Week 23

Yann LeCun: "Nice article in Financial Time where I explain that Auto-Regressive LLM are insufficient to reach human-level intelligence (or even cat-level intelligence).

But alternative architectures that I call 'objective driven' may reach human-level intelligence one day.

They use world models based on JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures, which are not generative).

With this, we may have systems that

understand the physical world
have persistent memory
can reason
can plan, perhaps hierarchically.

Four essential characteristics necessary for intelligent behavior, which humans and many animals exhibit"

The Guardian: "Future Made in Australia: $23bn for ‘biggest transformation’.. The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said in his budget speech on Tuesday night that the global economy was facing its biggest transformation since the Industrial Revolution... 'Australian energy can power it, Australian resources can build it, Australia’s regions can drive it, Australian researchers can shape it and Australian workers can thrive in it,' Chalmers told parliament... This includes tax incentives for the production of hydrogen and critical minerals from 2027-28. There will be a further 1.3bn for another round of the hydrogen headstart program to boost 'early-mover renewable hydrogen projects'.

An insane number. US plutocrats caused the deaths of those people, for some f-ing money. Sad.

If by August last year losses were at half a million, over a million losses current makes sense.

NYT: "[2023/08] Ukraine War Casualties Near Half a Million, U.S. Officials Say"

According to Russia, UA losses are 50k ppl / month, and RU/UA loss ratio is 1/5. That means Ukraine wld have lost roughly 1 million soldiers so far, and Russia 200k.

Philips: "From being just a munitions maker in 1914, duPont profited greatly enough from U.S. wartime seizure of German chemical patents to become a global force in that industry by the 1920s"

WION: "'National tragedy': Survey reveals 1 in 3 Americans are affected by drug overdose deaths"

Apple Insider: "A new and mandatory terms of service approval for Adobe Creative Cloud requires users agree to the company getting free access to users' projects, for whatever they want to do with it"

Philips: "In the 1980s, conservative tax-cut theorists and market utopians would call for the reenactment of the twenties as an economic triumph botched only by government mishandling, but their grandfathers knew better. Even the Republican Congress of 1929 was part of a wall of worry. In February the Senate had passed a resolution asking the Federal Reserve to provide advice should legislation become necessary to curb speculation.. During the disenchanted 1930s, a citizenry digging out from the debris of broken promises and shattered assumptions would rally round a president ready to point a finger of blame. The 1920s' admiration for wealth would become 1930s' distrust"

#Israel #Apartheid

Briahna Joy Gray: "It finally happened. The Hill fired me. There should be no doubt that The Hill, like every other corporate news media in America, supresses speech"

#Gaza #UK #War

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Butter that bread... Butter it. That's why they like you.

WION: "Israel inks $3 billion deal with US for 25 F-35 fighter jets"

That makes sense; improving infra will cheapen H2 massively, producing it is not a huge deal. We need to defund the grid, pay less attention to electrification, and direct all efforts to clean gas based distribution and storage.

Energypost.eu: "Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory in 2019 determined that hydrogen production costs account for just 15% of the final cost 'at the dispenser' for hydrogen used in transportation.. The remaining – or 'hidden' – 85% of hydrogen costs often get overlooked.. On a cost per kilogram basis, just 15% of this cost is due to production (~$2/kg). Roughly 50% of the hydrogen cost is from the station (equipment like compressors and on-site storage) and 35% is from distribution. This means a staggering 85% of the final cost of hydrogen is due to factors beyond production"

FT: "Meta AI chief says large language models will not reach human intelligence"

"@ben@werd.social

Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide? Microsoft's Recall software seems like a horrible idea.. Worse, it's going to be built into Windows 11 for all compatible hardware, in a way that will make it hard or impossible to disable. This doesn't make sense to me: which privacy-conscious CIO (just for example, one working in a well-regulated industry where privacy is a legal requirement) would allow this to roll out?"

Isn't that a bit late in the game..?

Shangai Sun: "Pentagon seeks books on Russian military strategy"

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The shell has a diameter 15.5 cm and is about 60 cm in length. Basically a scaled up gun bullet.

