Week 7
Cardiff University: "A new way of creating hydrogen, which eliminates direct CO₂ emissions at source, has been developed by an international team of scientists. The process reacts hydrogen-rich and sustainably sourced bioethanol taken from agricultural waste with water at just 270°C using a new bimetallic catalyst.
Unlike traditional methods, which operate between 400-600°C, are energy-intensive and generate large amounts of CO₂, the catalyst shifts the chemical reaction to create hydrogen without releasing carbon dioxide as a biproduct.
Instead, the process co-produces high-value acetic acid, an organic liquid used in food preservation, household cleaning products, manufacturing and medicine, and has an annual global consumption exceeding 15 million tons. The researchers from Peking University and Cardiff University, say the study represents a boost in de-fossilising the chemical industry, by replacing fossil feedstocks used in making chemicals with an alternative carbon source.
Just Cars: "Doosan Fuel Cell Company Ltd is poised to enter the South Korean bus market, with its commercial vehicle subsidiary HyAxiom Motors"
Audience seems to like it, so far.. The reshoots worked? Did they decrease the screen time of the "MAGA Hulk"? You know the "Red Hulk" who also happens to be the President of the United States? The president gets angry and turns into a Hulk, right? Smash!
u.rottentomatoes("Captain America Brave New World")
Out[1]: {'critics': '52', 'audience': '78'}
Yes there is software named Barracuda that uses CUDA... Not sure what the first five letters stand for, but they are using it.
#Connover #AI
CUDA is the programming interface for the graphics card. As we mentioned before graphics card hardware historically had to offer massive parallelization in its numerical code to accomodate gaming. Then some geniuses hacked around, spoke to the graphics API to pose non-graphics math computation as if they were graphics computations, to exploit that fast hardware. That language, interface later became CUDA. Apparently DeepSeek guys went deeper than that, spoke directly to the hardware itself.
The underlying "AI" approach is immature, lacking; LLM in terms of animal brain comparison is closer to an hamster rather than a human. But we can still celebrate the the underlying tech ability that allowed this code to be a more efficient hamster. Such coding can come in handy in scientific computing too not just for "AI". Maybe someone will use similar improvements for Finite Element computation to detect failure in building construction, in materials, or fluid dynamics. CUDA based GPUs along with CPUs are part of every latest supercomputing architecture.
Assembly is the rawest form of code, it is basically machine code. Almost noone writes assembly these days, we write in more expressive languages that are translated into machine code via special "compilers" or "interpreters".
Hard core. Close to the metal. Good for DeepSeek.
"@sehugg@infosec.exchange
If you were wondering if assembly language optimization is still relevant, it was partially responsible for NVDA's stock price dropping by 17% today:
'DeepSeek actually programmed 20 of the 132 processing units on each H800 specifically to manage cross-chip communications. This is actually impossible to do in CUDA. DeepSeek engineers had to drop down to PTX, a low-level instruction set for Nvidia GPUs that is basically like assembly language.'"
"Punch a NAZI". Punch yourself by being too dumb not to see what is described below.
Providing people material help would in fact stop fascism. You know what would not end fascism? Being "on the lookout" about it, "fighting it", "educating people". Fascism is a symptom, not the cause.
Incredible. Woke gaslighting in full display. Don't worry about economics, ooonly worry about social matters. Look, squirel!
Hillary Clinton: "[2016] If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?"
Firstpost: "'Let’s cut our military budget in half': Trump proposes nuclear arms deal with Russia, China.. Trump said he would pursue negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping once 'we straighten it all out' in the Middle East and Ukraine"
TASS: "India supports Trump's aspirations to peaceful resolution of conflict in Ukraine — Modi"
"But what happens to people who have their 'wealth stored in their homes'". If you have one house you bought that not to pay rent, which will also go down along with price. Resale can cause problems down the line but the market will fall overall, so you can pay for a new home with the sale of the old one.
Let's say wealthy person buys 10 houses. Tax real-estate wealth, he will perhaps have to sell the tenth house to pay the tax for the nine. Selling means prices will go down. A good thing.
