thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 16

TDB: "Kennedy got it wrong... JFK, who famously declaimed: 'Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.' It’s a good line... It’s also total BS... I’ve started to think about Kennedy’s words with something resembling bitterness. Yes, I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had in my life. But I can’t honestly say they were given to me by 'America' any more than I can say the macaroni and cheese I made for lunch was given to me by Kraft. I paid for that mac and cheese and I have paid for America"

Chollet: "I'll be worried when they get to 70% on ARC without training on the test set. That's my canary. We're very far today"

Wiki: "In 2023, researchers tested GPT-4 against a new benchmark called ConceptARC, designed to measure abstract reasoning, and found it scored below 33% on all categories"

"The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a unique benchmark designed to measure AI skill acquisition and track progress towards achieving human-level AI"

Morgan: "GPT-4 has become so lazy, it hardly does anything useful anymore without tons of prompting and coercion. And that's when there isn't a stream error. Stability is at an all time low too"

George Morgan: "Category theory will change machine learning forever. It's the key to being able to describe symbolic reasoning"

Recent actions around H2 can perhaps reverse some of that damage. But for now the ledger does not look good.

Even on fundamental issues like climate, US historically did the most damage.

Link

No it isn't..

Tony Blair: "[2003] The US is a force for good in the world"

Brits and their rouge offspring have lost their way. Maybe the rest of the world whose gov culture comes from militocracies should invade both of them, and correct this. I'm talking about a giant alliance of non-Anglo countries, first invade Britain, and then US, once invaded place them under strict military rule lasting for about one century, while correcting their weirdo biz-oriented, biz-controlled culture. Then, gradually, they could be shifted towards a more modern style democracy, and UK would be re-integrated into the EU.

"@miguel_pacheco@masto.pt

Toyota to make new Lunar Rover for NASA:

"@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Computers as tools for humans are so useful exactly because they can’t think and do tedious work like calculations or information storage and retrieval for humans in a deterministic way.

It took like nearly 90 years of digital computers to make them powerful enough to run a wasteful algorithm that pretends to think (but doesn’t) and to deliver bullshit non-deterministic results while using absurd amounts of computational and environmental resources."

You only have the right to exist peacefully. You had carved out a place for yourself nudged between the German guilt, US/UK MIC profitability, West Asia secterian tension, and general intransigence on the part of others. There are ways to exist peacefully in that region. Pull your head out of your ass..

H2 View: "AVL and Red Bull to develop high-density fuel cells for racing and aviation"

Pulse: "Hyundai Motor ramps up hydrogen bus production in 2024"

The Verge: "Google fires 28 employees after protest over Israel cloud contract"

Time: "Google provides cloud computing services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and the tech giant has negotiated deepening its partnership during Israel’s war in Gaza, a company document viewed by TIME shows"

NYT: "E.V. Sales Are Slowing. Tesla's Are Slumping"

The Telegraph: "Pro-Palestinian medical activists block entrance to NHS England HQ.. Demonstrators call for scrapping of ties with Palantir Technologies over claims it provides the IDF with military tech"

Palantir was founded by this guy FYI

Rolling Stone: "Mike Gallagher pushed the bill to ban TikTok because China can 'surveil its users.' Now, he's resigning and joining an American surveillance firm [Palantir]"

Richard Murphy: "[England’s West Coast rail line problem] is the consequence of profound mismanagement by Avanti, who are the private sector operator of this line which has now been in chaos for so long that the despair of those who need to use it is utterly justified.

We are used to hearing about the total failure of water companies by now.

Avanti's management of the West Coast line, which has not enjoyed the benefit of being subject to occasional state ownership, which advantage the East Coast route has enjoyed, has been absolutely disastrous"

"@gvwilson@mastodon.social

El Haji et al 2024: 'Using GitHub Copilot for Test Generation in Python.. within an existing test suite, approximately 45.28% of the tests generated by Copilot are passing tests; 54.72% of generated tests are failing, broken, or empty tests. Furthermore, if we generate tests using Copilot without an existing test suite in place, we observe that 92.45% of the tests are failing, broken, or empty tests'"

"@countcol@mastodonapp.uk

'Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.'