Most sought after item of the war - 155 mm artillery shell

TDB: "Putin Delivers Ominous Warning to Anyone Helping Ukraine.. Putin delivered what appeared to be a veiled threat against allies of Ukraine on Wednesday, suggesting Russia could supply long-range weapons to its own allies in order to strike Western targets"

Mediaite: "Rising has been through a long list of hosts since its debut in 2018. Gray is the ninth co-host to either leave or be fired from the show. In September 2022, Katie Halper was fired as a co-host after she defended Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for describing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration as an 'apartheid government.' That same year, former co-host Kim Iversen claimed she quit the show after the Hill refused to let her interview Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Israel National News: "Briahna Joy Gray Fired As Co-Host of The Hill’s ‘Rising’: ‘A Clear Pattern of Suppressing Speech’.. Gray announced on her social media account that she had been dismissed from The Hill.. claiming the decision was politically motivated... 'It finally happened. The Hill has fired me. There should be no doubt that "Rising" has a clear pattern of suppressing speech -- particularly when it's critical of the state of Israel,' she wrote"

Politico: "Israel targeted more than 120 US lawmakers in disinformation campaign.. The lawmakers were mostly Democrats, and the campaign involved pro-Israeli military posts on their accounts over the past year"

NYT: "Israel Starts New Offensive in Central Gaza; Dozens Reported Dead"

Middle East Eye: "Hamas cannot agree to any deal unless Israel makes a 'clear' commitment to a permanent ceasefire"

H2 View: "Policy Pillar: Future Made in Australia ignites the nation’s hydrogen ambitions.. It felt like a long-awaited moment when Australian Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, stood up in the country’s Parliament in Canberra, to announce the government’s AUD $22.7bn (15.2bn) Future Made in Australia (FMIA) Act framework, as part of his 2024-25 budget"

And whoomp! there he is

Politico: "If you really want to understand Trump’s appeal.. you need to wind back the tape to the 1984 Democratic primary, the almost-pulled-it-off candidacy of Colorado Senator Gary Hart and the emerging yuppie demographic that made up his base. They don’t remotely resemble the working-class base we associate with Trump today. But together, they helped shift the Democratic Party’s focus away from its labor coalition and toward the hyper-educated liberal voters it largely represents today, eventually creating an opening for Trump to cast Democrats as out-of-touch elites and draw the white working class away from them. In fact, if it weren’t for 1980s yuppies and the way they shifted America’s political parties, the modern MAGA GOP might never have arisen in the first place..

[After Reagan, Dems decided to go] harder in the direction that Gary Hart — and yuppies — had pointed them.. In 1992, that faction of the party got its wish with the nomination and election of Bill Clinton, not only a centrist but a Yale- and Oxford-educated baby boomer — the first yuppie president. In office, Clinton pursued an agenda that largely put the desires of college-educated professionals above those of the blue-collar working class. He signed welfare reform and announced the era of big government was over. He championed NAFTA, which made it easier to ship manufacturing jobs to Mexico. He deregulated the financial industry, boosting the power and profits of Wall Street"

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Not that I like the politics of the man.. Rummy along with "Dick" caused a lot of damage around the world.

Rumsfeld apparently liked to play Churchill Solitaire while traveling, btw meetings, breaks at work; he even helped design a smart phone app for it later AFAIK.

We're a one-stop shop for polsci, irel folk; start the day w/ a little commentary, check out the conflict maps, play a little game while waiting for the next meeting.. It's all good in the hood.

Web Solitaire

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Conflict Map: plots military / police related attacks / mobilizations around the world for chosen day. The history goes back one week, for now.

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Just wrote little browser code (javascript), gets a zip file from net, unzips it, reads text file inside, parses it, plots data on a browser map, all in a few seconds, in memory. There are efficient languages, frameworks out there, a lot can be done with them.

