It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures.

In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed.

Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO of Flock Safety, is an unlikely spokesperson for the dangers of the surveillance industry: His company says it has deployed more than 120,000 roadside cameras across 49 states. But in August, while defending his products and policies, he perhaps inadvertently showed why Americans should be alarmed by this technology.
Flock caught “a ton” of “bad cops” when it rolled out a tool to identify abuse of its data, Langley acknowledged on the All-In podcast.

My family and I enjoy the occasional meal of delicious slow-cooked meat, but every time we visit a barbecue joint, we can’t remember whether we like the beans and slaw on offer. Some beans are sweet; others are spicy. Some slaw is vinegar based; others creamy. We should keep track of this somehow, we always say but then never bother. I should make an app, I used to joke. But that was a ridiculous idea.
Thanks to generative artificial intelligence, it became less ridiculous.

One day not long ago, Franky, a 40-something woman who lives in the mid-Atlantic region, got an infuriating text message from her aunt. It was just the latest truth-stretching missive she had sent, and Franky’s impulse was to write back: “You’re a liar. You’ve always been a liar. All you do is lie.” Instead, she asked an AI program to write a response that was less “condescending and unnecessarily emotional.” AI-ese, Franky told me, helps make her responses more logical and neutral.