thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 50

Business Standard: "Tata Motors became the country's first bus manufacturer to receive the Central Motor Vehicles Rules (CMVR) type approval certificate for its Hydrogen Fuel Cell powered (FCEV) buses.

The largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in India obtained the approval for its Tata Starbus 4/12 FCEV model along with its variations"

"[Researchers discovered] small ruthenium particles and a solar-powered system for water electrolysis [can produce H2 efficiently]. This is the solution identified by a joint team involving the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology, IIT) of Genoa, and BeDimensional S.p.A. (an IIT spin-off). The technology, developed in the context of the Joint-lab’s activities and recently published in two high-impact factor journals (Nature Communications and the Journal of the American Chemical Society) is based on a new family of electrocatalysts that could reduce the costs of green hydrogen production on an industrial scale"

China Daily: "Hybot unveils hydrogen-powered heavy duty truck"

"Yamaha hydrogen combustion outboard brings more clean H2 to boating"

Semler: "Here.. is how the military-industrial complex siphons off money from pro-worker programs — and how it sustains its enormous political power.

No expansion, no big bang. Waah waah waah waaaah

Paper: "We find that the UV surface brightness of luminous disk galaxies are constant over a very wide redshift range (from z = 0.03 to z ~ 5). From this analysis we conclude that the Tolman test for surface brightness dimming is consistent with a non-expanding, Euclidean Universe with distance proportional to redshift. This result is also consistent with previously published datasets that were obtained to perform the Tolman test for a smaller redshift baseline when analysis of such data is done in a consistent system"

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Wiki: "Tolman's test compares the surface brightness of galaxies as a function of their redshift.. Such a comparison was first proposed in 1930 by Richard C. Tolman as a test of whether the universe is expanding or static"

Politico.eu: "[10/26] Slovakia's newly-appointed Prime Minister Robert Fico said his country would no longer send arms to Ukraine"

Arab News: "EU leaders fail to agree on a $55 billion aid package for Ukraine over Hungary's objection"

Hindustan Times: "India votes in favour of UNGA resolution demanding immediate ceasefire in Gaza"

CTV News: "Canada to support resolution on Israel-Hamas ceasefire"

"@FNB_Gas@mastodon.energy

Today Federal Minister Robert Habeck together with our CEO Dr. Thomas Gößmann presented the draft of the #hydrogen core network. This puts # Germany at the forefront of building the # hydrogen infrastructure in Europe...

Video

Through the project by ONTRAS, Gascade and terranets bw, # H2 can be transported from 2025...

Image

New construction or conversion from natural gas to # hydrogen ? Switching also means: faster implementation, lower costs, lower consumption of resources. This is good for the economy and the environment.

The #hydrogen core network will predominantly consist of converted natural gas pipelines as well as new hydrogen pipelines to be built.

The #hydrogen core network does not only consist of TNB lines. It also takes into account 710 km of lines from distribution system operators and other pipeline system operators.

Map

The @bundestag passed a comprehensive reform of the Energy Industry Act (#EnWG) on November 10 , 2023 . It removes the main hurdles for hydrogen network planning that resulted from the transitional regulation for hydrogen networks.

The #hydrogen core network is to be financed entirely through network fees. To achieve this, fees must be capped in the ramp-up phase...

The next big step towards the #hydrogen core network: FNB Gas presents the draft of the core network"

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Reuters: "[A] court ruling last month threw the [DE] government's finances into disarray...The coalition has agreed to plug a 17-billion-euro ($18.32 billion) hole in its budget for 2024 by cutting climate-damaging subsidies, spending in some ministries and federal grants.

A climate and transformation fund, designed to support companies' transition towards greener practices, will be reduced by 12 billion euros in 2024 and by 45 billion euros in the financial planning up to 2027, although Scholz said the fund will still have a total volume of 160 billion euros"

The political subtext is not always agreable, as in 6 Underground but the stories, action are fine, beats watching anything Woke.

State of Play, The Magnificent Seven, 3:10 to Yuma, Game Night, 6 Underground. All good works.

