Axios: Hey, Dad, We built an app

Posted on May 8, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
View in browser
 
Presented By Amazon
 
Axios Finish Line
By Mike Allen and Erica Pandey and Jim VandeHei ·May 07, 2026
 Hello, Thursday. Smart Brevity™ count: 826 words … 3 mins. Edited by Natalie Daher and copy edited by Amy Stern.
 
 
1 big thing: Hey, Dad! We built an app
Logo showing the letter P surrounding the U.S. Capitol dome
Logo: Politik App
 
James VandeHei Jr., 21, is a rising senior at High Point University and a Division I soccer player. He brings us the backstory of an app that launched today (and is moving up the news chart):

My dad’s letter on AI, which dropped in Axios Finish Line in January, came right as I was starting to go deep into the technology myself. Along with two buddies — Charlie Stallmer at Holy Cross and Chris Brophy at the University of Denver, also college juniors — I was already thinking about building an app.

The idea: After a summer on the Hill, the three of us had the same realization. Voting records, campaign finance and legislative activity are technically public — but practically buried. Even on the official Congress.gov, breaking down a single bill means sifting through legislative language no normal person should have to translate.

🏛️ Enter Politik (“Congress in Your Pocket”). It’s a nonpartisan, data-driven guide to how your leaders vote and where they get their campaign funds.

Just submit your ZIP code and Politik does the rest. You can ask questions about issues and legislative procedure, and say how you’d vote on hot bills.

Zoom out: The three of us are international relations majors. Not one of us had any prior experience coding or developing. For the first time in history, that didn’t seem to be an issue.📍

Using AI, we mapped out a path and built a strategy. We learned how to create motion graphics, animations, automated email marketing campaigns, app prototypes and much more.

Our secret sauce: The actual app was built by a self-taught programmer and AI savant, Nate Laquis. Nate, like us, didn’t study computer science or programming.

He was a finance major, driven by passion and curiosity, and has now started a software-building agency, Kanopy Labs. Nate worked his magic with our app, Politik, building the software in under three months.

🧾 Reality check: None of us went to college to study computers or software development. We didn’t have to. Using AI, we built a fast, smooth app that hit the App Store today. Democracy … now with receipts.

What I’ve learned:

⚡️ AI amplifies your passions. That’s true for everyone — me, my dad, Nate, my grandmother. Every day, it seems, there’s a new model. A new tool. A new must-use product. My advice: Pick one thing you’re truly passionate about and explore it with AI. What you’ll find is that you learn more about AI than you do the actual topic. 

Context is king. Create skills and memory files for your model to reference for everyday tasks. A simple example: We make all our video content using Claude Code. Every time we shoot a video, we have Claude analyze a file using every previous post, our brand guidelines and our video development skills. A process that used to take hours or days now takes us 20 minutes.

Take pride in your prompt. Sounds simple. But the more time you spend on an LLM, the more tempting it gets to abbreviate or brush past important details. That’ll come back to bite you. Take the time. Think through exactly what you want.

The bottom line: This is just the beginning of Politik. We want to build a community of passionate, engaged people hungry to inform themselves. We believe in fighting fire with facts. Politik is an unfinished canvas — and we want you all to help finish it.

📱 Download Politik.Be blunt with your feedback. Email me anything: jvandehe@highpoint.edu.Share this story.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

France 24: We tried making Iran’s viral Lego-style AI ‘slopaganda’. So easy but so addictive and contentional

Posted on May 8, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

HealthRanger on X: “The coming famine and global impact…”

Posted on May 8, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Jeff Bezos just told everyone to stop worrying about AI taking their jobs …

Posted on May 8, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Professor Jiang: Predicted the entire Iran war…what does he say about World War III?

Posted on May 7, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Godfather of AI WARNS: “It’s Too Late To Stop This”. The Diary of a CEO Clips

Posted on May 7, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

THEY ARE HIDING THIS

Apr 10, 2026 #thediaryofaceo#doac

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist known as the Godfather of AI, reveals that he estimates a 10 to 20% probability that artificial intelligence will wipe out humanity, and explains why nobody on earth knows how to prevent it. He describes how he spent 50 years building the neural network approach to AI that now powers every major system in the world, and why he was slow to recognise that the technology he created could eventually become smarter than the species that built it. He explains why AI will be far more creative than humans because it compresses information by seeing analogies between things that no person has ever connected. He demonstrates this by asking GPT-4 why a compost heap is like an atom bomb, a question no human could answer, and the AI immediately identified that both are chain reactions operating at different scales. He argues that this ability to see hidden connections across all of human knowledge will make AI more creative, not less, than any human who has ever lived. Discover: • Why the Godfather of AI estimates a 10 to 20% chance of human extinction • How AI sees analogies between things no human has ever connected • Why he believes current chatbots already have subjective experiences • The thought experiment that proves machines can be conscious • How cyber attacks increased 1,200 percent in a single year • Why European AI regulations specifically exclude military use • The reason nobody on earth knows how to solve AI safety 📺 Watch the full episode here –    • Godfather of AI: They Keep Silencing Me Bu…  

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Food Scarcity and Crop Failures Will Lead to Dumpster-Quality Food Being Sold at GROCERY STORES. Oil crisis, war U.S. Israel against Iran and so many more wars, soon we must be prepared for shortages and fall-off in quality of food. Being aware is a good place to start.

