Powderhorn

Nichol's apartment complex just fucked up royally, and the water is to be shut off. She doesn't want to be involved in the coverage, so I said, "Let me handle this. This is exactly the hour to provide a news tip."

So, I call the Killeen Daily Herald, and the first person I speak with is a designer (I don't miss that entry-level function ... it's often idiots trying to settle bar bets). I get transferred to what I expect to be a reporter, but turns out ... well, he's on the desk.

So much the better. Now I can be blunt.

I fucking miss talking with other journalists. We aren't here to shoot the shit, and I was clear about what I'd personally experienced in the complex and what was hearsay.

It's funny ... I once wrote a column entitled "Don't piss off the news editor," and this is the sort of thing where, well, you don't know who you've just pissed off, and you also don't know whether their ex-husband happens to be able to get through newsroom structures to provide a tip.

I closed the conversation by wishing him a pleasant evening -- but hoping it won't be too boring. "Easy nights are not why I enjoy being on the desk." And he responds in kind: "Completely agree." I provide my number and mention the reporter should text first, as I don't answer calls from people not in my phone. His response? "Neither do I. Too much bullshit."

Afterward? Calling KXXN. You want redundancy in this situation. I had good conversations with both, but I'm a source in Austin covering a problem in Killeen, which I can't effectively do and therefore need local journalists to finish the job.

Nichol has switched her approach from "I'd never be caught talking to a journalist" to (after much explanation of what all of this is going to entail) to ... "well, I didn't ask for your help, but you knew I was asking for your help."

Yeah, babe, I do. You didn't bring this to my attention because you wanted pity. You wanted me to step in and do what, well, I do.

And I have now gotten the ball rolling. Which, as manipulative as it may have been, was what needed to happen.

If a reporter shows up, she's now happy to entertain them. She wasn't going to be able to sell the story to anyone, so, well ... I just had to step in. Of course she didn't ask, as that would be weakness.

This said, she remains the only person who can, with a single touch, make me twitch violently.

And I remain the only person in her life that can blast through newsroom walls and get shit done. Will they cover her situation? I put 60% odds between the pair of outlets.

But she had a 0% shot without me navigating this, so that's an improvement. Sometimes I wish I didn't still love her, but I had no choice in this case. She was pleading without pleading, and I knew exactly how to get through the gates.

Yeah, that's not a great look in a dual-language country, especially when you headquarters is in Quebec.

The chief executive of Air Canada has apologized for his inability to express himself in French after politicians called for his resignation for his English-only message of condolence after Sunday’s deadly crash in New York.

But lawmakers in Canada’s lone Francophone province rejected the mea culpa as “too little too late” and overwhelmingly passed a motion calling for the head of Canada’s flagship carrier to step down.

Air Canada’s CEO, Michael Rousseau, has been criticized for the four-minute condolence video posted online that included only two French words – “bonjour” and “merci”.

“I am deeply saddened that my inability to speak French has diverted attention from the profound grief of the families and the great resilience of Air Canada’s employees, who have demonstrated outstanding professionalism despite the events of the past few days,” Rousseau said in a statement on Thursday.

“Despite many lessons over several years, unfortunately, I am still unable to express myself adequately in French. I sincerely apologize for this, but I am continuing my efforts to improve.”

But soon after, Quebec’s legislature passed a vote calling on Rousseau to resign. The motion, brought forward by the province’s minister of French language, cited the executive’s “lack of respect for the French language, Quebec families in mourning, and all Francophones across the province”.

Every summer, people descend on the wildflower capital of Colorado to see grasslands flush with corn lilies, aspen sunflowers and sub-alpine larkspur. In January 1991, scientists set up a unique experiment in these Rocky Mountain meadows. It was one of the first (and longest running) to work out how the changing climate would affect an ecosystem.

At the time, it was believed a temperature increase could lead to longer, lusher grasses. But instead of flourishing, the grasses and wildflowers started to disappear, replaced by sage brush. The experimental meadows morphed into a desert-like scrubland. Even the fungi in the soils were transformed by heat.

