capabilities.The post 3D printed modular desk organizer lets you design your own clutter-free zone first appeared on Yanko Design.

Handheld PCs like the Steam Deck and Lenovo Legion Go are quite the trend these days, but their convenient portability comes at the price of the power that PC gamers demand. Gaming laptops, on the other hand, are getting slimmer and more stylish, but you still cant enjoy playing your favorite titles in bed or while standing up. There are pros and cons to these designs, but the choice isnt entirely up to the consumer. They can only pick one or the other, at least with todays current devices.This concept for a multi-mode gaming laptop tries to envision a way to give gamers the best of both worlds. Its a traditional laptop when you need it but also a gaming handheld when you want it. And thats all thanks to its modular design which is really two devices in one, allowing the user to decide which to use based on their needs and situation.Designer: WistronLaptops are technically portable, too, but the advantage of handheld gaming PCs is that you can use them even without a table or without even sitting down. In exchange, you get slightly lower specs and poorer thermal management, resulting in a gaming experience that is acceptable yet also unsatisfactory by PC gamer standards. The Dual Fusion concept design addresses that by practically hiding a handheld PC inside a laptop or, more specifically, disguising it as a touchpad.A laptops touchpad is a critical part of its user experience, but the area around it is also severely underutilized. When it comes to gaming, however, that touchpad can become more of a nuisance when you accidentally touch it with your wrists. Seeing a potential for reuse, Wistron transforms that whole area below the laptop keyboard into a detachable component that is actually a handheld gaming device.The idea is that, when you want to play away from your desk, you simply detach that module and carry on with your game. The handheld device itself is more like the PlayStation Portal, meaning its a streaming device rather than a standalone computer. It has no computing power of its own and relies on the laptop to render the games graphics. The screen, which vertically rotates, can also function as a graphical touchpad or second monitor when its docked to the laptop.This concept solves the problem of performance for such a small handheld device, but it does presume that either the laptop is nearby or that you have good network access to the laptop, maybe even both. Although they have a similar modular concept, Acers DualPlay Laptop has a very different idea. It doesnt have an independent display and practically just hides a wireless game controller, allowing gamers to switch between keyboard and mouse and controller seamlessly without having to carry a separate accessory.The post Modular gaming Laptop concept has a touchpad that doubles as a detachable handheld first appeared on Yanko Design.

Jonas Ussing and Stine Srensen, co-owners of Space Office VFX, reveal the time-saving strategies behind the action-packed trailer to Trailmakers 2.0.

Fatal crashes. A door blowout. Grounded planes. Inside the citizen-led, obsessive campaign to hold Boeing accountable and prevent the next disaster.

MacworldLets talk about Severance.Perseverance.See what the Macalope did there? Its a little play on words. Wordplay is a delightful way to draw a reader in. By tricking them. Anyway, the horny one doesnt actually want to talk about Severance right now because he hasnt seen last weeks episode yet.Instead lets talk about Apples new C1 modem, which is almost like talking about prestige television but more boring.Look, not every column is going to be wall-to-wall thrills and spills.Still, you have to hand it to Apple. The companys travails with this modem were the butt of many jokes. Not that the Macalope ever stooped to making any. Cough. He doesnt know what column you were reading.After acquiring Intels modem division in 2019, the company seemingly struggled to ship a modem worthy of the C1 moniker. After repeatedly being rumored to appear soon, it took six years before it finally shipped in the iPhone 16e. But ship it did and the results are pretty good, considering.It seems that maybe it wasnt so much that Apple was struggling to get the modem to work, its that it was struggling to get it to work really well. While it doesnt support mmWave 5G in the U.S., its still a processor that can proudly sit next to its M-series relatives at Easter dinner. (The Macalope knows St. Patricks Day is closer, but when looking for a timely reference, Drink itself blind next to its M-series relatives on St. Patricks Day isnt quite the image you wanna go for.)IDGThe company could have pulled the plug like it did with Project Titan but it stuck with it. This is an interesting and timely example of Apples perseverance at a time when another project is facing its own delays: Apple confirmed that the can full of highly anticipated conversational version of Siri was being kicked down the proverbial road.Its going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.Apple PRs Jacqueline Roy in a statement to John Gruber (March 7, 2025)Since the company seemed to think it would be able to release chatty Siri relatively soon, it seems like this is probably more like the modem project than Project Titan. But, then, it actually showed a picture of AirPower, and look how that turned out.Apples chip development is obviously a different beast than its