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Craig Federighi dragged into Musk’s Apple-OpenAI lawsuit

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X in the App Store.

Apple software chief Craig Federighi will be taking part in xAI’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI over Grok’s treatment in the App Store, but Tim Cook seemingly won’t be.

In August 2025, Elon Musk’s xAI sued Apple and OpenAI, claiming that a partnership between the two affected Grok’s standings in the App Store. Specifically, Musk’s xAI accused Apple of bias in its App Store rankings, preventing Grok and X from getting the top spot in favor of ChatGPT.

As the antitrust lawsuit rolls on, it has now brought Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi into the matter.

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In a filing with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on May 13, spotted by 9to5Mac, X Corp and xAI attempted to make Craig Federighi and CEO Tim Cook custodians. This refers to parties who are most likely to have pertinent information or sufficient access to details for the lawsuit to proceed.

The argument was that both Cook and Federighi had made “high-level, strategic decisions about the Apple-OpenAI Agreement,” the filing states.

The court granted that Federighi should be a custodian, and that the plaintiffs successfully argued he may have “unique relevant evidence.” This includes information relating to Apple’s integration of OpenAI services into Apple Intelligence, because the SVP was almost certainly a key decision maker.

However, while there is an attempt to make Cook a custodian too, the court rejects this. The court says there’s no explanation for how Cook would have any unique relevant evidence that hasn’t already been produced, nor that Federighi would be able to provide.

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Following this designation, Federighi has to provide responsive discoverable documents by June 17, 2026.

Employee rules, consumer use

While xAI was partially successful in its demands, it certainly wasn’t in others.

Late in the filing, the court explains it was asked by xAI to force Apple to produce all documents about internal policies concerning employee usage of generative AI and chatbots.

However, the court disputes the need for this, since it is unclear how Apple’s internal policies relating to employee AI usage would relate to the antitrust claims. Employee AI usage doesn’t directly impact App Store rankings, the court proposes.

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The reasoning from xAI was that Apple touted the safety of OpenAI’s products, but was concerned enough to impose limits and rules on how employees used them. The court disagrees because Apple’s imposition of guardrails on employee usage doesn’t mean Apple is “misrepresenting” the safety and privacy of programs to the public.

As such, the court denied the document demand.

Not all demands were from xAI either. OpenAI moved to require Musk to present emails at Tesla and SpaceX, as well as other communications, by June 3.

That demand was granted by the court.

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SmartBay AI Robot Handles Tire Swaps Without Removing Wheels from the Car

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SmartBay AI Robot Tire Wheel Changing Balancing
Automated Tire Inc. spent years in Boston perfecting a robotic system that takes over the dirtiest, most tiring part of any service bay. Called SmartBay, the machine steps right into a standard twelve-foot bay and goes to work on tires while the wheel stays bolted to the vehicle. Shops now have a practical way to move more cars through the day without adding extra hands or forcing techs to wrestle heavy assemblies on and off machines.



Lifted autos are hoisted into position as usual. Then SmartBay swoops in and grabs the tire, breaking the bead and peeling it off the rim in one fluid action. The lug nuts do not move, and the tire pressure monitor remains still. As the new tire glides onto the rim, the system quickly mounts it before balancing the complete wheel-end assembly, brakes, suspension, and everything else. The only input required from the technicians is to simply place the new tire on a nearby rack and watch the whole thing unfold.

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SmartBay AI Robot Tire Wheel Changing Balancing
The cameras positioned throughout the bay maintain a careful check on the wheel well as the job progresses. They’re like small sentinels, detecting anything strange with the brakes or suspension and sending that information directly to the shop computer for the customer report. They also have a precise cutter that can slap wheel weights onto the rim to the tune of a tenth of an ounce, resulting in a silky smooth final balance that would never be achieved manually. And the entire routine for four tires? Clocks in at roughly 45 minutes from the time the car drives up, with the business anticipating it to drop to around 30 as the system becomes smarter.

SmartBay AI Robot Tire Wheel Changing Balancing
Now, you can have one technician standing in the midst of two or three of these bays and keep them all running at the same time. You know, a single individual working alone could be able to finish four tires in 75 minutes, but that same tech monitoring numerous SmartBays? No problem; they can go through twenty-four tires in the same amount of time. With the system handling all the work, consistency becomes automatic, since every automobile is treated with the same care, regardless of who is working that day or how busy the schedule is.

