Week 28

Corey Quinn: "I was in New York this week for the AWS Summit.. I know, I know–all of the industry is currently consumed by a paroxysm of GenAI hype.. However, the badge lanyards were GenAI branded, the keynote opening slide simply said 'Generative AI,' and every single offering discussed during the ~98 minute keynote was centered around Generative AI. Nearly every expo hall booth was dripping with GenAI; Elastic even went so far as to rebrand itself as 'The Search AI company.'..

[AI] fails to state a compelling business case. There has to be downstream value derived from any business initiative. Terms like 'transformation' are bandied around cheaply; so far all of the value business that I’ve spoken with are deriving from GenAI initiatives represent evolutionary steps rather than revolutionary steps.. the hyperfocus on GenAI is concerning to me because of what’s being shunted aside to create room for it..

They’re Amazon WEB Services, not Amazon GenAI Services. I fix large AWS bills for large enterprises for a living; my customers have a raft of very large-scale challenges that don’t involve GenAI in the slightest. Two years ago the AWS event keynotes were full of offerings that made solid strides towards assuaging those customer concerns. This year there was none of that; the non-GenAI section of the keynote simply didn’t exist"

Zucman: "A blueprint for a coordinated minimum effective taxation standard for ultra-high-net-worth individuals"

PDF

You can view multitude of file types via the browser / LAN-based app server, read binary from server, create response via make_response, and set the Content-Type to application/pdf, or video/mp4, ...

Ultra mobile computing setup... VNC to Unix board, sucky. HDMI monitor is out of the question, not commodatized enough. Kboard on Droid tablet, ssh into Unix board..? For visuals (no good X11 on droid sadly) use small web apps.

Roddenberry's universe has no money. The first TNG season was a little rough around the edges but the ep The Neutral Zone's message was clear.

Roddenberry was probably a Europhile. For TNG he picked a British actor as the Captain, and gave him the backstory of a Frenchman. The crew has uniforms, w/ ranks creating the air of a culture descending from a militocracy, not trading (that was the Ferrengi). The first officer acted the brash American type (every scifi needs its Han Solo) but Riker was Canadian according to Trek canon. Canadians are of course bizarre, un-American, weird.

"Ariane 6 uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as fuel for its main and upper stages... ESA and France’s space agency CNES wish to switch to solar-powered electrolysis of water [to produce green hydrogen as rocket fuel].. Project Hyguane – a portmanteau of the French words for hydrogen, French Guiana and the local Iguanas – is a €40.5M investment in a solar farm and distribution systems and is being designed to be allowed to easily expand in the future"

"The upper stage [of Ariane 6] is powered by the reignitable Vinci engine fueled by cryogenic liquid oxygen and hydrogen. This allows Ariane 6 to reach a range of orbits on a single mission, and deliver more payloads. The upper stage will typically burn one, two or more times to reach targeted orbits. After payload separation, the upper stage will perform a de-orbit maneuver, in order to mitigate space debris"

European Space Agency: "Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space"

Al-Monitor: "Commercial goods trucked into Gaza after aid logjams"

F24: "Record number of far-right MPs to enter French parliament despite election disappointment"

Politico: "Under the ranked-choice system, voters pick up to five candidates ranked in order or preference. If no one gets a majority on the first ballot, the last place candidate is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the voter’s second choice, a process that continues until one candidate claims more than 50 percent"

Is the French two-round system for parliament democratic, especially the way it was used recently, some parties conspired to boot out National Rally? Some could argue non-NR parties created a virtual ranked-choice voting system... Instead of second, third choices being counted via a computational elimination system, some parties, through a conspiracy, did it for the voters. But that's the key point - those parties made the choice for the voter. Under a ranked-choice system the winner with the most votes usually wins the elimination computation. When NR is involved in France, they lose more than they win. The conspiracy's outcome is officially democratic, but it smells funky.

"eXERO process [of Utility Global] is the first time a zero-electricity electrolysis process converts sustainable waste streams directly into high-purity, low-cost hydrogen. The process is achieved by removing the external electrical circuit from the electrolyzer and instead controlling the reaction using the overpotential (voltage) that exists between the different gas compositions. Similar to a conventional solid oxide electrolyser, water is reduced at the cathode to hydrogen and oxygen ions. The oxygen ions are then transferred through an electrolyte that conducts the oxygen ions. However, unlike a conventional electrochemical reactor, electrons are transferred through a conductive phase within the electrolyte, rather than through an external circuit"

Australian PM fought for Assange, played a huge role in his freedom. On his way out Sunak might have helped as well, not sure how much. Let's not forget Biden, sure he'd have wanted to avoid a potential mess in US, creating headaches for everyone, but still, USG could have made life living hell for Julian and they didn't. When pressed by Albanese JB didn't object, actively helped.