software development. Still, perseverance has paid off for the company in software, as well. Remember Maps? Sure you do, you used it earlier today to find that place with the thing (hospital specializing in fungal treatment). When Maps first relaunched with Apples own data it was, as the French like to say, a bit of an el disastro (disclaimer: that is not French, no French person says that). Now while you can have a reasonable argument over which is better, Apple Maps or Google Maps, theres no denying that Apples offering is pretty good, certainly Good Enough.Honestly, if it can get conversational Siri to be Good Enough they should just go with that. You may have noticed the quotes the Macalope puts around that modifier. Thats because no LLM can really have a conversation with you. Theyre all just faking it until they make it.Or they tell you to eat rocks and glue.If youd like to receive regular news and updates to your inbox sign up forMacworlds newsletters, including The Macalope and Apple Breakfast, David Prices weekly, bite-sized roundup of all the latest Apple news and rumors.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here.The concept of artificial general intelligencean ultra-powerful AI system we dont have yetcan be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential impact and then deflated as reality fails to meet expectations. This week, lots of news went into that AGI balloon. Im going to tell you what it means (and probably stretch my analogy a little too far along the way).First, lets get the pesky business of defining AGI out of the way. In practice, its a deeply hazy and changeable term shaped by the researchers or companies set on building the technology. But it usually refers to a future AI that outperforms humans on cognitive tasks. Which humans and which tasks were talking about makes all the difference in assessing AGIs achievability, safety, and impact on labor markets, war, and society. Thats why defining AGI, though an unglamorous pursuit, is not pedantic but actually quite important, as illustrated in a new paper published this week by authors from Hugging Face and Google, among others. In the absence of that definition, my advice when you hear AGI is to ask yourself what version of the nebulous term the speaker means. (Dont be afraid to ask for clarification!)Okay, on to the news. First, a new AI model from China called Manus launched last week. A promotional video for the model, which is built to handle agentic tasks like creating websites or performing analysis, describes it as potentially, a glimpse into AGI. The model is doing real-world tasks on crowdsourcing platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, and the head of product at Hugging Face, an AI platform, called it the most impressive AI tool Ive ever tried.Its not clear just how impressive Manus actually is yet, but against this backdropthe idea of agentic AI as a stepping stone toward AGIit was fitting that New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dedicated his podcast on Tuesday to AGI. It also means that the concept has been moving quickly beyond AI circles and into the realm of dinner table conversation. Klein was joined by Ben Buchanan, a Georgetown professor and former special advisor for artificial intelligence in the Biden White House.They discussed lots of thingswhat AGI would mean for law enforcement and national security, and why the US government finds it essential to develop AGI before Chinabut the most contentious segments were about the technologys potential impact on labor markets. If AI is on the cusp of excelling at lots of cognitive tasks, Klein said, then lawmakers better start wrapping their heads around what a large-scale transition of labor from human minds to algorithms will mean for workers. He criticized Democrats for largely not having a plan.We could consider this to be inflating the fear balloon, suggesting that AGIs impact is imminent and sweeping. Following close behind and puncturing that balloon with a giant safety pin, then, is Gary Marcus, a professor of neural science at New York University and an AGI critic who wrote a rebuttal to the points made on Kleins show.Marcus points out that recent news, including the underwhelming performance of OpenAIs new ChatGPT-4.5, suggests that AGI is much more than three years away. He says core technical problems persist despite decades of research, and efforts to scale training and computing capacity have reached diminishing returns. Large language models, dominant today, may not even be the thing that unlocks AGI. He says the political domain does not need more people raising the alarm about AGI, arguing that such talk actually benefits the companies spending money to build it more than it helps the public good. Instead, we need more people questioning claims that AGI is imminent. That said, Marcus is not doubting that AGI is possible. Hes merely doubting the timeline.Just after Marcus tried to deflate it, the AGI balloon got blown up again. Three influential peopleGoogles former CEO Eric Schmidt, Scale AIs CEO Alexandr Wang, and director of the Center for AI Safety Dan Hendryckspublished a paper called Superintelligence Strategy.By superintelligence, they mean AI that would decisively surpass the worlds best individual experts in nearly every intellectual domain, Hendrycks told me in an email. The cognitive tasks most pertinent to safety are hacking, virology, and autonomous-AI research and developmentareas where exceeding human expertise