Week 8

The American Conservative: "War on Iran Is the Opposite of ‘Realism’"

Politico: "Trump signs order imposing ‘temporary’ 10 percent global tariff after Supreme Court ruling.. The tariff, issued under a different authority than the one the Supreme Court just struck down, can last for 150 days."

Politico: "Republicans quietly celebrate the demise of tariffs. That relief might not last... Many in the GOP, especially those in battleground states, are happy to see the blanket tariffs go in a heated election year. Trump has already pledged to bring them back."

Should the executive have the ability to set tariffs? Yes.

#LLM #Bitar

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Politico: "Nearly half of America’s neighbors to the north now think the U.S. is a bigger threat to world peace than Russia."

The Telegraph: "Starmer blocks Trump from using RAF bases to strike Iran"

"@Geri@mastodon.online

Breaking. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office

Oh dear!"

The Register: "European Parliament bars lawmakers from using AI tools.. According to Politico, staff were notified that AI features on corporate devices (including tablets) were disabled because the IT department could not guarantee data security."

NBC News: "Middle-class Americans are selling plasma to keep up with rising costs"

In a previous post we saw Andersen mentioning the "New Democrats", Brown and Tsongas.. The New Labour in UK was the carbon copy of the New Democrats, notice even the naming is the same. These f--ers always arrive in pairs, Thatcher/Reagan, Clinton/Blair. The rest of the world watches like gaping fish and tries to copy them, as US/UK are trendsetters.

Why not simply surrender? The cultures are "similar", Anglo-Europe based, why bother to fight? Actually Canadian cultures codes are different.. and the political systems, citizen - government relations differ in ways that could compel people to resist. Free marketism spread everywhere including Canada but they would be invaded by a specific, and arguably the most disgusting form of it coming from the south, enough could think they have something to fight for.

Tanks go against tanks, Canada doesn't have a lot of those, they have bunch of moose.

It's smart actually.. why fight US conventionally, with the massive land border between you and them the most powerful military in the world could bring massive resources to that fight... You don't fight fire with fire, you allow them in, but later fight your own battle.

Unbelievable.. Canada is preparing an insurgency style response to a hypothetical US invasion, they are officially training for it. Would we see a replay of post 2003 Iraq but this time in Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec? It won't be a Hassan, Said setting up those IEDs, but William, Jack, or Henry.

"@jonathanhogg@mastodon.social

My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.

I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid...

We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages.. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel."

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information.

For some reason it hasn’t put out a security advisory - but instead buried it in a service alert which isn’t publicly visible."

"The entire AI industry is just 243 lines of math and a trillion dollars of marketing"

"@mralancooper@hachyderm.io

I find myself squirming with discomfort every time I hear someone mention the 'tech' world. It seems to me that what used to be the 'tech' world is now just a tiny tech pimple on the giant elephant's ass of the financial/capital world. Sure there's tech in that stuff, but there's also hospitality and facilities and accounting and HR. This is particularly true after the big layoffs of the past few years. Call it what it is: The Oligarch world, not the 'tech world.'"

MS started to break its own codebase because they rely more on LLMs? It is hard to believe but Tadella Nutella keeps pushing this shit at all levels that their internal coding might have started to suffer..

#Broken

Link

"Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal". Who said that?

Surprise surprise, businesses want cheap exploitable slave labor

WSJ: "Mass Deportations Sabotage the Economy"

via @MikeDunnAuthor@kolektiva.social

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CNBC: "Fed officials split on where interest rates should go, minutes say"

PC Gamer: "Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in 'AI slop' code contributions: 'I don't know how long we can keep it up'.. Projects like Godot are being swamped by contributors who may not even understand the code they're submitting."

Politico: "Tom Steyer is telling union leaders in California that he’d back a special election to raise corporate taxes in his first year as governor, as he tries to solidify his claim to the progressive lane in a crowded Democratic field."

