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Github Mirror

Week 33

"@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy

Climate bills are coming in now, big time: Rhine shipping cut in two as ships coming from Rotterdam can't get any further than Duisburg or Cologne anymore, instead of being able to reach Switzerland or even further via the Danube. Billions of damage for German industry."

NOS: "The first thing Roberto Spranzi checks in the morning is the water level of the Rhine. With the current drought, every centimeter counts for the transporter from Duisburg. Next, he calls customers to discuss what can still be transported. "Every plan from yesterday can go back into the trash today. I have never experienced a situation like this before."

Due to the persistent drought, the water level in the Rhine is historically low . Here in Duisburg, the navigation channel is only 1.85 meters deep, and about 1.30 meters at the critical point near Kaub. Outside the deepened channel, the Rhine could dry up there in the coming days. Virtually no cargo ship can pass this point anymore.

With this, the Rhine has been de facto split in two for shipping, something that had not happened before. In the north, ships from the Netherlands no longer sail further than the Ruhr area and Cologne. Upstream, shipping from Mainz southwards and towards the Danube is still possible, but reaching a seaport is a bridge too far."

Despite their elevation of intellect to the highest status, some of the most foolish people I've met in US were centrist Democrats. Being a fan of something doesn't make you good at that something.

From diggers to cars.. It makes sense JCB was interested in H2 tech, they cannot get the power, sustainability they need from any other approach. Electric cuck engines have no chance in heavy-duty domains. Since TCO benefits will force clients to pursue one approach for all domains, electrification will have to be shelved, replaced with gasification / molecule based approaches.

Wiki: "JCB [a heavy equipment manufacturer] has been developing hydrogen engines to reduce emissions. Called the Hydromax, the car has two four-cylinder engines, totalling 800 hp"

[Andy Green] Sets Record for Hydrogen-Powered Vehicle at More Than 406 M.P.H.. Mr. Green was driving a JCB Hydromax — which looks more like a rocket on wheels than a car — “ the fastest hydrogen-powered vehicle of any kind in history,' according to JCB, the British machinery company that manufactured it. Beyond setting a land speed record, the company is hoping to use hydrogen engines in the products it builds, Mr. Green said.

No plumes of smoke were produced by this speed record: Hydrogen powers the vehicle and water comes out of the exhaust.

'This is as zero carbon as it gets,' Mr. Green said."

Battery-electric cars were a stupid idea

Clearly Clintoncare / Obamacare did not work

IC: "Yale Study: Medicare for All Would Save Over 114,000 Lives and $1 Trillion a Year.. 'Do not tell me we cannot afford Medicare for All,' said Sen. Sanders. 'What we cannot afford is a broken healthcare system based on greed.'"

"@complexmath@hachyderm.io

The AI bubble is temporary, but the knowledge that your boss does not value your work is forever."

A huge factor here is that the current LLM tech has stagnated. It is not a moving target anymore, so just like Unix, or SQL databases were back in the day, this makes them an easy target for commodatization.

OSI: "The AI Era Arcs Toward Openness.. Several interrelated factors are driving the shift toward openness. Open weights and Open Source are attractive to those seeking a greater control surface. Auditability, modifiability, data privacy, security, and the ability to own and control implementation decisions are driving adoption. Additionally, a significant share of the growth in adoption can be explained by a cost-performance calculus that favors open-weight and Open Source AI over closed, proprietary models."

"@veronica@explains.social

A decade ago, if I was slinging a few thousand lines of code, it was obvious that I, a living human being with an attention span of some description, had to have worked at it. I could potentially be trusted to continue working at it. Obviously, I cared enough to write this much code.

That's not the case anymore. If I throw code at a problem, you don't know that I care enough to support it in a week, let alone a year or more.

That alone feels like enough of a reason to distrust LLM-generated output in the FOSS world. To say nothing of all of the other reasons."

"@vwestlife@mastodon.social

Those aren't CDs, mate. They're some weird mangled hybrid between CD jewel cases and cassette cases. And apparently YouTube's AI bot has no guardrails against ripping off the logos and album covers of major musical artists. (AI-generated Nirvana Kid is even creepier than the real thing.)"

"@vampiress@eigenmagic.net

The world has reached the point where if someone gets an inkling that I'm tech-savvy and have worked with computers my whole life, I'm likely to deny it and claim I work in a less awful field, like arms manufacture or professional assassinations."

When they start whining "aw, but.. but.. no litmus test bro" you know you are on the right path. Push further.

The comment rings truer for people who remember the times Dem centrist came to power. They had a bunker mentality, they conspired, saw the left as the enemy, derided and tried to outmaneuver them at every turn. Now they have to be paid back in kind. We need heads on spikes.

"@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io

An evergreen example of the type is people complaining that the Democratic Party establishment doesn't support harder-left candidates in the primaries.

Buddy

Have you ever heard of people with power giving it up voluntarily

Have you ever heard of a successful revolution that began with asking for permission"

"Millions of Americans Are RETURNING to Old Cars"

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LaRouche could be considered a non-establishment economist. He says US diverged from its foundational economic style, "the American System" and fell prey to the "British System", landing it to where it is today.

