thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 20

"@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu

Our commitment to the fediverse is here to stay.

Today, we launched our new Mastodon instance. It will ensure a privacy-focused space to engage with and get the latest from our Commissioners, departments, and the official voices of the Commission.

We want to thank @Mastodon for stewarding us and helping us make this possible.

Fostering European digital players is vital to our strategy for a stronger #DigitalEU.

This is a unique opportunity to grow the community even more. Let's get there!"

"@johnonolan@threads.net

There's something really special cooking in the ActivityPub/Fediverse space right now. Lot of energy and momentum that's giving me 2008-web vibes"

#Taxes

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Politico.eu: "EU hits Meta with new probe over ‘addictive’ algorithms harming children"

Andersen: "[O]ver the last half-century, antitrust violations were redefined to mean only corporate actions specifically intended to raise prices for consumers. Most of Google’s billions of users pay nothing directly to Google for its services.. So Google’s economic power is a new, befuddling kind—everyone is a user, but their real paying customers are all other businesses"

Merchant: "For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point. We mock [them] for using bleak sci-fi references to market products but these 'useful dystopias' might just be the point.. By attaching the new product to a popular speculation, especially one with built-in dramatic tension, the founders can elevate a buggy, unproven, or partially conceived technology into the cultural firmament, even if only briefly. It's a cheat code, a way of getting us to relate to a future that's already been culturally prototyped, and it can be quite successful"

NetBSD is another open-source operating system, it has a large, respectable following. Sony Playstation is based on NetBSD, along with embedded platform QNX, Apple Airport too (why they did not use their own crooked OS for that, I don't know), some commercial printers and net routers also use it. The announcement below will open some eyes. It is basically saying this "AI" produces shit and we do not accept shit in our codebase.

"@netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org

New development policy: code generated by a large language model or similar technology (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) is presumed to be tainted (i.e. of unclear copyright, not fitting NetBSD's licensing goals) and cannot be committed to NetBSD"

"In February, Honda unveiled the production version of its CR-V [fuel-cell] plug-in, which goes on lease sale to customers in Japan and the US later this year. The FCEV is powered by a fuel cell system made by a GM and Honda joint venture called Fuel Cell System Manufacturing (FCSM), based in Michigan. With a range of 372 miles on a full tank of hydrogen.. and a refuelling time akin to that of a petrol or diesel car, [it] is built in Ohio at Honda’s Performance Manufacturing Centre.

FCSM started mass production of fuel cell systems in January and what is possibly more significant than the launch of the new car is Honda’s claim that this is the first time hydrogen fuel cell systems have been produced 'at scale'"

"@Demo_Ticker_Berlin@todon.eu

💥Announcement! 💥

🔥#NoTechForApartheid: Against Amazon's support for Israeli human rights violations🔥

Arrival: U1, U2, U3 Gleisdreieck | M29 Schöneberg Bridge

📣Call:https://asanb.noblogs.org/?p=7633

# b1505 # noAmazon

Amazon has been supporting the Israeli army with cloud services since 2021.

The $1.2 billion defence contract 'Project Nimbus' (in which Google is also involved) enables the electronic surveillance of the West Bank and Gaza as well as the illegal collection of data on the Palestinian population"

NYT: "Arab League Calls for U.N. Peacekeepers in Gaza and the West Bank"

Deaton, Economics in America: "Wealthy minorities often block public provision of entitlement-like pensions or of healthcare because they do not want to pay taxes for them and do not need them for themselves or their families. Pharma companies lobby for extended patent protection to keep prices high, and wealthy partners in private equity firms lobby to preserve the tax breaks for their incomes by labeling them as capital gains. Banks lobby for rules that allow them to keep profits but share their losses. The American Medical Association restricts the number of places in medical schools [.. to] keep doctors’ salaries higher than they would be in a competitive market. Credit card companies are allowed, by the Supreme Court no less, to prevent retailers from giving discounts to people who pay cash, so that less well-off people who do not use cards are paying for the free air tickets and other benefits that credit card companies provide to their members. States have made it illegal for anyone other than dealers to sell automobiles, so manufacturers cannot sell direct. And so on.