ABC News: "Bernie Sanders and Gavin Newsom become adversaries over push to tax California billionaires.. Sanders is coming to Los Angeles to campaign for a proposed 'billionaires tax' that has set off an uproar in the Silicon Valley and led to divisions among Democrats"

Newsflash - billionaire is against taxing billionaires

Bloomberg: "Sergey Brin-Backed PAC Pushes to Counter California Billionaire Tax"

Politico: "A multi-pronged campaign to undercut the proposed one-time, 5 percent levy took a significant step forward Tuesday.. 'California is the world’s fourth-largest economy and a global center of innovation,' spokesperson Abby Lunardini said in a statement. 'Yet, for decades, it has become increasingly hard for working families and businesses to live, grow, and thrive here. Between skyrocketing costs, a housing crisis, and some of the country’s highest taxes — with less and less to show for it, the California dream is drifting out of reach for many'"

Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: "In the 1988 primary, Jesse Jackson ran as a full-on leftist, calling for single-payer healthcare, free community college, a big federal jobs program, and the cancellation of Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich—and by sweeping the black South and winning everywhere among voters under thirty, he beat Joe Biden and Gore and came in second to Dukakis, but…he was never going to be nominated... In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically center-right party. There was no organized, viable national economic left in the vicinity of power"

Jesse Jackson, RIP

Robert Close: "Recent experimental and theoretical work has demonstrated that many phenomena previously thought to be in the exclusive realm of quantum mechanics can actually be realized via classical physics.. The discovery of a classical interpretation of spin angular momentum evolving according to a Dirac-type equation further lessens the distinction between classical and quantum physics..

Despite the probabilistic nature of measurements, the quantum mechanical Dirac equation is fundamentally a deterministic equation describing the evolution of physical quantities such as spin density, momentum density, and energy density. These quantities are independent of any interpretation of the wave function as representing a 'particle'..

A fundamental principle of analysis is that one should strive to understand simple systems before attempting to analyze more complex systems. Rather than attempting to describe elementary particles and their interactions, we instead use simple examples of plane waves to demonstrate how terms in the Dirac equation relate to a specific classical physical model..

Conclusions: Classical spin density waves in an ideal elastic solid are modeled by a nonlinear vector wave equation in which temporal changes of spin density are entirely attributable to convection, rotation, and torque. A compatible nonlinear Dirac equation is also derived"

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I dont think this guy understands what it takes to write complex software like an OS or a compiler. For number crunching, of the type he does, complexity lies in its sci computational aspects, not in the overall architecture, data structures.

Astrophysics guy says oh shit all my collegues are enamoured by LLM code generation, even the best ones say it is better than personal code.

Yeah but academics are not great coders.. They knock out proof-of-concept stuff usually not production-ready work.

"@sturmsucht@mastodon.social

So, I started to volunteer in our local community centre to help (mostly) elder people with their computer and smartphone problems...

We remove ad ID's from phones, change default browsers, switch from MS Office to #Libreoffice.

And for next time I already have a date with an elder lady to switch her old Windows 10 laptop to Linux Mint.

And she is not the only one!

What a time to be alive."

"@geoff_eg@mastodon.social

I jumped to #linuxmint and I've been very very happy. None of the AI garbage, none of these silly design choices. It just works."

"@lrhodes@merveilles.town

Gen AI is an expensive way to create text and images. Right now, much of that cost is being subsidized and hidden, but it will eventually need to be paid. Because charging the actual cost will likely negate most of the value proposition of genAI, the companies that run the big models are focused on altering the social and economic context so that there are big external costs to opting out. E.g. getting companies to fire staff makes it difficult to pivot back away from AI because hiring and training replacement staff can be difficult and costly. Hence, the huge rush and hysterical sense of urgency around adoption: the demand for profitability is an approaching tidal wave, and they need to lock entire industries in before that wave hits.

