Week 23
The Journal Record: "A new documentary from The Frontier and ProPublica exposes a growing environmental crisis in Oklahoma: oil field wastewater seeping uncontrollably into communities across the state, contaminating land and drinking water for residents who often have no idea it is happening.
Reporter Nick Bowlin investigates how decades of oil and gas production have generated hundreds of billions of gallons of toxic wastewater, which energy companies dispose of by injecting it back underground under high pressure. Across Oklahoma, that fluid is spreading through old, unplugged wells and into places it was never supposed to reach.
About half of all Oklahomans live within a mile of an oil and gas operation."
#Palantir
Zizek vs Jordanson Peterson - great line by Zizek, you can't fix the ills of a grander system by just focusing on self, fixing your little corner. If the system is rigged against a group of ppl, those people are screwed. Period.
It says "I want to believe". I remember in The Matrix (an anti-government psyop) the hero becomes "The One" when he believes he is the one, or at least, he believes he can do something then he does it and he becomes what he believes... You see? The act of believing is more important than what is believed in.. This is likely a subconcious cultural precept which can be weaponized by "evildoers". "Believe" in something no matter what, while you are trying, trying, in that "get rich or die trying" mindset, they buy up all the assets while you are happily unaware in your comotose state.
UFO interest is a while-collar, upper middle-class obsession. If you are well off, this shit is what you "think about" to pass time, you do not have other worries in life.
Powers that be must like alien, UFO conspiracy stories to fester, they divert attention from income inequality, wealth distribution imbalance and how actually they are running America. If such movies were not useful, they would not exist. UFOlogy at its core is a psyop. They know it, politicians know it. Notice the speed Trump wheeled it out when the subject was useful for him, to distract attention
A new movie on aliens.. Does it add new information to the discussion, or does it glorify one still unproven viewpoint via colorful storytelling, and visual effects? The creator is just a director, why should we value his take more than someone else?
"In 1993, Democrats in Congress were attempting to rein in the Federal Reserve by making it more accountable and transparent. Those efforts were led by the chair of the House Banking Committee, the late Henry B. Gonzalez, who warned that the Fed was creating a giant casino economy, a house of cards, a 'monstrous bubble.' But such calls for regulation and transparency fell on deaf ears in the Clinton White House and Treasury."
BC admin was the catalyst for that bubble
Looking at price-to-earnings for SP 500, the "Bill Clinton Bubble" also known as dot-com bubble of 1995-2000 was worse than the bubble today. When the current bubble reaches those levels, it will be time to worry, if not sooner.
"Aw but some presidents were tougher on Benjo Mellonhead bro". It doesn't matter who is tougher on who. Personnel is policy, if you manuever the right people into position, whatever their little disagreement might be, they will fall in line when the important issues arise. Clinton, or Obama could be little tougher in style, then voila, in 2016 a $38 billion MOU was signed for Israel military aid.
MIC / corporate complex always has the right people in position. I'm pretty sure they eliminated Yitzhak Rabin, opening a pathway for Netanyahoo, for the military-industrial-Likud complex. Now you got your jagoff, he is known to act a certain way, you don't have to dictate to him this or that, or him on someone else, the landscape is set.
In a "one circle" F-22 would be better.. It has a smaller turn radius bcz of trust vectoring.
A fighter pilot (R. Bodenheimer) says he can go up against any other plane in an F-16. That sounds crazy at first, there are fifth gen planes out there, and F-16 is an older model, but he has a point. F-16 has excellent turning rate, so in a two circle fight (where two planes cross, turn in different directions -forming two circles-, then turn back towards eachother as fast as possible) F-16 truly has an advantage.. I just watched a simulation, an F-16 actually downed an F-22 in a two circle. F-16 is able to put all its energy into turning without losing speed.
Power Magazine: "[03/02] China achieved a significant fuel cycle milestone with its TMSR-LF1 thorium molten-salt reactor—a 2-MWth prototype built by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics.. The reactor reached first criticality on Oct. 11, 2023, and achieved full power by June 2024. In October 2024, SINAP scientists performed the world’s first addition of thorium fuel to a working molten-salt reactor (MSR), creating a platform for thorium-uranium fuel cycle research... And one year later, in November 2025, SINAP announced that TMSR-LF1 had successfully bred uranium-233 from thorium"
The commodization of the Unix operating system took 30 years... Created in 1973 the know-how on it spread, spread and a grad student in Finland implemented a popular version, mid 2000s cloud services were offering it as a service. LLMs in their final form came into being in 2018, it took a mere 8 years for the same process.
