Week 40
WSJ: "The World’s Most Surprising Economic Success Story Is... North Korea.. Arms sales to Russia and goods from China provide boost, despite sanctions; ‘the regime is wealthier than ever’"
"@celesteh@hachyderm.io
.. Los Angeles used to have an excellent tram system, with its suburbs laid out along the tram line. It was bought by General Motors and scrapped to get people into cars. The Key System, which went from San Francisco to Fresno, was scrapped by a tyre company. Cars did not replace horses in cities. They replaced effective mass transit by leveraging capital to destroy a common good. If cars were actually better, this destruction would have been expensive and unnecessary."
Fortune: "AI 'godfather' Yann LeCun has 'zero concerns' about human extinction and thinks Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is ‘deluded’.. AI pioneer Yann LeCun is unconcerned about the risks of artificial intelligence. LeCun told Fortune’s Emily Forlini he isn’t worried 'at all' about AI wiping out humanity, and he has 'zero concerns' about the recent string of rogue AI incidents, including OpenAI agents autonomously hacking Hugging Face in July. He attributes the incidents to poor human oversight and system design, and says they’re 'totally preventable.'
'Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,' LeCun said. 'They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.' Many AI labs lack a fundamental understanding of cybersecurity, he said.
He has a particular disdain for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his views on Effective Altruism"
"Another Utah city joins the growing — but costly — wastewater reuse bandwagon.. As cities across the West face megadroughts, warming climates and growing populations, reusing more of the water that goes down the drain starts to sound pretty good."
"@lbloch@sciences.re
A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.
He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.
His name is Fabrice Bellard."
Broadband subsidies, which were supposed to fund actual cables, were diverted to e-douche's Starlink? That sounds like corruption
"Ten years ago, the wealthiest 0.001% of California residents were worth a combined $700 billion. Today, that same fraction of the population, California’s 250 billionaires, are collectively worth 2.3 trillion. Their wealth now amounts to the entire annual income of all California taxpayers — some 20 million of them.
This extreme wealth has translated into extraordinary power, in California just like in the United States more broadly. During the 2000 federal election cycle, billionaires accounted for about 1% of total donations; in 2024 this number had risen to 19%. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X are all owned or controlled by prominent billionaires. Sergey Brin alone has already spent more than $100 million to defeat the California billionaire tax..
How did the billionaires get to be so rich? In many cases, they made important contributions, for which they have been amply rewarded. But our failure to tax their returns on capital—a myriad of loopholes they've taken full advantage of—has also allowed their wealth to compound, while ordinary Americans have paid higher rates...
Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Abhijit Banerjee (University of Zurich and MIT), Peter Diamond (MIT), Esther Duflo (University of Zurich and MIT), Paul Krugman (CUNY), and Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University)"
Fortune: "California’s billionaire tax will ‘kickstart a movement’ that spreads to more states, the federal government and other countries, Nobel laureates say"
No one can assume an identity and become it, esp. at a deep cultural level - this troubles some people, but from a Culture Code aspect, many of the instinctive characteristics of people are burned in their brains at a young age, and they are next to impossible to change. This is why first and later generation of immigrants are completely different from their forefathers (0th gen). You assimilate into the society you are born into, the minority adopts the ways of the majority. This should not be controversial.
A lot of these excesses were driven by Dem shitlib coastal mucktards anyway to divert attention away from economic issues. On that aspect alone, the pushback requires its own massive pushback.
"Living life as one sees himself / own identity / belief" jives with US' core principles, since Americans are said to be the descendants of people who escaped religious persecution, haunted for being a certain identity. But there are differences btw branches of monothestic religions and the excesses of L.G.B.T.I.C.U.P. Last I checked the Amish don't join sport competitions and force all other teams to ride in to the avenue on a horse and buggy.
No, you can not be anything you declare yourself to be, at least not in the eye of the general public, not on every issue.
If that's what they did, then they did a good job
"A new data investigation argues that The New York Times sharply changed the way it covers transgender people beginning in 2022, moving from rights-based framing toward more skeptical, conflict-driven coverage that elevated opponents of transgender rights"
To run the code, dload, place access keys in .twkeys.json, and hack
away. Need to sign up with Copernicus, get API keys (it's free).
What are the chances of getting a clear pic of a US Navy ship getting its ass bombed on the Persian Gulf right when it happens via satellite?