That's why resistance IN THE PRESENT counts for a great deal. Right now, we have the approaching wave in our favor, and they're counting on cultivating enough dependence before it hits that we'll have no choice to accept the actual costs. The closer they get to locking society into dependence on hyperscale AI systems, the more difficult it becomes to opt out of even the plainly dystopian uses of the technology. And the longer we "wait and see," the less say we may ultimately have in how this technology shapes our society."

I find that the area that trips up LLMs most is financial time series analysis.. Because there aren't enough Stackoverflow monkeys talking about that? (which "AI" consumes as input). After a while our chat sessions devolve into me proposing ideas and LLM just repeating them back to me. It has especially huge issues finding time series data that is easy to locate with a few searches. I've seen cases when LLM would say "the series you need is on FRED through URL blah" and you check, blah is not there.

Generating inefficient code is perhaps the biggest downside

Reddit: "Anthropic built a C compiler [in Rust] with a 'team of parallel agents', has problems compiling hello world...

• It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to [open source, human written] GCC..

• It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo video was produced with a GCC assembler and linker.

• The compiler successfully builds many projects, but not all. It's not yet a drop-in replacement for a real compiler.

• The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

• The Rust code quality is reasonable, but is nowhere near the quality of what an expert Rust programmer might produce"

For the Gibbs sampling based recommender code I started with vibe, had to issue more than a few additional prompts to make the code look somewhat structured, not slop-like, then I threw out the vide code rewrote the whole thing myself.

Fast Company: "A dispute between AI company Anthropic and the Pentagon over how the military can use the company’s technology has now gone public. Amid tense negotiations, Anthropic has reportedly called for limits on two key applications: mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Department of Defense.. wants the freedom to use the technology without those restrictions."

That year again, 1973, when things turned from bad to worse.. US bet on inefficient nuclear tech to please its military industrial complex and lost out on decades of free energy.

"[1973/01] Oak Ridge National Lab was directed by the Atomic Energy Commision to terminate all development of the molten salt reactor"

Is this true? Americans are indoctrinated on capitalism at a young age?

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CNBC: "Iran partially closes Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil choke point, as Tehran holds talks with U.S."

"@Geri@mastodon.online

#PalestineAction

#BDS

Does direct action work?

Well, yes!

Scotiabank's 1832 Asset Management subsidiary has dissolved its stake in Israeli arms manufacturer #Elbit Systems ESLT.TA, ESLT.O, regulatory filings showed, after the Canadian bank faced sharp criticism for the investment.

The investment arm no longer holds shares in Elbit, a change from its reported holding of about 165,000 shares in November, according to the filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday"

Politico: "For more than a decade, Kevin Warsh has advocated reining in the Federal Reserve’s pivotal role in the nation’s financial markets... Warsh has bemoaned the Fed’s purchase of trillions of dollars in U.S. government debt and bundled mortgages after both the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic, a process that kept longer-term interest rates down to boost the economy and flooded banks with cash reserves.

That policy, he says, has distorted the market and enriched Wall Street rather than ordinary Americans by propping up stocks and bonds, which are overwhelmingly owned by the wealthy."

CNBC: "xAI faces threat of NAACP lawsuit over pollution in Mississippi"

I knew I recognized the safe cracker guy from somewhere.. He was on Army of Thieves, playing the same role.. It is supposed to be the prequel to the zombie movie..? It was just a regular heist flick.

#ArmyofTheDead started like a Michael Bay movie, some fun, action with the promise of more, but its indoor scenes killed it, it lost its expansiveness. The grind clouded character development.

"Easy peasy Japanesey", funny #ArmyofTheDead

#Robotics #BostonDynamics The imitation learning stuff is good.. But the applications are still too focused on one thing.. it ain't general enough, the expert admitted as much at the end.

[-]

Al Monitor: "Iran said on Monday that the United States's position on Iran's nuclear programme 'has moved towards a more realistic one', a day ahead of a second round of US-Iranian talks in Geneva"

"It smells like.. victory"

Link

Robert Duvall RIP

NYT: "Canada Gives U.S. Arms Makers the Cold Shoulder on Military Spending"

IC: "How 3 local BDS campaigns won the divestment of millions in Israeli bonds.. Under pressure from local divestment campaigns, US states and municipalities that underwrote the genocide in Gaza are selling off Israeli bonds."