John Lennon"

Recent frontline #Sudan #SAF #RSF (mapping data source changed, no before/after comparison). The block shown is RSF controlled territory.

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NYT: "Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged... In the drowsy hours of a December afternoon, eight American Marines strolled into the headquarters of Haiti’s national bank and walked out with $500,000 in gold, packed in wooden boxes...

[D]ecades of diplomatic correspondence, financial reports and archival records reviewed by The New York Times show that, behind the public explanations, another hand was.. pushing the United States to step in and seize control of Haiti for the wealth it promised: Wall Street, and especially the bank that later became Citigroup...

The United States dissolved Haiti’s parliament at gunpoint, killed thousands of people, controlled its finances for more than 30 years, shipped a big portion of its earnings to bankers in New York and left behind a country so poor that the farmers who helped generate the profits often lived on a diet “close to starvation level,” United Nations officials determined in 1949..

'I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,' Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a leader of the American force in Haiti, wrote in 1935, describing himself as a 'racketeer for capitalism'"

Tampico was an oil town, Standard Oil had interests there. US private complex was likely looking for a reason to secure / expand their interests, and they occupied the place using the incident as an excuse.

Wiki: "The Tampico Affair began as a minor incident.. On April 9, 1914, nine sailors had come ashore to secure supplies and were detained by Mexican forces. Commanding Admiral Henry Mayo demanded that the US sailors be released.. Woodrow Wilson backed the admiral's demand.. The conflict escalated when the Americans took the port city of Veracruz, occupying it for more than six months. This contributed to the fall of Huerta, who resigned in July 1914"

Phsy.org: "For the first time, scientists have managed to create sheets of gold only a single atom layer thick. The material has been termed goldene. According to researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals"

"Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government" via @unix_discussions@mastodon.social

The National: "On Wednesday, five justices at the UK’s highest court unanimously ruled that the Tory government has breached its duties over the right to take part in lawful strikes in what Unison’s general secretary described as the 'most important industrial action case for decades'"

FT: "Rail chaos prompts fresh calls to nationalise England’s West Coast line"

"@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

'Carbrain moment'"

[-]

Smolin said "the leading theories are all consistent with the world’s being supersymmetric". The world is not supersymmetric. LHC results did not confirm it. A big oops for the "leading theories".

The Trouble with Physics, Smolin.

Not Even Wrong, Woit

Bankrupting Physics, Unzicker.

Unfortunately for ST crowd after many years and trials SUSY was not witnessed in the lab.

"How Supersymmetry Saved String Theory.. [with the help of SUSY] string theory could build a bridge from the bosons to the fermions, allowing it to make the leap from just a theory of forces to a theory of every single particle in existence"

In summary, String Theory is bust, hunting for more particles is a fool's errand.

"Neil Turok on the simplicity of nature"

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"@LukasBrausch@mastodontech.de

#TIL that installing a #Brother printer with @debian [Linux] is simply a piece of cake. I just pressed all the necessary buttons and it works out of the box. So far, that has never ever happened before. I didn't even have to install any drivers. I'm flabbergasted!"

"RMS drafted the first version of a license that could be used with free software in 1989. Since then there have been few altercations in it but its the term copyleft that he introduced still holds true. Copyleft which is a play on the word copyright, essentially means that if I give you a piece of software with full freedom to modify, share and redistribute, you will not deprive recipients of your modified version, of the same privilege"

The GPL license was created by Richard Stallman [RMS], the open-source guru, programmer extraordinaire. Everyone in OSS knows his "printer story", he used to make software additions to printers at an MIT lab where he worked during the 80s, but when he was denied access to the source code of a recent model, he felt that "intellectual property rights that companies were applying to software was harming the society and slowing down innovation". He initiated the GNU project and GPL few years later. Many open software projects later used this license, not the cuck alternatives, and flourished because of it.