If this kind of lobbying and granting of special favors could be restricted— and campaign finance reform would help—inequality would be reduced, even without changes in taxes"

Andersen: "'When I started in this business,' [Milton] Friedman told .. [to a conference] attendees [in 1998] 'as a believer in competition, I was a great supporter of antitrust laws. I thought enforcing them was one of the few desirable things that the government could do to promote more competition.' But Friedman said his 'views about the antitrust laws have changed greatly over time' because, he claimed, the government had never enforced them aggressively enough. So disingenuous, and so typical of libertarians who really don’t believe in competition as much as in disapproving of government and letting big business have its way"

NYT: "It's a little hard to believe that just over a year ago, a group of leading researchers asked for a six-month pause in the development of larger systems of artificial intelligence, fearing that the systems would become too powerful. 'Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?' they asked. There was no pause. But now, a year later, the question isn't really whether A.I. is too smart and will take over the world. It's whether A.I. is too stupid and unreliable to be useful. Consider this week's announcement from OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, who promised he would unveil 'new stuff' that 'feels like magic to me.' But it was just a rather routine update... Given these constraints, it seems just as likely to me that generative A.I. could end up like the Roomba, the mediocre vacuum robot that does a passable job when you are home alone but not if you are expecting guests"

SP 500 recovered from the dip already. Every dip is a opportunity to buy, as there is boat loads of money chasing the stocks, immense wealth has nowhere else to go. That graph right there is the proof of inequality.

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The Times of Israel: "First Jewish Biden appointee publicly resigns over his handling of Israel-Hamas war... Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Interior Department, accused US President Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict. Call had worked for the presidential campaigns of both Biden and US Vice President Kamala Harris"

The Guardian: "EU will force cosmetic companies to pay to reduce micropollutants.. Draft rules follow the ‘polluter pays principle’ and will mean companies cover 80% of extra clean-up costs"

H2 Central: "North Carolina-based OneH2, Inc. launches new cylinder technology for 931 bar high-pressure hydrogen tube trailers. The cylinder technology, a culmination of several years of development and investment, operates under a unique special permit issued by the U.S. Department of Transport for use on roads... While OneH2 has been operating fleets of 520 bar hydrogen transport trailers for materials handling applications, this new 931 bar design allows for direct fills of higher-pressure, 700 bar automotive and heavy vehicle applications, making hydrogen-fueled transport much more economical"

"@tbaldauf@social.tchncs.de

Journalist: 'So what do you think long-distance air travel is going to look like in 2050?'

Climate Scientist laughs derisively: 'By 2050, most long-distance holiday destinations will be uninhabitable, so I expect the majority of long-distance air traffic to be non-existent by 2050.'

Phew. Hadn't heard it THAT bleakly during a live interview yet"

Jalopnik: "Tesla's Storing Unsold Inventory In An Abandoned Mall Parking Lot.. The electric automaker is renting parking lots to store thousands of vehicles"

General Gerasimov, Chief of the RU General Staff: "[2013] What is modern war? What should the army be prepared for? How should it be armed? Only after answering these questions can we determine the directions of the construction and development of the armed forces over the long term. To do this, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the forms and methods of the use of the application of force.