CNBC: "Greece defends new six-day working week legislation, says it's an 'exceptional measure'"

"Energys Australia deploys hydrogen generators at remote cell tower locations"

Reuters: "Spain approves 800 million euros of subsidies for green hydrogen projects"

Boeing. It's not going.

TDB: "Boeing at It Again: United Airlines Plane Loses Wheel During Takeoff"

Wes Moore's name keeps coming up.. What is his position on the complex.. ? Searches only bring back platitudish positions on the military, "being thoughtful of veterans" so forth, but nothing about the larger machinery itself. Is WM another version of Beto O'Rourke with "platitude politics" and nothing more?

He seems genuinely keen on helping the poor though, that's good.

CNBC: "Apple reaches deal with EU regulators to open up mobile payments system to rivals"

WOSU: "[The Central Ohio Transit Authority] COTA gets $22.8 million federal grant award to pilot 10 hydrogen-fueled buses"

Fortune: "AI is effectively ‘useless’—and it’s created a ‘fake it till you make it’ bubble that could end in disaster, veteran market watcher warns"

The Register: "Microsoft ad subsidiary Xandr accused of violating GDPR.. Access, deletion requests go ignored, and consumer profiles contradict themselves, complaint alleges.. The complaint, filed today in Italy by the perennial privacy defenders at noyb.. claims that Xandr, in its role as Microsoft's demand-side platform used by advertisers to bid for eyeballs, has violated GDPR in two ways. Firstly, noyb claims that it has failed to minimize data collection or ensure the accuracy needed for targeted advertising. Secondly, it has failed to comply with any consumer requests for data access or erasure"

FuelCellsWorks: "H3 Dynamics Supplies Airworthy 0.5 MW Hydrogen Fuel Cell To Airbus Upnext For Aircraft APU Tests"

NYT: "Modi’s Russia Visit Showcases a Less Isolated Putin, Angering Ukraine"

Today Niu York, tomorrow New York.

#Frontline #RU #UA - 07/04 - 07/10

Ruski is coming for Niu York. Spirne is gone. Makiivka is in danger. So is Pishchane.

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"How big corporations took over Western governments"

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He was. I suspect he might've even been led there, at least, his passport cancellation done at a key moment to have him be stuck at that location. It sure beats Belmarsh. His was the lesser "crime" after all, telling on the government, embarrassing them. Assange's was worse, he outed the entire military-industrial private media complex, and unearthed their dealings.

"Was Snowden better off to end up in Russia?"

Modern science is falsifiable. Carroll wants a new science that doesn't require falsifiability so his theories become automatically valid. But then any god-damn theory is valid... Anyone can pull theories out of their ass and claim they are correct. Science cannot be conducted this way.

Voit, Not Even Wrong: "[2018] Sean Carroll has a new paper out defending the Multiverse and attacking the naive Popperazi [followers of Popper], entitled Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse... Much of the problem with the paper and blog post is that Carroll is.. ignoring the serious arguments about the problems with multiverse research"

Sean Carroll is a total crank, no doubt about it.. His dubious theories cannot be proven, but he doubles down, writes a paper with words "Beyond Falsifiability" in it, saying the definition of science is wrong. Think about what he is saying here: his bizarro theories cannot prove anything, so he says the definition of science has to change to suit him. That is the absolute low, bottom of the barrel for science and specifically American science. A certain culture created this guy with a giant L. The uber-dreamy exploration in all things, wout checking, wout verification, senseless imaginification brought you here.. That's why I argue the stewardship of bleeding-edge science needs to leave US and go back to where it started, Eurasia.

Some are protesting the scotus "immunity from official acts" decision but that was already de facto state of affairs now it became "de jure". US presidents have huge leeway in many things - that's why most of them also happen to be war criminals.

H2 Insight: "Hydrogen fuel consumption rises almost 50% in South Korea amid H2 bus boom"

The neighbors might be seeing a winner in SAF, maybe they now want to cosy up to them, support their side. Ongoing war is problematic for every neighbor it creates a refugee crisis.

Reuters: "Ethiopia's Abiy visits Sudan's [SAF] army chief on Red Sea coast.. Abiy Ahmed met Sudan's army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan on Tuesday, becoming the first foreign leader to visit him in his war capital Port Sudan since the start of the conflict between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF)"

"[04/15] Iran’s 'Limited Response' [to Israel's attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus] Pleases Hardliners and Used Channels with the US.. U.S. and neighboring countries were kept in the loop and that the predominant use of slow-moving, unmanned Shahed-238 drones indicated that Tehran had calculated and possibly even coordinated its operation with the U.S... If there is a silver lining in the attacks, it was that close contacts between Iran and the U.S. were maintained to try to avoid a further escalation"