Battery-electric tech is subpar, suboptimal, in terms of TCO it is a hellish nightmare. Even with all else were equal with clean molecule alternative (it isn't) the insufficiency of lithium for all storage needs would disqualify this tech from any widespread adoption.

Paper: "[W]hy does range anxiety exist for BEVs’ consumers? We guess consumers’ range anxiety mainly comes from two aspects: First, one cause of range anxiety could be that the real range of BEVs differs greatly from the nominal AER announced by automotive companies. Especially when the air conditioning is on, and the battery performance decreases in winter, it results in a lower real range. For example, the real range of BEVs is approximately 35%–40% lower than the nominal range (at minus 7) in cold regions of China... The second.. anxiety is charging anxiety. It is mainly due to the imperfect charging infrastructure, consumers’ inability to find charging piles in time, or charging time being too long, especially when battery charging is not on the consumers’ schedule"

Apparently e-jagoff kept whining in the last earnings call, a vlogger made this.

TSLA earnings not good?

Freight Trains: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

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Offshore Energy: "UK reveals winners of first hydrogen allocation round.. UK government has concluded the first hydrogen allocation round (HAR1) and selected eleven projects, totaling 125 MW capacity, to receive over £2 billion (around $2.5 billion) of revenue support from the Hydrogen Production Business Model"

"@zuck@threads.net

Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I'm pretty optimistic about this"

"@ben@werd.social

Threads is starting its initial real fediverse integration (as it launches into the EU). Exciting times"

Mediaite: "'Are you concerned that if there's no money, Ukraine could lose the war to Russia?' [reporter] asked [Senator] Tuberville. 'Well, that's always been a big possibility the whole time. I mean, I've never thought they could win to begin with'"

#Ukraine #Frontline

12/01 - 12/13

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"@tante

@malteengeler yes. Springer and a lying machine fit together like a glove"

"@malteengeler@legal.social

@tante Just as with crypto or blockchain: Look at who is adopting and promoting it and you get a good picture of what ideas lie at the core of a technology"

"@tante@tldr.nettime.org

A match made in hell..."

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"Could not protect" or purposely sold the data for munee.

The Guardian: "[05/24] Tesla has failed to adequately protect data from customers, employees and business partners and has received thousands of customer complaints regarding the carmaker’s driver assistance system, Germany’s Handelsblatt has reported, citing 100 gigabytes of confidential data leaked by a whistleblower"

Arab News: "56 UK parliamentarians demand Israeli settler travel ban"

#Boycott #Companies

via @Buster@mastodon.scot

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Things are getting worse for Biden but he still has an electoral advantage though it is decreasing with sinking net approval. How lower is low? Even with net approv -20 and 2% growth incumb seems fine, but if econ goes sideways there will be trouble.

u.biden_approval()['net'].tail(4)

Out[1]: 
end_date
2023-12-10   -17.583314
2023-12-11   -17.578400
2023-12-12   -17.317512
2023-12-13   -16.980148

NYT: "[2023/09] Americans Are Down on Biden.. [but d]espite a flood of negative polls for Democrats, the party has delivered a string of strong results in special elections"

CCR: "Palestinians Sue Biden for Failure to Prevent Genocide, Seek Emergency Order to Stop Military and Diplomatic Support for Israeli Government’s Assault on Gaza.. Leading Genocide and Holocaust Experts Submit Declarations in Support of Federal Case..

William Schabas, the world’s leading legal expert on genocide, wrote in his declaration in the case, 'I conclude that there is a serious risk of genocide committed against the Palestinian population of Gaza and that the United States of America is in breach of its obligation, under both the 1948 Genocide Convention to which it is a party as well as customary international law, to use its position of influence with the Government of Israel and to take the best measures within its power to prevent the crime taking place'"

H2 Insight: "French president promises 'massive funding' for natural hydrogen.. Macron says he wants France to ‘become one of the pioneering countries' in the production of so-called white H2"

H2 Council: "Hydrogen project pipeline grows by 35% since January 2023 despite macro-economic headwinds"

"@miguel_pacheco@masto.pt

First world #hydrogen #tugboat to start operations in 2024

AP News: "Former Fox host Tucker Carlson is launching his own streaming network with interviews and commentary"

Al-Monitor: "Israel came under pressure Wednesday from its allies over its war in Gaza.. The United Nations General Assembly also overwhelmingly backed a non-binding resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the devastated territory".

