TW

Github Mirror

Week 37

"Most of Russia’s tiny first-person-view drones now send and receive signals via jam-proof fiber optic cable instead of wireless radio. For heavier one-way attack drones that travel too far for fiber optics, the Russians have mostly switched to jam-resistant mesh radio networks made up of many interconnected senders and receivers.. It’s possible to jam a mesh radio network, but it’s hard. Every drone in a given network is a node. It’s not enough to jam a few of them; you have to jam all of them."

Drones are starting to resemble cruise missiles..

CSIS: "[New RU drone models Geran-4 and Geran-5] were introduced in 2026 and have many subsystems in common with the Geran-2 and Geran-3. Like the Geran-3, both fly with a Chinese Telefly turbojet engine.. Where they differ is the airframe. The Geran-4 features a more aerodynamic variant of the original delta shape, plus a reinforced structure that allows it to withstand significant G loads. It can maneuver at speeds of 186–249 miles per hour and achieve a maximum speed of 311 miles per hour. The Geran-5, on the other hand, eschews the delta-winged design entirely for a structure more typical of a cruise missile."

Science Alert: "Researchers Discover a Green Hydrogen 'Goldmine' Beneath Australia's Red Dirt.. 'Australia could be sitting on a massive, untapped energy reserve - and the potential is enormous,' says chemical engineer Alireza Keshavarz, from Edith Cowan University. 'There is enough hydrogen for Australia to benefit for generations, and potentially enough for us to become a major exporter of clean energy to the rest of the world'"

The war with Iran already did wonders for the American hegemony (as in decrease it). It might even help Israel being leashed properly in near future. Anti-war people wanted to get out of the Middle East, complained about bases, well, US had Iran bomb them, undermining its standing, power in the region. So there you go, u r getting out of the Middle East.

There'd be a fine line between working with Democrats and not being impeached (again)... but those could be part of the same discussions... if the Machivellian angle is true. We'll see what happens after the elections.

Reuters: "Trump says Iran war will end right after U.S. midterm elections"

And WH starts a stupid war endangering the House and Senate majority. Does Trump dislike his own party this much?

AP News: "Hakeem Jeffries.. and Jared Kushner met privately recently in New York, a signal that the White House is seeking ways to work with Democrats if they wrest majority control from Republicans in the midterm elections."

The Hill: "[06/22] Trump relationship with Senate GOP crumbling after repeated clashes"

AA: "Merz clashed with opposition AfD co-leader Alice Weidel in parliament on Wednesday over Russia policy and Germany’s energy supply... 'You stood by wordlessly and idly while the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up in front of your noses,' Weidel said. Instead of preparing to resume deliveries through remaining pipeline sections, she added, the government 'continues to reward the suspected masterminds of the attack in Kyiv with billion payments at Germany’s expense.'"

"AI" leaders want to slowdown because they don't want to bring about AGI "just yet". Don't flatter yourself. You can't.

Al-Jazeera: "1,400 Yemenis flee to Djibouti within 24 hours.. Yemeni refugees arrive in Obock, Djibouti, within 24 hours as Houthis tighten their grip on the Bab al-Mandeb strait."

NYT: "Houthis Seize a Key Red Sea Island, Threatening Another Global Oil Route"

#Yemen 09/11 - 09/13

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Epoch Times: "China’s Export Surge Fuels Global Backlash Over Trade Imbalance"

IC: "The September 11 Memorial Needs a Counter-Monument: Victims of Our Post-9/11 Wars Deserve Remembrance, Too"

"@vampiress@eigenmagic.net

I was re-watching some episodes of Deadwood the other day, and suddenly became curious about a specific actor playing a minor role.

Without stopping the TV episode, I opened a browser tab and opened chatGPT, asking a direct question about the character, the actor who played him, and the episode.

I got total garbage as a response, getting names of characters wrong, which actors played them wrong, and even total wrong info about what the episode was about.

Like, not even 'one or two minor things wrong', just total lies.

I only checked with the lying machine out of idle curiosity if it'd somehow gotten better but no, it hasn't"

TAC: "Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, We Owe the Next Generation a Better Strategy.. Political leaders failed the troops and their families. Americans must wake up and demand better."