H2 Insight: "Game-changing electrolyser coating that could halve hydrogen stack capex cost to be tested at scale.. A technology company that has developed a metallic alloy coating that could double hydrogen production from alkaline electrolysers and halve the stack capex cost for H2 projects has.. commissioned a demonstration plant to scale-up testing to commercially-sized systems. Oxford NanoSystems’ (ONS) so-called 'nanoFlux' alloy coating encourages the formation of more, smaller bubbles on the electrodes within an electrolyser, which in turn allow more electrons to move throughout the system — enabling the use of higher electrical currents and more hydrogen production in any given time period"

Techcrunch: "Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that promise — with its own newsletter as a start"

H2 Insight: "Electrolyser technology that promises to reduce cost of hydrogen by up to 20% receives government grant.. Catalyst and electrode supplier Matteco is working to build a new generation of alkaline electrolysers with fellow Spanish OEM Ariema Enerxía"

SCMP: "Hong Kong receives first hydrogen-powered light rail train in green energy push"

Plot against FDR! Is this the Deep State?

It sounds more like a Merchantile State.

Jesse Ventura: "[intro from the book War Is A Racket] President Roosevelt’s New Deal was considered anti-American and evil by the Wall Street crowd.. The president was taking on the stock speculators and setting up new watchdog federal agencies. He was putting a halt on farm foreclosures and forcing employers to accept union collective bargaining... he even spoke of raising taxes on the rich to help pay for New Deal programs.

So a lot of titans of finance hated the man’s guts. [War hero Smedley] Butler even suspected some of them might have been behind a failed assassination attempt against him shortly before he was elected president. Then one day in 1934, to Butler’s surprise, a bond salesman named Gerry MacGuire approached him... some captains of industry [had come] together and announced they were forming a new American Liberty League that September. Its stated goals were 'to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.' The League’s backers included Rockefellers, Mellons, and Pews.. [and they wanted to arrange a government takeover]...

[W]ho was their choice to lead a government takeover?.. Smedley Butler. They knew how popular he was with veterans, and the idea was to have Smedley come out of retirement and lead another veterans’ 'Bonus Army' march on the nation’s capital. They wanted to create havoc with as many as five hundred thousand men at Butler’s heels. Pressured by these events, so the twisted thinking went, FDR would be convinced to name Butler to a new cabinet post as a secretary of 'general affairs' or 'general welfare.' Eventually, the president would agree to 19turn over the reins of power to Butler altogether, under the excuse that his polio was worsening, and FDR would become a mere ceremonial figurehead..

[Butler] decided to bring a reporter friend in on the conspiracy, so it wouldn’t be just his word against the plotters’, and they worked together to gather more background [later outed the plotters, testified] before the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee.. But then the committee’s investigation came to a sudden stop and none of the alleged financiers were ever called for questioning. In fact, when the transcript of the committee’s interview with Butler came out, every person he’d named ended up being deleted"

@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

"What car addicts believe:"

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Can the war be useful for Zelensky to get out from under the thumb of oligarchs? He can use his war-time leader image, plus war destroys oligarch wealth decreasing their influence. Maybe. There were indications VZ wanted peace back in 2022 but was talked out of it by the international weapons cartel (via their tools in US/UK). It's possible but will there be a Ukraine standing by that point?

Ironically US played a role corrupting Ukraine for the benefit of its private stakeholders. Ukranian oligarchs ran Ukraine, who were in turn controlled by US 'proconsuls' like Victoria Nuland. The entire corrupt system survived because of and for United States. Zelensky became president thanks to an oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. Then the bear came down knocking, everyone lost their shit.

The Telegraph: "Ukraine to be told it is too corrupt to join Nato"

H2 Central: "SK E&S Unveils South Korea’s First Liquid Hydrogen Refueling Station in Gyeonggi Province.. Strategically located within the parking lot of SK Hynix’s Icheon campus, the station will primarily serve the company’s employee shuttle buses, marking a significant step in implementing the “ESG Leading Companies Hydrogen Commuter Bus Conversion Agreement” signed in May of last year.

The agreement, involving the Ministry of Environment, major corporations, local governments, and transportation companies, aims to convert over 2,000 existing internal combustion engine commuter buses to hydrogen buses by 2026.

The Icheon station will receive its liquid hydrogen supply from SK E&S’s Incheon Liquid Hydrogen Plant, which opened in May. This plant, the world’s largest single-factory liquid hydrogen production facility, can produce 30,000 tons of liquid hydrogen annually"

China Hydrogen Bulletin: "It is widely acknowledged that Chinese electrolyzer manufacturers sell products at world lowest price. In December 2023, eleven Chinese ALK electrolyzer manufacturers have been selected as winners in what is believed to be China’s largest ever public electrolyzer tender.. for a 1000Nm3/hr (5MW) ALK electrolyzer is Rmb7.898 million, or 219 dollar per KW ($1=Rmb7.2). The bidding price included ALK electrolyzer and BOP. This price is breath-taking as it only represents about one-third of which provided by western peers"

Politico: "Farage’s party’s string of second-place finishes, particularly across traditionally Labour seats which fell to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, will give the incoming government the heebie-jeebies. If Starmer fails to bring about the change and improve voters’ lives as he promises, who will Reform voters punish?

