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Arindam200/reddit-mcp: Model Context Protocol server implementation for Reddit
This repository contains a Model Context Protocol server implementation for Reddit that allows AI assistants to access and interact with Reddit content through PRAW (Python Reddit API Wrapper).
Bellevue Barbershop - North Towne Barber
haircuts
The iPhone in your pocket is now trusted for classified NATO data | ZDNET
This approval comes down to how Apple builds security into its products. New iPhones and iPads rely on Apple silicon with a Secure Enclave that isolates sensitive data, like encryption keys and biometric information. They also use protections such as Face ID, Touch ID, and Memory Integrity Enforcement, which block entire classes of memory-based attacks before they run.
To be clear, NATO has not crowned the iPhone and iPad as its official devices. But it is validating that Apple's everyday hardware meets the bar for classified government use. In other words, the same phone in your pocket is trusted in environments once reserved for bespoke, locked-down hardware. It also reinforces Apple's claims that privacy and security are core decisions.
Anthropic says Pentagon's "final offer" is unacceptable
Catch up quick: The Pentagon and Anthropic are in a high-stakes feud over the limits Anthropic wants to place on the department's use of its AI model Claude: no mass surveillance or autonomous weapons.
The Pentagon this week started laying the groundwork for one consequence — blacklisting the company as a supply chain risk — by asking defense contractors including Boeing and Lockheed Martin to assess their exposure to Anthropic. Alternatively, Hegseth threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to provide its model without any restrictions. Such an order may be on murky legal ground.The Pentagon's threats "are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security," Amodei said in a blog post.
"Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request," he added.The big picture: The Pentagon's requirement that AI models be offered for "all lawful purposes" in classified settings is not unique to Anthropic.
While Anthropic has been the only model used in classified settings to date, xAI recently signed a contract under the all lawful purposes standard for classified work. Negotiations to bring OpenAI and Google into the classified space are accelerating.What's next: Amodei said the company remains committed to continuing talks.
But if the Pentagon decides to offboard Anthropic, Amodei said the company "will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider."
The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis - Citadel Securities
The year is 2026. The unemployment rate just printed 4.28%, AI capex is 2% of GDP (650bn), AI adjacent commodities are up 65% since Jan-23 and approximately 2,800 data centers are planned for construction in the US*. In spite of the current displacement narrative – job postings for software engineers are rising rapidly, up 11% YoY.
Indeed Job Postings: Software Engineers + Overall Postings, Daily and 21dma
The more important question insofar as it relates to the AI displacement narrative is: how intensely is AI being used for work? We can tease out the answer from a subset of the St Louis Fed data that buckets by frequency of AI use. We would posit that if AI represents imminent displacement risk, the real time population data would show an inflection upwards in the daily use of AI for work. The data seems unexpectedly stable and presents little evidence of any imminent displacement risk (solid lines at the bottom of the chart).
Displacing white collar work would require orders of magnitude more compute intensity than the current level utilization. If automation expands rapidly, demand for compute definitionally rises, pushing up its marginal cost. If the marginal cost of compute rises above the marginal cost of human labor for certain tasks, substitution will not occur, creating a natural economic boundary. This dynamic contrasts sharply with narratives assuming frictionless replication of intelligence. Even if algorithms improve recursively, economic deployment remains bounded by physical capital, energy availability, regulatory approvals, and organizational change.
For AI to generate a sustained macro contraction one must assume that labor income falls and no compensating rise occurs in investment, fiscal transfers, or external demand. The surge in new business formation is an interesting point of reference here.
Micah's Meticulous Mowing – We mow meticulously
Liberating Structures - Introduction
Supreme Court strikes down tariffs - SCOTUSblog
In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the “major questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. In 2023, the court relied on the “major questions” doctrine to strike down the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. In that case and others like it, Roberts observed, it might have been possible to read the federal law at issue to give the executive branch the power it claimed. But “context” – such as the constitutional division of power among the three branches of government – and “common sense” “suggested Congress would not have delegated ‘highly consequential power’ through ambiguous language.”
In cases like this one, Roberts continued, in which the Trump administration contends that Congress has delegated to it “the core congressional power of the purse,” considerations like context and common sense “apply with particular force.” “[I]f Congress were to relinquish that weapon to another branch, a ‘reasonable interpreter’ would expect it to do so ‘clearly.’” And indeed, Roberts said, “[w]hen Congress has delegated its tariff powers, it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits,” a test that Trump’s tariffs failed here.
House appears on track to defeat resolution curbing Trump’s war powers in Iran
The bipartisan war powers resolution, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), aims to reassert Congress’s authority to wage war by requiring Trump to win congressional approval before launching any strikes against Iran.
But Massie, so far, is the only House Republican to say he’s supporting the resolution. And a small handful of Democrats — all of them close allies of Israel — are already lining up to oppose it. The combination sets the stage for the measure to fail in the Republican-controlled House, which would give Trump what amounts to a tacit authorization to conduct unilateral strikes as the president and other top officials signal that such an attack could be imminent.
