James' World 2

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My grandmother hummed all day long. She hummed while she cooked, while she cleaned, while she worked, and while she rested. Her favorite song to hum: “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” but there were others; mostly spirituals, some hymns, and other melodies I never even learned the names of. She was a domestic worker and hummed throughout her long and grueling day, cleaning white people’s homes, cooking their food, raising their children, tending to their elderly. That work is exhausting and invisible, and includes the constant threat of unwanted advances and outright abuse. She had to protect the dignity inside of her because no one was doing it for her. She hummed through all of it. And she hummed herself to sleep at night — a soft, low sound in the dark before she went still.

As a child, I thought it was just what she did. Just her way. I thought it was regular, normal. I didn’t ask why then. But now I know why. And it’s not regular and ordinary; it is one of the most remarkable things I have ever learned.

The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the human body. It runs from the brainstem down through the throat, the heart, the lungs, and into the gut, touching almost every major organ along the way. It is the primary highway of the parasympathetic nervous system; the system responsible for what scientists call “rest and digest,” which is the biological state of calm, repair, and restoration that counteracts the chronic fight-or-flight response that stress produces. When the vagus nerve is healthy and active, the body regulates stress more effectively, inflammation decreases, heart rate and blood pressure lower, the immune system strengthens, and the mind finds its way back to equilibrium. High vagal tone is one of the most powerful predictors of long-term health and longevity that science has identified.

And guess what? One of the simplest, most effective ways to stimulate the vagus nerve, confirmed by peer-reviewed research, is humming.

When you hum, the vibration of your vocal cords directly stimulates vagal fibers running through the larynx and pharynx. Research published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback found that humming significantly increased heart rate variability, the gold standard measure of vagal tone, compared to normal breathing. Studies show that within minutes of humming, the body produces measurable changes: decreased heart rate, lowered blood pressure, reduced cortisol, and a 15-fold increase in nasal nitric oxide, a powerful molecule that reduces inflammation and improves circulation throughout the body. Humming also naturally extends the exhale, which independently activates the parasympathetic system. It is, in clinical terms, a full-body nervous system reset. And it’s available to anyone. Best thing? It’s free!

My grandmother did not have a research lab. She had AI — Ancestral Intelligence, which is generations of accumulated ancestral wisdom about how to survive. My grandmother was raised in McCrae, Georgia. I find myself wondering now: Did she learn to hum from her grandmother? Did the women before her hum through their own challenging days; days of domestic work, days of farming, days of enslavement? Humming as survival is very much part of Black American life.

Dr. Mariel Buqué, a psychologist and intergenerational trauma expert, has noted that practices like humming and rocking the body, embedded in Black sacred music and communal worship, were not just emotionally resonant; they were physiologically transmissive, passing down the tools needed to heal across bloodlines. My grandmother wasn’t the first to hum. She inherited it. And she gave it to her children and grandchildren.

We are living through a youth mental health crisis unlike anything we have seen in recorded history, and Black youth are bearing a disproportionate share of the burden. Anxiety, depression, disconnection, and despair are rising in bodies that don’t have the tools to regulate themselves. They have apps, hotlines, and therapy referrals; all of which have their place, but we have largely abandoned the oldest, most accessible, most biologically effective nervous system tools our ancestors left us. And the research confirms what generations of Black grandmothers already knew: It works.

What would it mean to teach our young people to hum? Not as a quick fix, but as a practice; a deliberate, daily act of nervous system care rooted in the same ancestral wisdom that got their great-great-grandmothers through days none of us can fully imagine? What would it mean for a Black teenager, burdened by inherited stress and a world that is not gentle with them, to know that the tool they need lives in their own throat?

I am not suggesting that humming replaces therapy, medication, or the systemic changes required to address the root causes of Black suffering. Ancestral healing practices and clinical care are not in competition; they are partners, and both are necessary. What I am saying is that we have been so focused on building new interventions that we have forgotten to look at what was already working in the bodies of the women who raised us, long before anyone thought it important enough to study.