These days, together with traditional devices, nonstandard ones are being developed. The role of mobile, mixed-type groups of forces, acting in a single intelligence-information space because of the use of the new possibilities of command-and-control systems has been strengthened. Military actions are becoming more dynamic, active, and fruitful. Tactical and operational pauses that the enemy could exploit are disappearing. New information technologies have enabled significant reductions in the spatial, temporal, and informational gaps between forces and control organs. Frontal engagements of large formations of forces at the strategic and operational level are gradually becoming a thing of the past. Long-distance, contactless actions against the enemy are becoming the main means of achieving combat and operational goals. The defeat of the enemy’s objects is conducted throughout the entire depth of his territory. The differences between strategic, operational, and tactical levels, as well as between offensive and defensive operations, are being erased. The application of high-precision weaponry is taking on a mass character. Weapons based on new physical principals and automatized systems are being actively incorporated into military activity"

WION: "India likely to strike 10-year deal with Iran over Chabahar port in strategic leap"

TASS: "Blinken’s visit to Kiev shows US concerned over Ukrainian failures on frontline — diplomat"

It is looking increasingly like Putin is having a victory to sell

NYT: "Putin Is Selling Victory, and Many Russians Are Buying It"

#UA #RU #Frontline 05/12 - 05/15

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The Guardian: "Israel and Egypt in growing diplomatic row over Rafah border crossing.. Anger over Israel’s seizure of Palestinian side of crossing raises fears Cairo may downgrade relations"

Al-Monitor: "Ireland to recognise Palestinian statehood 'this month': minister"

Al-Monitor: "Palestinian statehood key to Arab plans for post-war Gaza"

First Post: "EU asks Israel to end Rafah operation 'immediately' else it will strain ties"

Al Jazeera: "Another Biden administration staffer resigns over US stance on Gaza war. Lily Greenberg Call says she cannot 'in good conscience' represent the US gov't, condemns 'disastrous' Gaza policy"

Anonymous: "It's fun that some folks think a secret group of rich people control everything instead of the widely known group of rich people control everything"

Due to winds the particulate stuff migrates to south Europe too.. Massively bad. It would be great if all of N. Africa was greened, that could hold the dust in place. That would be a hard undertaking for sure.

"Africa experiences some of the worst air pollution and some of the most severe health consequences in the world. In 2019, air pollution was the second leading risk factor for death across Africa, a large and dynamic continent that is home to more than 1.2 billion people. In terms of ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5), 5 of the world’s 10 most heavily polluted countries are in Africa.. Desert dust, also referred to as sand and dust storms, is a mixture of particulate matter from desert or arid areas. In the Sahara and Sahel regions of North Africa, as well as in Western Africa, windblown dust is a significant contributor to total PM2.5"

North African (climate pollution measure) AQI is always terrible; AQI incorporates many other measurements, PM 2.5 and PM 10 in this case contribute the most, which are "fine particulate matter". That region in red seen in pic below is almost always in red.

[-]

Hinton, LeCun are two of the three "Godfathers of AI" - the press keeps conflating one approach in machine learning with all of AI, but anyway, as far as deep neural nets go, these guys are the top. Perhaps LeCun more so than the rest.

Godfather Fight!

LeCun [to Hinton]: "One thing we know is that if future AI systems are built on the same blueprint as current Auto-Regressive LLMs, they may become highly knowledgeable but they will still be dumb. They will still hallucinate, they will still be difficult to control, and they will still merely regurgitate stuff they've been trained on. MORE IMPORTANTLY, they will still be unable to reason, unable to invent new things, or to plan actions to fulfill objectives. And unless they can be trained from video, they still won't understand the physical world. Future systems will have to use a different architecture capable of understanding the world, capable of reasoning, and capable of planning so as to satisfy a set of objectives and guardrails. These objective-driven architectures will be safe and will remain under our control because we set their objectives and guardrails"

Geoffrey Hinton: "Companies are planning to train models with 100x more computation than today's state of the art, within 18 months. No one knows how powerful they will be. And there's essentially no regulation on what they'll be able to do with these models"