Zucman: [I]n peacetime, the United States pioneered two of the key fiscal innovations of the twentieth century. The first of these innovations was the introduction of a sharply progressive tax on property. As we have seen, by the beginning of the century, US states already had a long history of property taxation behind them. But these property taxes had a major limitation: they were not progressive. The same rate applied to all property owners, regardless of their wealth. There had been efforts to make these taxes progressive over the course of the nineteenth century, but they had failed as states adopted 'uniformity clauses' mandating that all assets—no matter their nature (real or financial, for instance) or the wealth of their owners—be taxed at the same rate. In 1916, the federal government introduced its own progressive tax on property, in the form of a progressive tax on wealth upon death: the federal estate tax. Its rates were initially moderate: in 1916 the top estate tax rate reached 10% for the largest estates; it rose a bit during World War I before stabilizing at 20% in the late 1920s.
This changed between 1931 and 1935, when the rate applying to the top fortunes rose from 20% to 70%. It would hover in the 70%–80% range from 1935 to 1981. Over the course of the twentieth century, no continental European country ever taxed large successions in direct line (from parents to children) at more than 50%. The only exception? Allied-occupied Germany between 1946 and 1948, when tax policy was decided . . . by the Americans, who imposed a 60% rate"
Zucman: "The reasons for the sharp increase of tax progressivity [during early 20th century] are multifold. There was a desire to prevent war profiteering during the First World War— the type of profiteering that had enriched so many during the Civil War. To prevent a 'shoddy aristocracy' from emerging again, an excess profits tax was imposed during the conflict. At first it covered the munitions industry only; then after America entered the war in April 1917, the tax was extended to all firms. All profits made by corporations above and beyond an 8% rate of return on their tangible capital—buildings, plants, machines, etc.—were deemed abnormal. Abnormal profits were taxed at progressive rates of up to 80% in 1918..
[T]he rise of progressive taxation in America [also] stemmed from the intellectual and political changes that had begun in the 1880s and 1890s: the evolution of the Democratic party, brutally segregationist in the South, but eager to unite low-income whites in the North and the West against Republican financial elites by means of an egalitarian economic platform; the social mobilization in favor of more economic justice, in a context of surging inequality and industrial concentration. Simply put, a growing fraction of the population refused to see America become as unequal as Europe, which at the time was perceived as an oligarchic antimodel"
Shitlib Dems see themselves as tech-savy, and electric cars were such techy, shiny toys they liked to associate themselves with. Sadly the EV bet was one of the worst moves made by Black Bill Clinton, the error, now gone global, still partially lingers on because he could do no wrong. The rest of the world followed suit bcz anything US does has to be good. Cascading error.
The plan was likely initiated by Tony Blink Blink 737, a run-of-the-mill dipshit Clintonite Zio Democrat, and ended by new admin.
NYT: "State Dept. Suspends Plan to Buy Armored Vehicles From Elon Musk’s Tesla"
You can't run government like a corporation.
Capitalists want unhindered free trade, unhindered access to cheap labor. Maga is lukewarm on those. Are they good capitalists? Some even vehemently reject self-driving cars bcz it will steal a human driver's job. Globalisation, cheap labor is good for business. If you are against them you are not pro-business.
Trump has ok engineering mind, can manage construction projects, but he wasn't a good businessman IMO.
Know-how, true skillset can be carried to, used in other orgs. You could be writing excellent software in open-source, or in commercial context (although you'd have to try harder in the latter, quality is simply better with FOSS).
Not all known CEOs are good at bihness, they might have other (real) skillset, eg around development, design, delivery if not actual hands-on technical provess. Steve Jobs was a good creator and manager of internal projects, that was his real ability, from iMac to iPhone, he could take them from inception to completion. He wasn't a good businessman, not in his first stint anyway (he got better as time went on). Company-wide management, chasing finance is different.
Custom tech is used on this blog but anyone can use Jupyter Notebooks, publish results. Code, descriptive explanations can be authored side by side via notebook technology.
The CPS dataset is surely full of gems waiting to be discovered. Economists need to dig into it. See the code I used, Python, Pandas, simple download, CSV manipulation can get results. Gene Ludwig himself should have shared code actually, but he didn't.