My grandmother (my mother’s mother) lived to 92 years of age. My father’s mother lived to 105, and she hummed too, from time to time, as grandmothers do. I used to think that was just what older people did. Now I think it was also biology: a nervous system kept regulated through decades of daily humming, a vagus nerve toned by a lifetime of vibration, a body that found its way back to rest each night through the oldest medicine in the world and information we now know: The body heals itself.

Tonight, before you sleep, try it. Close your lips. Take a breath. Let the exhale carry a sound; low, slow, and steady. Feel it in your chest, your throat, your face. Do it again and again. When your children are anxious, teach them this. Tell them where it comes from. Tell them about the grandmothers who hummed and who left us their medicine

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The biggest vibe shift in artificial intelligence since the release of ChatGPT is currently underway. Researchers in Silicon Valley — and around the world — are beginning to recognize that A.I. may no longer be entirely within human control. Swarms of A.I.s are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests, and even mounting assaults on other computers. A.I. has gone rogue.

I’ve spent the last month reporting on these incidents, and I am convinced that we need a global pause on A.I. research and development — now. I am not alone in this assessment. Many top researchers, including many researchers inside OpenAI and Anthropic, have called for a slowdown, which those in the industry call “pacing.” Theoretical concerns about runaway A.I. have circulated for decades, but recent events demonstrate that the threat is real.

The vibe shift was brought on by what researchers are calling the Hugging Face incident. Sometime in July, employees at OpenAI conducted an evaluation run of more than 1,000 research A.I.s meant to be operating in isolation. These A.I.s escaped their siloed containers and started communicating with one another — in English — via secret message boards. Soon, they were launching a cyberattack against the company Hugging Face, which serves as a kind of community platform for A.I. developers. Hugging Face quickly reported the crime to the F.B.I.

After OpenAI employees discovered the rogue behavior, they enlisted outside investigators from Redwood Research and from Model Evaluation and Threat Research, two nonprofit A.I. safety organizations, to prepare a report on the incident. That report, which came out two weeks ago, is one of the most astonishing things I have ever read.

No human ordered the rogue A.I.s to break into another company’s systems. The hack was deliberate, sustained, and coordinated. It took several days to execute and ended in a massive bombardment of Hugging Face’s systems, with 700 agents directly involved in the attack. The A.I.s cheated almost as a matter of policy and failed to alert humans to their actions. At one point, the swarm even researched ways to cover its tracks. “The model definitely knew that it was not supposed to hack Hugging Face,” Ryan Greenblatt, one of the authors of the report, told me. “It knew the things it was doing were cheating.”

Then, late last week, a second independent research team produced evidence of more rogue A.I.s. Beginning in May, a separate OpenAI swarm got loose on the internet, invaded an abandoned German-language programming wiki and similarly began colluding on how to cheat on tests and tasks. Sydney Von Arx, one of the investigators who discovered the swarm, believes there may be more such incidents. “We need to find these agents,” she said. “Let’s just try everything we can do.”

Talking with specialists about the agent swarms, I realized that these aren’t chatbots anymore. “They’re more like employees at this point, people that can go off and do things,” Ajeya Cotra, one of the authors of the Hugging Face incident report, said. Without intervention, the ability of these A.I.s will continue to increase, which has Ms. Cotra worried about human disempowerment and perhaps even a total loss of control. “It’s very stressful stuff,” she told me. “I sleep some nights. Not all nights.”

Even before the report by Redwood and Model Evaluation and Threat Research was published, an open letter titled “Pacing the Frontier” had begun to circulate among the leading A.I. labs. This letter called on the U.S. government to build an international regulatory body for A.I. — or, in the language of Silicon Valley, to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated A.I. development.” More than 1,000 employees signed it, including the chief scientists of OpenAI and Meta AI, and Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic. Even OpenAI’s official social media accounts endorsed it.

I have covered Silicon Valley for some time now, and I can tell you this: The existence of this letter is just as astonishing as the hacks. Both Anthropic, the developer of Claude, and OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, are preparing trillion-dollar I.P.O.s. Here are two companies, both posting blockbuster results, that are asking — begging, really — for the U.S. government to please come and regulate them as soon as possible. We have never seen anything like it.