#Office

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Politico.eu: "A sure way to rankle an Austrian is to mention an upcoming Austria-Hungary football match and then ask who is the opponent.. [Recently w]hether the issue involves Ukraine, Russia, or even the Israel-Hamas conflict, the impression in EU circles is that the pair are singing from the same songbook"

#Ukraine #DW

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There is this incessant talk of "game changing weapons" as it relates to Ukraine. Such talk could be part of a marketing campaign triggered by the private "defense" industry. There is always the next bright shiny object that people are made to chase like a gaping fish.

Looked at which members in Congress receive the most campaign contributions from the "complex". Cuck Schumer sits at number two. Obviously this guy wants more arms to go to all major conflict zones.

Thanks to decades of neoliberalism the rich started to see themselves, their very presence a public good. The reality is quite the reverse. In excess they are a threat to public's well-being, and to the Republic.

Simple, since money is printed during loan, that money will be destroyed once the loan is paid back.

"What happens when a loan is paid back to the org that printed the money?"

Is there a contradiction between RU's stance on Ukraine and support of Palestine? I don't think so. From their POV they could easily claim Russians in east of Ukraine are like Palestenians with bigger guns and better friends.

H2 Central: "The Garuda Hidrogen Hijau Project [Indonesia], which is expected to start commercial operations in 2026, will run on 600 MW of solar and wind power, and will produce 165,000 tons (150,000 tonnes) of green ammonia per year. The cost of the project is estimated to be upwards of US$1 billion"

Latest neural net based approaches in their essence get one isolated datapoint, and one label (prediction target) per training cycle (batching can be done but that is an implementation trick). Truly representing, using sequence has always been a problem for NNs. In one approach you cheat by taking in enough pre-sequenced data as a snapshot. One datapoint can have, eg "cat sat on the" which is paired with label "mat". Then shift tokens one to the right in the bigger sentence, next isolated datapoint is "sat on the mat and" with new label "shat". For full sentences you ask NN multiple times, with different pieces, you get a sequenced -ish looking output, you might get "cat sat on the mat and shat". There is no planning, no true sequencing. One datapoint has no relation to the next. That's what I meant previously when I said these things are, at their core, extremely dumb.

Howard: "Something I think pretty much everyone.. including Yann LeCun agrees on is LLMs aren't going to make it. They're not a path to ASI. They're getting more and more expensive, they're getting more and more slow, and the more we use them the more we realize their limitations...

The thing you can really see missing here is this this planning piece, so if you try to get an LLM to solve like fairly simple graph coloring problems, or fairly simple stacking problems, things that require backtracking and trying things and stuff, they, unless it's seen something pretty similar in its training, they just fail terribly...

We need to be working on this missing piece, because a step-by-step solution to a math problem is something that currently is pretty challenging for an LLM to do well"

Jeremy Howard says in terms of goal for AI, we should actually be talking about ASI (A. Super Intelligence) instead of AGI. He is right, current crop of tools are pretty general, they shoot the shit on topics like a random jagoff who can read Wikipedia. But that's not what we want.. we don't want general intelligence, we want consistently good intelligence that can perform any task previously done by a regular human, better, consistently. Give this thing a math problem, it should be able to solve it, not generate random musings about it like a halucinating stochastic parrot. It should fly, not fall with style.

I actively avoid this faux AI shit like the plague myself

"@jedbrown@hachyderm.io

I search for a topic and find a blog post. As I read the title and first sentence, it sounds like I'm going to learn something. 😃 As I read on, it's increasingly basic, disjoint, and sloppy about things I know. I scan to the end:

Did you like this article? Well I didn’t fully write it. I just re-assembled GPT-4 answers to my own questions for anyone with the same doubts!

