Week 18

The Lever: "[I]t’s time to.. do something that’s.. long overdue: reinstating the drug pricing rule imposed by.. H.W. Bush’s administration. In 1989, Bush’s National Institutes of Health asserted the power to require that medicines developed at taxpayer expense be offered to American taxpayers at a 'reasonable' price. The idea was common sense: If the public spent money to help develop a drug, the public’s return on such investment should be affordable prices for that drug. Six years later, however, the Clinton administration bowed to pharmaceutical industry lobbying and rescinded the rule."

Reddit: "'Is there a real way to shut off the Google AI overview for searches?'

'Hate this shit knowing the energy draw this uses feels like everytime I google something I'm shooting a flaming arrow into the amazon'

'I'm the same, it's the reason I want to turn it off. I suspect that using an extension to hide it, literally only does that, hide it, and you are still using the extra energy when you google something...'

'I googled how to turn it off, and I got the AI overview of course, and it hallucinated a ridiculous answer apparently based on the previews of the first 3 search results below it!'"

Businesses are not great places to innovate. They are the last mile in economies. They are a side show, not the real deal even though the (corporate) media presents them as such. Its people are stupider. Its values are shoddier. It lives hand-to-mouth and never has the energy to look beyond monetary returns.

Google wrote a good paper on Attention back in the day, but they did not follow through on it themselves, being a commercial organization that typically kill innovation. Google jumped on the bandwagon after the LLM approach was developed to its current state by others.

The Transformer / Attention technology that allowed the recent LLM advances rose from academia, and a non-profit org (the initial OpenAI). Only they had the bandwidth to be courageous in a new approach as they did not have to worry about monetary returns. In a purely for-profit context LLMs would cease to be. All this "AI" money making requires a non-money-making origin. Isn't that sad? What does that say about capitalism?

LLMs train almost exclusively on open source code.. Good thing someone thought that up, yes? Making humanity's work available to all... If all code was commercialized LLMs would never exist.

Where would "AI" be without open source?

Politico: "When Bernie Sanders moved last April to block a U.S. arms sale to Israel, only 14 Democratic senators joined the Vermont independent. What a difference a year makes: When Sanders objected to another Israeli arms sale this month, 39 other members of the Senate Democratic Caucus joined him - a sea change that has raised eyebrows from Washington to Jerusalem."

We ain't gonna reach "green economy" with more lithium-ion batteries, more power lines.

Would be nice if someone can come up with better designs for small / mid size needs, like cars, trucks. Electric vehicles suffer from the "lithium problem" making them unviable for the mass market.

Interesting Engineering: "China develops iron battery 80 times cheaper than lithium.. The battery prototype demonstrated endurance, maintaining a stable structure and perfect reversibility over 6,000 cycles — equivalent to more than 16 years of daily operation — with zero loss in storage capacity... The development arrives as the international race to develop iron-based flow batteries accelerates, with the technology increasingly viewed as the most viable successor to lithium-ion for large-scale grid storage"

Nature: "Can China’s Great Green Wall shape efforts to keep the world’s deserts at bay?.. Arid regions are spreading, owing to global warming. By 2100, half of Earth’s land area is expected to be dryland3, with five billion inhabitants1. And human activities such as agriculture are exacerbating problems by removing protective vegetation, compacting and degrading soil and reducing the land’s capacity to retain water.

To meet this challenge, many countries have set up large programmes to combat desertification. One of the largest is China’s Three-North Shelterbelt programme, also known as the Great Green Wall of China."

The UK paper is about to do a hat dance they are so happy.. "Russia is beaten back"!

But by whom? Well jihadis of course.. (All on their own I am sure)

The Times: "Russian forces beaten back by al-Qaeda militants in Mali"

"@therightarticle@mas.to

The neoliberal playbook in 5 steps:

1. Cut public funding until services collapse

2. Point at the collapse and say 'government doesn’t work.'

3. Sell the fix to private companies

4. Deregulate everything they touch

5. Repeat until no one remembers it was a choice"

"@WesternInfidels@mefi.social

They force-fed Copilot into Notepad:

Link

When people didn’t like that, they addressed the matter... with branding:

Link"

"@codinghorror@infosec.exchange

I am continually amazed that Microsoft managed to make notepad.exe -barely an app in the first place- WORSE. Like, A LOT WORSE. This some Ig Nobel Prize worthy bullshit."

"Each LLM version better than previous and requires more compute, so we need more hardware". Not true. "Step change" via scaling crashed into a brick wall of initial architecture choices (certain type of neural nets). From this point on, it is only cosmetic changes here and there. AGI is beyond reach with the existing architecture.

The Lever: "After the 2024 election, a schism in the Democratic Party quickly widened. The party’s corporate faction.. decided the lesson of the election wasn’t that voters were sick of an oligarch-appeasing party, but that operatives should better coordinate shadowy shell organizations and slush funds of billionaire cash to match Republicans...

Today, this simmering conflict went from muted and subtle to blatant and explicit.. Over the weekend, The Lever published a blockbuster report exposing a billionaire-funded political machine.. our reporters detail how this machine of super PACs and overlapping donors and operatives seems to be edging right up to the legal lines of anti-corruption laws prohibiting various forms of coordination between outside entities, consultants, and candidates [to supress the left]."

