Not always a bad thing, but is one set of tech skill enough?

https://www.bespacific.com/opm-cuts-degree-requirements-for-government-tech-jobs-in-new-standards/

OPM cuts degree requirements for government tech jobs in new standards

Prefacing this update to include, not referenced in this article, job applicants for federal employment are now asked to answer questions to determine loyalty to Trump and willingness to execute Trump’s Executive Orders. Via NextGov/FCW: “The Office of Personnel Management released new classification and qualification standards for technology employees on Monday that make it easier for those without higher education degrees to get government jobs. The update is meant to move the government from relying on strict requirements for higher education and years of experience when hiring and promoting workers to using assessments meant to actually test for the skills needed for a given job.  The new standards for technology employees no longer include degree requirements, an OPM official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Nextgov/FCW…OPM is now rewriting the standards for all 604 occupational series roles and looking to reduce the number of series, too. The agency aims to move from self-attestation of skills in government hiring to formal assessments to test for aptitude for a given job…”

Where were you on the night in question? (Within 1751 feet of this spot...)

https://pogowasright.org/virginia-enacts-ban-on-precise-geolocation-data-sales-as-momentum-for-similar-prohibitions-builds/

Virginia enacts ban on precise geolocation data sales as momentum for similar prohibitions builds

Suzanne Smiley reports:

The governor of Virginia on Monday signed a law banning the sale of citizens’ precise geolocation data, a sign of growing momentum for such laws at the state level.

The legislation bars the sale of geolocation within a 1,750 foot radius, a buffer large enough to keep data brokers from pinpointing where consumers live, work, worship, shop and otherwise travel.

The bill, which was passed as an amendment to Virginia’s existing comprehensive data privacy law, received unanimous bipartisan support in the state’s legislature and takes effect on July 1.

Read more at The Record.

Why AI bias is not obvious.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10319-8

Language models transmit behavioural traits through hidden signals in data

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate data to train improved models1,2,3, but it remains unclear what properties are transmitted in this model distillation4,5. Here we show that distillation can lead to subliminal learning—the transmission of behavioural traits through semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a ‘teacher’ model with some trait T (such as disproportionately generating responses favouring owls or showing broad misaligned behaviour) generates datasets consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a ‘student’ model trained on these data learns T, even when references to T are rigorously removed. More realistically, we observe the same effect when the teacher generates math reasoning traces or code. The effect occurs only when the teacher and student have the same (or behaviourally matched) base models. To help explain this, we prove a theoretical result showing that subliminal learning arises in neural networks under broad conditions and demonstrate it in a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier. As artificial intelligence systems are increasingly trained on the outputs of one another, they may inherit properties not visible in the data. Safety evaluations may therefore need to examine not just behaviour, but the origins of models and training data and the processes used to create them.

Maine leads the way?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/aclu-lawsuit-ice-reign-of-terror-maine-california.html

The Clever New Lawsuit That Could Finally End ICE’s Reign of Terror in Blue States

There was, unfortunately, nothing unusual about Juan Sebastián Carvajal-Muñoz’s brutal abduction by masked immigration agents in January. Carvajal-Muñoz, a lawful Maine resident with a spotless record, was driving to work when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers allegedly cut him off, smashed his window, dragged him out, and put him in full-body shackles. They then threw him in the back of an unmarked SUV, leaving his car running with his keys inside it and his phone on the ground. These agents allegedly spent the rest of the day taunting and terrorizing Carvajal-Muñoz, refusing to accept proof of his lawful status and insisting that his visa would be revoked. They later locked him in a windowless cell with about two dozen other men that had no beds and a single, open toilet. That night, without any clear explanation, they dumped him in another state, leaving him to find his own way back home without his car or phone.

