Daily Tech Feed: From the Labs

May 1, 2026

The Singularity Is Not Near Without Symbolic Model Synthesis

April 27, 2026

The Board Has Been Terminated

On April 24, 2026, the White House fired all twenty-four members of the National Science Board by email — the independent governing body of the National Science Foundation, the agency that funded the public internet, the graphical web browser, 3D printing, the Antarctic climate record, and the foundational research pipeline behind modern AI. The firings came twelve days after the NSB objected to the Office of Management and Budget bypassing their statutory approval authority on a $900 million Antarctic research vessel contract. This episode traces the money, the mechanism, and the history of what the NSF built — and what independent scientific oversight was designed to protect.

April 9, 2026

Rough Consensus and Running Scared

Between October 2025 and April 2026, cryptographer Daniel Bernstein published a seven-part blog series titled "NSA and IETF" alleging that intelligence agencies are using the IETF standards process to weaken the next generation of internet encryption. The dispute centers on whether the successor to current TLS key exchange should use hybrid post-quantum cryptography — combining classical elliptic curves with the new lattice-based ML-KEM — or ML-KEM alone. The technical stakes are existential: if ML-KEM is eventually broken and the deployed standard is non-hybrid, every session protected by it becomes retroactively decryptable from stored ciphertext. The cost of the safety net is thirty-two bytes. The cost of removing it could be everything.