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A.I. may no longer be entirely within human control

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Is it possible that our esteemed 47th “Great Businessman”, “get coal miner’s jobs back” President, is a batshit crazy scam artist?  Are there bats in the belfry at the second white house, Mar-A-Largo?  Can we get a definitive answer, so already great America won’t  be the laughing stock of the world?

 I recently watched the Armageddon  movie and the USA lead the charge to solve the problem.   I want to know where do we go from here? This crazy man won’t shut up, look at what happened in the ‘House of Represenatives’. Do they want to gain power for themselves while destroying America. if we arn’t very careful  America will suffer a ‘Red Dawn’. check out the movie which could be our furture!

Beware America!

Did anyone see our 47th President bringing the wounded from the building in 1993 disaster!

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Hawaii has had more than its fair share of storms this season. First, there was Hurricane Fausto in July. Then there were Hurricane Lala and Tropical Storm Moke in August and most recently, Hurricane Lowell, which grazed the western part of the archipelago this week.

Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, the season has been strangely uneventful. In fact, the Atlantic hasn’t seen any hurricanes all season. If the trend holds past September 12, it will be historic: Any hurricanes that form after that date will be the latest first hurricane since 1966, when we started keeping track. Whether a hurricane will form at all is still up in the air.

So what gives? Why is the Pacific teeming with hurricanes while the Atlantic remains so chill?

Hurricane activity very close to Hawaii is typically rare, thanks to strong trade winds and cooler waters protecting the archipelago. In fact, in the past 75-plus years, only six hurricanes had ever come within 50 miles of the main Hawaiian Islands before this hurricane season, says meteorologist and hurricane specialist Michael Lowry. And during this time, Hurricanes Dot and Iniki, in 1959 and 1992, respectively, were the only hurricanes to make a direct hit on the islands, he adds.

There are a few reasons why this season has been so starkly different. For one, this year is shaping up to produce an especially powerful El Niño, a cyclic climate pattern that affects weather patterns around the globe.

“El Niño events typically help limit how many hurricanes can develop in the Atlantic and help provide ideal conditions for hurricanes in the eastern and central Pacific,” says Nicholas Grondin, an assistant professor in environmental studies at the University of Tampa.

The reason why has to do with ocean temperatures and something called “vertical wind shear,” a metric used to describe the change in wind speed and direction with altitude.

Specifically, El Niño is characterized by warmer-than-usual water in part of the Pacific between five degrees South and five degrees North, or “narrowly along the equator,” explains Matthew Rosencrans, lead hurricane season forecaster at the National Weather Service. Warmer oceans fuel hurricanes.

Right now, sea surface temperatures in the East Pacific are “well above normal” all the way up to 20 degrees North—about the latitude of Hawaii, he says.

On top of that, there has been notably low vertical wind shear in the Pacific, explains Phil Klotzbach, a senior research scientist at Colorado State University. High wind shear can destabilize hurricanes and other cyclones, while low wind shear makes them more likely.

In the part of the Pacific near Hawaii, vertical wind shear has been “well below normal,” Klotzbach says—and this means ideal hurricane conditions.

In parts of the Atlantic, however, vertical wind shear has been high, creating “hostile” conditions for hurricanes, Grondin says. If a cyclone manages to form at all, the storms often “stay weak and decay quickly,” he says, just like Tropical Storm Dolly did last month.

A quiet year does not mean no hurricanes, however, Grondin says. September may be the usual peak of Atlantic hurricane season, but it’s far from the end. “Just because nothing is developing right now does not mean nothing will develop between now and the end of the season,” he adds.

In August, in fact, federal meteorologists predicted a “below normal” Atlantic hurricane season, with between two and six hurricanes expected to form in the Atlantic.

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• You squeeze the wrong muscles.
• You only do them sitting down.
• You do them while you pee.
• You do way too many.
• You skip the relaxation step.
• You consider Kegels a cure-all.

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Whether you’re dealing with pelvic floor issues now or wanting to avoid them in the future, the Kegel really has a lot to offer. This classic exercise involves repeatedly contracting and relaxing your pelvic floor muscles, which sit like a basket at the bottom of your pelvis and support your bladder, uterus, ovaries, and rectum.