Doc lists variables like prptrea, hefaminc, prcivlf. Var
hefaminc seems to be for income. Ludwig looks at people w/ extremely
low pay, and says they should be considered unemployed,
w = ( (df['hefaminc'] <= 6) ).sum()
print ("%0.2f" % (w/(len(df))*100), "%")
28.28 %
It looks little higher than GL's result but in the vicinity, additional filters would improve the result.
df = u.download_dataframe("https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/datasets/2024/basic/jan24pub.csv",
outdir="/opt/Downloads/cps")
126802 rows downloaded
Great they have monthly datafiles, the URL naming scheme is,
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/datasets/[year]/basic/mmmyypub.csv
For January 2024 the file would be jan2024pub.csv
The unemployment rate calculated via Gene Ludwig's method is on the page below. Tech docs for his approach are on the same page.
It looks like the raw data comes from Current Population Survey.
Whenever Trump says "NATO members need to pay more, 2%, 5%", I hear "I want NATO to end", or "I don't want global defense spending". Because without US picking up the slack, I don't think there would be a NATO and such excess "defense" spending. If the members truly did pay, with that kind of money floating around, they might as well create their own alliance without US. My guess is they won't pay and defense spending will go down w/ NATO losing influence.
"@eb@social.coop
if anybody wants a fun project, compile chrome to WASM so you can run chrome in chrome"
He is in treasuries obviously, not cash cash. The amount is staggering isn't it, this is all government debt. There is money, accumulated somewhere, and it can easily buy that government debt. Gov spends spends, rich buys buys. Governments gradually lose assets, lose income bcz they don't tax, and they will fall furter in debt eventually they will cut services.
"Buffett is in cash, $325 billion"
Wealth won't trickle down, it will just sit there accruing interest, that's why it has to be taxed.
Ludwig, The Vanishing American Dream: [I]n 2018.. [a]mid a raft of seemingly very positive economic indicators — a low unemployment rate, strong GDP growth, buoyant market benchmarks — I had concluded that too few policymakers were taking heed of the fact that many communities were being left behind. Too frequently, Washington insiders seemed sanguine that wealth accruing at the top of the income scale would eventually 'trickle down' to the rest of the country. A closer look at localities like the place where I grew up—York, Pennsylvania—revealed that thinking to be entirely off base"
TASS: "Ukraine unlikely to get back its territories, says US President Trump.. The US president pointed out that Ukraine's membership in NATO was not appropriate adding that the Kiev authorities must seek peace"
Euronews: "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a return to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders was unrealistic and the Trump administration does not see NATO membership for Kyiv as part of a solution to the war triggered by Russia's invasion"
#Frontline #UA #RU 02/07 - 02/13
Standing, The Precariat: "As globalisation proceeded, and as governments and corporations chased each other in making their labour relations more flexible, the number of people in insecure forms of labour multiplied. This was not technologically determined. As flexible labour spread, inequalities grew, and the class structure that underpinned industrial society gave way to something more complex but certainly not less class based... But the policy changes and the responses of corporations to the dictates of the globalising market economy generated a trend around the world that was never predicted by the neo-liberals or the political leaders who were putting their policies into effect.
Millions of people, in affluent and emerging market economies, entered the precariat, a new phenomenon even if it had shades of the past. The precariat was not part of the ‘working class’ or the ‘proletariat’. The latter terms suggest a society consisting mostly of workers in long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionisation and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features they were familiar with...
On top of the longer term changes towards the unemployed, the financial meltdown of 2008–9 accelerated the growth of the global precariat by putting more pressure on firms to cut labour costs through flexibility measures and prompting government policies that encouraged them.
Predictably, the precariat initially bore the brunt of the shock. Temporary employees were the easiest to make redundant, simply by not renewing contracts. Randstad, the world’s second largest staffing company, reported sharp declines across Europe in 2008, observing that firms were more inclined to cut jobs than in previous recessions. But as the recession proceeded, it became clear it was a lever for expanding the precariat. Adecco, the world’s biggest temporary employment agency, reported that the regrowth of employment was concentrated on temporary labour"
Interesting.. they pose WASM as a competitor to Docker. The two techs do not appear comparable at first, Docker is installation management -can take a barebones machine (real or virtual) from nothing to fully installed w/ packages A,B,C on it- WASM is similar Java VM but more flexible.. but they are similar in that they offer code portability, universal execution anywhere. In that sense WASM has an advantage.