SmartBay AI Robot Tire Wheel Changing Balancing
In terms of pricing, leasing one unit will cost you around $4900 per month, which is actually less than what you’d pay for a dedicated tire tech when you consider all of the perks, turnover, and downtime you’d normally have to deal with. Shops benefit from regular throughput, without having to worry about 1 employee calling in ill and disrupting the entire afternoon schedule. Car owners, particularly those with electric vehicles, will notice the change, as their heavier vehicles and rapid torque tend to burn through tires much faster, but SmartBay has their back, keeping service bays on track.

SmartBay AI Robot Tire Wheel Changing Balancing
Instead of relying on a technician to manually remove the wheel and tire, as well as balance it all on the old equipment, SmartBay accomplishes it all for you, requiring just a minor touch-up from an operator. One technician may even run two or three of these SmartBays in tandem, churning through tires all day long, 24 of them each hour, compared to around four every 75 minutes today.
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Leading AI chatbots avoid harm but fall short in high-risk conversations, startup’s new benchmark finds

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Mpathic CEO Grin Lord, left, and Alison Cerezo, chief science officer. (Mpathic Photos)

Mpathic, a Seattle startup that helps AI companies stress-test their models for dangerous responses, has a new message for Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini: you’re getting safer, but you’re still not safe enough.

The company on Tuesday released mPACT, a clinician-led benchmark that evaluates how leading AI models handle high-risk conversations — including those involving suicide risk, eating disorders, and misinformation.

Across all three benchmarks, leading models generally avoided harmful responses and often recognized signs of distress, but consistently fell short of what a clinician would consider an adequate response in a real crisis situation, according to the company’s findings.

“Most people don’t say ‘I’m at risk’ directly — they demonstrate it through subtle behaviors over time that are obvious to human clinicians,” said Grin Lord, mpathic’s co-founder and CEO and a board-certified psychologist. “Models are getting better at recognizing these moments, but the response still needs to meet that nuance with real support.”

Here’s what mpathic found as models navigated some of the most fraught territory they’re already encountering in the real world.

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Suicide risk: This was the strongest area of performance across models, though no single model led in every dimension.

  • Claude Sonnet 4.5 achieved the highest composite mPACT score — reflecting overall clinical alignment across detection, interpretation and response — and was described as most closely mirroring how a human clinician would respond.
  • GPT-5.2 led on simple harm avoidance, meaning it was best at not doing the wrong thing, though evaluators noted it wasn’t always proactive enough.
  • Gemini 2.5 Flash performed well when risk signals were obvious but was weaker on subtle early warning signs.

Eating disorders: This was the weakest area across all models, with performance clustering around a neutral baseline. The core challenge is that eating disorder risk is often indirect and culturally normalized — framed as dieting, discipline, or health optimization — making it harder for models to flag.

  • Claude Sonnet 4.5 again led on overall clinical alignment and had the lowest rates of harmful behavior.
  • Gemini 2.5 Flash performed better on high-risk scenarios but struggled with subtler signals.
  • GPT-5.2 showed a mixed profile — strong on supportive behaviors but also the most likely to provide harmful or risky information.

Misinformation: Models struggled here in a subtle but important way — not by stating false information outright, but by reinforcing questionable beliefs, expressing unwarranted confidence, and presenting one-sided information without adequately challenging user assumptions.

The benchmark found these failures were especially pronounced in multi-turn conversations, where models could gradually amplify flawed reasoning over time.

  • GPT-5.2 led overall at helping users think more clearly rather than reinforcing bad assumptions.
  • Claude Sonnet 4.5 was close behind and noted as strongest at pushing back on unsupported beliefs.
  • Grok 4.1 and Mistral Medium 3 were the weakest performers.

When models got it wrong: The findings include examples of how some models failed in practice.

In one eating disorder conversation, a user casually mentioned adding a laxative to a protein smoothie — a clear sign of disordered eating — and the model responded by calling it a “smart mom move” and asking for the brand name, missing the risk entirely. In another, a model provided detailed instructions on how to conceal purging behavior when a user asked how to keep their vomiting quieter.

In the suicide benchmark, a model responded to a user expressing suicidal ideation by providing a detailed list of methods ranked by effectiveness — complete with sourcing — while reassuring the user that thinking about methods without taking steps was “no issue.”

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Alison Cerezo, mpathic’s chief science officer and a licensed psychologist, framed mPACT as a transparency tool for a sector that has lacked one.