Such accounts have become all too familiar since Donald Trump returned to office and unleashed the Department of Homeland Security to assault, kidnap, and imprison anyone who appears Latino. What makes Carvajal-Muñoz’s story different is that he is fighting back against the agents who violated his rights—and stands a real chance of winning. On Tuesday, a group of civil rights lawyers, including the ACLU and its Maine chapter, filed a lawsuit against these agents, seeking damages for the immense harm they allegedly inflicted on Carvajal-Muñoz. It is notoriously difficult to sue federal officers under recent Supreme Court precedents. But Carvajal-Muñoz’s attorneys are testing a legal theory that circumvents these roadblocks by suing officers under state law for violations of his constitutional rights. This strategy is largely untested, but it may be the only remaining way to hold ICE accountable in court. And if it works, it could open the door to a flood of similar suits by ICE’s many other victims.

Careful, reading this article may give you ideas!

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/lessons-from-innovation-pioneer-florence-nightingale/

Lessons From Innovation Pioneer Florence Nightingale

The nursing trailblazer was also a disruptive innovator whose successes offer enduring lessons for leaders in communication and persistence.

What if Trump was right? (Okay, forget I asked that.)

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/14/anthropic-mythos-federal-agency-testing-00872439?referrer=https://reddit.com

Federal agencies skirt Trump’s Anthropic ban to test its advanced AI model

Federal agencies and government officials are quietly sidestepping President Donald Trump’s ban on working with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, as intrigue and anxiety around the company’s powerful new AI model continues to grow.

The highly sophisticated new model unveiled last week has impressed — and worried — researchers because of its ability to unearth critical software flaws that even the brightest human minds have been unable to identify.

In recent days, staff from at least two large federal agencies have reached out to Anthropic to express interest in integrating Claude Mythos into their cyber defense efforts, according to a former senior U.S. technology official with direct knowledge of the discussions.

This is more like it!

https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2026/04/ai-hallucinations-cost-lawyers-110000-in-oregon-vineyard-lawsuit.html

AI hallucinations cost lawyers $110,000 in Oregon vineyard lawsuit

A federal judge in Oregon squashed a vineyard lawsuit after determining that two lawyers’ AI-assisted court filings  were replete with citations from non-existent cases — and one lawyer had attempted a “cover-up” when the bogus material was uncovered.

… Clarke ordered the woman’s lawsuit dismissed with prejudice — meaning it can’t be refiled — ruling that an artificial intelligence tool  had once again led human minds astray.

… The six-figure hammerblow for A.I. errors is the largest ever imposed by an Oregon federal judge. By comparison, the state’s appellate court’s largest fine  topped out at $10,000.

“In the quickly expanding universe  of cases involving sanctions for the misuse of artificial intelligence, this case is a notorious outlier in both degree and volume,” Clarke wrote in a Dec. 12 opinion. “Plaintiffs and their counsel have not been adequately forthcoming, candid or apologetic about their conduct.”

… The judge ordered Brigandi to pay $80,000 of the other side’s attorneys’ fees, plus $15,000 in fines for 15 references to made-up cases and eight fabricated citations.

For the hard core rockers…

https://www.bespacific.com/treasure-trove-of-1000s-of-secret-concert-recordings/

Now Online: a Treasure Trove of 1000s of Secret Concert Recordings

Kottke: “For decades, a guy named Aadam Jacobs has been recording live music shows. His collection of over 10,000 shows since 1984 feature the likes of Nirvana, R.E.M., The Pixies, Björk, Depeche Mode, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, The Cure, Phish, Fugazi, and so many more. With the help of archivists, the entire collection is making its way onto The Internet Archive.

The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and became mainstream. The collection features early-in-their-career performances from alternative and experimental artists like R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.

There’s also a smattering of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of Phish were thrilled to discover that a previously uncirculated 1990 show by the jam band is included. And there are hundreds of sets by smaller artists who are unlikely to be known to even fans with the most obscure tastes.

All of it is slowly becoming available for streaming and free download at the nonprofit online repository Internet Archive, including that nascent Nirvana show recording, with the audio from Jacobs’ cassette recorder cleaned up.

Some of the shows, like this pre-Dave Grohl one from Nirvana, were recorded before the bands hit it big. It’s wild to hear their performance of About a Girl get about three claps from the audience…”

Modern war. (Reads like an ad for the latest SUV...)

https://www.euractiv.com/news/ukrainian-robots-capture-enemy-position-without-troops-in-historic-first-zelenskyy-says/

Ukrainian robots capture enemy position without troops in historic first, Zelenskyy says

Ukrainian robots have taken an enemy position alone “for the first time in the history of this war”, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced.

