thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 41

F24: "How Donald Trump engineered the Gaza deal.. [M]ost of Trump's efforts had been behind the scenes, as he sought to pressure a reluctant Benjamin Netanyahu and win Arab support...

Trump has shifted from giving Israel a "blank check" to a conditional stance...Trump was also privately incensed by Israel's attack on Hamas members in fellow US ally Qatar while negotiations were at a sensitive stage. He used Arab unity against the attack to get them all to agree to the plan.

He then ambushed Netanyahu, making him call Qatar's leader from the Oval Office to apologize. Trump even sat holding the phone for Netanyahu while the Israeli leader read from a piece of paper, a photo released by the White House showed...

Firstly, the plan he laid before Netanyahu and Israeli officials had already been drafted following extensive consultations with Arab and Muslim leaders at the United Nations the previous week.

When Netanyahu was confronted with it, he found there were key areas in it that he had sworn not to accept, especially on his refusal to allow a Palestinian state.

Hamas responded [partial acceptance].. There was no mention of the fact that Hamas had not fully agreed to most of the other points in his plan. But instead of quibbling over the details, Trump pushed Israel, Hamas and their mediators to quickly thrash out a deal.

Trump told the Axios news outlet that he had said to Netanyahu: '"Bibi, this is your chance for victory.' He was fine with it. He's got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine""

The American Conservative: "Israel and Hamas Sign Off on First Phase of Ceasefire Deal"

F24: "Argentina's Congress curbs Milei’s decree powers in major blow to libertarian leader"

"@jbz@indieweb.social

⚠️ Qualcomm just bought Arduino, holy f*ck.

Huge loss for everyone, including Qualcomm, there's no way they'll recover their money once we ran away."

Link

Sornette's bubble detection formula,

$$ \ln(p(t)) = A + B(t_c - t)^\beta \big[ 1 + C \cos (\omega \ln(t_c-t) + \phi ) \big] $$

We can fit that to data.. Let's try SP 500.

df = u.get_yahoo_ticker2(2024, "SPY")
df = df[df.index > '2025-04-01']
u.sornette_lppl(df, "SPY")

tc: 190.115448
m: 0.990000
w: 12.460486
A: 6.524082
B: -0.001276
C1: 0.000001
C2: -0.000183
C_amplitude: 0.143820
phi_phase: -1.567148

The characteristic parameters of a bubble occurs at $B<0$, $0<m<1$, $6<\omega<13$, the values above fit that pattern. There is a bubble.

The Internet is abuzz with that share

[-]

Daily Mail: "Charlie Kirk furiously criticized 'bullying' Jewish donors and said he was considering 'leaving the pro-Israel cause' before his death, it was confirmed today.

The bombshell revelation comes after Candace Owens released a screenshot of Kirk fuming in a group chat that Jewish donors were pulling funding over his links to Tucker Carlson.

Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet confirmed the authenticity of the screenshots on Tuesday during the latest episode of The Charlie Kirk Show.

In the text messages, Kirk privately complained that a Jewish donor had withdrawn a $2 million investment into the organization because he refused to disinvite Carlson from the upcoming AmericaFest event.

'Just lost another huge Jewish donor,' Kirk wrote. '$2 million a year because we won't cancel Tucker. I'm thinking of inviting Candace.'

'Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes. I cannot and will not be bullied like this.'

Kirk concludes: 'Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro Israel cause.'"

Sornette: "[8/4] Since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the U.S. equity market has been buoyed by one unprecedented monetary intervention after another: QE1, QE2, QE3, Operation Twist, and what was essentially QE-infinity. Even major shocks—2018’s rate-driven selloff, the COVID-19 crash of 2020, and the losses of 2022—were rather brief and followed by aggressive recoveries, aided by dovish central banks and unprecedented fiscal expansion. In recent years, the U.S. federal government has run deficits around 7% of GDP—levels historically associated with wartime or deep recessions—despite operating in a context of peace and nominal full employment. The source of U.S. market exceptionalism is no mystery: it has been driven by this relentless policy support, a potent mix of ultra-loose monetary conditions and fiscal largesse, rather than by organic or sustainable economic fundamentals. This cocktail of interventions has inflated asset prices, masked structural fragilities, and fostered a dangerous illusion of resilience.

