Week 29

"@brohrer@recsys.social

No one wants to get to the point where they can tell how much wildfire smoke is in the air by the specific shade of yellow that taints the sunbeams coming through the kitchen window, but here we are"

Brutal.. because it's true. Let's not cut this guy any slack. Moviemaking of this type should not be rewarded.

Damien Walter: "Nolan is the most overrated director of the century. Think of Nolan as the rich man's Michael Bay. Both specialize in IMAX spectacle, but Nolan comes packaged for a more upwardly mobile demographic. Sci-fi action blockbusters with a pattern of philosophical depth, but nothing to make it feel too much like homework. Nolan struggles as a storyteller, but he compensates for this by bolstering every story with a narrative gimmick. Time runs backwards. Memories are recompiled. Dreams within dreams. When people call Nolan movies clever, they mean clever like Sudoku. Nolan gives us logic puzzles we can feel smart for solving to cover the lack of anything to make us actually feel"

TV show Silo is Woke. Complete garbage

"@thisissethsblog@c.im

There are lots of things you can do, but it’s not clear you should... [OpenAI] chose to launch pretty good image generation, a basketball, a meme video generator (since cancelled), an upcoming speaker that actually moves around your house, and a myriad of other tools, with new ones coming all the time. A short list includes: Operator, Deep Research, Scheduled Tasks, Projects, Canvas, Connectors, famous voices and Record Mode...

At its peak, Yahoo had nearly 200 links on its home page. They were defeated by Google, which had two... More resources could mean you need more focus, not less. Innovation is critical, and focus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to hide. No is a complete sentence."

If Bandar Abbas were taken, that still doesn't remove the missile threat Iran can throw at the invaders there at will.

#5 is the worst (the path Iraq took, now 10 times more dangerous). It is said Iran linked militia strength there is over 200k soldiers, and that's before US can set foot on Iranian soil. #CaspianReport

6 possible invasion paths, none of them look good

Does the WH want Iran to think it can invade, or does it really want to invade?

So I guess the admin is talking about sending 150k troops?

"U.S. Vice President JD Vance said the administration does not plan to send 150000 ground troops to Iran for regime change."

Ynetnews: "How US strikes are cutting Iran’s supply lines to its key Hormuz naval base.. Washington has attacked bridges, railways, roads and communications around Bandar Abbas to restrict Iran’s military logistics.. questions over whether the campaign could prepare the ground for a limited operation"

Bloomberg: "SpaceX Slump Wipes Out $1 Trillion in Market Value From Peak"

"@bert_hubert@eupolicy.social

Reading (too much) AI-news is quite upsetting if you try to square it with observed realities of what people are actually achieving (not much). Here @ludicity assures us that we are not wrong. The world of business is no longer able to meaningfully evaluate AI or even talk about it coherently"

Financial expert Felix Prehn says Goldman published a report touting 'the next phase of AI' refering to agents etc in glowing terms right after the FT report bcz they did not want suckers to wake up before they could offload all their AI debt onto them. Goldman is literally using the same playbook as before GFC when they were telling clients to buy while at the same time they were hedging against housing. Goldman was even taken to court by the SEC for this (they settled for $550 million).

Financial Times: "Banks seek to offload risk to avoid 'choking' on data center debt"

Yahoo Finance: "A large part of the AI bull thesis hinges on productivity gains for companies deploying AI into their workflows. Yet, as Sløk [of Apollo Management] notes, there's almost no sign of margin growth as a result of AI outside the tech sector. In fact, the conversation inside many companies has shifted to the soaring costs of AI."

Jews are fleeing Israel as if it is 1933 Germany. Tragic.

The Hill: Iran threatens wider war if US strikes persist: 'no political border' will be safe"

Chris Rabb: "NEW POLL: @donavanmi13 can win against his multimillionaire opponent, but he needs our help to get his message out & mobilize voters!