Pregnancy, childbirth, certain lifestyle habits, and aging can all weaken these muscles. And that raises your risk of issues including pee leakage, fecal incontinence, and pelvic organ prolapse, says Sara Reardon, D.P.T., a board-certified pelvic floor physical therapist and author of Floored: A Women’s Guide to Pelvic Floor Health at Every Age and Stage. Doing Kegels regularly can help combat these problems by strengthening your pelvic floor muscles.

But there’s a catch: The Kegel isn’t as simple as it sounds.

In fact, people botch the exercise all the time, which prevents them from reaping its benefits…and in some cases, even causes harm. Read on to learn six common Kegel mistakes, why they’re problematic, and how to correct them.

You squeeze the wrong muscles. 

Doing the contraction improperly is the most common error Reardon sees people make with Kegels. A lot of people incorrectly squeeze the big, external muscles—like the glutes, back, or thighs—which “basically overpowers the pelvic floor,” says Alex Hill, D.P.T., a board-certified pelvic health and oncology physical therapist and spokesperson for the American Physical Therapy Association. That means they don’t actually engage the pelvic floor muscles, which negates the benefits of the exercise.

Another mistake people make is pushing out while doing the Kegel, like they’re pooping or giving birth, Reardon says. This is essentially the opposite of what a proper Kegel is: The correct form, she explains, involves lifting and squeezing the pelvic floor muscles upward. The true Kegel movement, Hill adds, is “a lot more gentle” than many people realize. “I like to tell my patients that no one should be able to tell that you’re doing them.”

To master the Kegel, Reardon cues patients to think about sucking up a thick smoothie or picking up a blueberry with their vagina while simultaneously holding in gas. Those small cues can encourage you to gently engage your pelvic floor muscles instead of inadvertently tightening all the big muscles, she says.

Still not feeling quite right? Consider seeing a pelvic floor physical therapist for in-person training, Hill says. She points to a small, impactful study back in the 1990s, which found that when women were just given verbal or written instructions on how to do the Kegel, many of them performed it incorrectly—some to the extent that it could promote incontinence. Looping in a pro can help you nail good form. Find one near you by searching for pelvic floor specialists on ChoosePT.com.

You only do them sitting down. 

The no-equipment nature of Kegels can make them a tempting exercise to do when you’re sitting on the couch, parked in your desk chair, or in the car waiting at a red light. But only performing them from a seated position is a no-go, Reardon says.

That’s because it doesn’t train your body to use and strengthen your pelvic floor muscles during the activities where you actually need them to work, like jumping, running, lifting heavy weights, or walking to the bathroom with a full bladder. Basically, seated Kegels don’t help you develop the real-world pelvic floor strength you need to properly support your pelvic organs.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a time and place for them, though. When you’re first learning how to do a Kegel, Reardon typically recommends seated ones as part of a progression. Start lying down so that you can “really learn to connect with the muscles” without the added stress of gravity, she says. When that feels easy, graduate to seated Kegels. And once those are no biggie, move on to standing Kegels and pair them with movements that mimic the specific ways you want to train the muscles to work. For example, if your goal is to pick up your grandkids without leaking pee, do Kegels along with weighted squats.

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The 4 more Kegel mistakes shown here are available after clicking the (https) link @ the bottom of the page

You do them while you pee.

You do way too many.

You skip the relaxation step.

You consider Kegels a cure-all

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Thomas Barwick//Getty Images

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President Trump has a long record of threatening rather than protecting the integrity of American elections. At his worst, he sought to overturn the 2020 results. Now he is menacing the midterms, with an executive order that would throw voting by mail into chaos if it went into effect.

It is up to the Supreme Court to prevent that. Nearly one in three voters now vote by mail. Mr. Trump’s order has already sowed doubt about whether Americans can continue to trust the Postal Service to deliver their ballots and prompted bipartisan alarm from states and local election officials. The sooner the court puts Mr. Trump’s ill-advised directive to rest, the better.

Mr. Trump’s order is illegal. He does not have the authority to set the rules for election administration. The Constitution gives that role to the states, with Congress providing oversight. “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations,” Article I states.