Chris Bakke: "VCs in 2023: 'we made some bad investments in 2020 and 2021 but we've become quite disciplines'. VCs in 2024: 'we're excited to be leading a $175M pre-seed in IHOP AI - a company that was formed 7 minutes ago by two former interns at Google Deepmind who are seeking to revolutionize fast causal breakfasts by using LLMs'"

DE had invested a lot in this relationship my guess was it would continue

"Xi Jinping Meets with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.. Xi noted that this year marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the all-round strategic partnership between China and Germany. Over the past 10 years, despite tremendous changes in the international landscape, China-Germany relations have maintained steady growth, and bilateral cooperation has strengthened and deepened across the board, providing impetus for the development of both countries. Currently, transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe, and humanity faces growing risks and challenges. These problems can only be resolved through major-country cooperation. As China and Germany are respectively the second and third largest economies in the world, the consolidation and development of their relations carries significance that goes beyond the bilateral scope, and has a major impact on the Eurasian continent and the entire world"

DW News: "German investment in China at record high despite economic tensions"

Anything else? That is almost everything u need to win a war..

NYT: "Ukraine’s Big Vulnerabilities: Ammunition, Soldiers and Air Defense"

Robert Reich @rbreich@masto.ai is speaking some truth, most billionaires are made via a combination of "inherited wealth, government subsidies, tax loopholes, labor exploitation, and policy failures". "Can we stop perpetuating a myth that blames wealth inequality on the choices of everyday people" he asks..

ZME Science: "70% of the land in Britain is still owned by 1% of the population, largely descended from William the Conqueror’s army"

Its interesting after the first "revolution" once corporate honchos took charge, the Gilded Age started shortly after, a time of excess, and insane concentration of wealth.

Turchin: "The American Republic has gone through two revolutionary situations, as we’ve seen. The first one, which developed during the 1850s, was resolved by a social revolution, the American Civil War, which replaced the antebellum ruling elites with the new corporate ruling class. The second one, which peaked during the 1920s, was resolved by the adoption of the reforms of the Progressive and New Deal periods. ​Today, we are in a third revolutionary situation. How will it be resolved—by a civil war, by reforms, or by some combination of the two"

Turchin: "The president of the US Chamber of Commerce told the Chamber in 1943, 'Only the willfully blind can fail to see that the old-style capitalism of a primitive, free-shooting period is gone forever.' To put this in perspective, today the Chamber of Commerce is one of the organizations of the economic elite that pushes for the most extreme forms of neoliberal market ​fundamentalism. In a letter to his brother, President Dwight Eisenhower wrote:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things... Their number is negligible and they are stupid

Need it be said that Eisenhower was a Republican?

Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1964 on the platform of low taxes and anti-union rhetoric. By today’s standards, Goldwater was a mild conservative whose policies wouldn’t be that different from those of, say, Bill Clinton. But he was regarded as a dangerous radical, and business leaders abandoned his campaign in favor of Johnson. Goldwater was defeated by a landslide"

Automation had been progressing at break-neck speed already before this latest crop of "AI" tools.. Straight forward machine vision, automated mechanics can and has been displacing jobs. Forget the hallucinating parrots, be scared of this. An incredibly fast seperator that works based on visual recognition.

McCarthy says he asked VP Biden for Javelin funding for UKR defense back in 2015 and he said no. Good for him.

Bano: "Despite a persistent and boisterous chorus of 'supply guys' – commentators and ostensible affordability campaigners, many of whom are aligned with the homebuilding industry and are primarily interested in the deregulation of planning law – the government’s own analysis has shown that its housebuilding targets would have had a relatively small effect on housing costs, even if they had been achieved"

Bano, Against Landlords: "Before the 1980s the cost of housing was much lower than it is today. Landlords could not command the extravagant rents that we have come to take for granted. Private rents were capped and regulated by law, and the large-scale provision of council housing had diverted a very large number of would-be consumers away from the private rental market altogether. The cost of securing accommodation was much lower because of those cheaper rents (and, for homeowners, consequentially lower house prices), and because of a system that was generally less hospitable to the profiteering activities of landlords, lenders and speculators.. But in the 1980s the government deliberately and openly set out to change all that.. the consequences have been disastrous.. On the other hand, housing-based wealth is dangerously central to our national economy. Landlordism alone accounts for twice as many people’s livelihoods as the coal industry did at its peak, even before taking into account the millions of owner-occupiers who rely on housing wealth to sustain their day-to-day spending"

