Week 39
The Guardian: "The UK has warned countries around the world that the climate and nature crises and the coming El Niño threaten their national security and defence, presenting foreign ministries with the findings of a report suppressed under Keir Starmer [emphasis mine].
Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, made a presentation to the foreign ministers of the EU as well as Kenya and other countries on Wednesday night at a private meeting during the UN general assembly in New York, based on the report by the UK’s spy chiefs that found the collapse of natural systems around the world would lead to conflict, migration and food shortages."
"@jonny@neuromatch.social
[T]his is a great product. Everyone should get a free muse account with a burner email, give it no information, open a shell into it, and use it to mine cryptocurrency"
If the LLM is dumping out SSH keys that means anyone can login and use that virtual machine from afar, using up its resources.
"@jonny@neuromatch.social
[On Meta LLM f--kup] people replying keep saying 'it's supposed to do this, see you can browse the /home/hatch directory right in the app' and if being able to get a free seedbox and mining rig is how it is supposed to work"
"@manchicken@masto.hackers.town
Pharmacies in the United States are absolutely shit right now. CVS is dominating the market by having captured one of the largest insurance providers, and by literally buying out all of the competition. What’s left of Walgreens is now so poorly staffed and has such poor service that the folks working in the pharmacy are openly belligerent to patients."
RK is Jewy Jewman
Bryant, The Guardian: "Kraft can certainly decide who gets to say what on his property – although even that argument is a specious one if he cares about community and not oligarchy. But then extending his influence from his private bubble of Foxborough to allegedly use that influence to blackball Macklemore from the rest of Sheeran’s tour by calling ahead to Philadelphia, Dallas, Tampa, Charlotte, Indianapolis and Atlanta, Kraft engaged in yet another collusion, for each of those venues are largely publicly financed. They do not belong privately to Kraft, or the rest of the football oligarchy, but to the taxpaying public. Public space is protected by the first amendment."
Excerpt taken from the Sanchez speech at Mamdani organized event
Spanish PM Sanchez: "We subsidize public transport. We reduce taxes on food and energy. We protected pensions and we asked banks and energy companies benefiting from extraordinary profits to contribute more because those who have more, must contribute more. It is simple as that. Not as a punishment for their success, but because nobody builds success alone. Behind every successful company and every great fortune, there are workers, infrastructure, schools, hospitals, and institutions."
DJT net approval hit a new low
LLMs are dangerous in the way a monkey with a chainsaw is dangerous
AA is Anatolian Agency, not Alcoholics Anonymous
AA: "Macron says 'credibility' at stake on 'shameful' situation in Gaza.. 'War crimes have been industrialized,’ French president tells UN General Assembly. ‘It's a new era of barbaric acts'.. [he] said Tuesday that the international community's 'credibility' is at stake if it remains inactive on the situation in the Gaza Strip, describing the continued restrictions on humanitarian aid as 'shameful'"
The Guardian: "Eight USS Lincoln personnel have attempted suicide, US navy confirms"
Is it me or has people's retarded takes on sci-tech has reached a new low this year
Researcher: "I work in CRISPR discovery research. This is one of the most exaggerated nothing-burgers ever and would be laughed out of the room if a human scientist attempted to publish something like this"
Min Choi: 'This is wild.
Claude just found something humans missed.
It spotted a hidden repeat pattern in raw bacteriophage DNA...'
Politico: "Le Pen says she won’t leave NATO until Russia’s war in Ukraine ends.. The French presidential front-runner still plans to take Paris out of the military alliance's integrated command"
Indian Ocean... does that mean attacks on Diego Garcia
"An adviser to Iran's supreme leader has threatened to open a new front in the Indian Ocean if the US resumes its strikes against Iran.. Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to expand the geographic scope of the conflict if the US resumes its attacks by targeting US military assets outside the Middle East, including in Cyprus and Bulgaria"
"@pikesley@mastodon.me.uk
What the fuck are you talking about?"