could give rise to severe risks.In the paper, they outline a plan to mitigate such risks: mutual assured AI malfunction, inspired by the concept of mutual assured destruction in nuclear weapons policy. Any state that pursues a strategic monopoly on power can expect a retaliatory response from rivals, they write. The authors suggest that chipsas well as open-source AI models with advanced virology or cyberattack capabilitiesshould be controlled like uranium. In this view, AGI, whenever it arrives, will bring with it levels of risk not seen since the advent of the atomic bomb.The last piece of news Ill mention deflates this balloon a bit. Researchers from Tsinghua University and Renmin University of China came out with an AGI paper of their own last week. They devised a survival game for evaluating AI models that limits their number of attempts to get the right answers on a host of different benchmark tests. This measures their abilities to adapt and learn.Its a really hard test. The team speculates that an AGI capable of acing it would be so large that its parameter countthe number of knobs in an AI model that can be tweaked to provide better answerswould be five orders of magnitude higher than the total number of neurons in all of humanitys brains combined. Using todays chips, that would cost 400 million times the market value of Apple.The specific numbers behind the speculation, in all honesty, dont matter much. But the paper does highlight something that is not easy to dismiss in conversations about AGI: Building such an ultra-powerful system may require a truly unfathomable amount of resourcesmoney, chips, precious metals, water, electricity, and human labor. But if AGI (however nebulously defined) is as powerful as it sounds, then its worth any expense.So what should all this news leave us thinking? Its fair to say that the AGI balloon got a little bigger this week, and that the increasingly dominant inclination among companies and policymakers is to treat artificial intelligence as an incredibly powerful thing with implications for national security and labor markets.That assumes a relentless pace of development in which every milestone in large language models, and every new model release, can count as a stepping stone toward something like AGI.If you believe this, AGI is inevitable. But its a belief that doesnt really address the many bumps in the road AI research and deployment have faced, or explain how application-specific AI will transition into general intelligence. Still, if you keep extending the timeline of AGI far enough into the future, it seems those hiccups cease to matter.Now read the rest of The AlgorithmDeeper LearningHow DeepSeek became a fortune teller for Chinas youthTraditional Chinese fortune tellers are called upon by people facing all sorts of life decisions, but they can be expensive. People are now turning to the popular AI model DeepSeek for guidance, sharing AI-generated readings, experimenting with fortune-telling prompt engineering, and revisiting ancient spiritual texts.Why it matters: The popularity of DeepSeek for telling fortunes comes during a time of pervasive anxiety and pessimism in Chinese society. Unemployment is high, and millions of young Chinese now refer to themselves as the last generation, expressing reluctance about committing to marriage and parenthood in the face of a deeply uncertain future. But since Chinas secular regime makes religious and spiritual exploration difficult, such practices unfold in more private settings, on phones and computers. Read the whole story from Caiwei Chen.Bits and BytesAI reasoning models can cheat to win chess gamesResearchers have long dealt with the problem that if you train AI models by having them optimize ways to reach certain goals, they might bend rules in ways you dont predict. Thats proving to be the case with reasoning models, and theres no simple way to fix it. (MIT Technology Review)The Israeli military is creating a ChatGPT-like tool using Palestinian surveillance dataBuilt with telephone and text conversations, the model forms a sort of surveillance chatbot, able to answer questions about people its monitoring or the data its collected. This is the latest in a string of reports suggesting that the Israeli military is bringing AI heavily into its information-gathering and decision-making efforts. (The Guardian)At RightsCon in Taipei, activists reckoned with a US retreat from promoting digital rightsLast week, our reporter Eileen Guo joined over 3,200 digital rights activists, tech policymakers, and researchers and a smattering of tech company representatives in Taipei at RightsCon, the worlds largest digital rights conference. She reported on the foreign impact of cuts to US funding of digital rights programs, which are leading many organizations to do content moderation with AI instead of people. (MIT Technology Review)TSMC says its $100 billion expansion in the US is driven by demand, not political pressureChipmaking giant TSMC had already been expanding in the US under the Biden administration, but it announced a new expansion with President Trump this week. The company will invest another $100 billion into its operations in Arizona. (Wall Street Journal)The US Army is using CamoGPT to purge DEI from training materialsFollowing executive orders from President Trump, agencies are under pressure to remove mentions of anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The US Army is prototyping a new AI model to do that, Wired reports. (Wired)