LLM tech is in its commodization phase. The technology is not improving anymore, so now it's a known quantity which can be measured, deployed, priced. Commodity means free solutions will multiply, see LLMs from China, and Google making Gemma freely available. Scalers will benefit as the core product is now blasé. Potential beneficiaries: Google is one, Amazon is another if it develops or embraces one sufficiently advanced LLM (Meta could be a third, but I hear their LLM department has gone haywire). Anthropic, OpenAI do not have scaling experience, I started seeing more and more system failures from the two, they might not survive into the next phase which is horizontal spread.
It's all about balance in the end. High trade deficits are bad for the deficit country. Massively overpriced financial assets are bad for that country's middle class and foreign countries. Wealth distribution imbalance within a country is bad for overall living standards.
Exorbitant US asset prices, esp. financial, likely have a negative effect on the developing world with high trade imbalance. Such countries need dollars, so they have to offer interest rates equal or above the best US financial asset to pull dollars to themselves. As US assets become overpriced, their IR has to be high as well.. But high IR can dampen growth, pushing imbalances even higher creating a death spiral.
In The Grey, it was confusing at first, started with long exposition in the beginning, movies of this type usually have that at the end, but the pace keeps the viewer's attention, and it pays off. Good movie overall.
Rosenthal: "This is just a brief post to explain to my old boss, Eric Schmidt, why he and his ilk are getting booed at college commencements, and why laws against data centers are getting passed... the perpetrators of this [wealth] theft are telling their victims, the students and the public at large, that whether they like it or not they will be subjected to AI because that will make the perpetrators even richer. The victims have been informed that this new technology will:
- Nudify their images.
- Leak their passwords.
- Increase their utility bills.
- Consume their scarce water resources.
- Coerce state and local governments into providing many billions of dollars a year in tax breaks.
- Force them to invest their 401Ks and index funds in an obvious bubble.
- Eventually require a taxpayer bailout.
- Eliminate their jobs.
- Render their expensively acquired skills worthless.
- Be so expensive that only the rich can use it.
- Destroy democracy.
- Accelerate global warming.
- Encourage them to commit murder and suicide.
- Autonomously target them with drones.
- Possibly even end humanity.
- Add glue to their pizza."
Aw shit
CNBC: "Blackstone restricts flagship fund withdrawals"
March 2000 bubble burst, November people voted. The bad look could've helped shift votes in Reps' favor.
The earlier spike is the dot-com bubble, burst in March 2000, during the presidency of you-know-who.
After 2008 the US shifted to another "regime" that lasted until today. This bubble too will burst.
Schiller market price / earnings ratio - it's high and getting higher.
Science Daily: "Researchers at the University of Birmingham developed a perovskite-based catalyst that splits water into hydrogen at much lower temperatures than existing technologies, potentially allowing factories, steel plants, cement works, and renewable energy sites to turn waste heat into valuable hydrogen."
Maybe they are looking for living accomadations there, "apartment hunting", since the wealthy made above ground impossible to afford.
WaPo: "Mystery people keep emerging from NYC manholes. Here’s what we know... The string of sewer episodes has baffled New Yorkers and spurred speculation online about what the subterranean explorers are doing underground."
The Lever: "Data Centers’ New Deep-Pocketed Champion: The Kochs.. A Koch network-backed dark money front group is popping up across mainstream media as a new defender of the artificial intelligence buildout."
Great idea
CNBC: "Finland's president says EU should expand to 40 states — including Canada"
CNBC: "SoftBank’s OpenAI bet and rising debt are raising liquidity crunch concerns"
"@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place
i want smaller applications with fewer updates made by people who are paid more to produce less code and i'm not kidding"
Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: "[US aided state repression is part of the] familiar conditions of life in US domains; Colombian state terror is beyond the norm, but other clients are expected to act the same way when circumstances warrant, and regularly do. In the case of Colombia, the Kennedy Administration escalated the standard procedures, helping establish more firmly the regime of state terror as part of its general program of reinforcing the apparatus of repression throughout Latin America...