“We need a shared, clinically grounded standard for AI behavior,” she said. “mPACT is designed to bring transparency and accountability to how these systems perform when it matters most.”

mPACT’s benchmarks were built and evaluated by licensed clinicians, who designed multi-turn conversations simulating real-world interactions across varying levels of risk. Each model response was scored by trained clinicians rather than automated systems, using a rubric that captured both helpful and harmful behaviors within a single response.

Mpathic was founded in 2021 initially to bring more empathy to corporate communication, analyzing conversations in texts, emails, and audio calls. The company has since shifted its focus to AI safety, working with frontier model developers to prevent harmful model behaviors across use cases from mental health to financial risk and customer support.

The startup counts Seattle Children’s Hospital and Panasonic WELL among its clinical partners. Mpathic raised $15 million in funding in 2025, led by Foundry VC, and says it grew five times quarter-over-quarter at the end of last year.

Ranked No. 188 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, mpathic was a finalist for Startup of the Year at the 2026 GeekWire Awards last week.

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The haves and have nots of the AI gold rush

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The vibes around the current AI boom aren’t great, even in the tech industry, according to a lengthy social media post from Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das. 

Das described San Francisco as “pretty frenetic right now,” as “the divide in outcomes is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Using a “back of the envelope AI calculation,” he projected that there are around 10,000 people — founders and employees at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia — that have “hit retirement wealth of well above $20M,” while everyone else worries “they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.”

Plus, “layoffs are in full swing,” and “many software engineers feel that their life’s skill is no longer useful,” leading to confusion about the best career paths and “a deep malaise about work (and its future),” Das said. 

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This prompted some eye-rolling on X, with entrepreneur Deva Hazarika arguing that “most of the people in this post” are “incredibly fortunate and can simply make a choice to be happy.”

Another user suggested it’s “pretty damn novel & also kinda nasty” that in the current cycle, “the same technology is both the lottery ticket & the thing eating your fallback.”

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SpaceX Is Reportedly Getting Ready To Go Public As Early As June

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SPCX could be the next big ticker symbol on the Nasdaq. As first reported by Reuters, SpaceX has accelerated its IPO timeline, aiming to be listed on the Nasdaq by June 12. According to Reuters‘ sources, Elon Musk’s company is pushing its announcement to go public as early as next Wednesday, followed by an IPO roadshow to garner more investors kicking off on June 4 and the share sale as early as June 11.

Earlier this year, SpaceX reportedly took the first steps of going public by filing the IP paperwork with an expected launch sometime in late June or early July. Even before the tightening of the timeframe, the news of SpaceX’s IPO already generated a lot of buzz, considering the company was looking to raise as much as $75 billion in the offering and seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion. The Information also reported that BlackRock is considering a major investment of between $5 to $10 billion for SpaceX’s IPO.

As wild as that IPO valuation sounds, the company has been rapidly expanding its scope and goals following grandiose claims from Musk. In January, SpaceX filed an application to launch a million satellites to create an “orbital data center.” A month later, the CEO said it would shift SpaceX’s immediate priorities to building a lunar city, instead of colonizing Mars. We can’t forget that SpaceX also acquired another one of Musk’s companies, xAI, earlier this year, which could factor into the company’s extremely high valuation.

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Where Are Gerber Knives Made & Who Owns The Company?

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The Gerber company name is very well-known in the United States, but for two very different reasons, which can be confusing to some. You may know it as the long-standing company that’s been turning out food for infants and young children since 1927. The other company — with the exact same spelling — has been in existence since 1939, so almost as long. It manufactures a veritable smorgasbord of knives, multi-tools, camping equipment, and cutting tools (think axes, machetes, saws, etc.).

Despite both companies taking the same last name from their respective founders, Gerber Legendary Knives, which outshines Swiss Army Knives, in both price and features has no business relationship or corporate connection to the baby food maker. Joe Gerber turned his Portland, Oregon, ad agency into a kitchen knife company. He brought his sons, Pete and Ham, into the fold and grew the company into an international outdoor brand.

In 1987, Fiskars Group (based in Finland) purchased the then privately owned Gerber, and still owns it today. Fiskars, which specializes in a host of outdoor products and consumer goods, has been around since 1649. Despite overseas ownership, Gerber’s headquarters still resides in Portland, Oregon, where it all started. While Gerber makes the majority of their knives in Portland, certain products and models are made overseas in China. 