"The appeal of WASM lies in its write-once-run-anywhere capability, which allows developers to compile code from various languages into a binary format that can be executed in any environment that supports a WASM runtime, such as the popular V8 engine. This capability stands in stark contrast to the limitations of Docker and other container technologies, which can be cumbersome and require extensive configuration"
Politico: "Europe shifts Ukraine strategy as Trump pushes to end war"
There are problems w/ the CPI, median wage measures too says the article.. Link below.
Politico: "Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. Here’s why unemployment is higher, wages are lower and growth less robust than government statistics suggest... I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate"
Anderson, Private Government: "Most believe.. that their boss cannot fire them for their off-hours Facebook postings, or for supporting a political candidate their boss opposes. Yet only about half of U.S. workers enjoy even partial protection of their off-duty speech from employer meddling. Far fewer enjoy legal protection of their speech on the job, except in narrowly defined circumstances. Even where they are entitled to legal protection, as in speech promoting union activity, their legal rights are often a virtual dead letter due to lax enforcement: employers determined to keep out unions immediately fire any workers who dare mention them, and the costs of litigation make it impossible for workers to hold them accountable for this...
Certainly many U.S. CEOs, who think of themselves as libertarian individualists, would be surprised to see themselves depicted as dictators of little.. governments. Why do we not recognize such a pervasive part of our social landscape for what it is? Should we not subject these forms of government to at least as much critical scrutiny as we pay to the democratic state? My [aim] is to explain why public discourse and political philosophy largely neglect the pervasiveness of authoritarian governance in our work and off-hours lives and why we should return our attention to it, and to sketch some thoughts as to what we should do about it — for neglect of these issues is relatively recent. They were hot topics of public discourse, academic and legal theorizing, and political agitation from the Industrial Revolution through the New Deal. Now they are the province of members of marginalized academic subfields — labor historians, labor law"
# The EU - US, 2022
eu = ["Austria","Belgium","Bulgaria","Croatia","Cyprus","Czechia",\
"Denmark","Estonia","Finland","France","Germany","Greece","Hungary",\
"Ireland","Italy","Latvia","Lithuania","Luxembourg","Malta",\
"Netherlands","Poland","Portugal","Romania","Slovakia","Slovenia",\
"Spain","Sweden"]
print('$', f"{np.sum([u.baci_all_products(x,'USA') for x in eu]):,}")
print('$', f"{np.sum([u.baci_all_products('USA',x) for x in eu]):,}")
$ 522,475,955,116.00024
$ 352,066,108,325.0002
Modern cosmology doesn't have a freaking leg to stand on. It's not just this or that part being crooked, the whole thing is a house of cards. There is no fixing it by mere fiddling on the edges. Need a major rethink.
#UsefulIdiots
TASS: "Russia-Mexico Business Forum to be held in Mexico City for first time"
They process DAGs, directed acyclic graphs, they named the app Dagger.. Slick.
We'll see this approach more and more, write once in any language, deploy on any browser via WASM.
Dagger: "We Replaced Our React Frontend with Go and WebAssembly.. A few weeks ago, we launched Dagger Cloud v3, a completely new user interface for Dagger Cloud. One of the main differences between v3 and its v2 predecessor is that the new UI is written in WebAssembly (WASM) using Go. At first glance, this might seem an odd choice - Go typically isn't the first language you think of when deciding to program a Web UI"
Politico: "Johnson quietly shops new budget blueprint.. The rough plan would cut less spending than hard-liners want while also scaling back potential tax cuts"
"@simon@simonwillison.net
Lots of people are absolutely convinced they ChatGPT can access the internet, because often if you give it a realistic looking URL it will hallucinate the contents - but it refuses to do so if it thinks that the URL you gave it is unlikely to exist!
Here's an experiment that shows this in action - ALL of the URLs I gave it are equally fake"
Hawking was against the Big Bang Theory. There is also the issue of missing lithium, theory says certain amount of lithium should have been created, yet it is not there. Either our measurements are wrong, or the theory is. My bet is on the latter.
Hawking, A Brief History of Time: "[Roger Penrose and my work] became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a big bang singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe – as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account"
Futurism: "In the aftermath of its CEO's stunning assassination, UnitedHealthcare is now threatening legal retaliation against those who criticize the insurance giant online. Last month, [a surgeon] Potter posted on TikTok and Instagram that she had just been interrupted in the middle of a procedure for a breast cancer patient with a supposedly 'urgent' call.