Nice.. It worked
u.get_sentinel2().fetch_image(48.8584, 2.2945, zoom=1, day="2026-09-29")
Zoom 1: 10 m/px, 5.1 km wide, 512x512 pixels
Using scene 2026-09-29T11:07:25.828Z (tile cloud cover 57.53%)
Saved /tmp/sentinel.tiff and /tmp/sentinel.jpg
Out[1]: ('/tmp/sentinel.tiff', '/tmp/sentinel.jpg', '2026-09-29T11:07:25.828Z')
F--ing browser.. screwed up my streaming radio. No matter, create bash
aliases for same URLs, play them using mpv. The command line comes
to the rescue
"@cstross@wandering.shop
Anthropic is planning an IPO and filed their draft S-1 prospectus in June! They were circulating that draft S-1 around their investors last month. And it leaked to Reuters, who wrote it up.
Anthropic’s money situation is as bad as we thought. Actual revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion. Just the operating expenses were 12.65 billion, for an operating loss of 8 billion. They spent 2.75 to make each dollar that came in"
TNW: "Amazon customers can’t opt out of driver camera glasses, Bloomberg reports"
#Scholz
"The deepest AI-generated mathematical proofs have been typically accompanied by a poorly-written pdf or no pdf at all, and perhaps an end-to-end formalization in Lean.. [giving] little clue as to where the ideas came from, or even where the new ideas are. Again I defer to [Field Medalist] Scholze, who.. points out.. the new rank 30 and rank 31 elliptic curves came with equations and nothing else. 'We didn’t learn anything really'..Scholze, who in the recent Heidelberg Laureate Forum panel on AI and mathematics said that he will not use AI" via @andreasthom@mathstodon.xyz
"@dangillmor@mastodon.social
A carpenter friend in California told me today that the price of copper has gone through the roof -- e.g. $100 for a short section of pipe. He said the data centers are hoovering up raw materials in such a frenzy that the cost of essentially all construction materials is insane.
#Yemen
09/24 - 10/02
The Lever: "A landmark settlement confronts decades of PFAS pollution — but not the corporate system that keeps moving the toxic waste elsewhere... After years of public outcry, state officials announced a breakthrough earlier this month. The state had reached a $590 million deal with Chemours and associated companies to provide residents with clean water and repair the damage the pollution has caused. Politicians hailed the payout — the largest environmental-damages settlement in North Carolina history — as a major step forward in holding the company accountable for decades of damage.
But the agreement stops at the state line — while the contamination does not.
I had assumed, when I began researching Chemours’ pollution, that it was a local problem. But I quickly learned that it’s not just North Carolina struggling to navigate a new forever-chemical normal; it’s not even just the United States. The fluorochemical industry has a pattern of shuffling around PFAS production and waste, from North Carolina to Texas, from Italy to India. Every stop leaves a trail of contamination in its wake."
F24: "Fake BBC report falsely implicates Indian passenger and pilot in Flydubai hijacking attempt"
Clean Core gets it
MIT Technology Review: "[08/29] For just the second time in nearly two decades, the United States has granted an export license to an American company planning to sell nuclear technology to India.. The decision to greenlight Clean Core Thorium Energy’s license is a major step toward closer cooperation between the two countries on atomic energy and marks a milestone in the development of thorium as an alternative to uranium for fueling nuclear reactors."
Who cares.. Holtec's technology is mediocre, they built a smaller version of the same old light-water reactor tech. They need to use a better coolant. They need better fuel.
Reuters: "Holtec Nuclear shelves US IPO as AI trade hits turbulence"
The events described below rhyme with LLM tech evolution and their ongoing commodatization IMO
Oracle, a big klunky piece of.. software, made its bucks by charging obscene amts of money for enterprise "backend" usage. People would get the hardware to run their Oracle, somehow, Jew Ellison did not care. I've been in some hardware scaling meetings planning the deployment of Oracle DBs, and the license prices that were thrown around would make any IT manager cry.
But slowly, surely that klunky product was becoming commodatized, along with the entire stack of software necessary to run it (eg Linux). When the cloud arrived, they started offering services around such commodatized databases, open source solutions, and now such solutions could be scaled massively on a cheap(er) cloud. Postgresql is the prime example for this. Start ups I saw around mid 2010s all used FOSS DBs like Postgres, none of them would touch Oracle with a ten foot pole. Jew Ellison decried the cloud bcz it was such a foreign approach to his style of business.