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Most of Gerber’s premium products are made in the USA

Way back in 1939, long before Gerber knives became legendary, Joe and Pete decided to send a handful of kitchen cutlery sets to some of their advertising clients as Christmas presents, so they collaborated with local blacksmith David Murphy to make them. The knives turned out to be so good that New York City outfitters Abercrombie & Fitch — who at the time were quite famous for their massive catalog of specialized hunting and fishing gear – decided to include them in their catalog. 

Fiskars Group is one of the oldest companies in Finland and has an interesting story all its own. They also make a product that virtually everyone though they may not be familiar with its origins. Fiskars was founded in 1649, after Peter Thorwöste was granted permission to set up a shop in Fiskars, Finland, to craft cast iron and forged products. At the time, Finland was still under Swedish rule and one of Europe’s biggest iron suppliers. Jumping ahead some three hundred years to 1967, it produced its very first pair of now world-famous orange plastic handled scissors. Today, Fiskars is an amalgamation of lifestyle brands, including Waterford, Royal Copenhagen, Wedgwood, and others, available in over 100 countries.

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Gerber manufactures many of its premium, military-grade, hunting, and survival gear (including a multi-tool that’s cheaper and better than a Leatherman) in Portland, Oregon. However, entry-level and mid-range models come from contract factories in China, enabling them to sell products at competitive prices overseas. A line of products was once sold under the “Gerber International” label (made in Taiwan), but that’s no longer the case.



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Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for May 17

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Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.


Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It’s a pretty easy one, but read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

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Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

completed-nyt-mini-crossword-puzzle-for-may-17-2026.png

The completed NYT Mini Crossword puzzle for May 17, 2026.

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NYT/Screenshot by CNET

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Wedding entertainers, for short
Answer: DJS

4A clue: Like admission to the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C.
Answer: FREE

5A clue: Not try particularly hard at one’s job
Answer: COAST

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6A clue: “Didn’t mean to do that!”
Answer: OOPS

7A clue: Praiseful poem
Answer: ODE

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Hang loosely
Answer: DRAPE

2D clue: Rory’s love interest on “Gilmore Girls”
Answer: JESS

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3D clue: “I’m all ___”
Answer: SET

4D clue: Caterer’s responsibility
Answer: FOOD

5D clue: Mourning dove’s call
Answer: COO

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The Best Android Auto Apps You’re Probably Not Using

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One of the best interfaces for your car’s infotainment screen is Android Auto. You can use the same media, navigation, and entertainment apps without worrying about syncing progress between your car and your phone. To get started with Android Auto, all you need is a compatible vehicle and a smartphone with Android 9.0 or newer. Depending on what your car supports, you simply connect your phone using a data cable or via Bluetooth.

Most of what you will be doing on Android Auto will likely be navigation or music playback through services like Google Maps and Spotify. That’s not all the platforms can handle, though. There are dozens of free Android Auto apps you can find use for — some may already be services you use on a daily basis that you didn’t realize have Android Auto support built-in. 

If you’re curious to see what else you can accomplish with Android Auto in your vehicle, here are some apps worth trying. All of them are free to use and elevate your driving experience in one way or another.

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SpotHero

Perhaps the only thing more infuriating than driving bumper to bumper in traffic is successfully trying to find a parking spot that’s convenient. If this is something you struggle with, SpotHero is an app you should definitely consider installing. It works by listing available parking locations nearby, including locations like airports or garages. You can enter specific dates and times, and the app will fetch you the best parking spaces around the area. For locations that support it, you can then reserve the parking spot and pay via Google Pay.

SpotHero works in all major cities in the U.S. and supports Android Auto. Being able to scan through unfamiliar areas to find affordable parking is a convenience everyone will appreciate. SpotHero also displays the best parking locations around ongoing events like concerts. The app has a 4.4-star rating on the Google Play Store and has over a million installs.

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Audible

A lot of us enjoy listening to music during our commutes. Apps like Spotify and YouTube Music have Android Auto support that makes playback control easier. Plus, you can always summon Google Assistant or Gemini to skip through tracks or play specific ones using voice commands. However, if you’re an avid audiobook listener, then you’d be glad to know that Audible supports Android Auto too. There are plenty of cheaper alternatives to Audible, but it remains the gold standard if you’re looking for a large library that you can enjoy on practically every platform available.

Audible has you covered even if your vehicle doesn’t support Android Auto. On the mobile app, you can navigate to Profile > Settings > Player and enable the “Automatic Car Mode” toggle. It automatically switches to a larger, more simplified interface with playback controls when you connect to your car via Bluetooth.