The president of the Colombian human rights commission is reviewing facts familiar throughout Latin America. Military-controlled National Security states dedicated to 'internal security' by assassination, torture, disappearance, and sometimes mass murder, constituted one of the two major legacies of the Kennedy Administration to Latin America, the other being the Alliance for Progress, a statistical success and social catastrophe (apart from foreign investors and domestic elites)."
"But if everyone accepted the Turk identity it would have worked". But you could say that about any broken ideology, couldn't you? "If everyone acted in the way Y worked, Y would have worked". The argument is all circular. It was the founders' job to make their -ism, -ity fit the natural order of things, so the gulf between the real and the manufactured was not too wide. They failed to do that.
Yes the very presence of a "Turk Party" indicates this identity failed to become a unifying force for the entirety of Asia Minor, self-described "Turks" reduced to being just another minority, "a small interest group" within the larger population. This is why I keep stressing the point, Anatolians had to find a more unifying story, an identity that managed the state / citizen relations better. All nationalistic identities are constructed / made up, but some do a better job the game play than others. Didn't an Italian President d'Azelglio say "we have created Italy, now we have to create the Italians"? They did create the Italians, and their labeling matched their culture. Asia Minor's culture (which is 10k years old, based on all religions, ethnicities of the land) is not compatible with its current identity. This is why Balkanization is happening today, this is why the country is turning into Lebanon.
A TR court ruling brought back the previous leader of the opposition party, an ineffectual, "low energy" leader, a loser, part of the ongoing lawfare initiated by the ruling party to bury its opposition without bothering with elections. Some started to speculate, the returning leader is Alevite, and maybe a foreign backed scheme wants Asia Minor to become like Lebanon. The opposition party is reduced to being "the Alevite party" after the change, the ruling AK is already the "Sunni Party", the Kurds are being elevated to a whole new seperate Balkanized identity themselves, and through their leader Ocalan they will get their votes bcz they will be the "Kurdish Party". The Turks have their party too, under the "Turk Party" MHP.
What is today called Turkey will be Balkanized, turned into Lebanon and possibly later US corporate MIC poodle Israel and its US funded band of c-ksuckers will start taking chunks out of this new Lebanon too in the name of profit.
The Lever: "The First Real Legal Challenge To Trump’s Iran War.. In a stunning House vote, lawmakers began an attempt to end the war without presidential approval — creating conditions for a potentially historic legal showdown."
Politico: "Iran vote caps Trump’s congressional losing streak.. The House vote to halt the Iran war, while largely symbolic, further stymies the administration's political priorities during a week where the GOP has already scuttled several of the president’s goals."
TDB: "Trump Hit With Huge Blow as Republicans Turn Against His War"
"@drahardja@sfba.social
I am asking people once again to stop describing #AI using human words and attributes.
AI doesn’t answer—it extrudes plausible output that happens to be right.
AI doesn’t hallucinate—it extrudes plausible output that happens to be wrong.
AI doesn’t have agency—it extrudes plausible output that is consumed by a computer program.
AI doesn’t think—it extrudes plausible output that is fed back into itself for another round.
AI doesn’t create—it extrudes a mixture of its training data."
"@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green
Erin Brockovich says people are angry because data centers are being 'shoved down their throats' in secrecy
'We've made the decision that being transparent with the communities where we operate or seek to operate is paramount,' Microsoft said.
Rank, cynical hypocrisy. They were forced to be be more open. The entire strategy of Big Tech is to tell local communities as little as possible. Get in quick before anyone can object."
Hedgeye: "Rule changes for the SpaceX $SPCX IPO:
Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5.
This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations.
Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S&P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within 6 months.
Russell 1000 and Nasdaq 100 funds will absorb 24%.
The rules built to protect passive investors:
-
S&P 500 has required 12 months of trading and 4 quarters of GAAP profitability since 2002. Both waived.
-
Nasdaq cut its inclusion window from 90 trading days to 15.
-
FTSE Russell cut its to 5.
All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing."
"The following is not allowed in [our FOSS project] postmarketOS:
- Submitting contributions fully or in part created by generative AI tools to postmarketOS.
- Recommending generative AI tools to other community members for solving problems in the postmarketOS space.
