This seems to be dominating the news, but I’m not going to spend much time with it.

https://www.bespacific.com/at-the-top-of-the-ticket-a-criminal-defendant/

At the Top of the Ticket, a Criminal Defendant

Greg Olear. Trump may well be a convicted felon by Election Day. He’s still the GOP nominee. “Yesterday, open statements were heard in the case of The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. The defendant—a fixture in the New York tabloids for decades, a former reality TV star, and, improbably, the 45th President of the United States—is accused of “the crime of FALSIFYING BUSINESS RECORDS IN THE FIRST DEGREE, in violation of Penal Law §175.10,” a Class E felony. There are 34 counts in the indictment, each one specifying a unique instance of Trump running afoul of the law… A Class E felony is as low-rung as it sounds. This isn’t instigating a coup against our democracy, or making off with top secret documents, or bullying Georgia election officials to ensure that an election went his way. In the grand scheme of things, these counts are minor crimes. All it takes is one intractable MAGA on the jury who thinks this is a Deep State conspiracy, or that Stormy Daniels is some vindictive gold-digger, and Trump will skate. Even so, a former POTUS is a criminal defendant. Let’s pause for a moment and—to use a phrase I abhor that was ubiquitous on Twitter seven years ago—let that sink in. None of the other 43 previous presidents (Grover Cleveland was 22 and 24) were indicted for even a single crime, Ulysses Grant’s need for speed notwithstanding. Nixon likely would have been but was pre-emptively pardoned, so we’ll never know. A FPOTUS indictment, therefore, is unprecedented. And this is just the first of Trump’s criminal trials. There are three more pending. Not one, not two, but three: four, altogether. Four! That doesn’t even take into account the civil fraud case, where the State of New York is poised to seize almost half a billion dollars in assets from Trump pending appeal—and that assumes that the bond he secured winds up being legit…”

See also Axios: New York Courts to release daily transcripts from Trump hush money trial

Yes and no. Some things change, some remain the same.

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/16/ai-top-secret-intelligence

"Top secret" is no longer the key to good intel in an AI world: report

… Today's intelligence systems cannot keep pace with the explosion of data now available, requiring "rapid" adoption of generative AI to keep an intelligence advantage over rival powers.

• The U.S. intelligence community "risks surprise, intelligence failure, and even an attrition of its importance" unless it embraces AI's capacity to process floods of data, according to the report from the Special Competitive Studies Project.

• The federal government needs to think more in terms of "national competitiveness" than "national security," given the wider range of technologies now used to attack U.S. interests.

Something I have been meaning to try. Could this turn Shakespeare into a graphic novel?

https://www.makeuseof.com/best-open-source-ai-image-generators/

The 5 Best Open-Source AI Image Generators

AI-based text-to-image generation models are everywhere and becoming easier to access daily. While it's easy just to visit a website and generate the image you're looking for, open-source text-to-image generators are your best bet if you want more control over the generation process.