Hard Pass

The US operation to guide stranded vessels through the Strait of Hormuz will be paused for a "short period of time", Donald Trump announced on Tuesday evening.

Project Freedom was meant to help restore the flow of oil from the region and the global economy's eventual return to normalcy by guiding stranded ships out of the Gulf through the largely closed waterway.

But if during the "pause", global shipping firms and the insurance companies working with them are stymied by Iranian interference, it will be difficult for Trump to claim that objective has been achieved.

Democrat Chedrick Greene is projected to win the special state Senate race in Michigan, according to Decision Desk HQ, preserving his party’s narrow majority in the chamber. With Greene’s projected victory in the 35th District, Democrats’ advantage expands from 19-18 to 20-18, easing their path to advance legislation. Democrats won a governing trifecta in 2022, taking control of the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature. But the party lost the state House in 2024 and has held a one-seat majority in the Senate since. The district traditionally leans Democratic, but Republicans eyed the vacant seat in hopes of tying control in the Senate. While the Democratic lieutenant governor could break a 19-19 tie, Republicans would have been able to withhold votes to prevent Democrats from reaching the 20-vote threshold required to pass legislation.

California recently passed a law that will, in practice, cause AI chatbots to respond to any hint of emotional distress by spamming users with 988 crisis line numbers, or by cutting off the conversation entirely. The law requires chatbot providers to implement “a protocol for preventing the production of suicidal ideation” if they’re going to engage in mental health conversations at all, with liability waiting for any provider whose conversation is later linked to harm. New York is considering going further, with a bill that would simply ban chatbots from engaging in discussions “suited for licensed professionals.” Similar proposals are moving in other states.

If you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know exactly what’s happening here. It’s the same moral panic playbook we’ve seen deployed against cyberbullying, then against social media, and now against generative AI. Something terrible happens. A handful of tragic stories emerge. Lawmakers, desperate to show they’re doing something, reach for the most visible technology in the room and start passing laws designed to stop it from doing whatever it was supposedly doing. The possibility that the technology might actually be helping more people than it’s hurting, or that the proposed fix might make things worse, rarely enters the conversation.

Professor Jess Miers and her student Ray Yeh had a terrific piece at Transformer last month that actually engages with the data and the incentive structures here, and their central argument may seem counterintuitive to many: the way to make AI chatbots safer for people in mental health distress might be to reduce liability for providers. For many people, I’m sure, that will sound backwards. That is, until you actually think through how the current liability regime shapes behavior — as well as reflect on what we know about Section 230’s liability regime in a different context.

Hi not sure where to start here a bit embarrassed to ask ive lost my job and so down on life not eat for 2 days spent the last what I had to feed children can anyone help me in the right direction that will help us

Microsoft has quietly retracted its own documentation that suggested 32GB RAM is the “no worries” upgrade for gaming, and 16GB RAM is the baseline. This support document was likely written using a large language model, and Windows Latest first spotted it before it was taken down. Microsoft also nuked a document that recommended Copilot+ PCs for gaming.

Microsoft has a “Learning Center” where it publishes guides and marketing articles to promote various Windows features, and these rank well in search results. It’s mostly used by Microsoft to push a narrative and also make it easier for users to make a choice when they search the web.

In the first week of April, Microsoft quietly published a support document titled “Gaming features: What the best Windows PC gaming systems have in common.”

At first, the document might appear to be about Windows 11’s gaming features, but it goes a step further and builds a narrative around the memory requirement.

In the support document, Microsoft clearly notes that:

“For most players, 16GB RAM is a practical starting point. Moving to 32GB RAM helps if you run Discord, browsers, or streaming tools alongside your games. That extra memory also gives newer titles more breathing room as memory demands continue to rise.” – Microsoft.

“16GB RAM is the baseline; 32GB is the ‘no worries’ upgrade,” the company concluded in the support document, which was first spotted by Windows Latest.

This was later picked up by other outlets and the gaming community, and it didn’t go well with gamers.

Hi not sure where to start here a bit embarrassed to ask ive lost my job and so down on life not eat for 2 days spent the last what I had to feed children can anyone help me in the right direction that will help us