AI tools have several ethical issues. They require an unreasonable amount of energy and water to build and operate, their models are built in part with heavily exploited workers in unacceptable working conditions, usually without consent from or compensation for creators of the source material and oftentimes causing DDoS attacks against FOSS infrastructure in the process (which in turn force the deployment of challenge-based protections and increase cost and complexity of self-hosting for everybody). Furthermore they are being used to undermine labor and justify layoffs. These are harms that we do not want to perpetuate, even if only indirectly."
"Everytime you prompt the AI has to re-injest the entire conversation up to that point."
A new NYT article for women says "there's nothing wrong with wanting men". 😂 Wokesters messed things up so badly now stating the obvious is some kind of revelation. NYT: Sky Is Blue. NYT: The Pope is Catholic.
"@rysiek@mstdn.social
I need people to understand that stuff like this will keep happening, for two reasons:
-
To be useful these chatbots need to have full access to everything they are supposed to "manage"; otherwise they are pointless.
-
Trying to stop prompt injection is basically trying to semantically filter natural language.
These tools have no model of the world, no ontology to anchor any 'safety instructions' in. There will always be a way to talk one's way around them."
"Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox"
The No AI URL is at https://noai.duckduckgo.com
"DuckDuckGo’s No AI search tool reports huge traffic growth as Google pushes AI results"
Ha
"@xinicit@beige.party
So tired of blacking out every full moon when I really want to stay up and help the townsfolk hunt for the werewolf"
"@fribbledom@mastodon.social
GitHub Copilot got 25x more expensive over night.
I just felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of low-effort PRs suddenly cried out and were silenced.
Maintainers worldwide breathe a sigh of relief. Businesses are about to wake up to some very interesting invoices."
404 Media: "Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked"
Baez, Zucman, NYT: "On taxes and much else, California has often led the country. In 1978 the state’s voters approved Proposition 13, which strongly limited tax increases. Prop 13 was the opening salvo in Ronald Reagan’s antitax revolution, which swept the United States two years later.
This year California’s voters could spearhead a shift in the opposite direction. A large labor union representing health care workers and advised by academic experts — including the two of us — got the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act on this November’s ballot. The proposed tax would be a one-time levy of 5 percent on billionaire wealth, spread over five years. If the measure passes, it would be the first tax targeted at the combined personal and business wealth of billionaires enacted anywhere in the world."
"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
I think part of the reason Anthropic (who today confirmed they are trying to IPO), OpenAI (who are trying to IPO) and SpaceX (who own xAI) are trying to IPO is they know it’s a gold rush and investors don’t really know what they are doing - neither do businesses and banks - so it’s the ideal opportunity to lock in money and keep the train going.
Choo choo! Governments may end up bailing this out as it’s becoming too big to fail, by design."
Politico: "California is drowning in internet campaign ‘slop.’ 2028 is next... AI ads and influencer payments flooding California’s spring primaries are a likely glimpse into the next presidential race."
There are claims RU can take Kiev anytime they wanted, but are hesitant fearing that will invite NATO into Western Ukraine. So they have been "slicing the salami" so to speak, taking smaller chunks, winning slowly without provoking anyone excessively. Ukraine might be acting similarly, not to provoke a nuclear adversary, so they are "slicing the salami" too while defending, at least until recently. It's a theory.
#Ukraine - 05/22 - 06/02
IC: "How Israel’s War Crimes are Coming Home.. Opposition voices—initially led by Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid party—began demanding Netanyahu's resignation and snap elections"
JFK was one stupid son of a bitch. No wonder Bill Clinton idolized the man
Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: "A[s] JFK took over in 1961, 'the U.S. had in addition provided military capabilities such as helicopters and tactical air support' by January 1962, following Kennedy’s authorization of USAF Farmgate operations in October... US escalation led to 'a noticeable improvement,' Hilsman wrote. In particular, 'the helicopters were grand... Roaring in over the treetops, they were a terrifying sight to the superstitious Viet Cong peasants,' who 'simply turned and ran,' becoming 'easy targets.' Kennedy also authorized the use of napalm, which particularly delighted MACV Commander General Paul Harkins; asked about the consequences of napalming villages, he replied that it 'really puts the fear of God into the Viet Cong.'..
