thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 51

"@peterdutoit@mastodon.green

We absolutely cannot negotiate with the physics.

Pay attention to the instruments.

Satellite Data: Unreflected incoming absorbed solar radiation exceeds the outgoing heat radiation.

As a result we are heating and, it would seem when looking at the recent data, at an accelerating rate"

"@jonty@chaos.social

Favourite thing I've learned in 2023: Rosenthaler Platz U-Bahn station in Berlin is entirely decorated with radioactive uranium glazed tiles.

@gigabecquerel visited with a geiger counter to check"

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Prefering web tech over phone-specific app platform makes it easy to port software from one device to another. The application becomes instantly portable because every phone has a browser which can run standard web application code. You avoid corporate lock-in, utilize open technologies that are well documented, easy to use and fast.

iPhone owes a lot to the state, it's not about one interprid adventurer "taking risks", "being enterpreneurial"

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Link

You can get rid of the Central Bank change the currency of the country to someone else's, you can do it, and it can help with inflation. Bulgaria switched to the Euro their inflation fell. But that's only half the story. Central Banks are there to fund banks, if something goes wrong with them, with customer deposits and the like, CB can print / lend to save the banks. Bulgaria is part of the EU, can rely on ECB for that. Who's gonna save your ass son? Planning on relying a distant CB that is not even in the same continent as Argentina? You can rely on them if you become their bitch, that's probably why the jerkoff from Arkansas is there, to shmooze and blow smoke up your ass, to help you become a satellite. That was a Soviet term.. let's say "a client state".

The new Argent president has had some dubious associations, the first signs do not look good #Milei

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Slate: "We are now witnessing a five-car pileup of Trump–slash–Jan. 6 cases that will either be heard by the Supreme Court or land on their white marble steps in the coming weeks. The court has already agreed to hear the case of Joseph Fischer, the former Pennsylvania cop accused of taking part in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol and assaulting police officers, to determine the scope of prosecutions for obstructing an official proceeding. The court’s already flirting with hearing a direct appeal by special counsel Jack Smith to speedily resolve Trump’s claims to absolute immunity for his actions in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. And a game-changer of a case came out of the Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday that would knock the former president off of the Republican primary ballot in that state as a consequence of his involvement in the insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, which would also critically apply to the general election ballot next November. That ruling has to be settled by the high court in order to forestall, or affirm, other states’ efforts to do the same thing. Potential appeals of gag orders in criminal suits and doofy immunity claims in the E. Jean Carroll suit are all also winging their way to Chief Justice John Roberts’ workstation, and it’s not even 2024 yet"

USGS: "A new USGS study found that airport ice control products may result in elevated #phosphorus levels in #waterways downstream from the airport"

The Japan News: "Japan Railway Operators Eye Net-zero CO2 Emissions Via Hydrogen Fuel Cell Trains"

"@davidzipper@mastodon.social

Transit never needed 'reinvention.' It just needs service that's frequent, reliable, and extensive"

Bloomberg: "Hyperloop One to Shut Down After Failing to Reinvent Transit.. The company is selling assets, laying off remaining employees"

No expansion of the universe, no Big Bang. Cosmology is in trouble.

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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Reshare

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"

Good stuff.. i recommend staying away from smartphone apps as much as possible. Great apps can be written using pure Web tech.

"@scottjenson@social.coop

I did some #UX consulting for a non profit in Nairobi a while ago, and in addition to various UX stuff, I suggested they use a #PWA (a simple cached website) instead of an app.

I talked to them this morning. They shipped it and are thrilled. It's SO much smaller than an app, a critical issue in rural Kenya, and it's significantly easier to get people to find and install it.

So exciting when people discover the value of the standard, unfussy web"

I believe the use of the N-word is appropriate here.

This ambassador wrote an article in 2013 titled "The Five-Stage Plan for the Greater Land of Israel". Daam.. Nazi bitch.