😞

Thank you, kind author, for disclosing, but I need this information up-front. I want expertise, not a forgery of it"

DW News: "Why has the Ukrainian army not been able to breach Russian lines?"

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CSIS: "Some Israelis and outside analysts had come to believe that serving as Gaza’s governing body for nearly two decades had moderated [Hamas'] stance on the conflict and resistance to Israel, with the group accepting that a massive assault would be counterproductive. On the surface, at least, Hamas seemed to back up this perceived change with actions...

Was this strategy just a front while the group planned the October 7 attack? Perhaps. But Israel and the international community did not make a major shift in their policies in response to Hamas’s moderation. There were limited economic concessions and statements acknowledging Hamas’s role in governing Gaza. At the same time, there was incendiary far-right political rhetoric and rising levels of violence against Palestinians. Both 2021 and 2022 set records as the deadliest years for Palestinians, as the Netanyahu government green-lit the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and settlers themselves conducted pogroms against Palestinians" via @wilbr@glitch.social

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NYT: "‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas.. Netanyahu gambled that a strong Hamas (but not too strong) would keep the peace and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state"

The Guardian: "Foreign investors in Australia will face higher fees and steeper penalties for buying existing homes and leaving them empty as the government aims to address housing affordability"

"@miguel_pacheco@masto.pt

Hylane GmbH, after a year of renting hydrogen commercial vehicles

TASS: "'Russia-Japan green energy cooperation should not be affected by politics.. Cooperation between Russia and Japan in the formation and growth of supply chains for LNG, hydrogen, fuel ammonia, wood pellets and the development of the entire green technology complex would benefit not only our countries, but the entire world,' [RU official] Natalya Stapran said"

"JohanEmpa@mastodon.green

All new buildings should be zero-emission as of 2030 Buildings account for 36% of EU greenhouse-gas emissions"

#JoshPaul

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"@Karenawokekaren@sfba.social

Banner at today's March for Palestine London"

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European Court of Justice was one of the things the Brexiters whined about the most, because remember, they wanted to "take back their freedom" and not be subject to opressive European laws through ECJ enforcement.

But I bet their whining wasn't as much about taking back their local independence but about wanting to keep using this ICSID system where, I suspect, Anglo companies are favored more. IOW Brexiters wanted to go back to the shady multinational system they helped found where their rich feel more "at home", rather than be more equal terms with their European neighbors.

"[2022/03] The conflict between international investment treaty arbitration and EU law"

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"[2023/07] German Court Says EU Members Can Evade ICSID Arbitration"

I wonder how ICSID stacks up against the EU's own arbitration

The days of empire are over. Corporate muppets are running the show now.

It doesn't look like ICSID is essential for pulling foreign investment, Brasil is out of this system and it gets FDI just fine.

A corp even once sued the Egyptian government for raising the minimum wage through this bizarre arbitration system. Why have national governments laws etc then? Just have these muckers write laws for you.

They've already done huge damage in El Salvador, South Africa...

A shady arbitration system ICSID, part of World Bank. Sounds and is shady.. Unequal, opressive and an obstracle for developing countries.

#Kennard #ICSID

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#Reagan #Lebanon

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The Nation: "The 'Hunt for Hamas' Narrative Is Obscuring Israel’s Real Plans for Gaza.. The US press and politicians are trying to fit the attacks on Gaza into a Zero Dark Thirty mold, but it’s something much simpler—and sinister... The government is doing forcible population transfers, and this means everyone. It’s the simplest way to explain Israel’s actions, yet American media—tied to 'counterterror' narratives—can’t, or won’t, get their minds around the obvious fact that Israel is attempting to depopulate Gaza in stages"

AP News: "US vetoes UN resolution backed by many nations demanding immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza.. The council called the emergency meeting to hear from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who for the first time invoked Article 99 of the U.N. Charter, which enables a U.N. chief to raise threats he sees to international peace and security...

The vote in the 15-member council was 13-1, with the United Kingdom abstaining. The United States’ isolated stand reflected a growing fracture between Washington and some of its closest allies over Israel’s monthslong bombardment of Gaza. France and Japan were among those supporting the call for a cease-fire"