It was not long before State Department intelligence transmitted reports 'that indiscriminate bombing in the countryside is forcing innocent or wavering peasants toward the Viet Cong' and that over 100,000 Montagnards had fled VC-controlled areas, in part because of 'The extensive use of artillery and aerial bombardment and other apparently excessive and indiscriminate measures by GVN military and security forces,' which have 'undoubtedly killed many innocent peasants and made many others more willing than before to cooperate with the Viet Cong'"
In physics there is a fantastic researcher Lee Smolin (he's been arguing his profession has lost its way, suggesting alternatives etc), if you read the glowing praises he wrote for Epstein in one of his books it would make you cry. And this guy is nowhere in the vicinity of any politics, business, or power. Just a resarcher.
Chomsky, Epstein.. I would not make a big deal out of that relationship. The f-ker ingratiated himself into many places, some good people got mixed up with the bad.. In many cases the good ones explained away the first guilty charge with "relationship with a 17.5 year old (in the ballpark of his first guilty verdict language)" and ignored what followed afterwards, chalking it up to overzealous persecutors.
Finkelstein has been fighting Zionists for decades. Everyone should watch the "crocodile tears" video.
#JFK #Finkelstein
McGrann: "When value is generated by AI systems owned by a handful of corporations already world-class at tax optimization, every fiscal mechanism of democratic governance starves at once. The tax base erodes. Collective bargaining becomes vestigial (employers who don’t need employees don’t bargain with them). Consumer spending, which depends on labor income, contracts. Piketty’s $r > g$, the engine of wealth concentration, accelerates because AI severs the last link between capital accumulation and the need for human labor as a production input. Without redistribution, as one analysis of the framework put it, 'approximately everything will eventually belong to those who are wealthiest when the transition occurs.'
And the public funded the research that made it possible. The transformer architecture, large-scale training methods, semiconductor advances—all of these were publicly or quasi-publicly funded through universities, DARPA, and national labs. The public bore the risk. Private companies captured the reward. This is blindingly common across technological advancement in the last sixty years. As Mazzucato puts it, 'AI risks becoming another engine of rent extraction rather than value creation.' We subsidized the revolution and are now being told to accept displacement as the cost of progress that someone else profits from."
It won't be a nightmare if Mélenchon wins
Politico: "Brussels’ nightmare French election scenario risks coming true: Bardella vs. Mélenchon.. The far right and far left are on the march, while France's imploding centrists are busy fighting each other."
"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
If anybody is wondering how this keeps happening, Google pull their AI output from Reddit. Somebody posted a Reddit thread saying days have fish in them, so now Google replies saying that. Google just blindly trusts any poster on Reddit (not a joke)."
"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
GenAI is going great (this is real)"
Little history on modern LLMs below... Kyunghyun Cho is one of the key characters, Bengio is another. The underlying Attention approach was proposed by Dzmitry Bahdanau, Cho latched onto the idea provided guidance. Their version used recurrent neural nets, a Google paper later proposed RNNs were not necessary. AFAIK Sutskever was the first to recognize scale would make a difference on this architecture, which he showed in OpenAI (it was a non-profit back then).
All this research, proof-of-concept was done either in universities or a non-profit. Google wrote an important paper but did not act on it, I guess the more you become a for-profit capitalist org the less likely you are to innovate.
#LLM #History
Jonathan Vankin: "California Defense Contracting: How the Military-Industrial Complex Shaped the State.. Over the years, many of the executives and entrepreneurs who made Silicon Valley the technological Mecca that it quickly became have at least publicly projected a disdain for defense contracting. A 'divide' reportedly opened between the military, whose lumbering procurement process could take years, and the Valley, which prided itself on a nimble and fast-moving culture of innovation. The reality is, there is no such divide, and never has been"
Kelley had problems with Rust, esp. while making changes to a large codebase. I always wondered about that, if Rust's reference ownership and other self-checking schemes would get in the way during code maintanance.
Zig is said to have all of C's strengths, none of its weaknesses. Strong claim. They also created an alternative backend for the language, Zig is not dependent on LLVM.
The inventor of the #Zig programming language Kelley on accepting #LLM code contributions.
"Microsoft keeps reinstalling Copilot, so I found a way to rip it out of Windows for good"