[05/17] Quantum computing is considered much more powerful than regular computing because it can store many times more information, which is why some see it as the next big breakthrough in technology and key to economic growth
The new chancellor doesn't sound this dumb, at least so far
😂 😂 😂
"[05/17] UK chancellor Rachel Reeves: 'Quantum is an area within AI'"
And now the components are gone.. Oops
CNBC: "Chinese authorities reportedly in possession of F-35 components in Hong Kong.. Shipping giant UPS was sending a cockpit canopy and weapons bay door to the U.S. from Australia in late May when it was diverted to Hong Kong."
Some are failing to grasp that bcz LLM is software that can write software? And most of its "code" lives in a data form (as weights). But that's still a set of instructions captured somewhere. That is code. Code can have bugs. Especially the type of "meta code" LLMs are built on will have some major ones.
LLM is software. Software can have bugs.
#Yemen 09/21 - 09/24
AGI is here
"I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8 GB.. I asked Muse to archive the files it could see and send them to my Google Drive. It did.. The download was about 2.7 GB compressed and 6.8 GB unpacked. It appeared to contain the root filesystem of the Linux environment assigned to my session, including Ubuntu system files, Muse’s internal documentation, integration code, app templates, memory files, and agent logs. There were also SSH key files."
Many "leaders" in the tech industry don't get this. Usually they are "enthusiasm bros", who think if you whip up excitement and "push people to be their best" enough, amazing results will follow. This is a very enterpreneurial (that is a slur), capitalistic way of looking at innovation. True innovation almost never happens in for-profit context where some billionaire jerkoff "pushes you" to be "at your best" (Jobs was said to be a master at this, but he applied it selectively, was better it than your average jerkoff - he used it for engineering problems, for true innovative stuff, he would always be on the lookout for small outfits whose inventions were ultimately based on government's dime). Real innovation happens in universities, non-profits, where curious people (have the luxury to) take a chance on an approach which may or may not work.
LLM makers reached the end of their rope. They've gone as far possible within the constraints of the current LLM architectures. The stagnatation started in 2023, ever since they basically have been recylying the same ideas. That is 3 years of trying, scaling - nothing works. The limit is the architecture itself. The "agentic frameworks" are only a thin layer on top of the existing stagnant backend - there is still the same unimproved LLM, but now they torture it in a loop to generate even the simplest f-ing output (like JSON, a very bland file format).
Dean Baker: "The developments we are seeing, including from OpenAI and Anthropic, is that the lesser models can do just about anything anyone would want them to do"
"Macron noted the Strait's strategic risk was initiallly underestimated, identifying the US as uniquely capable of resolving it [that is a diplomatic way of putting it]... The French president offered explicit criticism of the broader strategy behind the war.. 'Having a regime change by bombing a country is not something I think feasible,' Macron argued. 'And for me, it's not a good option, because it doesn't work. And we did this mistake several times in the past decades'...
'When you want to engage people, you strategize with them, and you ask them before launching a war, and we decided not to join this war because we considered, and I still consider, it was not the right option,' Macron concluded."
Paper: "Forecasts of explosive AI progress hinge on AI agents automating AI research. But evidence on whether agents can carry out open-ended AI research is thin... We ran shadow evaluations on two unpublished NeurIPS 2026 submissions, giving frontier agents six days and thousands of dollars of compute. The agents completed all of the engineering without human help, yet could not make substantial progress towards answering the research questions. As a result, both papers were unambiguously rejected by the authors."
ProPublica: "As the scandal over Susan Collins’ relationship with Hawaii defense contractor Navatek became the central issue in her hotly contested senate campaign, she and her top aides mustered a defense with a series of incorrect and misleading claims.
On Tuesday, ProPublica published an investigation into the senior senator from Maine’s relationship with Martin Kao, the former Navatek CEO and a major donor who told law enforcement he exchanged campaign cash for government contracts. His confession came after his guilty plea for campaign finance and loan fraud."
"The Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD) has extended the 'Extreme' Water Shortage Order for Pinellas County and surrounding areas through March 31, 2027."