The experiment provided a window into the future. These meadows will disappear in the coming decades if warming reaches 2C above preindustrial levels, according to the resulting article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings are alarming, not just for Colorado, but for mountains across the planet as “shrubification” takes over.

I refused to file my taxes last year after Trump had already started engaging in excursions from democratic norms. It's like an abusive spouse demanding alimony during a contentious divorce.

More than $20bn. That’s roughly the cost of our military operation in Iran to date.

Tax day is a month away. If you’re like me, it makes your stomach turn to watch the US practice regime change in the Middle East – again. If you’re like me, the reckless murder of more than 150 little girls in the name of “liberating” Iranian women fills you with rage. The worst part? You and I literally paid for this.

Today, our government dollars at work look like the hellscape that was Tehran, where our military intentionally blew up oil storage facilities whose burning black rain will deliver cancer to generations to come. We are financing chemical warfare, a war crime, banned under the Geneva conventions. All of this, of course, against the backdrop of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where up to 70% of the weapons come from the United States and the revolting and deadly paramilitary operations of our Department of Homeland Defense and ICE.

The American people did not sign up for this. Congress was neither consulted nor did it approve the opening attack on 28 February, contrary to the separation-of-powers bedrock our country was built upon. Most of us are fed up with unjustified conflicts and “forever wars”. In fact, 70% of voters opposed potential action in Iran before the first bombs fell. A majority continue to oppose the war now, and support will keep eroding as gas and food prices rise.

The Trump administration’s “Make America healthy again” (Maha) agenda appears to be stalled as two of the government’s most influential public health positions sit empty.

The president has yet to nominate a permanent director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), leaving an agency that has been plagued by turmoil for the past year without a leader. At the same time, Trump’s controversial pick for surgeon general, Casey Means, remains in limbo as her nomination stalls in the Senate.

The CDC has now been without a Senate-confirmed director for more than 210 days, the maximum length of time an acting head can manage an agency under federal law.

Jay Bhattacharya – who also runs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – has served as interim chief of the CDC since February, and is expected to continue overseeing the agency through a delegation of authority by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, according to statements from both the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and White House.

In a statement, HHS said that Kennedy and Chris Klomp, who serves as the director of Medicare and deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), are “working with the White House on the CDC director search by evaluating candidates that can further the Trump administration’s objective of restoring the CDC to its original mission of fighting infectious disease”.

To explore the roots of Donald Trump’s Iran military strategy and the pugilistic rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome to launch the Fascist era, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air, proposing a revolution in warfare.

Victory in the future, he said, would no longer come from the grinding trench combat of the Great War. Instead it meant large-scale aerial bombardments, targeting not just combatants but civilians and civilian infrastructure and logistics.

“[It] is much more important to destroy a railroad station, a bakery, a war plant, or to machine-gun a supply column, moving trains, or any other behind-the-lines objective, than to strafe or bomb a trench.”

“[It] is not enough to shoot down all birds in flight if you want to wipe out the species;” he wrote, with a grim metaphor. “The most effective method would be to destroy the eggs and the nests systematically.”

Two years ago, Congress passed the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America” Act (RISAA) that included nominal reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill unfortunately included some problematic expansions of the law—but it also included a relatively big victory for civil liberties advocates: Section 702 authorities were only extended for two years, allowing Congress to continue the important work of negotiating a warrant requirement for Americans as well as some other critical reforms.

However, Congress clearly did not continue this work. In fact, it now appears that Congress is poised to consider another extension of this program without even attempting to include necessary and common sense reforms. Most notably, Congress is not considering a requirement to obtain a warrant before looking at data on U.S. persons that was indiscriminately and warrantlessly collected. House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed that “the plan is to move a clean extension of FISA … for at least 18 months.”

Even more disappointing, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, who has previously been a champion of both the warrant requirement and closing the data broker loophole, told the press he would vote for a clean extension of FISA, claiming that RISAA included enough reforms for the moment.

Many people start their work with AI by prompting the machine to imagine it is an expert at the task they want it to perform, a technique that boffins have found may be futile.