Yann LeCun: "It seems to me that before 'urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us' we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat"

Jan Leike: "[After leaving OpenAI due to his 'safety concerns'] We are long overdue in getting incredibly serious about the implications of AGI (artificial general intelligence). We must prioritize preparing for them as best as we can "

Al-Monitor: "Global warming accelerating at 'unprecedented' pace: study"

#Frontline #UA #RU - 05/30 - 06/06

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CyprusMail: "Israel nears decision on Lebanon border offensive, army chief says"

Firstpost: "Human Rights Watch condemns Israel for using white phosphorus munitions in Lebanon"

NYT: "Middle East Crisis: Biden Suggests Netanyahu Is Prolonging War to Stay in Power"

Al-Monitor: "Japan's Nagasaki holds off inviting Israel to peace ceremony"

Renewables Now: "Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power Co has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Tunisian government to study the potential for a large-scale project to export green hydrogen to Europe, according to an announcement on Friday"

Inside EVs: "Thousands More Teslas Are Piling Up In Parking Lots.. Tesla’s growing [unsold] inventory can sometimes even be seen from space, via satellite images"

Digitimes Asia: "Chinese EV makers in bankruptcy crisis"

Bloomberg: "Tesla Stock in 'No Man’s Land' After 43% Rout Ahead of Earnings"

#GenFauxAI

"@Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Men will literally burn down a rainforest to avoid giving an artist $20 to draw an image"

Econ right keep saying government is bad, they defund it at every turn, then gov dysfunction rises and they say "see, what did I tell you, government is dysfunctional, it cannot do anything!"

Andersen: "I’ve talked earlier about how "Government is bad" [message] becomes self-fulfilling, that an unimpressive and underdelivering federal government has served the long-term political interests of the right"

Philips: "[2002 W]hen I published The Politics of Rich and Poor, some of its success was owed to the two lead endorsements on the back of the book jacket. One was from New York Governor Mario Cuomo, then widely expected to be the 1992 Democratic presidential nominee. The second was from former President Richard Nixon, who gave it with full knowledge that the book was critical of the Reagan and Bush administrations for favoring the rich. Nixon’s streetcar-worker father had left Ohio for California after getting a name as labor agitator, and he thereafter interrupted his McKinley Republicanism to support third-party progressives like Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Robert La Follette in 1924. As president, Nixon himself supported national health insurance, income maintenance for the poor, and higher taxation of unearned than earned income. The 1972 Republican platform actually criticized multinational corporations for building plants overseas to take advantage of cheap labor"

"@RootkitHalo@infosec.exchange

Might find it interesting that MS is also pushing Copilot and Recall hard with retail partners.

Best Buy is creating a new role and pushing company wide trainings to push computers with copilot"

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

For those who aren’t aware, Microsoft have decided to bake essentially an infostealer into base Windows OS and enable by default.

From the Microsoft FAQ: 'Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers.'

Info is stored locally - but rather than something like Redline stealing your local browser password vault, now they can just steal the last 3 months of everything you’ve typed and viewed in one database"

NYT: "Netanyahu May Face a Choice Between a Truce and His Government’s Survival"

Nikkei Asia: "Japan and the European Union will work together on setting international standards for the hydrogen supply chain, in a bid to take the lead in shaping a new market, Nikkei has learned. The rules would cover such areas as technologies for producing and transporting the fuel.

Japan's minister for economy, trade and industry, Ken Saito, and Kadri Simson, the European commissioner for energy, will agree in an upcoming meeting to create a joint road map for hydrogen usage through 2040"

SCMP: "Start-up CM Xiageng Hydrogen Energy Technology, a green hydrogen equipment maker backed by the Fujian government and conglomerate China Merchants Group, plans to quadruple its output. It is rushing to feed a global market which is growing at a searing pace of 40.7 per cent annually.. It will soon launch fund raising plans to finance this expansion at a time when China’s installed green hydrogen electrolyser capacity is expected to grow to over 40GW by 2025 from last year’s 11.5GW"

The Atlantic: "AI travel plans leave something to be desired. When I told ChatGPT that I was a 'huge foodie' and asked it to adjust an L.A. itinerary accordingly, it suggested I go to a Michelin-starred restaurant for dinner. It didn’t say which one. It just told me that L.A. had some and that, if I liked food, I should go to one. That’s sort of like telling a person who likes music that maybe they’d be into a Grammy-winning artist and leaving it at that...