RF KKK is right on this one

RFK Jr: "[The war in Ukraine is] a war that should have never happened. It's a war the Russians tried repeatedly to settle on terms that were very, very beneficial to Ukraine and us. The major thing they wanted was for us to keep NATO out of the Ukraine. The big military contractors want to add new countries to NATO all the time. Why? Then that country has to conform its military purchases to NATO weapon specifications, which means certain companies, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed, get a trapped market"

Paper: "Huge amounts of plastic products are produced, utilized, and discarded each year, contributing to the increasingly serious ecological problem. Photoreforming, a solar-driven technology, provides an uncomplicated route to simultaneously recycle plastics and facilitate hydrogen (H2) production. Herein, we proposed innovative CdS/NiS composites which used visible light to drive H2 evolution from plastic wastes"

[-]

Reuters: "Apple lost a bid to throw out a mass [UK] lawsuit valued at just under $1 billion, brought in London on behalf of more than 1,500 app developers over its App Store fees"

Boehs: "The two richest companies, those two with their own search indexes.. quietly downloaded all the text on the internet.. and fed it into huge, glorified, energy consuming markov chains that we call LLMs. Now, they encourage you to feed your questions to it, instead of wading through all the shit they birthed. To users at this moment, this proposition is immensely popular. Simultaneously, while users jump ship from the web, website administrators continue to be lazy with no regard for their best interests. They also view LLMs as game changing. These products allow them to pump out more shit, much faster. In this way, the vicious spiral begins.

I’m sure we all understand the most immediate problem hurtling at us. AI is literally inbreeding as it continues to consume and produce. Researchers have coined it 'Model Collapse', 'Model Autophagy Disorder' and 'Habsburg AI'. It all means the same thing. The loss of intelligence on the web is happening shockingly fast, and it’s only accelerating. If you’ve been on Reddit or Twitter in the past few months, the signs of bots chattering back and forth with each other are unmistakable, while the platforms cheer it on and begin to sell it back to the AI"

Nikkei Asia: "Japan pushes for hydrogen trains on local lines, revamping safety rules"

DH: Investments of $180-200 billion in green hydrogen expected in India by 2030’

"@miguel_pacheco@masto.pt

Rotterdam Port to win a new hydrogen import hub:

The Mainichi: "The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is doubling its budget for hydrogen-related initiatives from fiscal 2024, seeing them as key to combating climate change"

But it is a great moneymaker for the MIC.

James Warden: "NATO encourages free-riding on the part of our partners; it encourages recklessness on the part of strategically insignificant though wildly bellicose client states; it encourages incredibly self-defeating behavior on the part of those nations that want to join it; it encourages and helps enable the U.S. to meddle in the Middle Eastern and North Africa where we have virtually no business being"

[-]

Ars Technica: "Oregon Governor Tina Kotek today signed the state's Right to Repair Act.. The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals and repair shops that they provide to their own repair teams.. Oregon's bill goes further, preventing companies from implementing schemes that require parts to be verified through encrypted software checks before they will function"

"@baldur@toot.cafe

Almost everything positive about LLMs you see today is based on extremely unreliable evidence, much of it from some of the most dishonest people you’ll find in tech (cryptocoiners, effective altruists, etc.)