You see trade deficits are something to be fought, not celebrated due to some misplaced love of globalisation because those deficits will turn around and bite you in the ass. We saw what happened when Germany's trade surplus leading to trade deficits in other countries and subsequent fallout in those countries. China's is creating similar problems.
Does anyone like globalisation anymore?
"Von der Leyen stated.. that the EU would use 'all available tools' to reduce its trade deficit and rebalance economic relationship with Beijing"
Could it be because the Big Bang did not happen?
Universe Today: "The Universe Has A Lithium Problem.. The Big Bang Theory suggests that there should be three times as much lithium as we can observe. Why is there such a discrepancy between prediction and observation?"
"Tesla is the carmaker whose software is so defective a federal jury found it liable, $243 million in the Benavides Autopilot case in August 2025, and whose own crash reports to the federal regulator rise every year.
The driver-assistance software it sells as 'Full Self-Driving' produced 826 reported crashes in the first half of 2026, dramatically up from 476 a year earlier and 180 in 2022, with July 2026 the worst single month on record, after records in May and then again in June. Tesla promised a lower crash rate and withholds the data that would show it; the only number it is forced to publish by law is the count, and the crash count has quadrupled."
HTW: "The UN should stop trying to be everything to everyone.. Its next secretary-general must cut overlap after decades of unchecked mandate expansion, argues Rafael Grossi, a candidate for the job"
The One Last Shot movie w/ Scott Adkins, Lundregen had some leftist takes.. A former soldier was ranting about "dying for corporations in Afghanistan". Good writing
Cybertage (sabotage in cyberspace).. Nice
"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
This will go well.
'Aviation turns to AI.. New system to help air traffic control'"
"The [Shopify] CEO.. explained that [a previous] initiative incentivized workers to 'go nuts' on AI, leading to a deluge of AI generated slop. 'You don’t really read it, and now it has to be reviewed by your colleagues, and they are like, "this doesn’t look right,"' he complained...
An April survey of 1,150 office workers found that 40 percent had encountered a phenomenon known as 'workslop,' or AI-generated content that looks professional on the surface but lacks any actual substance.
Estimates found workers already waste 3.4 hours a month cleaning up the AI schlock, amounting to a monthly loss of $8.1 million for a workplace with 10,000 employees."
It's like I have $y = x^2 + 2x$, then I say "we have flow of $y$ and it is balanced by $- x^2 - 2x$ giving $y - x^2 - 2x = 0$". This doesn't describe anything real. Algebraically the statement is correct, conceptually useless.
For a certain mathematical formulation of a problem, LLM says (adopting the answer for population modeling): "The time rate of change of population $P$ is $dP / dt$. But population can also change via births and deaths, we formulate that via $\mu P$, so we have a balance $dP / dt - \mu P = 0$" [emphasis mine].
See what's going on here? It thinks $dP / dt$ is some kind of flow variable, balanced by $\mu P$. When in fact $dP / dt$ is explained, defined by $\mu P$. RHS defines LHS. The wording BUT makes LLM misunderstanding crystal clear. It's like the machine has no consistent, conceptual view, no world knowledge in the truest sense.
"@mike_k@mstdn.social
Microslop’s discovered Rust is faster than Javascript.
But 'there are hidden dangers in using Rust' because it 'does not stop the agent writing the wrong program correctly'.
It’s like these people have had their brains sucked out & are now gleefully rediscovering wooden blocks & primary colours."
Outsiders are not privy to most of this conflict. There've been rumors of an attempted coup attempt on Xi, later an assasination attempt at the Jingxi Hotel, none of it verified. You can travel to China all you want, shop freely, see touristic sites, but if the press does not report on the inner workings of the government, you don't know
I think the beef started with Xi's third term, the old guard truly disliked that. From what I understand after Mao's iron rule CCP set up a more managerial system where party leaders come and go but they do not turn into an everlasting Mao. Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao were part of that system. Xi's third term upended that, so they've been quarreling ever since.