[A] team of researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai, Ohio State University, Penn State, and Meta came to a similar conclusion. They tested chatbots on 1,000 sample queries, such as 'Please create a travel itinerary for a solo traveler departing from Jacksonville and heading to Los Angeles for a period of 3 days, from March 25th to March 27th, 2022. The budget for this trip is now set at $2,400.' They then evaluated whether the chatbots were able to provide answers that met all the criteria in the prompt. The chatbots pretty much failed across the board. [Even the best] successfully answered only six queries out of 1,000, or 0.6 percent. The chatbots failed for a variety of factors: They made reasoning errors, and sometimes made stuff up"

NPU means Neural Processing Unit, so the machine runs "AI" locally, wout going out to the cloud. But I dont think one dinky little "neural" processing unit will allow you to run any of these recent LLMs locally. It is unclear such an ability would be desired either. LLMs are useless for any serious real-world need.

Biztech Mag: "Both the [Microsoft] Surface Pro 10 and the Surface Laptop 6 feature an NPU"

At least 30 GIGABYTES. This is just to use the model btw, training it will take 10-30x more resources.

"Compute resources used for [ChatGPT] inference: the model must be fully loaded into vram to compute the recursive seq2seq response (it can be anything between 30gb to 200gb depending on the architecture and number of parameters of the model)"

Stanford: "Vaporware: One practice that has been associated with Microsoft, and has subsequently been investigated by the Department of Justice, is Microsoft's practice of releasing 'vaporware'. Vaporware is considered an unfair marketing technique - it often allows a company that already has considerable market share in one area to claim similar market share in another area without even distributing a product. The enthusiasm for the anticipated release of the product is often enough to squelch any market competition, even though there is no product to compete"

Vaporwave is a good-ol' Silicon Valley practice, Microshaft was the master at it back in the day.

The Guardian: "A London-based billionaire non-dom left the UK for good on the day that the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced the scrapping of the 225-year-old tax scheme in the spring budget"

WION: "US confident of Israel agreeing to ceasefire plan amid threats from Netanyahu's own ministers"

In a historic first for Europe, green hydrogen producer Lhyfe has signed a memorandum of understanding with major stainless steel company Ugitech to create a green hydrogen production facility at Ugitech's plant in the French Alps.

This pioneering partnership aims to replace dirty pollution with clean hydrogen in steel manufacturing, according to Renewable Energy Magazine.

Under the agreement, Lhyfe will install a green hydrogen production unit capable of generating around 13 tons per day at Ugitech's site in Ugine, France. The locally produced hydrogen will power the steel plant's furnaces and heating equipment, with excess supply made available to fuel clean transportation in the region.

While we are at it: Web Tetris

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Game HTML gets embedded inside an <iframe>, our articles are in markdown but the page transformer ignores nested HTML anyway, then compile doc as usual, voila, game runs within site's look and feel.

Javascript code runs on user's browser, I am sending the viewer code to run on their browser, they execute the code on their own CPU, no server required (except serving the initial files to run).

Web Doom (via Javascript), hosting it on my blog. Code is 13 kb, free and open.

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"@Victor@spore.social

Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape. Japan will start allocating the ¥10 billion it promised to spend on institutional repositories to make the nation’s science free to read" via Nature

It's only fair we do the US version too.

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Good one.. Very funny.. #Map #Cartoon

via @unknow@mastodon.bida.im

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US consumer is in "thoughts and prayers" territory.

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

If you're wondering what the CISA and DHS take on Recall is, they both no commented to press"

Silicon Valley, Big Tech creates fluff, bullshit products, vapourware all the time. But the big daddy of them all is still the MIC. They've been at this for over half a century. They are good at it.

The private, revolving-door military-industrial-donor-complex has it wired so good, sometimes they don't even have to deliver a functioning product to make money.. A promise, a mere dream of a product will do. See the example of XM2001 Crusader mobile cannon, project greenlit in 1995 (Clinton admin), canceled after $7 billion, they delivered nothing. Zilch. The military leaders pushing such systems are promoted, not punished, and likely moved on to cushy private sector jobs. The corporate press saw none of this as they were heavily focused on more pressing issues such as "gays in the military".