Evil Geniuses: "Except for Google, Facebook, and Intel, cable TV and high-speed Internet providers, and Monsanto in much of agribusiness.. few of the resulting corporate giants are literal monopolies, one company absolutely dominating a given sector. Instead, most major American industries have rapidly turned into oligopolies, where two or three or four big companies run their show and tend not to compete fiercely. It’s like how smart mob families peacefully coexist. During the 1990s and 2000s, three-quarters of all U.S. industries became more concentrated, and their average level of concentration doubled. Oligopoly is now the American way in mobile and landline phone service, airlines, credit cards, meat and poultry, beer and soft drinks, breakfast cereal, and more. In the 1990s the six biggest banks held only one-sixth of all Americans’ financial assets, but by 2013, five years after the crash, that share had grown to 58 percent—the year the Democratic U.S. attorney general said that while he’d wanted to prosecute big banks for their role in the crash, he didn’t dare because, in addition to their being too big to fail, the legal trouble might have had 'a negative impact on the national economy'"

End Times: "Complex human societies need elites—rulers, administrators, thought leaders—to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all"

Carscoops: "Ford Might U-Turn On Its 2030 EV-Only Plan For Europe.. Change of stance comes in the wake of declining EV demand"

JEC: "Zero-carbon emission flights to anywhere in the world possible with just one stop..

Developed by a team of aerospace and aviation experts from across the UK collaborating on the government backed FlyZero project, the concept demonstrates the huge potential of green liquid hydrogen for air travel not just regionally or in short haul flight but for global connectivity"

Is there anything that doesn't degrade the battery?

"The Silent Killer: How Battery Degradation Can Decrease Your EV's Resale Value.. Here are several factors that can contribute to battery degradation.. Prolonged exposition to high temperatures.. Cold temperatures can also affect the battery's performance.. Fast-charging too often.. Storing the EV at a wrong state-of-charge: keeping your car for an extended period with an empty or full battery can harm its performance and lifespan.. The way in which a car is driven.. Hard acceleration, high speeds, and frequent braking can all cause the battery to degrade faster"

FleetNews: "Of drivers who said they wouldn’t buy a used EV, 62% cited concerns around battery lifespan – making the fear of poor battery health the single largest barrier preventing the second-hand market from taking off, a concern echoed by industry experts"

"@bpaassen@bildung.social

How weird it is that we expect large language models to generalize to all kinds of tasks... When I say 'generalize' I mean that a model is able to perform well on new, previously unseen data. In classic machine learning, this was very strictly defined: We assumed that training and test data were sampled from exactly the same distribution.. In recent years, machine learning got more ambitious: We also tried to make models generalize to test data from other distributions.. In these scenarios, the theoretical guarantees for generalization are essentially lost (except for special, nice cases)... For some reason, we expect LLMs to generalize to entirely new tasks that the models were not designed for. This is such a wild and weird expectation. Why would we think that this works?..

I guess because we saw empirical examples [where] it works. But I hope my long-winded explanation makes clear: We should be skeptical. Expecting generalization to tasks a system was not designed for goes far beyond the guarantees we can give.. The reasonable generalization expectation for LLMs is that they can auto-complete text in ways that is consistent with the training data and superficially satisifies human raters that operate under time pressure. That's what they are trained for. Anything else is coincidental"

End Times: "Ukrainian oligarchs ruled the country unrestrained by any other internal checks, [but] they did not become a cohesive ruling class. Instead, they formed several factions that struggled against each other using as weapons electoral politics, semilegal seizure of property, and even imprisonment. When Yanukovych came to power in 2010, he jailed his rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, an oligarch popularly known as the gas princess. The internecine conflicts between the oligarchs made a mockery of Ukrainian democracy. No matter whom the Ukrainians elected, the officeholders did nothing for the common people, instead concentrating on transferring wealth and power from the losing oligarchs...

