The Western Roots of China and the Chinese Roots of the West — Part I

 The Western Roots of China and the Chinese Roots of the West — Part I Hungarian Conservative

No Kings’ Was Biggest Protest in U.S. History

Daily Beast [no paywall] – “For reference, that’s between 1 and 2 percent of the total population of the United States. The “No Kings” protests in every state may have been the biggest day of demonstrations in American history, a data analyst has suggested. 

GitHub is Leaking Trump’s Plans to ‘Accelerate’ AI Across Government

404 Media – The federal government is working on a website and API called “ai.gov” to “accelerate government innovation with AI” that is supposed to launch on July 4 and will include an analytics feature that shows how much a specific government team is using AI, according to an early version of the websiteand code posted by the General Services Administration on Github. The page is being created by the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, which is being run by former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd. 

Shedd previously told employees that he hopes to AI-ify much of the government. AI.gov appears to be an early step toward pushing AI tools into agencies across the government, code published on Github shows. “Accelerate government innovation with AI,” an early version of the website, which is linked to from the GSA TTS Github, reads. “Three powerful AI tools. One integrated platform.” The early version of the page suggests that its API will integrate with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic products. But code for the API shows they are also working on integrating with Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock and Meta’s LLaMA. 

The page suggests it will also have an AI-powered chatbot, though it doesn’t explain what it will do. The Github says “launch date – July 4.” Currently, AI.gov redirects to whitehouse.gov. The demo website is linked to from Github(archive here) and is hosted on cloud.gov on what appears to be a staging environment.

 The text on the page does not show up on other websites, suggesting that it is not generic placeholder text. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency made integrating AI into normal government functions one of its priorities. At GSA’s TTS, Shedd has pushed his team to create AI tools that the rest of the government will be required to use. 

In February, 404 Media obtained leaked audio from a meeting in which Shedd told his team they would be creating “AI coding agents” that would write software across the entire government, and said he wanted to use AI to analyze government contracts.