Texas lawmakers double down on Discovery, call for DOJ investigation into Smithsonian

“This is the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard in nearly five years in the United States Senate.”

Have you heard the news that Texas’ senators want to chop up NASA’s retired space shuttle Discovery in order to move it from the Smithsonian to Houston? The lawmakers in question have and are now crying foul to the Department of Justice.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), together with Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas), on Wednesday sent a letter to the DOJ urging the Smithsonian be investigated for allegedly violating the Anti-Lobbying Act. They claim that the institution—Discovery‘s home for the past 13 years—improperly used appropriated funds to influence Congress regarding the relocation of the winged orbiter.

“Public reporting suggests the Smithsonian Institution has taken affirmative steps to oppose the passage and implementation of the shuttle’s relocation, as part of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” wrote Cornyn and Cruz to Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate. “These steps include lobbying the staff of the Senate Appropriations and Rules Committees to express disapproval, coordinating with members of the press to generate public opposition to the law’s passage and disseminating misinformation about the cost and logistics of the move.”

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(g+) Halluzination und Weltherrschaftswünsche: Das Anreizsystem der KI

Wer verstehen will, warum selbst die besten KI-Systeme halluzinieren und Politiker Tech-Milliardären folgen, muss den Blick auf die Anreize richten. Ein IMHO von Markus Feilner (Politik, KI)

Wer verstehen will, warum selbst die besten KI-Systeme halluzinieren und Politiker Tech-Milliardären folgen, muss den Blick auf die Anreize richten. Ein IMHO von Markus Feilner (Politik, KI)

California startup to demonstrate space weapon on its own dime

“All of the pieces that are required to make it viable exist.”

Defense contractors are in full sales mode to win a piece of a potentially trillion-dollar pie for development of the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield.

CEOs are touting their companies’ ability to rapidly spool up satellite, sensor, and rocket production. Publicly, they all agree with the assertion of Pentagon officials that US industry already possesses the technologies required to make a homeland missile defense system work.

The challenge, they say, is tying all of it together under the umbrella of a sophisticated command and control network. Sensors must be able to detect and track missile threats, and that information must rapidly get to weapons that can shoot them down. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top commander, likes to call Golden Dome a “systems of systems.”

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We let OpenAI’s “Agent Mode” surf the web for us—here’s what happened

From scanning emails to building fansites, Atlas can ably automate some web-based tasks.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced Atlas, a new web browser with ChatGPT integration, to let you “chat with a page,” as the company puts it. But Atlas also goes beyond the usual LLM back-and-forth with Agent Mode, a “preview mode” feature the company says can “get work done for you” by clicking, scrolling, and reading through various tabs.

“Agentic” AI is far from new, of course; OpenAI itself rolled out a preview of the web browsing Operator agent in January and introduced the more generalized “ChatGPT agent” in July. Still, prominently featuring this capability in a major product release like this—even in “preview mode”—signals a clear push to get this kind of system in front of end users.

I wanted to put Atlas’ Agent Mode through its paces to see if it could really save me time in doing the kinds of tedious online tasks I plod through every day. In each case, I’ll outline a web-based problem, lay out the Agent Mode prompt I devised to try to solve it, and describe the results. My final evaluation will rank each task on a 10-point scale, with 10 being “did exactly what I wanted with no problems” and one being “complete failure.”

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