Firstpost: "Germany Says Netanyahu Will be Arrested if He Sets Foot in Country"

Historian William Dalrymple: "Has the BBC outsourced its coverage of the Rafah [sic] to the Israeli embassy? When 45 people have just been hideously burned alive, how is that not a bloodbath, @BBCNEWS? Would you use that language if say, the bomb had dropped instead on Portland Place [the home of the BBC]?" via @Andii@mas.to

F24: "Iran's hardline ex-president Ahmadinejad registers candidacy for snap presidential poll"

Green Car Congress: "Hanwha Aerospace and Hanwha Ocean.. will jointly develop hydrogen fuel cells for ships as part of a government-led green energy project"

Popular Mechanics: "In the quest for vehicle fuel sources, Korea has taken the lead on crafting a combustion engine that runs on hydrogen. But it isn’t just Korea’s Kia and Hyundai — which have teamed to create a hydrogen combustion engine—moving forward on the concept. Volvo is now also planning on the design.

The technology is virtually already in place for hydrogen combustion engines, and both the driving ranges and refilling times are similar to that of traditional gasoline-powered combustion engines"

"Overselling AI"

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"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Here’s a video of two MSFT employees gaining access to the Recall database folder - with SQLite database right there. Watch their hacking skills. (You don’t need to go this length as an attacker, either). Cc @riskybusiness@infosec.exchange. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is the dumbest cybersecurity move in a decade. Good luck to my parents safely using their PC"

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#WastefulCompute

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#GOOG #Search #ChatParrots

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There is no strategy.. it's bunch of money grubbing muckmuckers trying to maximize their short-term gain at the expense of strategy, as in, what is good for the citizens, country in the long term.

Israel is needed for the private complex; their very presence is the instigator of chaos, and chaos = profits. The shit stirred up in Syria alone (an Israel enemy) was a massive moneymaker for the MIC, and it's not just about weapons sent to Israel. Israel can sell US military equipment, with US' knowledge, to countries to which the U.S. is restricted by law from selling, they act as the middleman. A vast military deployment is possible / is justified by Israel's presence and US' "protection" of it.

Just like Israel is not 'the tail wagging the dog' when it comes to US foreign policy, Russiagate was not completely abt helping Dems save face for their disastrous 2016 loss either. Russiagate was a suitable line of attack precisely bcz it forced the Trump admin to be colder towards Russia. With all the "Putin puppet" talk going on the new admin had to act hawkish against them, and this was RG's key feature. As far as the military-industrial-complex, revolving-door private-owned surface-state is concerned, if Russia cannot be plundered by American oligarchs, they have to be villified, so NATO is always front in center in the relation and MIC can sell weapons within its specs. Russiagate performed this function brilliantly as well as checking other boxes, blaming a foreign power so econ ineq is not discussed, attempting to salvage the Clinton legacy (who is the prime shitlib, econ-right social-left extraordinaire, fake left, poser, and a dumbass).

WaPo: "Russian jamming leaves some high-tech U.S. weapons ineffective in Ukraine.. Confidential Ukrainian assessments obtained by The Washington Post show how accuracy rates of some Western weapons fell after Russian jamming disrupted guidance systems.

JDAM-ER, Storm Shadow, Scalp are all jammed. Himars hit rate is now between 50-70%, Excalibur an embarrassing 6%. Up and down links of the UA drones are also jammed #AustriaMil

F24: "Hamas says Israel's Gaza ceasefire plan 'positive'"

"@ridicol@mastodon.social

Slovenia raises the Palestinian flag today alongside its own flag and the flag of the European Union on the government building in the capital, Ljubljana, following its official recognition of the State of Palestine as an independent state"

Al Monitor: "UNRWA chief says Israel 'must stop its campaign' against agency"

Arab News: "Belgium’s Ghent University severs ties with all Israeli universities"

Arab News: "France bans Israel firms from upcoming defense fair"

F24: "Israel far-right ministers threaten to quit if Biden ceasfire plan goes ahead.. Two far-right Israeli ministers threatened on Saturday to quit Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyhau's government if he goes ahead with a hostage release deal outlined by US President Joe Biden"