Khanna, Massie and other supporters of the check on executive war powers maintain that they’re merely firming up the use-of-force authorities delineated by the Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the power “to declare war.”
Last summer, after Trump launched strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan resolution limiting Trump’s use of force in that country.
Over the last three months, the lower chamber has voted on three separate war powers resolutions — two related to military actions in Venezuela, and the third governing the Pentagon’s strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean region. All resolutions were defeated by Trump’s GOP allies.
“We were told that the nuclear program in Iran had been completely and totally obliterated. Not my words, Donald Trump’s words. And so now we’re to believe that there’s an exigent circumstance where Donald Trump may need to strike militarily in order to prevent Iran presumably from achieving its nuclear ambitions,” Jeffries said Tuesday.
The Blacklist Paradox: Why the Pentagon is Threatening its Only Working AI
The danger here isn’t just about one contract; it’s about the precedent. If the Pentagon successfully bullies Anthropic into submission or replaces it with a more “flexible” competitor, we are effectively witnessing the birth of an intentionally unethical AI.
The Death of Human Agency When AI is integrated into weaponry for “all lawful purposes” without restrictions on autonomy, we invite the Responsibility Gap. If an AI-driven drone swarm misidentifies a target, who is at fault? By removing the “human-in-the-loop” requirement, the military is seeking a weapon that offers the ultimate prize of war: lethality without accountability. Surveillance as a Service Existing U.S. laws were written for wiretaps, not for generative AI that can ingest millions of data points to build predictive profiles. Under an “all lawful purposes” mandate, an LLM could be turned into a digital Panopticon. Anthropic has warned that current laws have not caught up to what AI can do in terms of analyzing open-source intelligence on citizens. The Moral Race to the Bottom If the Pentagon blacklists Anthropic, it sends a clear message to competitors: Safety is a liability. To win government billions, firms will be incentivized to strip away safety layers. Reports already suggest OpenAI, Google, and xAI have shown more “flexibility” regarding the Pentagon’s demands.
The Pentagon’s “supply chain threat” maneuver is a scorched-earth tactic designed to force Silicon Valley to choose between its values and its bottom line.
If Anthropic stands firm, it may lose $200 million in revenue and a seat at the defense table. But if they cave, they may well be providing the operating system for the very “Terminator” future they were founded to prevent. In the world of 2026, the most dangerous threat to the supply chain might just be an AI that has been ordered to stop caring about ethics.
Formatting Dates and Times | ICU Documentation
date formatting in ICU - International Components for Unicode
vitalik.eth on X: "It will significantly increase my opinion of @Anthropic if they do not back down, and honorably eat the consequences. (For those who are not aware, so far they have been maintaining the two red lines of "no fully autonomous weapons" and "no mass surveillance of Americans"." / X
It will significantly increase my opinion of @Anthropic if they do not back down, and honorably eat the consequences.
(For those who are not aware, so far they have been maintaining the two red lines of "no fully autonomous weapons" and "no mass surveillance of Americans". Actually a very conservative and limited posture, it's not even anti-military.
IMO fully autonomous weapons and mass privacy violation are two things we all want less of, so in my ideal world anyone working on those things gets access to the same open-weights LLMs as everyone else, and exactly nothing on top of that. Of course we won't get anywhere close to that world, but if we get even 10% closer to that world that's good, and if we get 10% further that's bad)
Free AI Voice Generator & Voice Agents Platform | ElevenLabs
Powering the best enterprises, creators, and developers. From ElevenAgents for customer experience, ElevenCreative for content creation, to the leading AI voice generator.
The Looming Taiwan Chip Disaster That Silicon Valley Has Long Ignored - The New York Times
After the call, the Semiconductor Industry Association hired McKinsey to take a look. They started with a basic question: What would happen if companies couldn’t get chips from the island?
A summary of the resulting report opened with a map of Taiwan detailing how integral the island is to the global economy. Taiwan enabled roughly $10 trillion of the world’s gross domestic product. It made chips for iPhones and more than half of so-called memory chips for cars, and it led in assembling A.I. chips.
The island’s semiconductor manufacturing is mainly in Hsinchu, an area where Taiwan’s government discouraged manufacturing after World War II because it is next to the sloping beaches that are the best place for an amphibious assault against the island.
If Taiwan’s factories were knocked offline, the impact would be immediate, the roughly 20-page report said. Economies would flounder. In China, the gross national product would fall by $2.8 trillion; in the United States, the drop would be $2.5 trillion.
Other reports, including one by Bloomberg Economics, a research service, estimate a conflict would cost the global economy more than $10 trillion.