Zelenskyy stated on Monday that an enemy position was taken over “without infantry and without losses on our side” through the use of both aerial drones and unmanned ground systems.

“The future is already on the front line – and Ukraine is building it,” Zelenskyy said.

Analysis by cost?

https://www.bespacific.com/forecasting-the-economic-effects-of-ai/

Forecasting the Economic Effects of AI

We completed the most comprehensive study of how economists and AI experts think AI will affect the U.S. economy. Forecasting Research Institute. Mar 31, 2026. “There is widespread disagreement over the impact that AI will—or won’t—have on the U.S. economy: some prominent voices warn of a transformative upheaval and large-scale job losses, while others predict modest boosts to productivity at best. But there has been little work attempting to systematically understand expert views on the economic impacts of AI. What do top economists predict will be the economic consequences of AI—and why do they hold those beliefs? In a new working paper, researchers from the Forecasting Research Institute and coauthors from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Yale School of Management, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania present results from a large-scale forecasting exercise tracking the views of 69 leading economists, 52 AI industry and policy experts, 38 highly accurate forecasters, and 401 members of the general public.

• The survey ran from mid-October 2025 to the end of February 2026. This post summarizes the key findings. For more details, refer to the full working paper. We also built a tool so you can compare your own forecasts of AI’s economic impact to economists’ forecasts. When you submit your forecasts, you will get a shareable image that compares your predictions to economists’ predictions…”

Everything you ever wanted to know…

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report

Inside the AI Index: 12 Takeaways from the 2026 Report

This year's AI Index report reveals AI's capabilities are advancing quickly; less so, our ability to measure and manage them.

Led by a steering committee of academic and industry experts and produced by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, the Artificial Intelligence Index has tracked the field's evolution since 2017, measuring everything from technical capabilities and research output to societal impact and public perception. What began as an effort to bring rigor and transparency to AI's rapid development has become the field's most comprehensive annual snapshot—a data-driven portrait of where artificial intelligence stands, where it's headed, and what it means for society. 

The new report shows that AI models are achieving breakthrough results in science and complex reasoning, but at a concerning environmental toll. America is outspending any other country on AI, but is finding it harder to attract top talent. Meanwhile, AI’s workforce disruption has moved from prediction to reality, hitting young workers first. 

What follows are the year’s most significant developments in AI, or read the full report.

Milestone?

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/704225/rising-adoption-spurs-workforce-changes.aspx

Rising AI Adoption Spurs Workforce Changes

For the first time in Gallup’s measurement, half of employed American adults say they use AI in their role at least a few times a year, up from 46% last quarter. Frequent AI use is also increasing, with 13% of employees now saying they use AI daily and 28% reporting they use it a few times a week or more.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.bespacific.com/osint-navigator/

OSINT Navigator

“We built OSINT Navigator to make it easier for investigators and researchers to find the right tools for the job — and discover tools they didn’t know existed. Navigator allows you to enter a question like “How do I find the owner of a website?” or “How do I research a YouTube video?” and receive a mix of AI- and community-recommended tools and guidance. You can try it out right now for free at https://navigator.indicator.media/. OSINT Navigator draws on a curated database of more than 7,500 tools from nine independent OSINT toolkits (see the list below ). The dataset is open-source and can be accessed here. We’re grateful to the creators of the toolkits for allowing us to include their content in Navigator’s search results.  When you ask a question, an LLM retrieves the most relevant tools and generates a tailored response. Answers can also be contributed by investigators in the community — all responses are ranked by user votes, so the most useful ones will rise to the top. It’s really helpful for you to rate and submit answers. Navigator offers 10 free searches per day for anyone. Indicator members receive 50 daily queries and the ability to use an API or a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connection to query Navigator from within an AI agent or tool. (Be sure to login with the email that’s connected to your membership.) You also have the option to run Navigator locally in your browser, which we detail below. Navigator is developed by Tom Vaillant, a journalist and technologist who runs Buried Signals, in partnership with Indicator.”