The U.S. market has come to represent nearly 70% of global market capitalization, despite the U.S. economy accounting for only ~24% of global GDP. This imbalance is amplified by record-breaking concentration: over 33% of U.S. equity value is now housed in just the 20 largest firms—a degree of dependence that has no historical precedent.

All this converges to a troubling picture: a market propped up not by resilient fundamentals, but by layers of leverage, fiscal deficits, speculative AI and tech euphoria, and massive defense spending...

Trump’s return and his tariff escalation are not historical aberrations. They are symptoms of a long unaddressed social and economic decay. The last two decades have seen exploding inequality growth, real wage stagnation, and the erosion of the middle class—the backbone of functional democracies. Much like the French Revolution—where poorly managed famines following successive crop failures ignited long-simmering social tensions—the rise of today’s populist movements is a direct consequence of persistent elite mismanagement and failure to address deepening inequality...

Expect high volatility, deeper corrections, and a breakdown of the AI-tech-shale-military bubble that has dominated capital flows. Mega-cap concentration will unwind painfully. Value stocks may perform better, but broad indices like the S&P 500 are likely to struggle for years."

Didier Sornette is a physicist who applied the mechanics of material breakdown to financial markets, predicting bubbles and crashes. His latest newsletter above.

MIT Economics: "Some predictions have claimed AI will double growth or at least create a higher growth trajectory than usual. By contrast, in one paper, The Simple Macroeconomics of AI published in the August issue of Economic Policy, [economist] Acemoglu estimates that over the next decade, AI will produce a 'modest increase' in GDP between 1.1 to 1.6 percent over the next 10 years, with a roughly 0.05 percent annual gain in productivity"

Financial Times: "Lately, [AI] optimism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of U.S. GDP growth this year... Since the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population own 85 per cent of U.S. stocks, they enjoy the largest wealth effect when they go up...

In a way, then, America has become one big bet on AI. Outside of the AI plays, even European stock markets have been outperforming the U.S. this decade, and now that gap is starting to spread... What that suggests is that AI better deliver for the U.S., or its economy and markets will lose the one leg they are now standing on."

Chollet: "You can teach a Transformer to execute a simple algorithm if you provide the exact step by step algorithm during training via CoT tokens.

This is interesting, but the point of machine learning should be to find the algorithm during training, from input/output pairs only -- not just memorize an externally provided algorithm. Pretty trivial program synthesis techniques can achieve just that in the case of multiplication.

Because if you already have the algorithm, you can just write it down and execute it instead of training a Transformer to inefficiently encode it."

Paul: "A beautiful paper from MIT+Harvard+ @googledeepmind 👏.. Explains why Transformers [used in LLM neural nets] miss multi digit multiplication and shows a simple bias that fixes it. The researchers trained two small Transformer models on 4-digit-by-4-digit multiplication. One used a special training method called implicit chain-of-thought (ICoT), where the model first sees every intermediate reasoning step, and then those steps are slowly removed as training continues."

Chollet: "The point of our work isn't to build an artificial human. The universe is full of questions far more interesting than our own reflection. The point is to create a new kind of mind to help us explore & understand the universe better than we can ourselves. The way to think about AGI is as a scalable, efficient formalization & implementation of the scientific method. Not a brain in a jar."

"Vietnam reports that some 400,000 people have suffered death or permanent injury from exposure to Agent Orange. Furthermore, it is estimated that 2,000,000 people have suffered from illnesses caused by exposure and that half a million babies were born with birth defects due to the effects of Agent Orange"

JFK gave the order for the use of the weapon. An overrated president, and a war criminal.

'Aw man, we can't see Charlie among those trees.'

'Why don't we destroy all trees!'

This is literally how they thought

"USVA Agent Orange is a blend of tactical herbicides the U.S. military sprayed from 1962 to 1971 during Operation Ranch Hand in the Vietnam War to remove trees and dense tropical foliage that provided enemy cover."

If quantum computation does not provide much improvement over classical, it will reinforce the view that there is no inherent parallelism in nature to be exploited at quantum level, the Copenhagen interpretation is a farce, as Masse stated below.

[-]

My first software project as programmer used Oracle in its solution stack, I am very familiar in what it can and cannot do. It was okay when there were no alternatives... I remember their pricing was at eye watering levels.. That is how ZioJew Ellison made his mint.

There is no need to use Oracle in any organization. Free and open source software Postgresql can help on almost all needs. It is fast, can scale, it is actually seen as a drop-in replacement for Oracle database.

Here is a joke for you: British Cuisine.

That's funny right?

Fish and chips and mad-cow disease, that's basically the menu

Learning how to cook from Jamie Oliver.. Why would anyone learn cooking from a Brit?

[-]

Jacobin: "Among Democrats, democratic socialists enjoy significant popularity. The poll’s findings include:

'These results tell a clear story: democratic socialism is now mainstream,' said DSA Fund executive director Gabe Tobias."

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

A few days ago Oracle, via the media, blamed their own customers for not installing a July security update.. then when the media coverage stopped, quietly released a new security update for the actual exploited vulnerability. 🥴"

The Telegraph: "Merkel: Poland and Baltics partly responsible for Ukraine invasion.. Former German chancellor claims the countries’ opposition to negotiations with Moscow fuelled Russian ‘aggression’"

Politico: "Judges appointed by Trump keep ruling against him. He’s not happy about it."

For democratic politicking to work, the views of the new actors who saw vote increases in the last election must be included in governance. The centrists could adapt one hot button issue from each, NR and the leftist coalition."

CNBC: "Déjà vu in France as political chaos returns. But this time, it’s different.. the Lecornu government was not toppled by the opposition, like those of predecessors Michel Barnier or Francois Bayrou — it was its own allies that caused its downfall."

Of course.. time is ripe for such attempts..

F24: "Maduro says Venezuela thwarted 'false flag' plot to bomb US embassy"

Firstpost: "With Gaza plan, Trump throws Netanyahu toughest dare: making peace with Palestinians.. Two years after Hamas triggered the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip with its all-out invasion of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be facing the toughest moment of his decades-long career. His principal supporter, US President Donald Trump, has told him to make peace with Palestinians — and he would not take no for an answer.

But Netanyahu cannot afford peace.

Domestically, continuing the war favours Netanyahu, and, indeed, prolonging the conflict with the Palestinians has always worked to his advantage, and now Trump’s push for peace has cornered him, says Muddassir Quamar, a scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the Centre for West Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi."

This is good analysis.. Says Lady Gaga is talented but actually interested in something else, Drake is a Nepo Baby, and Britney Spears was a total robot, her music, dance careography all managed by others. Then the drama around her conservatorship, the father was not a one-time event, that was basically her whole life.

[-]

We should not try to mimic exactly how nature does things. We can learn, get inspiration from it, but humans solve things differently. A plane does not fly like a bird. Our math, our formulations generalize. You can't compete with nature at micro level, you would need a computer as big as the nature for that, and it still wouldn't be fast enough.

HRMs introduce more structure into black-box neural-net artificial intelligence systems. An analogy is we don't try to simulate fluid dynamics starting with tiny water molecules, we use math to generalize, there is always top-down structure imposition. HRMs raise the level of abstraction, they attempt to mimic the outward effects, abstract steps of thought via guidance rather than bottom up micro-monkey interactions hoping it will reach intelligence. It's like hoping unfettered markets with micro-monkey interactions of people, bihnesses can lead to walhalla, vs controlled capitalism. LLM neurons relied on tiny components whose magical, chaotic interrelations would supposedly bring about Artificial Superintelligence. They failed. HRM is pointing towards the new way.

#HRM

Code

Paper: "Current large language models (LLMs) primarily employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques, which suffer from brittle task decomposition, extensive data requirements, and high latency. Inspired by the hierarchical and multi-timescale processing in the human brain, we propose the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), a novel recurrent architecture that attains significant computational depth while maintaining both training stability and efficiency. HRM executes sequential reasoning tasks in a single forward pass without explicit supervision of the intermediate process, through two interdependent recurrent modules: a high-level module responsible for slow, abstract planning, and a low-level module handling rapid, detailed computations. With only 27 million parameters, HRM achieves exceptional performance on complex reasoning tasks using only 1000 training samples. The model operates without pre-training or CoT data, yet achieves nearly perfect performance on challenging tasks including complex Sudoku puzzles and optimal path finding in large mazes."

[-]

"Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM): a tiny brain that embarrasses giant LLMs.. Sudoku-Extreme, the puzzles that leave most models hopeless, HRM solved 55% of them, Claude and o3-mini, Zero. Same for large 30×30 mazes. HRM found the optimal path 74.5% of the time, while the others sat at zero!.. The model that’s smaller than GPT-1, the original GPT with 117M parameters, suddenly outperforming models thousands of times its size on reasoning-heavy tasks."

France is the new Italy

CNBC: "France's new PM resigns sparking fresh political chaos"

ADL = ZJL, Zionist-Jew League..

The Guardian: "FBI cuts ties with two advocacy groups that track US extremism after rightwing backlash... FBI director Kash Patel said agency would sever ties with Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League"

Moyers: "[2016] Bill Clinton's legacy in empowering the consolidation of corporate media is right up there with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).. [T]he Telecommunications Act of 1996.. signed into law on February 8, 1996, was 'essentially bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies,' as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) described it, and radically 'opened the floodgates on mergers.'"

BHJ: "In 1983, the US media was controlled by 50 companies.. by 2020 the number shrank to six... Not only are there six conglomerates alone that mainly own the media, but these six are so interconnected that they are practically one."

Robert Reich: "[9/24] The richest man on earth owns X.

The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok.

The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post.

See the problem here?"

Mortgage demand, their use can cause house price increases, which in turn raise demand for mortgages more, raising house prices again, and on and on.. A snowball effect. But if you rewind it all back, why did people start to need bigger mortgages to begin with? The culprit: rising inequality. The snowball naturally will make that worse too, only the top 1% will have the money to lend to struggling home owners, and middle class' monthly payments will generate a massive passive income for the rich which they can use to buy even more assets.

Why isn't Canadian healthcare financing become problematic when their conservatives are in power? Well because they haven't done a half assed job like the US, their system has proper funding from get-go.

Trust the corporatist guy (former chairman of Blackrock DE) to do the right thing

"@signalapp@mastodon.world

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe."

#Ukraine 09/27 - 10/05

[-]

"Bush was pivoting to a War on Drugs as a new frontier for defense contracts".. Them defense contracts

Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: "Noriega rose through the ranks of the National Guard of Panama, a force created during the Cold War along the lines of the Somozas’ militia in Nicaragua. While being paid by the U.S. government to spy on leftist movements in Panama in the early 1960s, he enrolled at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas training center, then based in the Canal Zone. (Noriega’s fellow alumni included the future heads of death squads and secret police across Latin America.) In 1970, Noriega was made Panama’s chief of military intelligence. A year after, he was formally put on the payroll of the CIA..

In January 1989, a former director of the CIA, George Herbert Walker Bush, became president of the United States. Noriega, who had started working with Bush in 1976, must have thought he had won the lottery. But with the Cold War coming to an end, Bush was pivoting to a War on Drugs as a new frontier for defense contracts, surveillance, and a pretext for military control. Once in office, Bush turned on his erstwhile employee, calling for Noriega to step down and imposing crippling sanctions on Panama. On December 15, 1989, the Panamanian national assembly named Noriega the country’s 'maximum leader of national liberation' and symbolically declared war on the United States. The next day, a group of U.S. troops got into an argument with PDF soldiers at a roadblock in El Chorrillo. A Marine lieutenant named Robert Paz was shot. He died soon after at Gorgas Hospital in the former Canal Zone. On December 20, citing the Colombian-born U.S. Marine’s death as a justification, the United States invaded Panama for the second time."

The National Interest: "Why Did America Just Send a Dozen Aerial Tankers to Qatar?"

Calm down, the word just means "the leader" in Italian.

#USNavy There is still some concentration around Iran, less than last time I checked, and of course, there is massive focus around Venezuella. What is Il Duce up to?

[-]