Informed Comment: "'Why are you obsessed with a two-state solution?' said Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the UK.. Hotovely’s remarks triggered a swift response from the UK’s two major political parties"

H2 View: "Verne and LLNL achieve storage record with CcH2 solution.. With a capacity of 29kg, the two companies have tripled previous records for cryo-compressed hydrogen storage, achieving its first demonstration, meeting the energy storage needs of semi-trucks"

FuelCellsWorks: "ACWA Power Signs Agreement To Develop Green Hydrogen Project In Egypt Worth More Than $4 Billion"

"@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

'UK petition to restrict parking on the pavement'"

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"@Victor@spore.social

California is set to adopt regulations that will allow for #sewage to be extensively treated, transformed into pure drinking #water and delivered directly to people’s taps"

Woke is a side-effect of the grand bargain. Cultural left and economic right made a deal to take economic issues off the table, label government as evil and give each other permission to exercise their respective "freedoms". One smokes weed, the other buys guns.. be free, be free.. Being extreme Woke is one of the few outlets the cultural left has for exercising its political activism. That's why they double down on it when things go awry, because they've already taken much off the table. Over time they've gone blind, they don't even notice the superstructure anymore. This is their Matrix. Anti-government, pro-rich with a few "freedoms" sprinkled in to divert attention, all egged on by moneyed interests of course because it benefits them.

Same with this woke business.. Woke is not something low income folk care about, at best it is a non-issue, at worst off-putting. If ur party keeps talking abt such topics, they will judge you a cosseted cuck and will not vote for you.

Immigration issue should not exclusively belong to the right wing. Cheap, undocumented labor can also hurt native labor, their negotiating power.

The Guardian: "Macron: Fighting illegal immigration is not just a subject just for the [political] right. If you live in a working-class area affected by this you are for this law"

BBC: "The French parliament has passed legislation toughening France's immigration policy"

Janes: "China-Russia joint air patrol improves air-sea co-ordination.. Chinese and Russian military forces have conducted their second joint strategic air patrol of 2023 in an effort to improve their air and naval force co-operation"

Politico: "Advocacy organizations supporting Israel.. have spent roughly 100 times more on advertising via Meta’s social media platforms in the last month compared to groups aligned with Palestinians and Arabs, according to an analysis.. The combined spending of more than $2 million on Facebook and Instagram.. shows how pro-Israel groups are trying to shape public opinion among Americans, especially younger generations who are increasingly skeptical of Israel"

"advisorybriefs@mas.to

Israel's bombing campaign has exceeded the force of the bombing of Hiroshima"

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"@clive@saturation.social

Man, the 'dead internet' is arriving

@bhawthorne describes his recent experience searching for basic info online -- he looked for the temperature to roast hazelnuts, and got nothing but stochastic-parrot garbage...

He concludes:

'I think it may be time to download an archive copy of the 2022 Wikipedia before we lose all of our reference material. It was nice having all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips for a couple of decades, but that time seems to be past'"

The beginning of the winter was about NNs too in a way; not AI in general, some grandiose claims were made, and they disappointed.

I'd say LeCun was more instrumental in bringing back NNs in deep net form, he is also more active in its further development today than the other two.

Howard is the creator of the ULMFiT on which all modern language models are based. LeCun is "the other godfather of AI" if you believe Hinton is the godfather of AI, which he is not but according to corporate media it appears he is. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio are basically the three researchers who brought neural net techniques back to weak AI. There was an "AI winter" previously they helped end it.

"Who are LeCun and Howard per previous AI post?"

People in SV have become drug addicts... Every new bubble, false promise tech is like a new drug to them.. but it all gets used up, then the junkies need a new fix.

"@marcan@treehouse.systems

Being very generous, LLMs like GPT-3 are trained on over 1000 times the amount of words a human could possibly perceive until age 18, assuming they spent every waking minute of their life listening to speech. GPT-4 probably used more.

