Week 2

"@Gotterdammerung@glitch.social

#FediPunk is the digital gutterpunk ethos where the Fediverse thrives in its glorious mess, held together by duct tape, user patches & sheer spite for corporate monoculture. It's not just a rejection of surveillance capitalism, it's a hymn to chaos, a love letter to an internet that bleeds authenticity through its flaws.

Here, nostalgia isn't naive. It's weaponized. It remembers the wild promise of the early web: decentralized, anarchic & gloriously inefficient"

Assad is gone, if the new regime acts in bizarre ways that is still fine for the complex because it will be a reason tor invade Syria, for real this time. "Assad must go" will turn into "we need to fight Islamic extremism", and munee will flow in the direction of the usual suspects.

H2 Central: "Consortium Led by H2 Global Energy Signs MOU with Tunisian Government for $6 Billion Green Hydrogen and Ammonia Project"

H2 Central: "Hydrogen Finally Gets A Price Tag: S&P 500 New Energy Plays Soar Along With This Amazon Vendor – $3 per kilogram.. A number of new energy stocks, including S&P 500 nuclear stocks Constellation Energy (CEG) and Vistra (VST), along with Amazon.com (AMZN) supplier Plug Power (PLUG), moved higher following the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service revising its rules for hydrogen production tax credits.

The U.S. Treasury on Friday published its final rules on clean hydrogen production, with guidelines producers must meet to qualify for the clean hydrogen production tax credit of up to $3 per kilogram. The move broadly gave companies clarification on whether they could take advantage of the tax credit"

Statham got the zeitgeist immediately.. he now plays working class action heroes. It's still similar action, but w/ hard hat, or a check shirt. His next movie is literally called A Working Man.

Anyone talking econ should use more data and code if they have the ability. See this blog.. Talk is cheap. Let's see see computation.

"@mxmehl@mastodon.social

Germany-based #SovereignTechFund contributes 384.000 EUR to #OpenStreetMap over two years. And the best part: it's not for fancy features big sponsors think they need, but for technical debt removal, documentation, testing infrastructure, vandalism prevention, and two additional paid roles.

@sovtechfund once again made a great choice and continues to follow their strategy of sustainable support of critical #OpenSource projects, which @openstreetmap definitely is"

Reddit: "The Amiga was way ahead of its time graphically. How long did it maintain this lead?.. the 3D approach used by Doom was only really efficient with VGA's framebuffer of 'chunky' pixels, rather than the Amiga's 'bitplane' approach. That was the tipping point at which PC graphics became more competitive"

Amiga and PC.. I've had both hardware, former was seen as the king of graphics, but all of a sudden PC platforms had a killer game, Doom. Surprisingly to some PCs ran that graphics code extremely well.

"Paris welcomes new fleet of hydrogen-powered taxis.. A total of eight new hydrogen refueling stations will be established across the French capital to support this rollout"

#Davis #Henningsen

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Firstpost: "Relations between Netanyahu and Trump have hit a snag after the Republican leader shared a video on his social media platform TruthSocial featuring economist Jeffrey Sachs accusing Netanyahu of manipulating the US foreign policy and orchestrating an 'endless war' in Gaza and the Middle East.

In the clip, Trump can be heard calling Netanyahu a 'deep, dark son of a bitch'. The video came at a crucial time when intensive diplomatic efforts are underway by Egypt, Qatar and the current US administration to broker a truce deal between Israel and Hamas that would include hostage releases"

It's now BRIIICS? (after Iran and Indo)

Al Jazeera: "Indonesia joins BRICS group of emerging economies"

"Lithium, a key component of EV batteries, is extracted using heavy diesel-powered machinery that emits substantial amounts of CO2. This process undermines the environmental benefits promised by EVs. Studies have shown that the CO2 emissions associated with lithium mining and battery production often exceed the emissions saved by operating EVs, especially in regions reliant on fossil-fuel-based electricity grids.

Furthermore, Earth’s lithium reserves are insufficient to supply a global population of 8 billion people. As demand surges, mining operations will expand into ecologically sensitive areas, exacerbating environmental degradation and threatening biodiversity... EVs are notably heavier than traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, primarily due to their large batteries. This additional weight increases road friction, leading to accelerated wear and tear on infrastructure. Local communities bear the brunt of these costs, with road maintenance expenses tripling in areas with high EV adoption.