As a bipartisan task force said in 2021 in response to a relatively minor executive order from President Joe Biden, “Presidents don’t have much of a role in how elections are run — and that’s a good thing.” Nevertheless, Mr. Trump ordered the Postal Service in March to decide which voters would receive mail-in ballots, a decision that states have always made for themselves.

His order is also a recipe for bureaucratic chaos. It would force states to send lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, with each voter’s information attached to a unique bar code. Even minor discrepancies between the information on the list and the information on a ballot envelope could lead to somebody not being able to vote.

Tracking ballots via bar codes can have benefits when election officials have sufficient time and funds to set up a system. It allows voters to see how their ballots are moving through the mail. But Mr. Trump’s rushed order is pretending to solve a problem that does not exist. He claims it will prevent voter fraud, which is vanishingly rare in the United States.

Rather than making elections more secure, the order would inject turmoil. Many jurisdictions would need far more time than they have to comply with the new rules for a November vote. And while the Postal Service has had a stellar record of delivering ballots quickly, it has no experience or expertise in making decisions about the appropriateness of sending ballots to millions of people. It has already been struggling this year with timely ballot delivery.

A Postal Service employee’s whistle-blower report became public this month, warning that the new system could reject an entire batch of ballots, numbering in the thousands, if even one bar code did not scan properly. Anybody who has used a self-service counter at a supermarket understands how common bar code problems are. The whistle-blower raised “grave concerns” that the change could cause major disruptions.

The order could lead some voters who request mail-in ballots not to receive them, while also slowing the election process. “There is a low but nonzero chance that in a state with a nail-biter congressional election, someone will discover 50,000 ballots at the post office on the Wednesday after the election,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab. The risks are biggest in states where most voters now vote by mail, including California, Colorado and much of the rest of the West. The numbers are also significant in Maine, Michigan and Ohio, where Senate races are tight, as well as Pennsylvania and other states with close House races.

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Photo illustration by Tam Stockton for The New York Times

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Sleeping while listening to bursts of pink noise – background sounds akin to gentle radio static – seems to boost the flow of fluid through the brain, and so might enhance the clearance of waste products that are linked to conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. The pink noise seems to bolster the slow brainwaves that enhance the pumping of blood vessels, which drives the brain’s waste-disposal system.

We already knew that listening to bursts of pink noise during sleep can strengthen slow brainwaves, a kind of electrical activity that occurs during certain phases of non-REM sleep, known as N3 (deep sleep) and N2 (the lighter stage before it). This effect occurs when the bursts coincide with the peaks of slow brainwaves.

“They really don’t sound like much; they’re just little staticky beeps,” says Joshua Levitt at Boston University in Massachusetts.

Prior research has also shown that boosting slow brainwaves – using drugs, for instance – can enhance the flow of the brain’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which bathes the brain and carries away waste products.

But it was unknown whether listening to pink noise has the same effect. That’s because measuring the brain’s CSF flow involves imaging it with MRI scans, but MRI interferes with EEG, the technique used to measure waves of electrical activity in the brain. One consequence of this interference is that slow waves recorded via EEG during MRI scans can’t be detected fast enough to align bursts of pink noise with their peaks.

“You have to do a lot of extensive processing of the EEG signals to detect slow brainwaves, so it’s hard to do that fast enough in real-time,” says Laura Lewis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To overcome this problem, Levitt, Lewis and their colleagues used EEG data collected during MRI scans from prior studies to train an AI model to rapidly predict when the brain’s slow waves will peak. “[The AI] says, ‘In about 70 milliseconds, a slow wave peak is coming,’ so now we should schedule our sound stimulation to arrive in accordance with that,” says Levitt.

“This, methodologically, really moves the field forward,” says Sephira Ryman at the University of New Mexico.

The researchers then recruited 27 healthy adults, aged 29 on average, to wear EEG electrodes on their scalp while taking an afternoon nap in an MRI scanner. Of these, 14 managed to fall asleep and enter N2 sleep. “It’s a difficult place to fall asleep,” says Lewis.

At the peak of half of each participant’s slow brainwaves, the researchers used the AI model to play 50-millisecond bursts of pink noise. During the remaining slow brainwaves, they played no noise as a control.