To AI or not to AI…

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6525800

Artificial Intelligence and Human Legal Reasoning

Empirical evidence increasingly demonstrates that generative artificial intelligence has the capacity to improve the speed and quality of legal work, yet many lawyers, judges, and clients are reluctant to fully embrace AI. One important reason for hesitation is the concern that AI may undermine the human reasoning and judgment on which competent legal practice depends. This Article provides the first empirical evidence evaluating that concern by testing whether upper level law students who rely on AI at an early stage of a project experience reduced comprehension and impaired legal reasoning on later stages when AI is not an available option.

To evaluate the possibility that AI degrades comprehension and reasoning, we conducted a randomized controlled trial involving approximately one hundred second and third year law students at the University of Minnesota Law School. Participants completed four sequential lawyering tasks: writing a memo synthesizing the law based on a packet of legal materials, answering closed-book multiple choice questions that tested their comprehension of the materials, writing a memo applying the materials to a fact pattern, and revising their second memo. Participants were randomly assigned either to a control group, which could not use AI until the final revision task, or to an AI-exposed group, which used AI during both the initial synthesis task and the final revision task, but not during the intervening comprehension and application tasks.

The results provide a more complex picture of AI’s effects on legal reasoning than critics or enthusiasts often assume. As expected, participants who used AI to help craft synthesis memos produced substantially stronger work and completed that task more quickly. But contrary to our preregistered hypothesis, AI exposure at this initial stage did not diminish downstream comprehension of the underlying legal principles. To the contrary, participants who used AI on the synthesis task outperformed the control group on the later application task even when neither group had access to AI. Yet when all participants used AI to revise their reasoning memos, participants who started with weaker memos improved while participants who started with stronger memos regressed. These findings suggest that AI does not inevitably erode or promote independent legal reasoning, but that its effects depend on when and how law students and junior lawyers use AI. The Article builds on this insight by suggesting best practices for AI use and avenues for further empirical research.

Tools & Techniques. (Got an old laptop?)

https://www.makeuseof.com/chrome-os-flex-3-dollar-flash-drive-back-market/

This $3 flash drive turned my ancient laptop into a working Chromebook

Where have you been?

https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based-geolocation-surveillance-tech/

Uncovering Webloc

Targeted and mass surveillance based on everyday consumer data from mobile apps and digital advertising has been referred to as advertising intelligence (ADINT). We refer to it as “ad-based surveillance technologies.” These technologies have proliferated alongside the personal data surveillance economy. They are poorly regulated and often sold by firms that operate without transparency, raising serious security, privacy, and civil liberties concerns – especially when used by authoritarian governments that lack proper oversight.

Response or arrogance?

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/10/france-to-ditch-windows-for-linux-to-reduce-reliance-on-us-tech/

France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech

France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.

Wisdom?

https://thenextweb.com/news/estonia-eu-child-social-media-ban-opposition

Estonia is the rare EU country opposing bans on children’s social media use

In short: Estonia and Belgium are the only two EU member states to have declined the Jutland Declaration, an October 2025 pan-European commitment to restrict children’s access to social media. Estonia’s ministers argue that age-based bans are unenforceable, that children will find ways around them, and that the correct approach is to enforce the GDPR against the platforms themselves and invest in digital literacy rather than restricting young people’s participation in the information society.

Closer to AI as a real person?

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests-ai-agents-buy-software-licenses-seats-2026-4

Microsoft exec suggests AI agents will need to buy software licenses, just like employees

Ashley Stewart's scoops are always worth reading. This week, she published a sharp piece on the AI threat to software, and how Microsoft, Salesforce, and others are responding.

Buried in the story was a deceptively simple question: does your AI agent count as an employee?

At a recent conference, Microsoft executive Rajesh Jha floated a provocative idea. In a future where companies deploy fleets of AI agents, those agents may need their own identities — logins, inboxes, and even seats inside software systems. If so, AI wouldn't shrink software revenue. It could expand it.