Moreover, the increased road friction necessitates specialized tires for EVs. These tires are approximately three times more expensive than those used for traditional vehicles, adding another layer of cost for consumers... The lifespan of a lithium-ion battery in an EV typically ranges from 8 to 10 years. Replacing a battery can cost between 7,000 and 15,000 dollars, a significant financial burden for many vehicle owners. This issue raises questions about the long-term affordability and sustainability of lithium-powered EVs"

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The dynamics works like this: income inequality will cause bigger income inequality, it is a self-reinforcing process. Top 1% has more assets than bottom 99%, rent payments, grocery payments, payments of all kinds will flow to the rich, simply because they own assets and the rest needs those assets to live. If imbalances are not corrected via taxation, the rich will use those payments to increase their assets which means they will receive even more payments from the bottom. Hence the cycle, the "doom-loop" keeps going.

GvWire: "Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on social media that California is preventing insurance companies from being able to cancel or not renew the policies of Southern California wildfire victims on Friday"

More water would not have made a difference #LAFire

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I agree.. and it's great to be able to have this conversation

"@stux@mstdn.social

It's not okay to force other instance admins to block everything you also block (as admin or user)

The point of the Fediverse is to have a lot of different instances with each their own guidelines

Ofc we need to be on the same line but that doesn't mean everything has to be 1-to-1

Personally I don't agree with: "I'll block you if you don't block what I block'

Stop that"

#USSLiberty #Owens

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What kind of deep state is this, they arranged for Trump to lose in 2020, but allowed him to win for 2024? 🤨

Al-Monitor: "Russia eyes Libya to replace Syria as Africa launchpad.. The fall of Russian ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria has disrupted the Kremlin's strategy not only for the Mediterranean but also for Africa, pushing it to focus on Libya as a potential foothold"

Clooney got that "enterpreneurial spirit" too doesn't he, see video below, typical all-blue capitalist Democrat, they say nothing about inequality, complain about trans bathrooms, and otherwise rake it in and expect their side to win elections all the time... This guy has been an example for others, and the next gen to follow.. The smart one... No wonder US is screwed.

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It's not a problem of Reps/Dems bickering all the time.. The problem is precisely the opposite, these fuckers are exactly the same, on material issues that count the most, they bicker on social issues as a cover for them allowing the economy being looted by the corporations and the rich.

Remember Clooney in his more active, visible days, when he was 'splaining' all day what was wrong with politics.. He was repeating that bullshit argument "Democrats and Republicans need to come together". That's all he had. Then bunch of other Holywood types repeated this empty mantra, I guess they judged him as "the smart one" (for what reason, noone knows), and followed him. I'm glad the politics-savy Clooney figure finally imploded.

That should teach you to stay away from politics Holywood

😂 😂 😂

Daily Mail: "George Clooney Reportedly Furious at Barack Obama After His Bold Demand Makes Actor a Scapegoat for Kamala Harris’ Presidential Defeat"

EVs are notably heavier than traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, primarily due to their large batteries. This additional weight increases road friction, leading to accelerated wear and tear on infrastructure. Local communities bear the brunt of these costs, with road maintenance expenses tripling in areas with high EV adoption.

The lifespan of a lithium-ion battery in an EV typically ranges from 8 to 10 years. Replacing a battery can cost between 7,000 and 15,000 dollars, a significant financial burden for many vehicle owners. This issue raises questions about the long-term affordability and sustainability of lithium-powered EVs...

Hydrogen fuel cells present a compelling alternative to lithium-ion batteries. Hydrogen is the most abundant element on Earth, making it a virtually limitless resource. Fuel cells are also ten times lighter than lithium-ion batteries, reducing vehicle weight and associated infrastructure wear and tear.

Hydrogen-powered vehicles refuel in just five minutes or so, compared to EVs taking 45-minutes to hours. Further, the hydrogen fuel cell has an average lifespan of 20 years and offer longer driving ranges per refill compared to EVs. With advancements in technology, blue and green hydrogen production costs are becoming increasingly competitive"

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"@cwebber@social.coop

I love computing

I love to compute on the computer

I hate the companies that have made computing on the computer miserable as they try to squeeze us all through their product lifecycles"

If the shit worked properly, wouldn't Amazon use it in its "Just Walk Out" stores? #AI

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Autoencoders are not unsupervised either IMO, again the same idea, the data itself becomes label. You are still using an architecture that requires labels.