CNBC: "Saudi Arabia shut down East-West crude oil pipeline after multiple attacks by drones from Iraq"

"@tristanbuckmaster@mastodon.social

Just to point something out to Open AI since they do not seem to have any mathematicians capable of understanding what they put out. They like to point out that their work was inspired by unforced Euler. As I said in my statement, our hypodissipative result (which is not public), but as I understand it part of their training data was already pointing to the fact that unforced Euler was possible.

This below is absolute academic malpractice:"

"@emilymbender@dair-community.social

The Boosters say: AI is a thing, it's inevitable, it's imminent and it's going to solve all of our problems.

The Doomers say: AI is a thing, it's inevitable, it's imminent and it's going to kill us all.

These are obviously the same story, with just different twists at the end. And both are nonsense... Nadella, Pichai, Huang, Zuckerberg, Huang, Dean --- you all own this unhinged narrative just as much as the Doomers do. Of course, they're happy to own this, because they benefit.. from keeping the policymakers focused on fantasies."

I like their approach, they massively constrain the tool, and, well use it like a tool, not some magical wand that will solve everything once it is waved.

Shopify: "Preventing slop.. It’s tempting to just point an LLM to the React Native [existing] codebase and try to one-shot the same features in native [another programming language, LLM converts], but it doesn’t work. Even if you ask it to gather as much information as it can up front, freeze that into specs, task files, and then implement it, you end up with a huge amount of unmaintainable code that can’t be shipped.

To solve this problem, we built a system called Helix that takes a more gradual approach. It doesn't expect the first output to be correct, and builds a loop where an imperfect attempt simply cannot move forward until it becomes a good result.

The developer points Helix at a screen. Helix reads the React Native code and proposes a sequence of checkpoints (small, ordered slices of the work) that can be reviewed in minutes. Then, checkpoint by checkpoint, it builds: each one must prove its behavior with tests, match the running app in a visual review, survive two adversarial code reviewers, and get a human's nod before it's committed and the next one starts. Feedback from every review is remembered, so the loop gets more autonomous as the migration progresses."

MIT News: "An electrochemical approach turns ammonia into pure hydrogen.. An MIT team has demonstrated a more efficient way to extract pure hydrogen gas from hydrogen carrier molecules."

CNBC: "Houthis reportedly advance to key Red Sea island [Perim], further threatening crucial oil choke point.. The advance raises the threat to shipping near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a waterway that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden to global markets."

This is our first Yemen map, before/after will be available after the next release

Houthi areas are marked in red.

#Yemen #Houthi 09/11

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"@akareilly@hachyderm.io

I don’t want a new phone. I want my perfectly good hardware to keep getting updates until it actually stops working. I want replaceable batteries that get recycled. If a company stops giving updates I want to be able to change the OS."

#Gibney

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"[A..] Tesla Model Y struck a sidewalk shed outside 315 Madison Ave., a bus stop pole and a mailbox on East 42nd Street, according to the NYPD. The car kept moving several more blocks before stopping near Second Avenue. Both women inside, each 27, were taken to Bellevue Hospital, where the passenger was pronounced dead."

The Guardian: "UK datacentres will create just 25% of jobs predicted by tech sector, analysis finds.. Facilities likely to employ 10,400 workers, compared with 40,000 in industry estimates, thinktank says"

Excerpt 1

Ornstein: "The landmark Citizens United was a narrow case, brought on an as-applied basis.. Roberts and his allies pulled it back to broaden it - without any request from the plaintiffs and without briefs or hearings - and redo it in a way that would subvert over a century of established campaign law"

Excerpt 2

Time: "[2015 T]o avoid upending Obamacare’s operation as he assumes Congress wanted, Chief Justice John Roberts rewrote three parts of it: turning the individual mandate into a tax, reworking the Medicaid expansion, and now finding that 'established by the state' means 'established by the federal government.'"

Roberts saved the ACA, also helped create the mess known as Citizens United. These two cases are not at the opposite ends of the spectrum. In both cases, corporations benefited.