On the other line was a UHC representative, who asked her if it was absolutely necessary that her patient stay overnight post-surgery — a question that appalled the doctor and most everyone who saw the video... A month after going viral [in a different post Doctor said] she had been contacted by UHC, accused of libel, and subjected to thinly veiled threats of legal retaliation if she didn't comply with the company's demands"
"Lithium Battery Fire Sickens Residents, Sparks Worry of ANOTHER Sacrifice Zone" #StatusCoup
Blue is previous state of ISR incursion, red the latest.
#Frontline #Israel #Lebanon 2024/11/18 - 02/09
Surely Jordan is not happy with these turn of events..
MEM: "[2024/12] Al-Mayadeen channel reported that occupation forces had taken control of the Yarmouk riverbed and the Al-Wahda Dam, which supplies water to Jordan for drinking and agriculture, and hydroelectric electricity to Syria. Taking control of the dam gives Israel control over one of the main water sources in Syria"
#JacobBarandes #QM
The comments below are an outgrowth of JB's research who was able to show QM is merely a reflection, a projection of physical models based on "configuration spaces combined with stochastic dynamics". The system evolves based on non-Markovian stochastic process, while measurement the experimenter loses something during that transition which results in the funky results, that are attributed to the "unexplainable weirdness" of quantum mechanics.
Other gems in the video, wave functions (of QM) are not real. They have no physical existence in reality. Ergo any talk about their "collapse" would be unscientific.
There is a Socialist Rifle Association?
"@starwall@wizzzard.online
leftists need to recognize that we are at war.. get organized and absolutely get armed. we most learn the mistakes of the Indonesian Communist Party... This is not a matter of revolution vs reform, it's a matter of collective and self defense.
Please find and get in touch with your nearest Socialist Rifle Association branch"
Hossein-Zadeh: "Frightened by the specter of peace and/or peace dividends [after the fall of the Berlin Wall], beneficiaries of military spending frantically sought to invent and substitute 'new threats' for the 'communist threat' of the Cold War era, thereby preempting the realization of peace dividends.
In pursuit of this goal, beneficiaries of war and militarism found a strong, well-established network of politically savvy allies: radical Zionist proponents of 'greater Israel.' Because the interests of these two powerful groups converged over fomenting war and political convulsion in the Middle East, an ominously potent alliance was forged between them— ominous, because the mighty U.S. war machine was now supplemented by the almost unrivaled public relations capabilities of the hard-line pro-Israel lobby in the United States. The alliance is unofficial and de facto; it is subtly forged through an elaborate network of powerful militaristic think tanks"
Hossein-Zadeh: "[2006] U.S. policy makers in the Middle East would go along with the demands of the radical Zionist lobby only if such demands also tend to serve the special interests that those policy makers represent or serve — not necessarily the interests of the American people, or collective U.S. 'national interests' in general. The fact that, as pointed out earlier, U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War era was less accommodating to the territorial desires of militant Zionism than in the post–Cold War period is an indication of this point. Another corroborating indication of the point is that as the military-industrial complex has been gaining more and more influence over U.S. foreign policy, that policy has, accordingly, been more and more geared to the wishes of hard-line Zionism because, as has been frequently pointed out in this chapter, the interests of the U.S. military establishment converge with those of militant Zionism over war and political convulsion in the Middle East"
Syria is another case in point. They had tussles w Israel bcz they are near (Israel causes problems to all who is near), hence Syria along the way became mostly pacified and it acted less on Palestine issues, would jump, even until recently, at any chance to be on good terms with Israel.
The guys near Palestine, Jordan, Egypt also happen to have, historically, more conflicts w/ Israel, bcz of that very reason - they were near Israel. The private military-industrial-Likud complex used more arm twisting on them compared to the rest, bcz they had more of a potential to fight Israel.
Iran came into the picture later, after the near "threat" subsided, but the complex needed military spending, that's when Iran became "more evil" leading them to be more vocal on the Pal issue.
Thats true but half the story (also a bit unfair).
"The further you are from Palestine, the more you cheer for the Palestinian cause"
If US support for Israel was "strategic" then why were two influential presidents before Truman against it? Eisenhower and FDR.
Truman is skooling the viewer on how it's done. Take it from the pro, the first leader to genocide others via nuclear bomb. Ethnic Cleansing 101. Watch and learn.