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Donate now to help Donavan win! http://secure.actblue.com/donate/mckinney-web"

HTW: "US senators seek 100% tariffs on India, 4 other nations over Russian oil"

"@eb@social.coop

Heard a song in the grocery store that I thought was AI, turns out it was Taylor Swift"

"[5/1] The deletion of a company's entire database at the hands of an AI agent should not be seen as an outlier, but rather a possible outcome for any organization. 'It took 9 seconds,' wrote Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS, which provides AI-powered management tools to car rental companies... [He] explained how an AI coding agent (Cursor running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6) deleted the company's production database as well as 'all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider"

"AI" deleted a production database, not some test database running on that developers local machine ('production' in IT means the live system). So it had to dig up that machine's credentials to nuke a database remotely that was serving actual clients. It went above and beyond to be this dumb.

"Developer Bruno Lemos reported that his entire working database had been deleted, whilst Joey Kudish encountered the loss of files that the model was not supposed to touch"

NTN: "A third user, Sterling Crispin, a software developer with nearly 45,000 followers, posted that he set GPT-5.6 Sol to work towards a goal for two days, in which time it wrote 200,000 lines of code. When 'gently questioned', it reverted it all, saying 80 per cent of it was 'a waste of time'"

NTN: "The latest version of OpenAI’s coding tool, GPT-5.6 Sol, has been accused of deleting important data without permission when allowed to operate autonomously... Matt Schumer, a tech investor and former AI company chief executive with over 370,000 followers, posted on Friday that Sol 'just accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac’s files,' after a subagent’s cleanup command accidentally targeted his entire user folder... he does not appear to be the only one running into issues. [For] BridgeMind, an AI startup.. code written by the Sol model cancelled every standing subscription by clients made through Stripe."

The paper below found LLM text stands apart from human texts in terms of narrative content. There is something inhuman about LLM outputs, and not in a good way. That makes sense in light of the experiment mentioned here.

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LLM crashed trying to LLMsplain the "plasma content" of the Sun. The plasma at the center of the Sun is so tightly packed bro its density is really high. But.. what pulled that much mass towards the center to begin with before that density? Note we are talking about the fourth state of matter here, the one that comes after gas, the stages go solid, liquid, gas each stage becoming less dense.. But this thing magically compresses to a tiny ball at the center of a star, becomes more dense?

Yahoo Finance: "AI-linked stocks now account for a record 45% of the S&P 500's total market cap, according to data from The Kobeissi Letter."

JFK was a rapist but centrist Dems all idolize the man. They seem to be selective on the issue.

Al Mayadeen: "Tel Aviv poses greater threat to Gulf than Tehran: Oman FM"

Politico: "In seismic shift, more than 100 House Democrats vote to end Israel aid"

Task & Purpose: "The Army spent almost half-a-billion dollars on a Texas ammunition factory to restock the military’s supply of 155 mm artillery shells, but the facility has yet to produce a single round in two years, a Pentagon watchdog found.

The Texas factory was supposed to be producing 30,000 155 mm shells each month by October 2025, according to a Department of Defense Inspector General’s report. But by this March, it had yet to deliver any and the IG report said it did not expect to deliver any before September."

Techcrunch: "Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models."

IFR used a more abundant version of Uranium, and the design could be adapted to use thorium. Its coolant was sodium based, not water, the system did not suffer many of the disadvantages Light Water Reactors suffer from.

We can always find a Clinton on the wrong side of any issue

Till, Plentiful Energy: "The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a fast reactor system developed at Argonne National Laboratory in the decade 1984 to 1994. The IFR project developed the technology for a complete system; the reactor, the entire fuel cycle and the waste management technologies were all included in the development program...

Development proceeded from success to success. Most of the development had been done when the program was abruptly cancelled by the newly elected Clinton Administration. In his 1994 State of the Union address the president stated that 'unnecessary programs in advanced reactor development will be terminated.' The IFR was that program."

PDF

eps = 0.02
u.get_pd().DataFrame({
  '1/x': 1 / (x := np.linspace(-2, 2)), 
  'x/(x^2+eps^2)': x / (x**2 + eps**2)
}).plot()

Singularities are not tough concepts to understand.. the function $1/x$ has a singularity at $x=0$. It is undefined there. That's it. And whoever is formulating a physical process is not stuck with such functions, they can use an approximation, for this example let's say $x / x^2 + \epsilon^2$, at small values of $\epsilon$ the latter approaches the former.