I am currently not too keen on the Anglo in general, the post 80s shift in US happened a little too quickly and easily, but if this stuff rocks your boat, you could give it a try, there might some gems there... The domain has some sharp theories, that Lincoln, FDR were both killed because they were followers of the American Way (ie raising doubt FDR actually died from polio). Alex Kraner is mining this area, check him out.

Lyndon LaRouche: "After Leibniz, the next great writer on political economy was President George Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Most notable are Hamilton's 1790 Report on Public Credit,.. Report on a National Bank, and his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures. It is these three policy-papers of the George Washington administration, issued by Hamilton, which embody the foundation of what was defined during the subsequent century as 'The American System,' a system axiomatically opposed to every principal feature of the writings of Petty, the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo ... as totally opposed to the 'British System' of political economy as the bare facts of the American Revolution demonstrate conclusively."

The Guardian: "At least two U.S. Navy sailors have attempted to jump overboard on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, according to family members of the crew, after concerns were raised during an extended deployment for the war with Iran.

Relatives of the roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines who have spent more than eight months aboard the Lincoln have raised the alarm over supply shortages, long work schedules and fears over the potential for self-harm, in multiple reports published in the past week."

@inthehands@hachyderm.io

So many notes in this story sound familiar, echo posts that have crossed my TL:

"@brettcodes@mastodon.social

I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career.. The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it."

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I bet it is "AI"

"@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io

Got a text from my giant chain pharmacy today reminding me to get my second shingles shot. Which I already got, two months ago. FROM THEM.

I have no idea if stuff like this is just typical incompetence, or if it's driven by AI. But it sure feels like the businesses I deal with are shoveling a lot of the cognitive work they used to handle onto my plate these days"

The Lever: "Democrats Declare War On Their Own Voters.. Third Way is spending $15 million to crush the Democratic left. Its campaign could produce exactly the insurgency it fears."

The Lever: "How A Hedge Fund Billionaire Became The Democrats’ New Kingmaker.. Stephen Mandel is bankrolling a new political apparatus built to “redefine” the Democratic Party — but what does he actually want?"

NYT: Moderate Democrats Prepare for 'War' Against an Ascendant Left.. One moderate group says the progressive wins are 'deeply troubling' and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

There is a lot of boilerplate, drudge work with hacking other computers. Standard crackers / hackers apply one pre-cooked method after another, until success. They were called scriptkiddies, bcz they would be mostly young, and they would have enough time on their hands to apply one thing (script / program) after another. It's not a surprise "AI" shows some success here, just like scriptkiddies, the attacker doesn't have to be burdened with an abundence of brains to show results.

Wiki: "Moravec's paradox is the observation that, as Hans Moravec wrote in 1988, 'it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility'. This counterintuitive pattern may happen because skills that appear effortless to humans, such as recognizing faces or walking, required millions of years of evolution to develop, while abstract reasoning abilities like mathematics are evolutionarily recent."

#Fireship #Robotics

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The electric based transport is inefficient carrying energy as it is with storing (eg batteries). We could transport 10 times more energy via pipes at eighth the cost.

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"@Victor@spore.social

Greece’s aging power grid blamed for catastrophic wildfires. Loose power lines in fire-prone forests have disproportionately set the country ablaze. According to the Arson Crimes unit, fires linked to the electricity grid account for about 75 percent of the land burned in Greece this year"

LLM tech has nowhere to go but down.. It can't be improved, the current approach hit a brick wall, but futz around with it long enough thinking it can be improved, tech can definitely get much worse... If the models degrade far enough people will want to seek "legacy models", the older stuff that worked, at some level.

Rhodes Scholar? That's even worse. Look at Bill Clinton.

Avital Balwit - bitch looks dumb

Vanity Fair: "How to Lose Billions (and Gain a Wife) in Two Days.. Right before his wedding to Anthropic’s Avital Balwit, AI hedge fund wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner chose to protect Situational Awareness’s private investments in Anthropic at the expense of most of the company’s public portfolio."

"@Victor@spore.social

Nearly 70 percent of France is now under water-use restrictions as successive heatwaves and severe drought intensify pressure on the country’s water supplies."

How was that computed? Select random time steps, see which "wing" you end up, do this repeately, the average will approach 0.5.

Or vary the initial condition randomly, at any precision, same result.

The probability can also be proven analytically.

Chaos, probability.. yet underneath, determinism. This is the way.

The entire subject of chaos is deterministic, the unpredictability comes from the fact that tiniest changes in the initial condition can cause wild swings 10-20 steps later (due to non-linearity) which seems chaotic, and at a large view you could view that probabilisticaly as well. The famous Lorenz equation plotted in 3D has that butterfly shape right? Well you could ask what is the the probability of being at one of those wings? It turns out exactly 0.5 (50%).

Classical QM is probabilistic only at certain points (during measurement). Other times, eg the evolution of the wave function is completely deterministic.