Reuters: "[2012] Ellison famously mocked cloud computing as 'complete gibberish' in a 2008 tirade after a Wall Street analyst asked him to comment on the trend. He described it as a fad, comparing the computer industry to the fashion world."
"Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery clears legal hurdle"
MEE: "UAE-owned club [Manchester City] found guilty of financial violations charges.. The club engaged in "sham" commercial contracts to artificially inflate revenues and reduce costs by more than $1bn, the findings showed."
#Stallone #War #MIC
A sign of anti-Israel sentiment or false flag to create symphaty for the "Zionist entity"?
NYT: "Passengers intervened after a clash broke out in the cockpit of a flight to Tel Aviv from Dubai, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, according to accounts from those on board"
"If we have about 85% to 90% of the US federal tax receipts are coming from workers in some form, direct or indirect, then ultimately we're going to have to have a significant redesigning of the tax collection system, which is.. consistent with Peter Turchin's elite over-production work, in the sense that you have the rise of the DSA, and these.. redistributive policy platforms. Ultimately what's going to happen is they're going to start taxing where the money is and where it's being generated... So you can follow the bouncing ball, it's going to be folks like us on the call who have the privilege of talking about financial markets for a living. It's going to be the companies that are making all the money in AI.. Ultimately, in a weird way, the profit rainbow that is justifying trillions of dollars of capex is ultimately, in my opinion, a mirage. Now that's when the market really starts to break down.. There's going to be a Wile Coyote moment where we realize, how does Uncle Sam pay for all this? And they're gonna go 'Nvidia'. That's.. Jensen Wang. So you're gonna get a big check in a few years, my friend"
"Luke Gromen & Darius Dale: Which Inning Are We In?" #Taggart #Reshare
"Luke Gromen & Darius Dale: Which Inning Are We In?" #Taggart
FT: "Corporate America embraces cheaper 'open' AI models.. Corporate America is turning to lower-cost.. AI models, as spiralling IT expenses push executives to look for alternatives to Anthropic and OpenAI"
"@pikesley@mastodon.me.uk
Is it 'Exploding Rockets Are Good For Rocketry, Actually' Day again already? It comes around so fast"
Sometimes it feels like Potus wants ME warmongering to be voted down in the midterms so via the electoral aftermath US can leave faster. Already via Iran the bases are destroyed, US credibility in the region damaged.
Except some recent outliers (!), DJT is consistent - allowed Kurds getting their ass kicked by Iraq (1st term), then did the same for Syria (2nd term). Prepared the plans to leave Afghanistan (which Biden followed).
AP News: "The US military says its withdrawal of troops from Iraq is complete"
The Lever: "Banks make billions underpaying depositors — and Wall Street just admitted that consumers finding better deals could threaten the system."
NYT: "German Town Votes to Stop Adding Memorials Outside Homes of Slain Jews"
They are betting on the wrong thing.. GPT is stagnant tech with no promise of improving with no chance against scalers, even small open source players
From the people who bet 'big' on WeWork
Financial Times: "SoftBank launches one of biggest junk bond deals to fund OpenAI bet"
The keyword with such news is always "monkey with a chainsaw"
F24: "OpenAI cancels release of new AI model over safety concerns"
"@mattblaze@federate.social
The 'AI changes everything' people rhyme remarkably well with the 'blockchain changes everything' people."
Osenilo: "It is customary to read the death of the ether out of [Michelson's] experiment. That is wrong, and Michelson’s contemporaries knew it. Back in 1845 Stokes.. proposed that the Earth carries its medium with it, as a carriage carries its own air. Inside the carriage there is no wind, and Michelson’s instrument is bound to stay silent"
Defense Mirror: "The US Navy has withdrawn its warships from the blockade line around Iran after Tehran's first operational use of the advanced Qasem Basir 'carrier killer' anti-ship ballistic missile.. recent satellite imagery shows no US carriers or destroyers in the Gulf of Oman or Arabian Sea since early September, per open-source intelligence and Sentinel-2 data..
The Qasem Basir has a declared range of roughly 1,200 kilometers - enough to cover nearly the entire Gulf of Oman and the US fleet's previous positions - and is reportedly equipped with electro-optical and thermal imaging seekers designed to track naval targets. A senior Iranian official Mohsen Rezaei earlier said the missile 'created hell for the Americans'..
Satellite imagery shows the USS George Washington, USS George H.W. Bush, USS Tripoli and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are no longer visible in the designated blockade zone, with the line reportedly pushed beyond the missile's range."
