“I’m looking for employees who have their own unique way of seeing things my way.”
3 Easy Ways to Organize Your Digital Photos
PCMag – “How awful does it feel to open a digital photo and not remember anything about it? The good news is that you can help yourself avoid that experience by organizing your pictures. And contrary to popular belief, that process doesn’t have to be a pain.
A new genre has appeared on the book scene: a biography of a biography. Joseph Epstein has mixed feeling: »
There Are Too Many Overweight Biographies
A DOGE AI Tool Called SweetREX Is Coming to Slash US Government Regulation
Wired – no paywall – “Named for its developer, an undergrad who took leave from UChicago to become a DOGE affiliate, a new AI tool automates the review of federal regulations and flags rules it thinks can be eliminated. Efforts to gut regulation across the US government using AI are well underway.
On Wednesday, the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the Office of Management and Budget hosted a video call to discuss an AI tool being used to cut federal regulations, which the office called SweetREX Deregulation AI. The tool, which is still being developed, is built to identify sections of regulations that aren’t required by statute, then expedite the process for adopting updated regulations.
The development and rollout of what is being formally called the SweetREX Deregulation AI Plan Builder, or SweetREX DAIP, is meant to help achieve the goals laid out in President Donald Trump’s “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation” executive order, which aims to “promote prudent financial management and alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens.” Industrial-scale deregulation is a core aim laid out in Project 2025, the document that has served as a playbook for the second Trump administration.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has also estimated that “50 percent of all federal regulations can be eliminated,” according to a July 1, 2025, PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Washington Post. To this end, SweetREX was developed by associates of DOGE operating out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The plan is to roll it out to other US agencies. Members of the call included staffers from across the government, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of State, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, among others. Christopher Sweet, a DOGE affiliate who was initially introduced to colleagues as a “special assistant” and who was until recently a third-year student at the University of Chicago, co-led the call and was identified as the primary developer of SweetREX (thus, its name). He told colleagues that tools from Anthropic and OpenAI will be increasingly utilized by federal workers and that “a lot of the productivity boosts will come from the tools that are built around these platforms.”
Sweet said that for SweetREX, they are “primarily using the Google family of models, so primarily Gemini.” Neither Sweet nor OMB immediately responded to WIRED’s request for comment. HUD’s press office responded only to say the request was “under review.” Google did not yet respond to a request for comment.
Previously, WIRED reportedon the output of an AI tool for deregulation at HUD. A spreadsheet detailed how many words could be eliminated from individual regulations and gave a percentage figure indicating how noncompliant the regulations were; how that percentage was calculated was unclear. At the time, Sweet did not respond to a request for comment, and a HUD spokesperson said the agency does not comment on individual personnel.
Site Behind Major SSN Leak Returns With Detailed Data on Millions
Follow up to previous posts – National Public Data Published Its Own Passwords; Is Your SSN in the National Public Data Breach? Here’s How to Find Out; and How to Remove Your Profile From National Public Data; See also PC Mag – National Public Data, a website infamous for its role in leaking millions of Social Security numbers last year, has returned with the ability to look up anyone’s personal information. The site shut down in December amid a wave of lawsuits against parent company Jericho Pictures after a breach exposed an estimated 272 million unique SSNs and 600 million phone numbers. Since then, the site has been relatively dormant. But today, we spotted the nationalpublicdata.comdomain springing back to life with a new interface. It looks like the domain has changed hands: In a page about last year’s breach, the site’s new owners write: “Important Notice: Jerico Pictures, Inc., the Florida company that suffered a major data breach in 2024, no longer operates this site. We have zero affiliation with them. We’re keeping this page, originally posted by Jerico Pictures, Inc., intact so its history remains traceable.”