Posted on May 7, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

https://brightvideos.com/play/vid-377c7968-a0e5-4c36-9c02-f79152d2fbea/index.html

Food Scarcity and Crop Failures Will Lead to Dumpster-Quality Food Being Sold at GROCERY STORES

63 views14:07

Stay informed on current events, visit http://www.NaturalNews.com

– Impact of Middle East Conflict on Food Supply (0:00)
– Contamination Incident with Grain Shipment (1:38)
– Potential for More Contamination and Lowered Standards (5:12)
– Dumpster Diving and Survival Strategies (8:53)
– Adapting to Food Scarcity and Price Increases (12:29)

Watch more independent videos at http://www.brighteon.com/channel/hrreport

▶️ Support our mission by shopping at the Health Ranger Store – https://www.healthrangerstore.com
▶️ Check out exclusive deals and special offers at https://rangerdeals.com
▶️ Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed: https://www.naturalnews.com/Readerregistration.html

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Important to understand. “Tucker Carlson says the markets look fake….”

Posted on May 7, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Axios: Intelligence explosion

Posted on May 7, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

 Intelligence explosion
 
Illustration of the Claude AI logo reflected on a pair of safety goggles.
Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios
 
Anthropic, the AI lab whose identity is wrapped around warning the world about AI risk, is claiming “early signs” of AI not just coding its own products but building itself, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column.

Why it matters: Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark predicted this week that there’s a 60%+ chance of an AI model fully training its successor by the end of 2028. “What I’m looking at is a technological trend where, if anything, the speed will accelerate further,” Clark told us.

In the new research agenda for The Anthropic Institute — first shared with us, and out today — the company says it’s seeing signs of “AI contributing to speeding up the research and development of AI itself,” a process known as recursive self-improvement. And Anthropic researchers think the world should know.

“My prediction is by the end of 2028, it’s more likely than not that we have an AI system where you would be able to say to it: ‘Make a better version of yourself.’ And it just goes off and does that completely autonomously,” Clark, who heads the institute, told us from Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco.

“It’s always been the case that humans outside the technology need to come up with the ideas that they then put back into it. What happens if we have a technology that can generate ideas within itself for how to improve itself? That’s a new concept.” 

The five-page document warns of a possible “intelligence explosion” — long a theoretical term confined to AI safety circles. Now it’s in writing, in an official Anthropic document.

Clark told us an intelligence explosion is when AI systems suddenly start improving at blinding speed. Lots of bad things can happen (cyber meltdowns and biological attacks). And lots of good:

“What do you do with a tremendous amount of growth or a tremendous amount of abundance in many, many different fields of science all at once?” he asked. “Today’s institutions have very, very narrow pipes through which you push new drug candidates. How do you massively broaden the size of those pipes in advance of this abundance?

“What’s new: The Anthropic Institute is part research arm, part early-warning system. The research agenda focuses on four buckets:

Economic diffusion: jobs, productivity, who captures the gains.

Threats and resilience: cyber, bio, surveillance.

AI systems in the wild: agents, governance.

AI-driven R&D: the recursive self-improvement question.

The promise: Anthropic is committing to publishing more “detailed information about how our work at Anthropic has sped up as a result of new AI tools, and ideas about the implications of potential recursive self-improvement of AI systems.

“Translation: A frontier lab is on the record promising to tell the public when the machine starts building itself.

If AI is building itself, will we need AI companies? “We and the other companies are going to be taking this technology and trying to get it to do good in the world,” Clark told us. “To help push forward things like biology or medicine or robotics.”Mike Allen interviews Anthropic’s Jack Clark yesterday.

Between the lines: The agenda asks how to run a “fire drill” for an intelligence explosion — a tabletop exercise that “actually tests the decision-making of lab leadership, boards, and governments.

“Labs don’t draw up fire drills for problems they think are decades away.

The institute notes that during the Cold War, the U.S. had a hotline to the Kremlin in case of a nuclear crisis. Similar geopolitical infrastructure could be needed for a crisis involving AI systems. “One of the lessons from the Cold War is that rival nations dealing with technology that has an existential impact on the human race found ways to talk to each other about it,” Clark said. “And we are going to need to do the same here.” 

What it means for jobs: Anthropic will publish monthly reports on how AI is reshaping work, designed as “an early warning signal for significant change and disruption.

“The document asks whether AI companies, “in partnership with government,” might turn industrywide “dials” to throttle AI diffusion sector by sector, the way central banks throttle inflation.

An AI lab publicly entertaining coordinated industrial-policy levers on its own technology — that’s new. “We are planning for success here,” Clark said.

Reality check: This is also a positioning play. Anthropic has built a brand on being the responsible frontier lab. An institute anchored to its safety trust extends that brand ahead of whatever model upgrade lands next.

“The motivation has always been: Tell the whole story,” Clark told us. “I’m just trying to get ahead of what I think of as the next big question and get Anthropic ahead of that.

“The bottom line: That doesn’t make the recursive self-improvement admission less real. It makes it more interesting that Anthropic chose to put it in writing. Watch a video of Mike’s interview with Jack … (Thanks to executive producer Jimmy Shelton for the lightning turn.) … Share this column.
    

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Oil and gas fields and Europe. The EU is under resourced and ought to continue with Russia as supplier, starting with Germany where the closed off pipeline exists. Ireland has the most expensive electricity supply in Europe and a shortage of facilities to store oil, and gas supplies. Self sufficiency in energy should be a priority surely

Posted on May 7, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

James Melville 

@JamesMelville

Compare and contrast: Norway

Reopens North Sea gas fields

UK

Ed Miliband bans new North Sea oil and gas fields

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment