Week 1

China usually tries to one up the West on tech, science frontier by making things bigger and better. If they don't see a future in LHC type experiments, don't consider it worthwhile to one up anyone on, that is bad news for that line of research. I hope EU follows suit, and forces their physics community back to the drawing board.

AFP: "China halts particle accelerator mega-project"

There wasn't a conspiracy around battery electric cars, they were just a bad choice made by people who did not understand engineering.

I'm not seeing people dropping dead around me but maybe the planners were off a few days?

😶 😶 😶

"70% of the population who took this slow-kill depopulation [covid] shot will be dead by December 31, 2025"

#LLM #JEPA

[-]

Yann Le Cun: "One of the most important aspects of advanced machine intelligence is the ability to understand the physical world that surrounds us [which LLMs cannot do]. This ability enables AI systems to learn, reason, plan and act in the real world in order to assist humans [LeCun, 2022]... Currently, the common approach to achieve these tasks is to use large token-generative Vision Language Models (VLMs).. which takes visual input $X_V$ , textual query $X_Q$ to generate desired textual response Y autoregressively in token space, i.e., $(X_V,X_Q) \to Y$. This is straightforward but inadequate for two main reasons. First, VLMs are expensive to develop, because they are trained to generate responses.. to queries by capturing both task-relevant semantics with task-irrelevant surface linguistic features such as words choice, style or paraphrasing..

This paper introduces the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Vision-Language (VL-JEPA), turning expensive learning of data-space token generation into more efficient latent-space semantic prediction. Thanks to its non-generative nature, VL-JEPA is not forced to reconstruct every surface detail of Y in the token space. Instead, it only needs to predict the abstract representation $S_Y$ in the embedding space"

[-]

Narco Rubio.. That's funny. But the name is incorrect, this military action was hardly about narcotics.

Double slit experiment on Github by Roth. Code is running here, I am hosting the HTML + Javascript on this site.

Elastic aether simulation code by Chantal Roth, she combines R. Close and S. Rashkovskiy's research, provides demonstrations for them. Good examples of the theory.

[-]

Ro Khanna: "Trump betrayed his MAGA base today launching a war of choice to bring regime change in Venezuela."

Christian Zionism is an artificial, shoddy construct. If the interests behind Israeli support lose power, this bastardized version of Christianity can disappear in a single day.

WaPo: "Alarmed by anti-Israel sentiment from conservative influencers such as Tucker Carlson, Christian leaders traveled to Israel to counter the podcasters’ messaging."

A lot of international stuff ends up there.. The infamous Halkbank case of TR was in the "Southern District" of NY AFAIK. Yes, same district on the TV show Billions. Former offices of Preet Bharara, Rudy Gulliani.

New York?

"Nicolas Maduro and his wife been indicted on various charges, including narco-terrorism, and will be prosecuted in New York, according to Pam Bondi."

The legal basis of the capture is dubious.. Nobel "Peace" Prize winner must be in cahoots with some shady interests.

HTW: "‘US fulfilled its promise’: Venezuela oppn leader Maria Corina Machado on Nicolas Maduro ‘capture’.. The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner said that Nicolas Maduro will face 'international justice for the heinous crimes committed against Venezuelans'"

"Pads that pick up power from anywhere on the wall".. outlandish stuff.

"1989: The Home of 2020" #BBC

[-]

Reddit: "I’m a developer for a major food delivery app... You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets" (that’s literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent.

First off, the 'Priority Delivery' is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a 'psychological value add.' Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up.

We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better.

But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the 'Desperation Score.' We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior.

If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as 'High Desperation.' Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy 15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for 6 dollars?" We save the good tips for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust."

You do need capitalism, bidness for some things, they are like the kelp organism in the ocean ecology. Recycle waste, filter some stuff, convert one thing to another thing.. they can be beneficial. But they do not constitute the core. The society, the media should not glorify creating businesses, and portray being a businessman as automatically a good thing.

Business is not even "the visible part of the iceberg" when it comes to growth, economy, innovation... They are a tiny speck on the visible part of the iceberg.

It's true: businesses do not innovate, not the fundamental kind. They can combine existing know-how together and come up with a product, but they are far, far away from any type of genuine discoveries. Even the recent "AI" advances, to the extent they represent an advance, were made by an non-profit, not a commercial entity. Commercial incentives are fundamentally at odds with true innovation.

"@oaklandprivacy@mastodon.social

California residents now have a real tool against the data broker industry.

The state has launched DROP, a single portal to demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers in one request, for free."

Reuters: "[10/26] Colombian Senator Ivan Cepeda was elected to be the left's 2026 presidential candidate on Sunday after a primary vote by the Historic Pact, a leftist coalition that brought the country's current president, Gustavo Petro, to power in 2022."

Cory Doctorow: "Under anticircumvention law any manufacturer can trivially turn their product into a no-go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of reporting on its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA... every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

Now, it makes a certain twisted sense for the US to enact a law like this, after all, they are the world's tech powerhouse, home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world. By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America enhances the rent-extracting power of the most valuable companies on US stock exchanges.

But why would Europe pass a law like this? Europe is a massive tech importer. By extending legal protection to tech companies that want to steal their users' data and money, the EU was facilitating a one-way transfer of value from Europe to America. So why would Europe do this?

Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which other countries came to enact their anticircumvention laws and maybe you'll spot a pattern that will answer this question.

Australia got its anticircumvention law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Australia to enact anticircumvention law.

Canada and Mexico got it through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anticircumvention laws.

Andean nations like Chile got their anticircumvention laws through bilateral US free trade agreements, which oblige them to enact anticircumvention laws.

And the Central American nations got their anticircumvention laws through CAFTA – The Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA – which obliges them to enact anticircumvention laws, too.

I assume you've spotted the pattern by now: the US trade representative has forced every one of its trading partners to adopt anticircumvention law, to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and money by American firms...

That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

[A] possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

The Times of Israel: "Mamdani revokes IHRA antisemitism definition on day 1.. Mamdani’s executive order also nullified an order that opposed the campaign to boycott Israel. Mamdani is a longtime supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel."

"@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu

Today, Bulgaria adopts the euro as its official currency. 💶

A new currency, a stronger bond with Europe.

Travel, work, and business will become easier and more connected.

With Schengen now fully in place, this means more freedom, more opportunities, and a shared future.

Progress is not a dream. It is a choice. And Bulgaria has chosen it.

Let's keep moving forward together. 🇪🇺🇧🇬"

This is cool, someone created a Github repo for the Unix operating system, and added its original programmers as GH users, so it looks like they made "commits" to that Unix repo starting from the 70s..

"Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today"

[-]

Leonid Levin: "There are many problems with [quantum computers]. For instance, thermal isolation cannot be perfect. Tiny backgrounds of neutrinos, gravitational waves, and other exotics, cannot be shielded. Their effects on quantum amplitudes need not satisfy the restrictions on which error-correcting tools depend. Moreover, nondissipative computing gates, even classical, remain a speculation. Decades past, their existence was cheerfully proclaimed and even proved for worlds where the laws of physical interaction can be custom-designed. In our world, where the electromagnetic interaction between electrons, nuclei, and photons is about the only one readily available, circuits producing less entropy than computing remain hypothetical. So, low temperatures have limits and even a tiny amount of heat can cause severe decoherence problems. Furthermore, the uncontrollable degrees of freedom need not behave simply as heat. Interaction with the intricately correlated q-bits may put them in devilish states capable of conspiracies which defy imagination...

All such problems, however, are peanuts. The major problem is the requirement that basic quantum equations hold to multi-hundredth if not millionth decimal positions where the significant digits of the relevant quantum amplitudes reside. We have never seen a physical law valid to over a dozen decimals. Typically, every few new decimal places require major rethinking of most basic concepts. Are quantum amplitudes still complex numbers to such accuracies or do they become quaternions, colored graphs, or sick-humored gremlins? I suspect physicists would doubt even the laws of arithmetic pushed that far. In fact, we know that the most basic laws cannot all be correct to hundreds of decimals: this is where they stop being consistent with each other!"

Clancy was a total Reagan bootlicker. According to his telling he owes his success to him, Ronald read The Hunt for Red October, recommended it and TC shot to fame almost overnight. Clancy as we know was the master of the "techno-thriller", his stories featured lots of gizmos most of which of course was used by the military. Weapons manufacturers must have salivated over every new Clancy publication.

Tom Clancy's 1994 Debt of Honor was likely influenced by the previous decade too.

Trade imbalances create animosity.. Japan was 80s' China, and there was a lot of animosity towards them too. There was the fear that Japan was "buying up stuff", the 1992 novel Rising Sun captures the era. 1987 some Rep Congressmen smashed a Toshiba w/ sledgehammers due to some allegation the company was selling to Soviets.. Crazy times. The Thucydides Trap does not explain such situations well.

Reuters: "Oil tankers still arriving in Venezuela despite US blockade, data shows"

The story is kind of like Dune isn't it? The forest instead of the desert? Or Tarzan, forest dwellers instead of gorillas? A former noble falls from grace, starts "slumming it" among thieves / apes / desert fremen? Are we seeing the same story over and over again?

Hopefully there is no hidden anti Europe propaganda buried in the story. Normans were from mainland Europe after all.

Ah they have a lady who is "spirited", as the show calls it, she is this show's Lena Headey. She had a doggy. It is Game of Thrones.

Add Lena Headey, some doggy, you basically have Game of Thrones.

I like the historical backdrop of the new Robin Hood TV show. This story usually begins with the hero already in the forest, doing his thing.. But according to this more detailed backdrop, Hood's father is from the displaced Saxon elite, he was displaced because the Norman invasion. The father, a former noble, is made a "forester" (a huge demotion), he manages the place, the new king's property, that would give the kid a logical reason to be in and out of the "Sherwood" forest, working towards his new status as the "prince of thieves".

The new take makes more sense, even if a RH did or did not truly live. Robin Hood's later "robbing the rich give to the poor" acts will have more urgency to them now because surely they will be robbing the "new royalty", the invader Normans, and giving the money to the natives, Saxons. They picked the perfect token Norman, Sean Bean.

RU is taking bigger and bigger chunks now.. They are even advancing south of Vovchansk. The pocket around Myrnohrad finally closed.

#Ukraine 2025/12/18 - 2026/01/01

[-]