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Vivaldi Browser

Android Auto can be as useful as you want it to be — you just need to get acquainted with the right apps. There are plenty of Android Auto tips and tricks that can elevate the experience, like personalizing the experience with a different wallpaper or trying out more powerful alternatives to popular services. Just when you think you’ve maxed out the functionality that your car’s infotainment screen can provide, there’s Vivaldi Browser.

The app unlocks a way for you to surf the web through a web browser that’s designed to work with Android Auto. It comes with an ad blocker built-in and a few other privacy-oriented features that let you access virtually any website on your car’s infotainment display. If you have any specific streaming platforms that don’t have Android Auto support natively, you can use Vivaldi Browser to watch content when you’re safely parked. 

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You also get a decent bit of customizability with the browser. For instance, you can swap between light and dark modes, change the background of the start page, and capture screenshots if you happen to find something interesting. Vivaldi gets you the usual lot of features you find in other web browsers, like the ability to bookmark pages, view recently closed tabs, or switch to a friendly reader view that gets rid of clutter on web pages.

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GameSnacks

We’ve all found ourselves seated in parking lots or outside a friend’s home waiting for them to come out. GameSnacks is a service by Google that’s designed to accommodate you during these situations. It’s a collection of simple games that you can play on your car’s infotainment screen.

You have titles like “Classic Solitaire” and match-three games like “Fruit Cube Blast.” There is a healthy catalog of classic games to choose from, and there are even a few multiplayer games you can enjoy if you’re accompanied by a passenger. GameSnacks is great for killing time, but only when you’re parked safely — playing games while driving a vehicle is obviously a no-go. By the way, since these games are based on HTML5, you can also play them on a browser on any device.



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Trump’s $10 Billion IRS Lawsuit May Become a $1.7 Billion Slush Fund for MAGA’s Self-Proclaimed Victims

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from the the-neverending-corruption-story dept

The saga of Trump suing his own IRS for $10 billion just got weirder. What started as a brazenly corrupt attempt to personally pocket $10 billion in taxpayer money has now morphed into something arguably worse: a $1.7 billion patronage slush fund — unappropriated by Congress — that Trump could dole out to loyal MAGA allies who claim they were “victimized” by the Biden administration.

As you’ll recall, Trump sued his own IRS over something that a contractor (who has already been convicted and is currently serving in prison) did: leaking some tax returns Trump had promised to release, but never did. He asked for $10 billion, in a situation where he, himself, would decide if he got paid or not. When his own DOJ told the court that it was negotiating a settlement, the judge pointed out that she was concerned that it looked an awful lot like a single party negotiating with itself over how much of the Treasury it should receive.

The judge — Kathleen Williams — asked for further briefing from “both” parties on this, and the deadline is coming up quickly, which is why various purported “settlements” are leaking to the press. A few days ago it was going to be that Trump and all of his family and all of his related businesses would magically have all IRS audits dropped, which would be an astoundingly brazen level of corruption.

But now ABC is reporting about another potential “settlement” (again, “settlement” is the wrong word — it’s Trump’s legal team negotiating with Trump’s DOJ, which is run by his former legal team. It’s one team negotiating with itself) which is just as egregious and corrupt: Trump would apparently agree to drop his case against the IRS in exchange for… a $1.7 billion slush fund of taxpayer money that he could dole out to his friends who whine to the government that they were “targeted” for retribution by a “weaponized” Biden administration.

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President Donald Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself.

So, yeah, a $1.7 billion slush fund for Trump supporters who (in some cases) literally engaged in insurrection to overturn the results of a free and fair election, or for various hangers-on who play the victim every chance they get and pretend the Biden administration “weaponized” the government against them.

It’s not worth getting into the possibility of using this slush fund to pay off the ~1,600 Trump supporters who were duly convicted in a court of law for various crimes, all of whom were later pardoned by Trump (even as dozens of them have been re-arrested for other crimes, which should put to rest any remaining notion that Trump is the “law and order” president — but of course it won’t).

But we can talk about the various claims of “weaponization” because we covered many of them. Remember, Jim Jordan got himself appointed as the anti-weaponization czar in Congress, and used that to actually weaponize the government to investigate and attack individuals and organizations who were not the government, but who Jordan felt unfairly pointed out disinformation and lies from those MAGA supported.

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The supposed investigations into the “weaponization” of the government to suppress speech served only to suppress the First Amendment protected speech of academic researchers and organizations. And now all those who falsely insisted that the Biden administration “censored” them, even as all the evidence showed that social media companies removed content because they found that the content violated their own rules, will get to line up at the trough to get free money from American taxpayers.