"Jew York"...? I don't know about that one

♪ It's a case of divide-and-conquer ♪

♪♪ 'Cause you let a Jew break up my crew ♪

♪ House n..a gotta run and hide ♬ ♬

♪♪ Yellin' Compton, but you moved to Riverside. ♬

NV - widely seen as the best diss track of all time. The scene on Straight Outa Compton shows the backdrop. Paul Giamatti plays J. Heller (the Jew).

That sounds borrowed from No Vaseline #IceCube

The Jew Crew 😂

Asked around before visit, learned it wasn't like Warsaw 1944 over there, but still.. Hey most tourists aren't lucky to get a Kush, Witkoff visit to create a ceasefire over a city.

A compass can came in handy, yep surprisingly while navigating a modern city in 2026. Use offline map (find location by landmark) then use dead-reckoning and compass to navigate.

How are things in Russia? I was recently in Moscow, life seemed uneffected by the ongoing war. But of course it is still a f-ing war, there is a massive EW umbrella that stretches for tens of kilometers over the city that basically renders GPS useless (to thwart UA drones that might utilize the service to target). GPS is a Western system, but Russian GLONASS is effected too, delivery services, taxis get lost sometimes, it hinders the flow of the economy. Most famous Western sites / online services are inaccessible. No Western connected ATM cards, credit cars will work. It sucks esp. for foreigners. It makes you think, no one would willingly put themselves into this position, unless provoked

In this account LLMs were involved but they filled in the blanks, did not discover a new direction, nor propose genuine new ideas. Treat LLMs as a postdoc slave or a knowledgeable junior programmer that need to be managed. They are not human-like, nor sentient, nor superintelligent.

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NY Post: "OpenAI stunned the mathematics world when it announced Tuesday that its artificial intelligence model cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours. But an NYU academic has chimed in — saying the AI giant tried to strong-arm him into helping the bots solve the dizzyingly complex equation, and may have cribbed the work he had already done... [P]rofessor Tristan Buckmaster.. has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company’s scientists allegedly warning he might 'ruin his career' if he refused...

He said scientists from OpenAI approached him and tried to convince him to jointly announce the solution, claiming they had independently solved Navier-Stokes [fluid eqn]. Buckmaster questioned the timing of their finding the solution in a blog post, noting OpenAI had only done so 'in the past few days' — after the company became aware of his work... He asked OpenAI experts whether its AI systems used to solve the equation had been 'trained on, or had access to' his research, but said they declined to answer"

Villi Iltchev: "Ben Thompson said it well. Every 10-15 years people relearn the same lesson. The only consumer business model is ads and you cannot charge consumers for software."

"@LukaszOlejnik@mastodon.social

LG smart TVs scan user’s local network for phones and watches, log location and nearby Wi-Fi names. Then send it to LG Ad Solutions. Pull the cable and it keeps recording, stores the audio, uploads when reconnected. Automatic Content Recognition samples whatever comes through HDMI, so the console counts too."

The Verge: "LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even when offline or on standby mode, according to a new report from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus."

"Marginalia Search

"@alda@topspicy.social

Reliable sources claim that Matt Mullenweg is being sacked from Automattic.

WordPress.org being Matt's 'personal website', running on the company's infrastructure and wp-admin on self hosted sites depending on that domain name being reachable to work at all, this could have far reaching consequences."

"Every year, the OECD surveys students around the world for the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA]. The 2025 results were just released today. Around the world, results have gone down over the past ten years. But PISA includes an AI measurement. How do students do when they use the chatbot in school? It turns out that winners don’t do chatbots. The graphs show that students with little or no AI use trounce the students who do use the AI"

"@ingram@mastodon.social

If I wanted 100% of the time ambient transcription I'd just buy an LG TV. Who needs a watch for that?"

9to5Mac: "The new Apple Watch will use microphone and other sensors to generate AI recaps of your day"

"@prism@infosec.exchange

Good idea

'United cancels planned 9/11 flyover featuring passenger plane escorted by fighter jets.. Denver's Office of Emergency Management was working to alert citizens and prepare for public reaction about the planned flyover.'"