By 2014, American 'proconsuls,' such as veteran diplomat Victoria Nuland, had acquired a large degree of power over the Ukrainian plutocrats. This was not cheap—Nuland boasted that the Department of State had invested $5 billion in extending its influence over the Ukrainian ruling class. In this, the American agents were aided by the deep animosities pitting the oligarchs against each other and dividing the oligarchate. Because the oligarchs were unable to agree among themselves, they required an external manager to set a common agenda. During the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, as we know from a transcript of the telephone conversation between them, Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, who was then the US ambassador to Ukraine, made decisions about who was to be appointed to various state positions (president, ministers, etc.).

Over the thirty years since Ukraine’s independence, its power structures have developed as a three-tiered configuration: people, oligarchs, American proconsuls. The masses of Ukrainian citizens voted in periodic elections, but whoever they elected pursued their private interests without any regard for the wishes of the electorate (except where the popular wishes coincided with the desires of the oligarchs). As a result, soon after being elected, each administration rapidly lost public support and became mired in scandal..

The current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s entry into politics was a result of rivalry between two oligarchs, Poroshenko (president of Ukraine between 2014 and 2019) and Ihor Kolomoisky (the head of the Dnipropetrovsk oligarchic clan), who needed a candidate to oppose Poroshenko"

PV Magazine: "Researchers propose use of cesium, rubidium for hydrogen batteries.. A study led by Russia’s Skoltech and China’s HPSTAR suggests that rubidium and cesium additives could improve the efficiency of hydrogen batteries. Researcher Dmitrii Semenok tells pv magazine that 'it is a question of changing the approach to the search for promising hydrogen storage materials'"

"Alpine Alpenglow Hy4 Is 2022’s Hydrogen-Powered Concept Made Real

"@TaxJusticeUK

Tax havens swallow up £380bn in lost tax globally every year – British tax havens make up a huge proportion of this"

Evil Geniuses: "[In the 2000s] the world’s second-richest man and most beloved American billionaire—beloved because he’s both low-key and plainspoken—admitted that those labor leaders in the late 1970s had been right, that the privileged and powerful had launched a one-sided war against working people and the middle class. 'There’s class warfare, all right,' Warren Buffett said, and 'it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning'—and we 'shouldn’t be.' Forbes had published its very first list of the richest people in 1982, estimating Buffett’s wealth then to be the equivalent today of almost $700 million. Two decades later, when he talked about the rich waging and winning class war, his fortune had grown to 58 billion. His fortune is now 85 billion, 130 times what it was at the beginning of America’s—his phrase—class war"

I cannot see why hybrids have "lower emissions", if you are using ICE to charge the battery, then you are still emitting GHG while charging the battery. The savings obtained from regenerative breaking is about 15%, not a game changer. Hybrids, just like battery-electric vehicles are a waste of time and money. We can have full ZEV using an efficient fuel that is clean, efficiently produced and stored.

"Hybrid electric vehicles are powered by an internal combustion engine and one or more electric motors, which uses energy stored in batteries. A hybrid electric vehicle cannot be plugged in to charge the battery. Instead, the battery is charged through regenerative braking and by the internal combustion engine"

#Transit

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When Western sources label Russia as "isolated" they make obvious the self-centric nature of their worldview, just like when West Asia is labeled "the Middle East". The middle of what, cracker? You mean the middle to the east of you? Well that only flies when everything is situated according to you.

"@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud

Make friends and colleagues believe you're an advanced A.I. by turning the heating on full and drinking a bottle of water every time they ask you a question"

Carscoops: "Move Over Mirai, Ram Is Working On A Heavy Duty Hydrogen Truck

Hossein-Zadeh: "A widely shared.. view, especially outside of the United States, attributes the recent rise of U.S. militarism, especially the invasion of Iraq, to the geopolitical imperatives of Israel and the concomitant influence of the Zionist lobby. Some of the proponents of this view go so far as to argue that the U.S. foreign and/or military policies in the Middle East are made by leading forces or figures of militant Zionism.. Without denying the contributory roles of these factors, [my work] points to a more crucial force behind the drive to war and militarism: the powerful beneficiaries of military expansion and war dividends, or the military-industrial complex and related influential interests that are vested in the business of war and military expansion"

Holy Kharkiv. RU momentum continues.