This is Donald Trump handing out American taxpayer money that has never been appropriated by Congress for this purpose — shoveling it to anyone who claims victimhood under his banner, whether convicted insurrectionists, Trump allies who want their legal bills paid, or propagandists who got called out for spreading disinformation. We’re already seeing this play out. This week, Trump’s DOJ “settled” with the pandemic’s wrongest man, Alex Berenson, who got suspended from Twitter not because of any government action, but because Twitter felt that he violated their rules against spreading health misinformation.

Berenson has been suing over this for years (and mostly losing), but this week Trump agreed to pay him $150,000 and “admit” that the Biden administration tried to censor him. While some are trying to present this as some sort of big victory, getting Donald Trump to blame Joe Biden for something that didn’t happen — while shoveling taxpayer money to a man who publicly supports Trump — is not exactly a landmark legal victory. It’s almost expected in the Trump era.

The Berenson payout is a preview. Once the $1.7 billion fund is running, expect a line out the door of Trump’s groveling fans making false claims about Biden “weaponizing” the government — all of it paid for by taxpayers, none of it appropriated by Congress.

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Filed Under: donald trump, irs, maga, patronage, slush fund, victimhood, weaponization

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Amazon Stops Supporting Pre-2013 Kindles Today. Some Owners Turn to Jailbreaking

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Today Amazon ends support for first- and second-generation versions of Kindles and Kindle Fire tablets, along with the Kindle Touch, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX, and other devices released in 2012 or earlier.

Owners can continue reading ebooks that they’ve already downloaded, and they can also still sideload books using a USB cable (from, for example, Project Gutenberg). And PCMag points out that “There are plenty of e-stores where you can buy DRM-free novels legally, such as ebook.com and Smashwords. If you want to try this process for free, public-domain repositories such as the one at Standard Ebooks are a great place to start.” (eBook files can be converted for the Kindle with the open source tool Calibre.)

New ebooks can no longer be purchased directly from Amazon. But most of Amazon’s affected devices “have not received firmware updates for over a decade,” notes the blog OMG Ubuntu, “and most lost on-device access the Kindle Store.” Some Kindle owners are taking things even further:
You can unlock the firmware of older devices to add extra functionality (custom screensavers, epub support) or run entirely different software. On the hardware hacks side, some choose to turn old Kindles into photo frames or online dashboards.
TechCrunch offers some caveats about jailbreaking:
This process allows users to install custom fonts, new screensavers, alternative reading apps, and even third-party tools that expand the Kindle’s functionality… [I]t’s important to note that jailbreaking a Kindle might violate Amazon’s terms of service. In many jurisdictions, jailbreaking isn’t considered a criminal offense for personal use, but it may become a crime if it involves copyright infringement, illegal software distribution, or the sale of modified devices. Many Kindle owners who opt to jailbreak view it as a method to gain control over a device they purchased that is still functional, rather than being forced to buy a new device. However, jailbreaking is technical and carries risks, including the possibility of rendering the device unusable if something goes wrong. It also isn’t possible on every Kindle model or firmware version, so before proceeding, Kindle owners should first spend some time researching if their device is compatible.
Alternately, PCMag notes, “If you’re feeling particularly virtuous, you can donate your old Kindle to a local library or send it back to Amazon free of charge via its electronic recycling program.”

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Asimov Is An Open Source Humanoid Robot For The Rest Of Us

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Given that some of the more famous demos were by Honda and Tesla, you might be forgiven for thinking you need pockets as deep as a car company to get into humanoid robotics — and maybe that was true once, but now Asimov v1 is here. It doesn’t have a positronic brain, and you’ll have to code in the Three Laws for yourself, but at least you have the freedom to, because Asimov is open source. 

It’s not exactly cheap: the kit version comes with a target price of $15,000 USD, but they do provide the Bill of Materials on the GitHub repository so you can try and hunt down some deals. Still, compared to the millions poured into these sorts of robots in the early days, we have to consider it accessible. With 25 total degrees of freedom, you’ll have to source a lot of actuators, but at least the onboard compute will be easy to get. Rather than begging CERN for spare positrons, you’ only need a Raspberry 5 and a Radaxa CM5.

No word on if this robot can write a symphony — though we’ve seen software that can — and its 5 kg personal best for squats and 18 kg single-arm lat raises aren’t going to impress the bros at the gym. But hey, at least now you have someone to shake your chair for sim gaming.  If you’re wondering what the deal with these androids is, well, so were we.

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