NYT: "Ireland Joins South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel"

Notice how Israel's response to anything untoward to itself is immediate violence. They know their protector in US very well.. Every rocket, every bomb represents an increase in the margin of the private complex, surface state, greedy mob of muppets who make money from mayhem in the middle east.

It's more like they want to protect Israel as the weapon-purchaser-in-chief in its unending fight with its neighbors.. Israel is good business. Munee needs to flow in their direction, lots of people eat from it.

Forward: "The Heritage Foundation plans to 'identify and target' volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are 'abusing their position' by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic, according to documents obtained by the Forward."

Happy Past January 6. Insurrectionists: be better prepared next time.

Obviously serious researchers seeking alternatives means human level AI will not be reached via existing approaches. They are just wasting energy, creating bunch of junk.

I would call the empty-patch approach supervised learning, it seemingly does not require labels, but the labels are generated from the data itself. Clustering, PCA are unsupervised, at a fundamental level.

New "AI" idea is working on a layered architecture where vision based training starts first, a net is trained by taking out patches from real-world images, and machinery tries to predict those empty patches. That way the necessary internal connections are formed representing the outside world, visually, then other learning is layered on top...

Will motor function be part of that training? A big part of how we learn the world is tied to how we move in it. When I take a big step vs small one, I see certain visual changes in the outside world (far points move little, near ones a lot), that is part of my understanding of the outside world.

Bloomberg: "NTPC’s Clean Energy Arm to Build $21 Billion Green Hydrogen Hub.. The clean energy unit of NTPC Ltd., India’s largest thermal power producer, is developing a green hydrogen hub at an estimated cost of 1.8 trillion rupees (21 billion dollars) as the country seeks to add more carbon-free fuel to meet its needs"

As easy sources of oil become depleted, more risky, harder to drill areas will be tried... That means more oil spills. Expect more frequent occurences of such events.

Data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2024

# thousand barrels daily
data = [86572, 86572, 91717, 92085, 92588, 95002, 95172, 88928, 90282, 94292, 96376]
prod = u.get_pd().DataFrame(data,index=range(2013,2024),columns=['world oil production'])
prod.plot()

Why did Trump do it? Voters, politicians of all stripes in those states like it.

WaPo: "[2020] In reversal, Trump to ban oil drilling off coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.. The move comes after the White House previously proposed a huge expansion of drilling off U.S. coasts. Democratic and Republican governors have resisted offshore oil exploration"

CleanTechnica: "[Another admin] cannot simply undo [an environmental] EO with a countermanding order.. [such EOs are] similar to other permanent protective orders issued by Republican and Democratic presidents alike under the authority of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, including Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush"

AP News: "Biden issues ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in most federal waters."

Cocktail Martino - The Girl from Ipanema - feat. Tom Gaebel #music

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Actually I was unfair, LLMs are not as smart as an hamster.. An hamster is still smarter than these "AI" algorithms. I meant LLM processing power is similar to an hamster. But since their algorithms are shit, inefficient, the result is colorful, sometimes creative, parroty junk. It can sound smart, but boy, when it takes a wrong turn, it all goes down the cliff.. A hamster is absolutely smarter than any neural network based approach currently in use.

The Congress got off easy on January 6, they should have received a good ass kicking.. God knows they deserve it. Moulton, Rouzer, Green.. who do they work for? All they do is day trade.. Nancy too of course. But there are people who make more money than her, strangely enough.

TASS: "Number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 2023 surpasses 45,800"

This is the author of the NYT opinion piece shared before, the health insurance exec. Dug it up from my archives, 2020.

"@wendellpotter@twitter.com

Amid America's #COVID19 disaster, I must come clean about a lie I spread as a health insurance exec: We spent big [dollars] to push the idea that Canada's single-payer system was awful & the U.S. system much better. It was a lie"

Link

NYT: "West Bank Settlers Hope Trump Will Back Annexation Dreams"