Persona-based prompting – which involves using directives such as "You're an expert machine learning programmer" in a model prompt – dates back to 2023, when researchers began to explore how role-playing instructions influenced AI models’ output.

It's now common to find online prompting guides that include passages like, "You are an expert full-stack developer tasked with building a complete, production-ready full-stack web application from scratch."

But academics who have researched this approach report it does not always produce superior results.

In a pre-print paper titled "Expert Personas Improve LLM Alignment but Damage Accuracy: Bootstrapping Intent-Based Persona Routing with PRISM," researchers affiliated with the University of Southern California (USC) find that persona-based prompting is task-dependent – which they say explains the mixed results.

For alignment-dependent tasks, like writing, role-playing, and safety, personas do improve model performance. For pretraining-dependent tasks like math and coding, using the technique produces worse results.

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has argued he and others who believed immersive environments would require head-mounted hardware got it wrong.

In a post penned to mark Meta’s recent decision to end its work on the Metaverse after blowing through $80 billion, Stephenson said that twenty years ago, when he worked at virtual reality hardware company Magic Leap, he would ask “Do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?”

“At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no,” he wrote. Now he thinks that another 20 years into the future, devices like smartphones will still dominate. “Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces.”

Has Microsoft finally reckoned with Windows 11's many failings - or has its OS chief, Pavan Davuluri, simply offered more soothing platitudes to users fed up with bugs and unwanted AI?

Davuluri wrote a lengthy post on the Windows blog that was long on promises that things will get better, but short on words like "sorry," "apologize," or even the Americanism "our bad."

According to Davuluri, the movable taskbar dropped from Windows 11 is returning. Windows Update will stop forcing restarts quite so relentlessly. File Explorer will work as it should. And Windows itself will be less of a resource hog, faster, and more reliable.

Microsoft has also promised to rethink its obsession with AI. Davuluri said: "We are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad."

Not that Copilot is going away. "You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows, focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted," Davuluri said.

This implies that, up to now, the changes have not been intentional. So spraying Windows with the assistant, regardless of how users felt about it, was somehow an accident?

Windows 11 has become a bit of a car crash in the last few years - borked update after borked update. Rather than fixing problems, Microsoft instead focused on adding AI to Notepad and Paint. Users cried out for the return of seemingly minor functionality, such as the ability to move the taskbar, but Microsoft instead offered widgets and more Copilot.

Citing national security fears, America is effectively banning any new consumer-grade network routers made abroad.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has updated its Covered List to include all foreign-made consumer routers, prohibiting the approval of any new models.

For clarification, the FCC says this change does not prevent the import, sale, or use of any existing models that the agency previously authorized.

That Covered List details equipment and services covered by Section 2 of The Secure Networks Act, which, by their inclusion, are deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to US national security.

According to the FCC, this move follows a determination by a "White House-convened Executive Branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise," in line with President Trump's National Security Strategy that the US must not be dependent on any other country for core components necessary to the nation's defense or economy.

Its determination was that foreign-produced routers introduce a supply chain vulnerability which could disrupt critical infrastructure and national defense, and pose a severe cybersecurity risk that could harm Americans.

I remember my very first online search, back in 2001: “What is the meaning of life?”

I remember clicking through to a mysterious minimal website that told me all points of consciousness were facets of the divine wishing to perceive itself.

This striking idea, which I discovered through Internet Explorer, profoundly affected me. Given developments in AI, it makes sense to return to my old search, seeking new answers.

My editor has fed ChatGPT the collected wisdom of humanity just for me. The goal: to find an answer to the ultimate question of why we are here. I belong to no one faith, but find beauty in many spiritual paths. If the truth is in fragments of all of them, this is our best chance of seeing it. I’m strangely nervous.

HolyGPT, as we call it, incorporates the complete texts of the Abrahamic religions, Dharmic traditions (including Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism), Indigenous wisdom (where available in the public domain), as well as works of esoteric mysticism, poets and secular philosophers.