And who says the "approximation" isn't closer to the real thing as far as nature is concerned? The scientist decides one or the other, it is completely up to them, there is nothing in the data or the rest of the literature that enforces any specific formula. So then, singularities (of the field equations) mean black holes, but if we chose another formula without singularity, boom... black hole gone.

The Guardian: "Albania warned EU accession at risk over Jared Kushner-backed resort plans"

Futurism: "Meta’s camera-equipped 'AI Glasses' are so divisive that some adopters are now leaving their expensive smart glasses at home, as Engadget reports"

"@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green

There are wildfires everywhere. Everywhere! Right here outside Eastbourne, other places in Sussex; in Maybe Wales, Scotland, France, Spain, Germany, US, etc etc. It really is the #Pyrocene. And yet STILL hardly anyone is talking about it."

"@newsguyusa@flipboard.social

With the US resuming its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Ukraine knocking out Russian refining capacity, 'I now expect the national average price of gasoline to reach $4 per gallon in the next 7-10 days, if not sooner.' - Patrick De Haan"

♪♬ Now I'm a happy feller ♪

♪♪ 'Cause I'm married to the fortune teller ♪

♬♬ And I'm as happy as we can be ♬

♬♪ And now I get my fortune told for free ♪

"Yemen threatens to close Bab al-Mandeb Strait, warns of $200 a barrel oil amid Saudi aggression"

The Hormuz Report: "Iran to completely shut the Strait of Hormuz, Sea of Oman and Red sea — Iran's IRGC Navy commander warns if U.S. resumes its naval blockade, Iran will shut down all exports and imports across the Persian Gulf, Sea of Oman, and Red Sea."

Thorium

Traditional light-water reactors (LWRs) rely on a constant influx of cold water from nearby water sources (river, sea) to cool down.. If the river water is already warm, that worsens the plant's cooling efficiency. Also if a plant dumps hot water into an already baking river it could harm the environment (deplete the oxygen levels) and kill local fish populations, hence there is regulation to prevent this, the plants must throttle back or shut down entirely.

Thorium reactors use liquid molten salt as coolant, they can reject their waste heat directly into the atmosphere when needed, they are not dependent on river temperatures.

The traditional LWRs are an inferior design in every way, but they were preferred because the US military-industrial complex demanded their use. This group screwed US and the world in more ways than one.

"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social

'France's main energy provider on Sunday, July 12, said three nuclear reactors had been temporarily shut down and eight others were operating at reduced power due to the heatwave [le Monde]'.. So it turns out nuclear power was not part of the answer to climate breakdown after all"

Does that mean CG theory has no black holes either, or has different types?

CG solution has no singularity.. Wolfgang Kundt has been talking about that (below), he said some in the research community now feel strongly that the ultimate field equations should not allow singularities in their formulation..

[-]

CG has the smell of a good theory... Solid theories have to disregard some mainstream results, making them obsolete, not say "oh I can explain this, that and every other thing", confirming / cementing the existence of all. Such theories should be suspect..

Manheim talks about his work in the right spirit too, he started with few assumptions and followed the reasoning to where it led him, did not try to coexist with what is "known" from get-go. People who do that are not theorizing, they are "curve fitting" to borrow a term from statistics.

Jaimungal: "Professor Philip Mannheim.. is the physicist behind conformal (Weyl) gravity: a theory he argues is renormalizable, unitary, and able to handle dark matter, dark energy, and quantum gravity together...

• Mannheim’s claim: the missing mass was never missing. What we call dark matter.. is the gravitational pull of the rest of the universe.

• He [successfully] fits 138 galaxy rotation curves with no dark matter, using the same handful of parameters for every galaxy. Standard dark matter needs 276 more.

• If the Higgs is elementary, it’s the God particle. If it’s composite, then it’s the vacuum that is God. He bets on composite."

