Trump’s justice department issues directive to strip naturalized Americans of citizenship for criminal offenses

The directive gives justice department attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue denaturalization, including in instances of lying on immigration forms, cases where there is financial fraud or medical fraud against the US or against private individuals; and cases referred by a US attorney’s office or in connection with pending criminal charges.

The concept of citizenship being anything more than a fancy visa is going away folks

CMAT led a chant of Free Palestine yesterday which was rad, but this got me

The RAF had its flight training privatized, leading to what I think is fair to say is a total collapse of training capability.

The NAO investigation into the UK Military Flying Training System (UKMFTS) contract, which is let to a consortium backed in part by US arms multinational Lockheed Martin, thundered that the RAF was short of 330 pilots, while almost half of students entering the UKMFTS system last year failed to complete their intermediate training.

"In its worst year (2018-19), 49 students completed Phase 2, an 86 per cent shortfall against the [Ministry of Defence's] current aircrew requirements. In its best year (2015-16), 182 students completed Phase 2, a 21 per cent shortfall," said the NAO in its latest report.

Damningly, RAF fast jet pilots, the two-winged master race* who fly the service's Typhoon and F-35 fighters, were taking more than seven years to get from joining the Air Force to being declared ready for frontline duties.

CW: Nazi shit

MI6 distances its new chief from Nazi grandfather

I like how MI6 try to make it sound that having a muderous Nazi grandfather is a good thing and an example of diversity in action, actually:

A spokesperson added: "Blaise's ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.

"It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today's hostile states, as the next chief of MI6."

The Daily Mail, which first revealed the family link, reports that it found hundreds of pages of documents in an archive in Freiburg, Germany, which showed Mr Dobrowolski was known as "The Butcher" or "Agent No 30" by Wehrmacht commanders. He reportedly signed off letters to his Nazi superiors with "Heil Hitler" and said he "personally" took part in "the extermination of the Jews".

No matter whose vision you subscribe to, something big will happen with AI in the next two years

Although I’m always wrong about everything, I’m still open to Ed Zitron’s “something big”, and the bottom falls out of it (although I’m sure it’s too big to fail by now)

It could be a tool with amazing potential. The latest Steve Yegge blog post is one of the most depressing things I’ve read about software engineering in years…

This turned out to be the biggest surprise of the new world: agentic coding is addictive. You will hear it more and more often, because it bewitches people once they've got the hang of it. Agentic coding is like a slot machine, where each of your requests is a pull of the lever with potentially infinite upside or downside. On any given query, you don't know if it's going to one-shot everything you wished for, or delete your repo and send weenie pics to your grandma.

Every time something good happens, which is often, you get rewarded with dopamine. And when something bad happens, also often, you get adrenaline. The intermittent reinforcement of those dopamine and adrenaline hits creates the core addictive pull. It can become near-impossible to tear yourself away. We had to drag several vibe coders off stage at a conference I was at recently. As we escorted them away from the podium, they would still be wailing, "It'll work on the next try!"

…

How do you know if you're doing AI right at your company? We've noticed that the companies that are winning with AI – the ones happy with their progress – tend to be the ones that encourage token burn. Token spend per developer per unit time is the new health metric that best represents how well your company is doing with AI: an idea proposed by Dr. Matt Beane and playing out in the field as we speak. I see companies saying, "If our devs are spending $100-$300 a day, that's much less than paying for another human engineer. So if AI makes our devs twice as productive, or in some cases only 50% more, we're winning."

…

Amp is also more fun. It takes a different design approach, being intentionally team-centric. Amp gamifies your agentic development by making it public, with leaderboards and friendly competition, as well as liberal thread sharing. It all manages to be low-pressure

I’ve thought about it a lot as it’s fucking me up a bit tbh, lol….

I possibly interview really fucking badly, there’s internal politics about bringing me in, or they simply don’t know what they’re doing. Or all 3. Working at the level I have been (basically an architect across a dozen teams) means that I haven’t been writing that much code day-to-day for a while. It was a last minute surprise pair programming test framed by the recruiter as a non-assessment….I’m honestly glad to be free of that mess, even though my savings continue to dwindle :yea

Still in awe of how shit UK military security is. Palestine Action broke into the RAF base that underpins Britain’s global air power projection, minced around on e-scooters, disabled multiple strategic assets, and left without being caught. This, while the UK is potentially days from joining a regional war in the Middle East and still deep in a proxy war with Russia. Given this, the Heathrow power incident, airport drones, etc,. there seems to be a very real window for adversaries to exploit and cause significant disruption inside the UK - largely unopposed.

Amazon displaying tariff prices "hostile and political," White House says

I'm guessing Blue Origin is about to lose some contracts

In Kids TV News, HBO is dropping Sesame Street (they license content, which essentially funds its production and availability on PBS). Given Trump will almost certainly end federal funding for PBS (and the show is a personal target of Matt Schlapp and Ted Cruz), it may prove to be one of the casualties of the new republican regime unless someone else picks it up.

As a parent, it’d actually be quite sad to see it go, either entirely or from PBS. High quality, freely available children’s content that is positive, educational and inclusive should be a given, but naturally, the market will consume all - even Elmo.

British fascists set fire to hotel housing asylum seekers

Starmer’s Britain