No, that's not how humans work, nor how intelligence works. You are not creating intelligence, you are just throwing a big SSD at the problem (and a fancy fuzzy compression algorithm). If you need 1000x more data to come up with output similar to a human, that means your model is 1000x worse at generalizing and actual intelligence than a human (and it's worse, because we know LLMs fail catastrophically when given tests that require actual intelligence, not just appearing knowledgeable). At that point you are so far off it is silly to assume that throwing more compute at the problem in the future will bridge that gap, with the same approach"

Expecting a slam dunk there? They've gone against maga before for certain cases. We'll see.

That sounds like judic. overreach to me. This will surely end up at scotus.

Reuters: "Trump barred from Colorado ballot for role in attack on US Capitol"

The complex can exploit all kinds of politician. If you are in the drama of "hesitant superpower" - they can work with that, there will still be bombing, base building, the drama of "will he, won't he" is still useful.. Statemanly stuff, good TV. If an admin wants to go big, such as W, you do a country or two, but the handlers will stop you short of a third. AFG, IRQ fine, not Iran. If there was an empire, trying to create order, you'd "do" Iran. But no. Now Iran has to be involved in Iraq (Shite majority Sunni minority) more chaos / mayhem ensues. But that's great business - more money for troop deployments, bombs, housing. There is an increased awareness of danger, always beneficial, "see you need our products".

"@AnarchoDoggo@kolektiva.social

The US: we definitely don't want this to turn into a wider regional conflict

Houthi rebels: *show some concrete solidarity with Palestinians being genocided*

The US: Okay we will now mobilize the the militaries of the global north to rain down war upon you"

Surely politicians favored by donors think they are following a well crafted strategery, but the pols who get the money always seem to follow a certain type of strategery that makes the contractors the most amount of money. Order is not good, regularly occuring death and mayhem is preferred. You can't just destroy once, you do it (or allow it to happen) multiple times. It needs to be repeat business. Raytheon destroys, Bechtel builds. Then Raytheon destroys again, and Bechtel rebuilds.. This is a sweet, sweet deal if you can get it. And the private complex has it.

There is no empire. There is no deep state. There is bunch of money-grubbing muppets looking for their next payday. That's what's going on here.

Hossein-Zadeh: "[2006] The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential Washington think tank and a major lobbying force for the military - industrial - Likud alliance, can boast of being the metaphorical alma mater of a number of powerful members of the Bush administration. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney, State Department arms control official John Bolton, and former chair of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle all have had long-standing ties with the institute. The institute played a key role in promoting Ahmed Chalabi’s group of Iraqi exiles, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), as a major Iraqi opposition force 'that would be welcomed by the Iraqi people as an alternative to the regime of Saddam Hussein' once the United States overthrew that regime. From 1998 on, when there was U.S. government money openly available to support the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein due to the AEI-backed Iraqi Liberation Act, Chalabi’s INC grabbed the bulk of the funding. In return, the INC, working closely with the AEI, played an important role in the justification of the invasion of Iraq. It served, for example, as a major source of (largely fabricated) intelligence for the civilian militarists of the Pentagon whenever they found the intelligence gathered by the CIA and the State Department at odds with their plans of invading Iraq.

Another example of the interlocking network of neoconservative forces in the Bush administration and the militaristic think tanks that are dedicated to the advancement of the military - industrial - Likud agenda is reflected in the affiliation of a number of influential members of the administration with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affair (JINSA). JINSA 'is on record in its support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and against the Oslo Accord'... In its fervent support for the hard-line, pro-settlement, anti-Palestinian Likud-style policies in Israel, JINSA has essentially recommended that ‘regime change’ in Iraq should be 'just the beginning of a cascade of toppling dominoes in the Middle East.' JINSA has influential friends either as liaisons with or members of the Bush administration. For example, Assistant Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith is a former JINSA advisor. General Jay Garner, the initial head of the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, is also a former JINSA advisory board member. JINSA advisor Michael Ladeen, who also unofficially advises the Bush administration on Middle Eastern issues, has occasionally talked about the coming era of 'total war,' indicating that the Bush administration should expand its policy of 'regime change' in Iraq to other countries in the region such as Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. In keeping with its role as a cheerleader for U.S. intervention in the Middle East, JINSA chose to honor Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz... to receive the 2002 edition of its Henry M. ‘Scoop’ Jackson public service award. The corporate sponsor of the affair was Northrop Grumman, a company that Wolfowitz worked for as a paid consultant prior to joining Rumsfeld’s Pentagon...

