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A 2,000-year-old canal system in Colombia visible from space was long assumed to be built at the direction of powerful rulers. New evidence is turning that assumption on its head.

2024: GOP megadonor Tim Barnard donates $1 million to Trump 2026: Tim Barnard's company is awarded over $5.6 billion in border wall construction contracts

2024: GOP megadonor Tim Barnard donates $1 million to Trump 2026: Tim Barnard's company is awarded over $5.6 billion in border wall construction contracts

John Gruber isn’t buying the Claude watermarking either:

What happens if you copy my text and quote it in something you write, by hand? Now you’ve got a watermark in your prose, invisible characters or something, that implicates that your prose is AI-generated? Even though you didn’t use AI and just copy and pasted text from me? Madness.

Maybe the watermark won’t work on short sections of text, like a blockquote, because there aren’t enough words to detect a pattern (unless every word is shifted with the algorithm, which seems insane). But who knows, because how it really works is a secret.

Depending on the model, you might have hundreds to choose from—or just one.

Philadelphia Inquirer: “It was with this same spirit last summer that Shapiro announced the largest single private sector investment in Pennsylvania history: Amazon committed $20 billion in Pennsylvania that included two data center campuses in Luzerne and Bucks Counties. Pennsylvania scored the project because of its promise to fast-track permitting and use tax breaks for […]

Below is a guest post from Michelle Crosby and Steve Pierson of the American Statistical Association.

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The American Statistical Association (ASA) “FedStat Health” project team recently released its mid-year status report, 2026 Midyear Update: Resources and Leadership Supporting Federal Statistics. As someone who spends every day monitoring,

The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious...

The Perseids will peak between August 12 and 13. Here’s what time—and where—you can get the best view, and why 2026 will be an exceptional year.

“Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, the most vulnerable Democratic governor in the country, announced a former Republican as her running mate for reelection Tuesday, assembling a politically rare ticket in an era when partisanship reigns supreme,” the Washington Post reports. “Hobbs chose John Giles, the former mayor of Mesa who was a lifelong Republican until he […]

The city is soliciting input from residents through Aug. 24 on sculpture proposals for the new park being built on a stretch of the old Santa Fe railroad line.

This essay is part memoir, quarterly report, love letter and mourning.