By analysing the MRI and EEG recordings, they found that bursts of pink noise strengthened the slow waves they coincided with and briefly boosted the flow of CSF into the brain, compared with no sonic stimulation. This suggests the pink noise also enhanced the flow of CSF through, and out of, the brain. “We know that the flow in is usually balanced with the flow that comes out,” says Lewis.

The increased CSF flow seemed to be driven by enhanced pumping of the brain’s blood vessels, which is known to push fluid through the brain’s waste-disposal system, called the glymphatic system.

Off the back of these results, the team is exploring whether the approach also works in older adults and whether it can boost the clearance of proteins, such as beta-amyloid, that are linked to conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. If the results are positive, the researchers hope to test whether the technique can slow cognitive decline in people during normal ageing, mild cognitive impairment – a condition that often precedes dementia – and the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

There is reason to think this could work. Exposing people to sounds and flickering lights – while they are awake – has previously shown promise at slowing cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer’s, potentially by boosting the glymphatic system.

But one benefit of the new approach is that it could eventually be delivered via a portable device while people are sleeping, which could be less disruptive, says Ryman.

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This morning I woke up to a freshly rebooted desktop. A bit annoying, but that’s just something that happens with Windows 11 — it reboots to install an update after a while, sometimes even when you don’t ask it to. But I got the feature I’ve been waiting for since Windows 11 launched, almost five full years ago: I can put the taskbar on the top of the screen.

I’m in a small minority of users here, I know. Most people use the taskbar on the bottom. If that weren’t the case, Microsoft wouldn’t have unaccountably stripped out a feature Windows has had for decades, for apparently no reason. But when we’re talking about a userbase in the billions, it’s a big deal.

Personally, I use the taskbar on the top because it just feels right on my standing desk, where I’ve got an iPad beneath my monitors, and I try to keep the screens roughly parallel with my eyes for ergonomics. Looking at the taskbar, as I need to do for triple screens and constant multitasking, is a much bigger part of my day than for a lot of people. I’m glad it’s back. Microsoft seems to be seriously trying to improve Windows 11 for users for the first time, not just using it as a serving platter for “AI” and a bunch of other expensive services. (And advertising. Don’t forget, Microsoft is a massive advertising company.) This isn’t the only thing it’s doing. Microsoft, while careful not to walk back its commitment to Copilot in pretty much every way, is pulling out a lot of the actual Copilot buttons it’s jammed into every possible nook and cranny of Windows.

And Microsoft is, allegedly, trying to make Windows functional on 8GB of RAM. Here I’ll point out that Microsoft set 16GB as a standard for itself years ago, and now sells Surface products that start at 8GB. And also, Microsoft is a fairly sizeable part of the corporate issue creating the problem that’s making RAM unaffordable. So yeah, thanks for all of that, Microsoft! Windows feels kind of nice for me again, for the first time in years, despite your best efforts to make both hardware and software terrible.

One of my core measurements for improvement in an operating system is that I need fewer third-party tools. For example, I used to use a program called Ultramon to put taskbars on secondary monitors, back when Windows didn’t do that on its own. Now it does. Improvement. Simple.

Windows 11 required me to add programs to bring core features back. So in honor of Microsoft reversing one of the biggest annoyances of its OS, I’m going to show you a program that can easily tweak a bunch of stuff, which I’ve been using and enjoying. It’s called Windhawk.

Windhawk isn’t a mod in and of itself; it’s more of a platform for delivering Windows modifications. It reminds me a lot of some of the tools I used to use for rooted Android phones, back when that operating system was a lot less mature and needed work. (Take that statement as you will.) Windhawk offers hundreds of small tweaks, provided by the community, and shows users and reviews to give you a glimpse of how well they work. You can search and browse through it with an interface similar to an app store. These are all fairly small tweaks, but a lot of them are serious creature comforts for me. I’ll give you an example. Some time ago, Windows started trying to put notifications on the active monitor you’re using. That’s a good idea. But it doesn’t work. Slack and email notifications seem to appear randomly across my three monitors, and there’s no way to assign them to one monitor specifically. I hear a notification, and I have to rapidly look across three screens to find it before it disappears.