A closer look at the professional records of the neoconservative players in the Bush administration indicates that '32 major administration appointees... are former executives with, consultants for, or significant shareholders of top defense contractors.' For example, James Roche, former Air Force secretary who took over the Army, is a former president of Northrop Grumman; his assistant secretary Nelson Gibbs is another Northrop alumnus. An undersecretary at the Air Force, Peter Teets, was chief operating officer at Lockheed while Michael Wynne, a Defence Department undersecretary, was a former senior vice president at General Dynamics. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself is an ex-director of a General Dynamics subsidiary, and Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, acted as a paid consultant to Northrop Grumman. Today, point out Hartung and Ciarrocca, the armaments lobby 'is exerting more influence over policymaking than at any time since President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex over 40 years ago'"

FuelCellsWorks: "Fortescue Awarded €200 Million In European Union Funding For Norway Green Hydrogen And Ammonia Project"

That program would have to be funded of course with tax revenues which likely is high enough for FN. But they have a wealth distr problem too, not as bad as US, but getting worse. Assets hogged by top 10% will trigger housing crisis.

"@BrentToderian@mastodon.online

'In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life'"

FuelCellsWorks: "Greenh Electrolysis Entered Into A Contract To Build A Hydrogen Production And Refueling Station To Power India’s First Hydrogen Train"

FuelCellsWorks: "Citybus Launches Hong Kong’s First Hydrogen Double-Deck Bus And Refueling Station"

Said It Like Ike #TheComplex

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Semler: "Top Five Weapons Companies Set to Get $140 Billion From Pentagon Next Year.. A Sludge analysis estimates that more than half of the fiscal year 2024 Pentagon budget will go to private contractors, with the five largest companies raking in one-sixth of all military spending"

#Dog

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#Queensland #Australia #Flood

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The Battle For The West Bank #F24

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F24: "French top diplomat calls for 'immediate and durable' Gaza truce"

"@joelle@social.joelle.us

If you grew up in the 1980s, you probably remember hearing about how people in the Soviet Union couldn't buy necessities because of the failures of central planning. It was used as proof capitalism was superior to communism.

Welcome to the 2023 USA, where one drug company running behind central production targets causes a shortage for everyone. Or where one food plant having problems causes a baby formula shortage. The problem is a lack of slack in the system--but slack is unprofitable"

Hierarchy exists in high-risk domains for a reason. The "Maverick" stuff is for movies.

Bad news for Ukranians but Russian army without the Wagner chief seems to be fighting better than with him around. Guy was an "enterpreneur" right, always marketing himself meaning unnecessarily talking out of his ass that also broke discipline. Such acts do not work in high-risk occupations like war. The free-market is fine for selling shoelaces or candy and shit, but for anything more serious, the government has to be involved.

Peggy Lee - Ridin' High

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"First Hydrogen fleet at the [Siemens] Wildenrath test center

The powers that be can try to criminalize it, but cannot criminalize people simply not buying certain products.

BDS will work. Thats why they are scared of it.

Cannot deny what Houthis are doing is helpful for the Palestinian cause.. they are hitting the muckers where it hurts, their money and bidness. If the boycots expand as well together they can move the dial.

F24: "World’s largest shipping firm Maersk suspends Red Sea traffic after Houthi attacks.. A ballistic missile fired by Yemen's Houthi rebels slammed into a cargo ship Friday in the Red Sea near the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait, following another attack only hours earlier that struck a separate vessel, authorities said"