"[LA] draws [water] from four separate systems, only one of which touches the Colorado, and the Colorado's share of its supply is smaller than most people assume. The bigger risk is not that the taps stop but that the substitutes are all constrained in their own ways, and that the cheapest of them was exhausted decades ago."

Jack Matlock: "But later when the people in Kosovo, the Albanian speaking people began to rebel against Serbia, the US actually sided with the rebels, and in effect used NATO to make war against Serbia. Now Serbia had not attacked or threatened any NATO member. That could only have been considered a an offensive use of the [org]. And of course, this made a very bad impression on Russians because Serbia was a traditional Russian ally and to see the NATO actually going to war [made a bad impression. US] didn't invade it at first but simply bombed until until they capitulated and then NATO.. occupied Kosovo. Then just based upon a vote of the Kosovo legislature which declared independence that independence was recognized.

[With that act] the NATO powers violated one of the important agreements that we had negotiated that had helped end the Cold War.. the Helsinki final agreement.. [it said] there should be no changes of borders without the mutual consent. Now, for the first time after the end of the Cold War, we used NATO in an offensive way against a country that had not attacked any member. And then we recognized the the independence [of Kosovo] without a referendum or anything else. I would say now that that set a direct precedent later for what President Putin in Russia did when he he absorbed Crimea at the result of of a peaceful referendum, which is overwhelmingly in favor of it... [W]e considered that illegal whereas we had we had sponsored.. a less defensible change of borders earlier."

Jack Matlock: "When people say the war in Ukraine is the first war in Europe after the end of the Cold War, that's not true. It wasn't as big, but the war against Serbia was the first war, and it was initiated by NATO."

#Iran #Reagan

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The Gentlemen second season, very good

(Non-combusting) compressed air engines never took off because you lose a lot of energy while compression, and not gaining enough during decompression. Combustion on the other hand, taps into a massive stored energy within the molecules. That's why we burn stuff, both for heat and to generate mechanical work. There are clean fuels

A transparent version shows the expansion of the gas.. that is massive power right there.

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Potato guns use simple combustion, the bottom part of the pipe is the "chamber", usually hair spray gas (containing propane, butane) is dispersed / propelled in it, potato is in the nozzle, a simple spark ignites gas, expanding gas pushes the potato. We see the effects.

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"Reminder this Labor Day that unions didn't win weekends and the minimum wage and an end to child labor and sick leave and more by being nice, or polite, or respectful. The won by fighting. They won by striking and struggling and being radicals."

Michell Clark: "They made healthcare a commodity, education a debt trap, and housing a speculation market - then told you that poverty is a personal failing. They privatized survival and called it freedom."

The Guardian: "Mike Huckabee [claimed] on Saturday that Downing Street was motivated by 'Jew hatred'"

The Guardian: "The UK’s planned ban on trade with unlawful Israeli settlements is a welcome, if overdue, first step and must be judged according to its practical impact, a UN expert has told the Guardian... The UK foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, has vowed to act more decisively against Israeli settlements, as well as continued restrictions of aid into Gaza"

They turned Spiderman into an affluent coastal shitlib. They spew anti-government (pro-rich) propaganda in the movie, never talk about Parker's money problems (a huge topic in the comics) and the box office numbers simply reflect the top 20% wholly or partly watching the movies in theathers.

"Does Marvel Hate The Poor?"

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"@zer0billionaires@mastodon.social

All the while, feathering their nests, funneling contracts and money, taking donations and telling us all cut back on what few joys we have."

"@seachanger@alaskan.social

US capitalists executed the leaders of the May 1 1886 strike for an 8 hr work day. In 1889 socialists declared May 1 Int'l Workers Day to honor them, creating a beloved holiday worldwide, but not in the US, where Labor Day was moved to September to erase workers' struggle from the public mind."