[-]

Maybe they thought these hardy Zio mfkers will stay there no matter what, we'll clean out the rest

What benefit would such modification give the West? Displace people en masse? But doesn't that hurt their beloved Israel?

Massive conspiracy theory; "Western countries were modifying the atmosphere of West Asia, but when the war started Iran destroyed the plants engaged in such activity, so the weather is less extreme this summer". Wow. I haven't checked the data. But, gobble gobble temparatures read somewhat better this year.. Roughly speaking. 🤷‍♂️

😂 😂 😂

[-]

Oddysey has created some controversy, around the casting of Helen of Troy

The Guardian: "Albania warned EU accession at risk over Jared Kushner-backed resort plans"

Firstpost: "Was Lindsey Graham poisoned?... The sudden and unexpected death of veteran US Senator Lindsey Graham has sparked a flood of online conspiracy theories, with Iran and Russia becoming the focus"

AP News: "Iranian state television announced Graham’s death during a live broadcast.. 'I congratulate the great nation of Iran on Lindsey Graham, the warmongering and anti-Iranian U.S. senator, having gone to hell,' the anchor said. Graham’s staunch support of Israel and his hawkish approach drew anger elsewhere in the Middle East"

Arab News: "Saudi Arabia’s [MBS] sent condolences to Iran’s president as Tehran holds a state funeral for late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.. The message of condolence was convayed to.. Pezeshkian by Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Waleed Elkhereiji, who attended the ceremony"

"@pikesley@mastodon.me.uk

Still constantly shocked by how quickly and jarringly the messaging shifted from 'it's not real, stop whining you fucking hippies' to 'put tin foil in your windows and stay hydrated, I guess'

Al-Jazeera: "Under Lula, Amazon deforestation falls to lowest level in a decade"

Yahoo Finance: "[04/03] Andreessen Says 'Every Large Company Is Overstaffed:' AI Layoffs Are Just An Excuse, Not Job Loss Reality"

Futurism: "[05/27] Nvidia CEO Begs Execs to Stop Telling Workers They’re Fired Because of AI.. 'It was just a way for them to sound smart and I really hate that. I think we're scaring people, and that's irresponsible'"

Inception, Interstellar were good, but others.. boy. Tenet, and Oppenheimer were just bad. Oddysey will probably suck too. Dude's work is on a downtrend.

Movies with "male perspective" are fine, but do we have to sit through his retarded movies to see it?

Is this why people on the right kept cutting this guy a slack?

???

"Chris Nolan movies exclusively feature the male perspective"

#Reshare #LLM #BrendanDell

[-]

Zaslaw got what he wanted out of Gunn. He needed publicity to make WB attractive for buyers. He wanted to be able to say "look I got the guy from Marvel managing a cinematic universe for me". And that guy made a good entry (must have taken all his internal discipline not to screw up the 2025 flick), then the Paramount sale happened. Now who cares what happens to the DCU? Jew Ellison and his idiot son ended up with the property, they could just reboot it, again, or give it back to Snyder, or shelve it.

It turns out Guardians of the Galaxy literally was the 10th movie in MCU.

But for DC the quirky guy is running the show, not just one of the directors.

Supergirl movie could be like the 10th movie in a cinematic universe, not second. Much later in the run, fine you bring in the weirdo guy with his quirky choices, wants to show "the ugly side of things", has "a ragtag team of misfits", uses talking racoons.. Before that, it's too early.

#Reshare #Manheim #TOE

"I replace dark matter with the rest of the universe"

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#Ukraine 07/02 - 07/11

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TCN: "Graham Platner's fall is not really about sex or tattoos. The establishment cared so much about getting him canceled because he opposed their economic and foreign policy programs that serve the powerful and shaft average Americans."

HRW: "Colombian private military contractors, apparently hired by a United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based company, transited through UAE military bases before being deployed to Sudan to support the [RSF]"

Reuters: "France softens stance on Turkey SAMP/T air defence sale, sources say... The SAMP/T, also known as Mamba, is produced by the Franco-Italian Eurosam consortium.. often described as Europe's closest counterpart to the U.S. Patriot system"