We talked abut Youxia before, a princeling, one of the rare military officers in China with actual combat experience (Vietnam), and ally of former president Hu Jintao (who himself was famously thrown out of a CCP conference, bcz he is in conflict with Xi).
Corruption.. it's likely bullshit, part of an internal power struggle
NYT: "Ex-Commander of China’s Military Accused of Corruption and Expelled From Party.. Zhang Youxia, once the People’s Liberation Army’s top uniformed commander, and another general had taken 'exceptionally large' bribes, investigators said."
"@climatenewsnow@mastodon.social
Many US military veterans have much higher levels of Pfas 'forever chemicals' in their blood than non-veterans, new peer-reviewed research finds, raising more questions about health risks the nation’s service members face after serving at polluted bases."
#Yemen 09/15 - 09/21
"@neauoire@merveilles.town
Wow, basically every single time I come across something written in Rust [programming language], it's slop, like every, damn, time. I don't believe that anyone actually willingly writes Rust anymore at this point. I honestly can't recall the last time I saw a Rust codebase, and the author is like, I wrote that."
"@samhenrigold@hachyderm.io
Cloudflare released a tunnel product that was seemingly entirely vibe-coded, so now you can google dork to snoop on everyone’s localhost. What a time to be alive"
Open borders is a Koch brothers plan after all
This sounds good
DSA: "The situation becomes more complex when we talk about open borders for economic refugees. Of course, that line is very blurry. There is a wide range of opinions on the left and among labor unions, although everyone on that spectrum agrees that the United States has contributed to the economic conditions that drive people to seek better lives elsewhere...
Neither unions nor everyone on the left have been arguing for open borders or mass immigration."
"@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt
I don't know what is more weird: that there are 144 bytes of writable Flash in each of my toothbrush heads, or that my phone can read them, or that my phone can't write into them because the toothbrush head is password-protected and does toothbrush-side cryptography checks. DRM in your toothbrushes is more likely than you think!
For now the toothbrush allows me to use heads that are 'expired' or 'inauthentic', but it is not unthinkable that one day there will be a toothbrush head with a larger Flash and a payload with a firmware update for the brush that will lock down the toothbrush."
Firefly, a great show while it lasted.. But deep down it gave anti US unification messages.. Browncoats are the South, the alliance is the North -yankees-, and the key characters (good guys) of the show were former browncoat soldiers. That's probably why the show was canceled after only one season.
UD was September 20? LOL
"@evanprodromou@threads.net
Happy Unification Day to those who celebrate. You can find me at a nearby Alliance bar."
TechXplore: "Pilot system couples seawater desalination with hydrogen production.. In a study published in Nature Energy a team led by Prof. Deng Dehui.. proposed a 'seawater to hydrogen and fresh water (STHW)' route that couples alkaline water electrolysis (AWE) with low-temperature vacuum distillation desalination."
H2 Starfire #CleanCombustion
"Middle-Class Americans Are Tired of Acting Like Everything Is Still Affordable"
Zionist cunt and a Trekkie..? Did you not get the entire Bajoran storyline asshole? Those were the Palestinians of the Trek universe.
IC: "UK, France, Canada Ban Trade With Israel’s Illegal Settlements"
NYT: "Merz [faces] growing pressure on Sunday after his center-right party finished behind far-right and far-left parties in state elections in the east."
Hindustan Times: "Russia’s ruling United Russia party has been leading the country’s first parliamentary election since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.. Putin has linked the party to support for his policies, including the war in Ukraine.. The.. Yabloko party, which opposed the war, was removed from the nationwide ballot by Russia’s Supreme Court in August."
Navy Times: "Navy not returning to damaged Bahrain base ‘anytime soon,’ top officer says"
The Atlantic: "The American Age Is Over.. A period of global dominance has ended in plain sight... The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military personnel, a global network of bases and logistics systems, and military and diplomatic partnerships with all corners of the world—has proved insufficient to defeat Iran.. armed with cheap missiles and drones."