Farage was explicit about who he’ll be gunning for in the next election, which must be held by 2029. 'We’re coming for Labour — be in no doubt about that,' he said in his victory speech in Clacton leisure center. 'This is the first steps in something which is going to stun all of you'"

#NATO #Swanson

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The left bloc still has some shitlib centrist positions.. If they form coalition with centrists in power, they can sink with them, NR will come back even stronger.

France has two-round sys for parliament, non-NR blocs tactically pulled out candidates to allow the strongest candidate from any non-NR bloc to get the votes for the second round. National Rally was #1 in the first round, now it is at #3.

Macron's gamble worked.. his alliance ended up above NR.

The Guardian: "Surprise win for leftwing alliance predicted in French election.. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally falls into third place despite strong showing in first round of voting"

Against whom I wonder..

Arab News: "Japan, Philippines defense pact negotiations nearing conclusion, ambassador says"

SA and Iran close relationship will squeeze out Israel.. Until now Israel has been using Iran, Syria, Lebanon to villify part of the West Asia so they can justify theirs and the US' war machine presence there. If IRN and SAU plus others coalesce, they will lose that enemy. Therefore anyone supporting the raproachment indirectly supports a defanged Israel.

Firstpost: "Saudi Arabia's king and crown Prince keen on strengthening ties after Iran gets new president"

Monbiot: "What is the 'normal' envisaged by pundits and politicians of the left and centre? It is the most anomalous politics in the history of the world. Consciously or otherwise, they hark back to a remarkable period, roughly 1945 to 1975, in which, in certain rich nations, wealth and power were distributed, almost everyone could aspire to decent housing, wages and conditions, public services were ambitious and well-funded and a robust economic safety net prevented destitution. There had never been a period like it in the prior history of the world, and there has not been one since...

In the absence of one of the four great catastrophes, income and capital inexorably accumulate in the hands of the few, and oligarchy returns. Oligarchs are people who translate their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power. They build a politics that suits them. Scheidel shows that as inequality rises, so does polarisation and political dysfunction, both of which favour the very rich, as a competent, proactive state is a threat to their interests...

Oligarchs seek the destruction of oversight, which is why UK bodies such as the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive have been comprehensively gutted. The same desire was the driving force behind Brexit. They want the cessation of protest. They want a failing NHS, to justify privatisation. They want malleable politicians and a tame BBC. They get what they want, distorting every aspect of national life. They pour money into [extreme] political movements, which help capital to solve its perennial problem: democracy. The arc of history bends towards injustice. But every so often it is broken over the knee of catastrophe"

"Belarus-Cuba military cooperation discussed [btw two defense ministers in Minsk]"

"Israel: Sirens sound across Galilee amid Hezbollah rocket barrage"

"@scerruti@csed.social

I see a lot of people talking about UBI and it's impact of individuals, but I think it misses a larger impact... [modern work] created massive childcare issues and wreaked havoc on both schools and family structures. Freeing up a parent to stay home would have benefits by increasing wages for those remaining in jobs and improve educational outcomes"

That speech sounded somewhat lefty. Hopefully we'll see some improvement in UK #Starmer

TASS: "Israeli strike on school in Gaza City kills five"

Firstpost: "Hamas says it has accepted US-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal"

Arab News: "NATO leaders will vow to pour weapons into Ukraine for another year, but membership is off the table"

Forbes: "Vietnam’s All-Out Hydrogen Gambit.. In April 2024, Vietnam and the United States embarked upon one of the world’s most ambitious green hydrogen collaborative strategies. The [USAID] and [SC] Bank Vietnam signed a [MOU] to support Vietnam’s transition towards a hydrogen-centric renewable energy model. Building upon President Joe Biden’s visit to Hanoi in September 2023, this MOU aims to facilitate private-sector investment and help Vietnam achieve its net-zero emission goals by 2050...

The Vietnamese strategy for hydrogen power.. aims at nothing less than overturning the canon of hydrogen development. It aims to produce up to 500,000 tons of hydrogen annually by 2030 and 10-20 million tons of hydrogen annually by 2050. This would be equivalent to the UK’s current annual electricity consumption. Most importantly, Vietnam wants to use not just 'green hydrogen,' which is hydrogen fuel generated by renewable energy sources, but it wants to position hydrogen as the center of a modern energy ecosystem"