Given that these models are obscenely power-hungry during a global climate crisis it’s my opinion that integrating these tools into your daily work is inherently unethical and irresponsible"

Wiki: "A person with non-domiciled status, sometimes called a 'non-dom', is a person living in the United Kingdom who is considered under British law to be domiciled (i.e. with their permanent home) in another country. Non-doms pay UK tax to the UK government like all other UK residents"

The Guardian: "‘Petrified’ non-doms poised to flee UK over Labour’s tax plans, say experts Prospect of party closing Tory ‘loopholes’ if elected prompts some wealthy individuals to explore a move overseas"

Deaton, Economics in America: "[Milton] Friedman liked tax competition between countries and supported tax havens, because they put a brake on governments’ ability to tax. And he repeatedly argued that attempts to limit inequality of outcomes would not only stifle freedom but, in the end, result in even more inequality. Left to themselves, free markets would produce both freedom and equality.

It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.

Instead, we got a world in which the Sackler family paid themselves more than $14 billion while igniting and promoting an opioid epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Band-Aid and Baby Powder, grew opium poppies in Tasmania to fuel the opioid epidemic while the American military was bombing the Taliban’s heroin supply in Helmand province. Private equity firms discovered they could make money by buying up ambulance services and staffing hospital emergency rooms with their own physicians who charge 'surprise' fees to patients even when their insurance includes the hospital. Surprise fees in emergency rooms (and operating theaters) were eliminated beginning in January 2022, but surprise bills for ambulance services continue. If you need an ambulance, you are not in the best position to find the best service or to bargain over prices; instead, you are helpless and the perfect victim for a predator"

#Dots #Parrots

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Xinhua: "Australian PM welcomes U.S. president's consideration of dropping Assange prosecution"

"How much of Americans' tax money funds war?" #AlJazeera

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AFR: "First Graphene has completed a 12-month project in the United Kingdom to develop low-cost, high-performing electrocatalysts for hydrogen production... Supported by AUD$183,000 (around USD 121,300) in funding from Innovate UK, the project trialed production of graphene enhanced water-splitting electrocatalysts... The Company benchmarked the graphene enhanced, low-cost electrocatalysts against two different commercial catalyst materials, assessing the product’s stability and mass activity. Results indicated First Graphene’s catalyst requires less energy to produce hydrogen when compared to a commercial iridium catalyst in similar conditions"

"@bobwyman@mastodon.social

H. J. RES. 54, calling for a constitutional amendment to establish that corporations aren't people, now has 80 sponsors in the House. Section 2 of the resolution addresses campaign contributions. Personally, I think it should be in an additional amendment since there are those who would support one of these sections but not the other. I believe that an amendment should be single-subject and not an omnibus"

OSI: "The supply-side value of widely-used Open Source software is estimated to be worth $4.15 billion, and the demand-side value is much larger, at 8.8 trillion"

Did the tourists from West Asia give up on the West? No visits to Miami, LA?

TASS: "[2023/12] Tourists from Middle East countries form the bulk of the demand for travels in Russia - they account for 38% of all bookings"

Angela Nagle: "[2018] The Left Case against Open Borders.. With obscene images of low-wage migrants being chased down as criminals.. others drowning in the Mediterranean, and the worrying growth of anti-immigrant sentiment across the world, it is easy to see why the Left wants to defend illegal migrants against being targeted and victimized. And it should. But acting on the correct moral impulse to defend the human dignity of migrants, the Left has ended up pulling the front line too far back, effectively defending the exploitative system of migration itself"

He went to Maga-Lago to lobby.. A for effort.

The Japan Times: "Cameron lobbies old adversary Trump to unlock Ukraine aid"

#Egypt #Protests

Turchin: "[Previous Egyptian president] Mubarak gained power in the usual manner: by first working his way through the military ranks and then becoming the heir apparent of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. However, once in power, he broke the rules of succession by starting to groom his son, Gamal Mubarak, as successor. Gamal did not work his way to power through the army ranks; instead, he earned ​an MBA and became a leader of the new economic elites in Egypt. Had Gamal succeeded his father as ruler of Egypt, it would have amounted to a social revolution in which the old military elites were replaced by the new economic elites. The army officers were clearly not enthused about losing power. According to Korotayev’s reconstruction of the intraelite conflicts underlying the revolution (followed by the counterrevolution), when massive protests erupted in 2011, the army stood aside and allowed the Mubarak regime to fall"