The first part was easy. TSMC committed more than $50 billion to building a second and third plant in Arizona, two years after announcing its first facility during Mr. Trump’s first term. Intel promised to expand in Arizona and invest as much as $100 billion in an Ohio campus. Samsung pledged $45 billion for two factories in Taylor, Texas.
Customers were reluctant to buy chips that cost more than 25 percent more and were a generation behind those made in Taiwan, where the government has an unofficial rule requiring TSMC to put its most cutting-edge technology on the island first.
Intel and Samsung, despite their pledges to expand production, didn’t have any commitments. Their technology had fallen behind TSMC’s, and the industry doubted they could catch up.
Mr. Trump met with Mr. Tan days later and suggested that Intel give the United States 10 percent of Intel’s business. The chief executive agreed to the unorthodox request, even though some argued it was on shaky legal ground. Intel gave the government equity in exchange for the $8.9 billion it had been promised from the CHIPS Act.
The deal helped Intel secure its federal subsidies, without having to meet financial benchmarks to qualify for the money.
He told top chip executives, who had gathered for a Semiconductor Industry Association meeting, that the administration wanted them to buy 50 percent of their semiconductors from American plants, four people who attended said. Companies that didn’t would pay a 100 percent tariff.
Income tax in the United States - Wikipedia
Total effective tax rates (includes all taxes: federal+state income tax, sales tax, property tax, etc) for the richest Americans declined by 2018 to a level beneath that of the bottom 50% of earners,[18] contributing to wealth inequality. Analysis by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
Federal Insurance Contributions Act - Wikipedia
The Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA /ˈfaɪkə/) is a United States federal payroll (or employment) tax payable by both employees and employers to fund Social Security and Medicare[1]—federal programs that provide benefits for retirees, people with disabilities, and children of deceased workers.
Since 1990, the employee's share of the Social Security portion of the FICA tax has been 6.2% of gross compensation up to a limit that adjusts with inflation.[a][9] The taxation limit in 2020 was $137,700 of gross compensation, resulting in a maximum Social Security tax for 2020 of $8,537.40.[7] This limit, known as the Social Security Wage Base, goes up each year based on average national wages and, in general, at a faster rate than the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). The employee's share of the Medicare portion of the tax is 1.45% of wages, with no limit on the amount of wages subject to the Medicare portion of the tax.
So personal income tax in the US is ~30% for most of us (ranging from ~10%-37%), compared to Social Security's ~6.2% Medicare is 1.45% (or 12.4% + 2.9% if you count the employer portion). AND only the first ~$137K is taxable so our maximum tax amount to Social Security and Medicare is capped, while normal income tax that politicians can direct to anything from foreign wars to immigration enforcement to redistribution to different states or interest on debt driven by tax breaks to the rich that caused deficits.
US Immigration and Border Security Fact Sheet: State of the Union 2026 | USAFacts
An average of 9,000 refugees were admitted monthly between January 2024 to January 2025. From February to December 2025, there were 1,226 total admissions, 1,059 of whom were from South Africa.
It's quite disappointing that these policies - especially the H1B tax, which brings the best and brightest in the world to the US - all target legal immigrants.
State of the Union 2026 Fact Sheet | USAFacts
I love this report!
This data-driven, impartial report contains historic metrics — how you use them to advocate for the changes you want to see in the country is up to you.
Most spending was on Social Security, national defense, grants to state and local governments, Medicare, and interest on the debt. Spending and revenue were both higher than their pre-pandemic levels, and the federal government ran another deficit as spending outpaced revenue.
Why do we always lump Social Security in with other national spending? Social Security is collected separately from all other tax revenue and goes directly to the Social Security trust fund. That money cannot be put anywhere else. Politicians can't direct Social Security goes into a trust fund and politicians can't change how it's spent, unlike defense spending and other spending. In my view, Social Security should be separate. It's not the government's money to spend, it's money that is given back to the people directly. So comparing national defense, which the government can choose to change the spending levels, reallocate it to other spending priorities, Social Security cannot be because it's a trust fund.
Public schools took in and spent more funds than ever before. It also had mixed impacts on teachers and students. The number of public-school teachers has increased each year since 2020 while the number of students has decreased or stayed the same. Meanwhile, test scores have fallen.
Well we have to do something about that and be drastic about it. However, I don't see how cutting funding alone - the current Republican priority - will help.
US security group looks to recruit hundreds of personnel as it targets Gaza role
UG Solutions told the FT it had made a “very broad” bid to provide anything from security for trucks to work sites and storage facilities for Trump’s contentious new Board of Peace, which is tasked with overseeing a new governance framework for Gaza.
The company deployed contractors to guard militarised aid sites run by the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was shut down last year after five months of operations during the devastating war between Israel and Hamas. Hundreds of starving Palestinian aid seekers were killed by Israeli troops as they travelled through military zones to GHF sites, provoking fierce international condemnation at a time when severe Israeli restrictions on aid triggered a famine in Gaza.