Futurism: "Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed"

F24: "AI is already getting boring"

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"@ketan@climatejustice.social

Knowingly using a piece of software that BY DESIGN fabricates text is not 'hallucination' - it is fraud. I'd be prosecuted if I sat down and invented references for submissions in a court case. I'd lose my job as an academic if I did the same for a paper. Someone explain why automating fraud has somehow made it completely fine and consequence-free? The very tiny remaining few of us who still give a crap about 'not lying' need to fight to bring back real consequences for fraud, fabrication"

FT: "Elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell admits to AI ‘hallucinations’"

"Is AI the next dot-com crash? | Business Beyond"

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Higham, Trading with the Enemy: "I searched in vain through books about the corporations and their histories to find any reference to questionable activities in World War II. It was clear that the authors of those volumes, granted the cooperation of the businesses concerned, predictably backed off from disclosing anything that would be revealing. To this day the bulk of Americans do not suspect The Fraternity. The government smothered everything, during and even (inexcusably) after the war. What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel?

Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the Focke-Wulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Göring's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them?"

"The Product Nobody Asked For" #MS

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"@MarkHoltom@mastodonapp.uk

Cocoa butter is expensive. To save money, companies replace it with a blend of six industrial oils. But oil doesn't taste like chocolate, so they add PGPR (polyglycerol polyricinoleate) to keep it from separating and petroleum-derived vanilla to mask the waxy taste.

Real chocolate has five ingredients or fewer. If you see 'vegetable fats,' put it back.

Now what's even worse is in the UK it's still allowed to be called chocolate as our standards for coco solids is quite low. Yet some brands like Hersheys and Reese are so low they have to be called chocolate flavoured confectionery."

"Cadburry's 'Dairy Milk' is legally banned from being called chocolate in 27 countries. Why? Because the cocoa butter was replaced with industrial oils and petroleum-derived vanilla"

Euronews: "France drops Microsoft for homegrown cloud provider for health data"

“The Iron Bank will have its due” #GameofThrones

Lebor, Tower of Basel: "Thanks to [new] research... we know that during the war years a total of 21.5 metric tons of gold passed in and out of the Reichsbank gold account at BIS, of which 13.5 metric tons was acquired during the war. Some of the new gold—much of which was looted—was used to pay the interest on the BIS’s loans and investments to Germany. Six metric tons were used to pay the Reichsbank’s debts through the BIS payments system for international railway and postal traffic, which the bank also handled...

The Belgian gold had been melted down at the Prussian Mint and stamped with false identifying numbers and dates between 1934 and 1939. About 1.6 metric tons was used by the Reichsbank to meet its BIS interest payments, as well as 2 metric tons of looted Dutch gold.

However, not all the gold melted down at the Prussian Mint originated in the vaults of national banks. The Nazis set up a network of informers and torturers, called the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK), to track down private gold holdings in occupied territories. The stated purpose of the special unit that was handpicked by SS soldiers was to control currency traffic across the Third Reich. Its actual purpose was 'the acquisition of gold by any means, including deceit and brutality,' according to British intelligence records. In Paris alone the DSK employed eighty informers, from the 'lowest levels of society to the highest circles.' Each received a 10 percent commission, as well as false identity cards and counterfeit American and British currency. Victims were lured with supposed sales of property or land. They were then arrested, beaten, and tortured to reveal how they would pay for such a purchase. The favorite interrogation method of Hugo Doose, who ran the DSK for the Channel Islands, was to break a beer glass over his victim’s head. Ludwig Jaretski, an Austrian living in Paris, 'employed burning matches on stripped victims.' Some of the BIS gold had an even more grisly origin, which came from the watches, spectacles, jewelry, and gold teeth of concentration camp victims. This was why, after the war, Emil Puhl, vice president of the Reichsbank and BIS director, would be found guilty of war crimes."

Russia is building a nuclear power plant for Asia Minor but it is old design. "The Turks" will be import-dependent on the uranium fuel. There is plenty of thorium in Anatolia.

Block, circumvent, contain.. here is a better word: cooperate. If countries treat Iran not as a donkey but a regional power, and work with them, "both state and non-state actors" will not disrupt their shit.

Pipe dream.. Good one

MEE: "'Pipe dream': Turkey's plan to redraw Middle East energy routes after Iran.. From Qatar to Saudi Arabia to Turkmenistan, Turkey dreams of overcoming the Hormuz block and becoming an energy hub

Although Turkish and Qatari leaders publicly suggested as far back as 2009 that they had agreed to build a pipeline connecting Qatar’s North Field to Turkish infrastructure through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, the scheme reportedly faced opposition from former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, under Russian pressure.

With Assad’s downfall, Turkey would like to revive the idea... Dargin pointed out that the proposed Qatar-Turkey pipeline would be vulnerable to disruption from both state and non-state actors, including Iran-aligned groups and militant organisations targeting energy infrastructure."

"America's Abandoned Reactor Just Went Live — In India"

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Al Jazeera: "India’s nuclear leap: Why its fast breeder reactor success matters.. India’s most advanced reactor has set the country on a path towards potentially cutting its dependence on uranium — and instead using the much more abundant thorium."

"India Enters Elite Nuclear Club Alongside Russia With PFBR"

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"LLMs are a Dead End"

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Another proof JFK assasination was the work of the surface state, the private complex and LBJ.

LBJ ducked, as if he knew what was happening

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