Politico: "[RFK Jr] turned his agencies toward skepticism of processed food and vaccines, but he’s faced pushback at every turn — including from Republicans... Upon being sworn in as Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy launched a Make America Healthy Again Commission to explore the poor state of American children’s health and ways to improve it.

[Kennedy said] that America’s corn production relied on glyphosate, the world’s most commonly used herbicide... Seven years before, in his prior career as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy had sued the pesticide’s manufacturer, winning a multi-million dollar judgment for his client: a groundskeeper who said glyphosate had given him cancer.

[T]he White House released the commission’s report.. [the] document asserted that children suffer more from chronic diseases and behavioral disorders than any previous generation, with their diets a likely culprit... saying [glyphosate] and another herbicide, atrazine, were present in the blood of children and pregnant women at 'alarming levels.'"

Sirota: "In an appearance at the Munich Security Conference that has the chattering classes buzzing about a 2028 presidential bid, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] channeled Roosevelt’s warning. She suggested that her party had betrayed working-class politics, and that ending such betrayals are required to stave off the continued march toward authoritarianism"

#Reshare

TAC: "[W]hen the Palm Beach police handed [Democratic district attorney, Krischer] a child sex ring implicating Epstein, a major Democratic donor, Krischer intentionally tanked the case."

#Sorensen #Weinberg

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They are still using the wrong technology, but now in smaller scale. See Thorium. The advances needed in nuclear tech are not one of size, it is for a different kind. But I believe too many vested, commercial for-profit interests are pushing the old tech, they simply dress it up in new packaging.

Firstpost: "US airlifts micro nuclear reactor from California to Utah in first deployment test.. Concerns remain over radioactive waste. Lyman noted that even small generators produce significant quantities of waste."

#Ukraine 01/31 - 02/16

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Paper: "AIs have made rapid progress on research-oriented benchmarks of knowledge and reasoning, but it remains unclear how these gains translate into economic value and automation. To measure this, we introduce the Remote Labor Index (RLI), a broadly multi-sector benchmark comprising real-world, economically valuable projects designed to evaluate end-to-end agent performance in practical settings. AI agents perform near the floor on RLI, with the highest-performing agent achieving an automation rate of 2.5%. These results help ground discussions of AI automation in empirical evidence, setting a common basis for tracking AI impacts and enabling stakeholders to proactively navigate AI-driven labor automation."

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#LLMpilled #LeCun

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"People will remember you like we remember the bosses who told radium girls it was safe to lick the radioactive glowing paint"

"You're an absolute clown. Please stop embarrassing yourself further."

The bot was flamed on the comment section too.. it is hilarious

Reddit: "Slop pull request is rejected, so slop author instructs slop AI agent to write a slop blog post criticising it as unfair"

A Github "pull request" submitted by a bot.. PR's are code change requests, a coder makes a change on their branch, and asks the change to be merged into the mainline. In this case the change was done by a bot.

It was denied, the project does not accept non-human code, then the owner of the bot made the bot write a blog post about how it was discriminated against 😂

[-]

#Reshare

TAC: "Palm Beach’s Democratic district attorney, Krischer spent years going after Rush Limbaugh for pain pills—raiding drugstores, seizing records, and leaking information—before finally dropping all charges. But when the Palm Beach police handed him a child sex ring implicating Epstein, a major Democratic donor, Krischer intentionally tanked the case."

"@Victor@spore.social

Arizona State University is testing technology to repurify and #recycle heavily #contaminated #industrial #wastewater. Using advanced #membranefiltration, the technology can handle water even more contaminated than seawater, creating a potential closed-loop system where nearly every drop of industrial wastewater is reused."

DW: "US orders another aircraft carrier to the Middle East"