TAC: "The ‘Burnham Bounce’ Is Real... [though] Labour remains vulnerable on immigration.. Since he ousted Keir Starmer in July, there has been a steady drumbeat of policy announcements, all ruthlessly targeted at ordinary people’s concerns—especially on the cost of living. Burnham has announced cuts to taxes on energy bills, a cap on bus fares, a crackdown on “rip-off” online subscriptions, a boost to apprenticeships and technical education, an end to “ugly” high streets, and so on and so on. That these policies themselves don’t amount to much (for instance, the average saving on an energy bill will be £3.75 per month) is not the point. What matters is that these are bread-and-butter issues that normal folks actually care about. The message is loud and clear: Andy is on your side."

DUGKS is similar to probabilistic LBM method. But if the lack of ed material on DUGKS is a problem (the approach is quite new) for most gas simulations at high Mach NS (or its inviscid form, Euler equations) will work acceptably. There are plenty of discretization methods to choose from.

As we see even the hard-core NS equations contain generalities, and are based on assumptions.

That is a solid observation. Chungking mofo.. He's got it down.

Xu, A Unified CFD Framework: "The continuum mechanics assumption for fluid elements in the [Navier-Stokes] equations, as well as in other extended hydrodynamic equations, will break down gradually with a change of scale from hydrodynamic to kinetic one. Many unsolved problems in fluid mechanics, such as the turbulence, separating flow, and laminar-turbulent transition, may stem from the intrinsic continuum mechanics assumption in the NS formulation, where the non- equilibrium transport mechanism and the abundant discontinuities within the fluid are absent in the mathematical formulation."

For gas simulation containing shock waves LBM will not be sufficient, a new method UGKS, and now DUGKS looks promising. Created by the Chinese scientist Kun Xu

Nobody tries to hide away battery-electric lithium-ion tech, the tech is harmless for entrenched interests.

The military (the M of the MIC) could be helping its friends in the private sector by taking potential competition away from the public view, so old designs can survive for a little longer ensuring "the complex" keep cashing in.

Vid featuring said engines complains militaries (esp. US) take many of the new designs off the public view, perhaps slowing their spread for general use. This is not the time to hide away critical tech. Better combustion engines are needed.

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1-stroke engine by Innengine. Airbus will use the approach, they're planning to build next-gen drones with it.

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Another great design, runs on H2

"H2 Starfire is an experimental, highly compact hydrogen-powered rotary engine designed to replace traditional piston-driven internal combustion engines with a high-revving, low-part-count alternative"

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"@glyph@mastodon.social

if you are trying to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs and you are reading the personal story of someone building an impressive demo, do not read the post looking for technical details. instead, see if you can spot:

CNBC: "Israel-Hezbollah clashes deepen threat to fragile truce as Lebanon's president calls for U.S. support"

"@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social

I cannot emphasize enough how utterly bankrupt neoliberalism is. It’s done. There’s no gas left in the tank; it can propose and accomplish, effectively, nothing."

They want to "improve" Clintoncare / Obamacare enacted by Black Bill Clinton... Why does this legislation require constant pushing, "building on", patching years later? Was its design fundamentally flawed?

Third Way.. Tony Blair kept mumbling that shit all throughout the 90s

😂 😂 😂

"@thirdway.bsky.social

Our Health Care Bill of Rights builds on the Affordable Care Act to create the most comprehensive..."

Politico: "We’ve run out of time’: Republicans accept that Iran war will last past elections.. The dour mood comes as Republicans contend with stubbornly high gasoline and grocery prices"

Politico: "As House Republicans fight behind closed doors about how to respond to the backlash against data centers, one committee is pushing forward on the issue publicly.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has found itself at the forefront of the Capitol Hill data center debate, clearing the Ratepayer Protection Act — which sets frameworks to compel data centers to cover increased energy costs — in a unanimous vote this summer. And as data center discord swirled among House Republicans this week, the committee held another hearing on a bill to have data centers pay for their water use and system upgrades."

If these "extremists" help end the stupid war in Ukraine it will be a good thing. The West should be ashamed of themselves for the role they played in provoking this war.

"Alice Weidel, co-chair of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has demanded that Berlin immediately cease all forms of assistance to Ukraine — including military aid — and has declared Kyiv’s potential membership in the EU and NATO 'completely unacceptable'"

NYT: "German Far-Right Surges, in Threat to Postwar Taboo on Extremists in Power"

#Ukraine 08/30 - 09/05

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