#UA #RU #Frontline 05/06 - 05/12

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First Post: "Cornell University president announces retirement amid campus protests, 3rd Ivy League head to step down"

TASS: "Israel carries out strikes on refugee accommodation centers in Jabalia"

"After achieving the first circumnavigations of the globe in a balloon and more recently in a solar aircraft, Swiss explorer Bertrand Piccard unveils his new emission-free project: a green hydrogen-powered airplane to fly non-stop around the Earth, demonstrating how concrete solutions can help build a cleaner and more efficient world. With science company Syensqo as the main partner of this technological, environmental and human adventure, the limits of innovation will be pushed back to enable the development of the airplane, built in France by engineer and navigator Raphaël Dinelli"

Xinhua: "China has successfully developed its first 100-kilogram class vehicle-mounted liquid hydrogen system, marking a new breakthrough in the country's transportation sector, according to its developer China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). As one of the core components of liquid hydrogen heavy trucks, the new system is fully domestically produced and will help hydrogen-powered heavy trucks achieve an improved range of over 1,000 kilometers with just one [fueling]"

China Daily: "Future rides on hydrogen energy industry.. Sichuan province is going all out to support the hydrogen energy industry's development. This follows a conference held in late April on further promoting the application of the hydrogen industry chain... China's 10,000-ton-level photovoltaic hydrogen production project in Xinjiang has participated in transactions totaling over 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and is steadily moving toward full-capacity production. More companies have seen the optimistic prospects and are actively collaborating to promote industry upgrades. Buses and heavy trucks are increasingly running on hydrogen, and Jiaxing Port in East China's Zhejiang province is seeing large-scale deployment of hydrogen energy heavy trucks"

NGT News: "Wrightbus Secures Order for 46 Hydrogen Buses from German City"

Evil Geniuses: "Even Richard Posner, the pioneering conservative scholar and senior federal judge.. admitted in 2017 that it has all gone too far... As a member of Congress, he said, 'you are a slave to the donors. They own you. That’s [the] real corruption, the ownership of Congress by the rich.' And the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, the conservative majority’s view that 'there’s no such thing as spending too much money to support a political candidate, because your money is actually speech—that’s all nonsense,' but as a result, apart from passing a constitutional amendment, 'there isn’t anything the government can do [about regulating campaign finance] now'"

"@derf@social.skyshaper.org

Good: nowadays Deutsche Bahn is providing official APIs for station boards, journeys, routing, etcetera.

Bad: it's an absolute capitalistic hellscape of an offer, starting at 5,000 € / year and going up to 90,000 €/y. Good riddance, Open Data.

I am aware that the root of the problem is likely a combination of politics/legislation/contractual issues and not Deutsche Bahn. Regardless, it sucks"

"@eb@social.coop

I swear that making everything electronic sucked the life out of cars. Electronic steering, pedals, paddles, shift levers INFOTAINMENT etc ugh"

"@eb@social.coop

The 2007 Subaru Legacy drives better than most modern cars"

I wasn't picking on Neil Foei Gras Tyson; he is trained scientist, had some good takes on private vs public finance of space exploration back when... I can't say guy is any more or less annoying than the current crop of science popularizers out there, many of whom keep pulling unverified theories out of their asses, multiverses, string theory, to name a few... I only stated Tyson's claim to fame was based on a falsehood, but then again, which science character is completely deserving of the limelight they have? What did Brian Greene achieve? Sean Carroll? The theories they blurt out remain unproven, in Carroll's case cannot be proven. It's all bunch of scifi-friendly non-falsifiable non-sense. Quite unscientific if you ask me.

F24: "Russian forces attack Ukraine's northeast Kharkiv region, opening new front"

F24: "UN General Assembly overwhelmingly backs Palestinian bid for membership"