IRS IT department has shrunk 42% under Trump

Snapshot Report: Status of the IRS’s Workforce as of January 2026 June 9, 2026 Report Number: 2026-IE-R009 – According to IRS records, 31,273 employees separated, took a DRP – Deferred Resignation Program & Early Out Offers or used some other incentive to leave the agency during the one-year period between January 2025 and January 2026. These …

Subjects: E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research

Self-hosted search engine helped me escape Google’s AI redesign

How to Geek: “SearXNG is an open-source meta search engine. The “meta” part means that it can query multiple search engines and display the best results from the pool. Currently, it supports some 70 search engines. It’s also completely free and shows no ads anywhere…Most importantly, though, it feels like searching the internet before generative …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Search Engines

Lowtein

“Lowtein is a simple website that geolocates you and tells you about the cheapest proteins available in your location. Here in Pittsburgh, for example, it informs me that Giant Eagle has a special on pork chops (56% blow the regional average price), Martin’s Food Market has inexpensive bacon, and that you can’t easily go wrong …

Subjects: Economy, Food and Nutrition

Google Earth’s flight simulator mode is now available in your browser

Engadget: “Google Earth seems to be the area where the massive company remembers that tech can be cool and downright fun. In 2024, it added an option for seeing historical recreations of select times and places. This is the sort of clever curio we love, and Google delivered even more the following year. Once you …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

Welcome to Words of Type Encyclopedia!

“Words of Type brings together the terms used in typography, illustrated and explained in multiple languages. Words of Type has been initiated by Lisa Huang, a French and Chinese typeface designer. Words of Type Encyclopedia aims to be a useful and accessible tool for everyone interested in typography and type design, at all times and …

Subjects: Education, Internet

An interoperability and provenance layer for the world’s legislation

Open Laws Foundation: Most legal-data projects scrape statutes and dump them into a convenient format. That throws away the structure: cross-references, temporal validity, the relationships between acts. And that structure is the part that actually makes legislation useful to machines. We do the opposite. Read the spec GitHub ↗︎ Stable identifier olf:it/legge/2019/123/art_3 A profile of …

Subjects: E-Government, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation, Search Engines

It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests

404 Media: “A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia …

Subjects: AI, E-Commerce, Internet, Search Engines

The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes

The New York Times Gift Article – In the age of A.I., Hany Farid is struggling to prove what’s real before the internet decides for itself. For more than two decades, Farid, 60, had been the world’s leading expert in the field of digital forensics, but in the last six months he’d stopped trusting his …

Subjects: AI, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial

A Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial. I’m Its First Target The Hollywood Reporter: “The billionaire has reteamed with the legal strategist who helped him bring down Gawker to start an AI-powered appeals court for the rich and aggrieved. The billionaire has reteamed with the legal strategist who helped him bring down Gawker …

Subjects: AI, Censorship, Financial System, Free Speech, Legal Research

AI In Finance and Banking, June 15, 2026

Via LLRX – AI In Finance and Banking, June 15, 2026 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, conferences, industry white papers and reports, academic papers and speeches, and central bank actions on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links …

Subjects: AI, Congress, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research

Postal Service Seeks to Block Mail Ballots in States Resisting Trump Demands

Yahoo News “The U.S. Postal Service has recently proposed new rules for mailing absentee and mail-in ballots in federal elections, requiring states to provide voter eligibility lists and unique barcodes to ensure ballots are sent only to approved recipients. The proposal, published in the Federal Register, follows an executive order issued by President Donald Trump …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research