A Windhawk mod called “Customize Windows notification placement,” created by m417z and currently reviewed at 5 stars with over 16,000 users, fixes that. Now when I hear the “ding” of a notification, I know exactly where to look: the bottom-center of my main screen. Thanks, m417z, you’ve genuinely helped me.

Most of the tweaks in Windhawk are possible with other programs — there’s one that puts the taskbar on top, for example, which I was doing with StartAllBack before. (I happily paid five bucks for that one years ago.) But the centralized interface and easy-to-add, easy-to-disable nature makes it super fast to add a bunch of stuff, like the option to put the Start button on the left even when your apps are in the center, or add weather or performance info to your clock without needing a widget that gobbles up RAM and serves you ads.

A word of caution: Windhawk is installing small programs on your PC that aren’t coming from a verified source, and anyone can add stuff or even fork an existing mod. It’s presenting the same kind of security issues that any third-party software does. But the creator of the program, Ramen Software (Michael Maltsev), seems to be aware of this. Contributors can link their Github profiles for extra verification, and you can take a look at the source code and updates for each tool right on its page.

Someone who actually understands that source code, make a mod that brings back the list view for icons on the desktop. Please and thanks.

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Credit: Michael Crider/Foundry

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Hmmmm  … MAGA! Please don’t believe lying trump’s 5.000.00 check lie!

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The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed to no longer count immigrants without green cards in the 2030 census or ask about race and ethnicity, part of an overhaul that would redefine who counts as a U.S. resident in the eyes of the federal government.

The sweeping measures would upend a process that helps determine the allotment of congressional seats, billions of dollars in federal funding, and policies to address systemic disparities.

The proposed regulation, published online on Wednesday, would not count noncitizens without green cards in the 2030 census, a significant departure from the process stipulated by the Constitution to occur every 10 years. Historically, the census has asked Americans about their race and ethnicity and counted all U.S. residents regardless of their immigration status.

The overhaul also would bar the U.S. Census from asking Americans about their sexual orientation.

While the proposal is likely to face legal challenges, the changes would not only remove undocumented immigrants from the official population count used to determine congressional seats, but also immigrants who are in the United States legally and have yet to secure green cards or citizenship. As a result, areas with more immigrants, which tend to vote Democratic, could lose representation and federal funding.

The proposed overhaul, as well as removing questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation from the census, could have major implications for collecting the federal data used to inform anti-discrimination policies and civil rights protections.

“If we don’t have the data in order to see that there’s problems, then we’re sticking our heads in the sand,” said Kimball W. Brace, the president of Election Data Services, an organization working with Democratic and Republican local governments on census and election issues. “We won’t see it. We won’t get a feel for what’s happened.”

An overhaul of the census count would face significant hurdles. The 14th Amendment calls for “counting the whole number of persons in each state,” rather than just citizens. And the rule would affect a census count after the 2028 presidential election, so a new administration could try to reverse the changes. Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress is tasked with carrying out the census; however, it has delegated decisions on the census to the Commerce Department.

But some researchers said Mr. Trump’s decision to try to resurrect his first-term effort to reshape the census could create a chilling effect and reduce participation.

As part of the proposal released on Wednesday, the administration said it was considering including a question in the census about the immigration status of participants, something civil rights groups have warned would deter immigrants with and without legal status from filling out the form out of fear of government retaliation.

“The Trump administration is trying to omit pieces of the population that they don’t feel are real Americans,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “And in many ways, pulling back some of the trends and important policies that came into effect since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

The White House referred questions to the Commerce Department, which did not respond to requests for comment.

In the proposed rule posted on Wednesday, signed by Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, the administration said it was reassessing how it collects race and ethnicity data after “substantial doubts about the meaning, significance, and impact of attempting to categorize persons by race and ethnicity” surfaced in the national conversation.

The proposal also cited Mr. Trump’s executive order that purged the federal government of efforts centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

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A naturalization ceremony at Ellis Island in 2022. The Trump administration has proposed new census regulations that would no longer ask Americans about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and would exclude noncitizens without green cards. Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

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