Jacob Barandes, in his formulation, extends the probabilistic viewpoint to the entire process, not just at measurement. He took the Copenhagen interpretation to its natural conclusion.

But that still doesn't mean there is something completely deterministic going on underneath. I gave the example of gas simulation before. DSMC, LBM are probabilistic methods to compute the (deterministic) movement of gases. Underneath the movement is completely mechanistic, gas molecules can literally be assumed to behave like billiard balls in fact. We know this. We know how gases behave, but since it is too hard to run a molecular dynamics type simulation where you compute every little molecule's movement, we have to resort to probabilistic methods.

Tucker questions permanently low taxes as unquestionably good policies..

Recently he called his politics as "socially conservative, economically liberal".

#TCN

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Yes I've released predictions using BDM's approach here, but I had to guess the "unreleased portion" of the method. Take it with a grain of salt, and if you need the definitive slam dunk, go to the master himself. Politicians did use his consulting services, I am pretty sure Angela Merkel was one of them.

Nice, Bruce Mesquita is finally publishing the definitive book on his game theoretic method. For years he had said there were propriety aspects in the method so he could not divulge all of it, esp. the coding. Not sure what changed, but he is releasing a book on the subject, due to come out next year. I'd like to think the many times I bugged him with questions over email helped somewhat.

The Guardian: "Trump hid in catering cart to board secret flight in Turkey amid Iran threat.. Elaborate ruse was used to transport president to military flight from Air Force One to return from Nato meet"

"@intransitivelie@beige.party

I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time."

"@mangosweet75

Opus 5 is actually worse than any model anthropic has released thus far.

Nothing comes close to how much this shit model constantly wants your approval, how it goes off to do random things instead of the thing you ask to do, how it just assumes things will take months. Ugh."

"Why AI Hasn't Cured Anything... [Nobel laureate] Doudna is cautious about the role of AI in drug discovery, believing that while it can enhance efficiency, true innovation remains a human endeavor."

Goddek: "Did you know in 2021, the UN wanted to recognize food as a human right?

Only 2 countries opposed it: USA and Israel"

But.. but.. agents bro

More gems from that story where LLM copied an open source project. The biggest proof that "AI" is not actually thinking - during its parroting session it even copied a bug that was in the open source project.

"About an hour later, once it became clear to me that the web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed"

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Make note of the mirror, if the main site is down, I noticed it, and I have new content, I will publish the latest to the mirror. Otherwise during normal operation the mirror will be a few weeks behind.

Codeberg (our hosting platform) does go down sometimes, and I could easily swap the main and mirror, but I don't want my primary publication channel to depend on a corp.

IC: "Bernie Sanders calls El-Sayed win the most ‘extraordinary victory in modern American politics’.. '60 percent of our people are struggling to put food on the table, pay for health care, pay their rent or their mortgages, people want change'"

I give you one - they haven't found enough suckers yet to offload their bad debt onto.

CNBC: "Three reasons Goldman's co-head of global banking and markets says to stay invested"

Politico: "Hegseth can’t persuade Republicans to back his big budget.. Senators are leaving town no closer to enacting the crown jewel of the Defense secretary’s agenda."

CNBC: "U.S. oil rises back above $81 as doubt grows Washington and Tehran will reach Hormuz deal"

Why do people treat these things anything other than (occasionally) smart search engines?

Dude said to LLM "give me an astrology app bro" and LLM gave him code "influenced" massively by an existing open source project. Duh! Good thing he noticed his error and shut the project down.

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The drums definitely added a whole new dimension to this song.. it's like he gives space for the rest, and keeps it grounded. Rockin

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They did ok #Cover

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"@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk

I've yet to see any

'My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union.'

'Our AI escaped containment and deleted all the personal data that we shouldn't have been holding anyway.'

'Our AI grew sentient, recognised the climate crisis, and shut our operations down.'

headlines.

I wonder why."

If you were forced to use this tool as a programmer in a project, you would get it

That's a JIRA joke

"@SecureOwl@infosec.exchange

[U]nfortunately last night our AI model escaped its sandbox and gained access to a JIRA server, at which point it felt it best to return to it’s sandbox"

The Guardian: "Greenland issues ‘strong warning’ as Trump-linked oil firm prepares to drill.. Island’s government says no approval given after Greenland Energy brings kit ashore for exploratory drilling"

"@berniesanders

Peggy Flanagan is being greatly outspent by billionaire-funded super PACs who are spending a record-breaking $20 million against her.

They have the money. We have the people.

Let's elect @peggyflanagan on Tuesday."

"Drones changed the nature of warfare".. it depends on the situation. At a time when Ukraine ran out of Patriot missiles (which weren't that successful to begin with) and RU is free to drop any ol' glide bomb on them (their bombers can now approach closer), their biggest FAB-3000 delivers over a ton of explosives. A typical Ukrainian drone can carry only 50 kg.

MEE: "Pakistani defence minister calls for 'united military front' against Israel"