Chemistry World: "300MW electrolyser construction starts off Spanish ‘hydrogen valley’.. In September, Spanish energy company Moeve started building a 300MW solar-powered electrolyser to make CO2-emission-free ‘green’ hydrogen in Huelva, in the south of the country. The Spanish government is contributing €300 million (£260 million) towards the over €1 billion cost of the site."
The Tribune: "India launches world’s first nuclear heat-based hydrogen production facility.. India has launched the world’s first hydrogen production facility using the copper-chlorine thermochemical cycle powered by nuclear heat from the fast breeder test reactor. The pioneering facility expands the role of nuclear energy beyond electricity generation, opening new avenues for decarbonising goals while strengthening India’s long-term energy security. The facility is developed at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), Kalpakkam."
I still think (visual, physical) world models are necessary for the grand final model. All aspects of human condition needs to be included in the training.
Almeida claims the factor that holds back LLMs from improving has been their complementary nature, they exist to autocomplete, to chat. This is why they keep failing on the bigger task we expect from them, deciding, executing on their own, acting more like a human. His ideas are worth paying attention to. There are some interesting statistics coming from their new product.
Apparently named after some dude named Jevons
New approach is called Jev, not Jew
Diogo Almeida: "[LLMs] have been superhuman at chat for years, so where is all the automation? This has been my driving question for the last four years. At OpenAI, I helped build the methods that made language models useful at following instructions and talking with people. That work ended up as the research behind ChatGPT. At the time, I thought maybe chat models would lead to AGI, but despite the hype it became obvious to me that there was something really big missing..
We built a new stack entirely focused on automation: with a new model architecture, parallel sampler for maximum efficiency, and training method we call Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions (RLCD)...
Our first public model is Jev, available today in early access. Jev achieves similar levels of intelligence on System One tasks compared to existing LLMs, while being two orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. While Jev gives up string generation, it’s optimized for structured outputs and can’t hallucinate."
"UiPath founder Daniel Dines's new book, The Work That Remains challenges the notion of fully autonomous AI in enterprises. Dines argues that AI, while capable of reasoning, cannot 'learn on the job' or develop a persistent 'self' for accountability, making it a 'bright stranger' in a business. He identifies four limits: inability to learn, lack of self, weakness in high-consequence scenarios, and insufficient accuracy for critical tasks. His proposed operating model is 'AI proposes, humans decide, automation executes' leveraging AI for synthesis, humans for judgment, and deterministic automation for exactness. Dines emphasizes building a 'map and rails' for enterprise work, describing processes explicitly for AI to act within, while automation handles precise execution. He warns against the 'headcount trap,' urging companies to map, build, validate, and redesign roles before adjusting staffing"
Hopefully this war does not end like the one in Grozny, where large swaths of urban areas were simply flattened.
Atlantic Council: "[08/18] Odesa under attack: Russia is cutting Ukraine off from the Black Sea"
#Ukraine 09/15 - 09/28
W. E. B. Du Bois: "[1953] Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books."
Pettis, Trade Wars are Class Wars: "Germans consumed less than they produced, and they underinvested in their country, which produced large surpluses with the rest of the world. At the same time, Spaniards, Greeks, and the others experienced booms, spending far more than they earned and borrowing to cover the differences. In the years leading up to the global financial crisis, Spain had the second-biggest trade deficit in the world, behind only the United States, while Greece, a country of just eleven million people, had the fifth biggest. But Germany’s pathologies—rising inequality, depressed consumption, and systematic underinvestment—were a preview of what was to come for the rest of the continent..
The European crisis was never about a conflict between fascistic Germans and dishonest Greeks—it was about income distribution. German policies developed in response to the twin shocks of reunification and the postcommunist liberation of Eastern Europe transferred purchasing power from workers and retirees to the ultrarich, which in turn forced Germany’s neighbors to tolerate some combination of rising unemployment and soaring indebtedness."
"@jonny@neuromatch.social
THE FUCKING 'CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTIONS' IDEA THAT WON OVER THE NYTIMES JOURNALIST IS FUCKING HARDCODED. ALL THE IDEAS ARE FUCKING HARDCODED. AGI IS HERE BABY!!!!!!"
"@tristanbuckmaster@mastodon.social
It took OpenAI only 100 agents 50 hours to go from zero knowledge (a huge search space) to obtaining their Euler result which shares strikingly specific, non-obvious structural features with our ongoing research. After narrowing the search search space by orders of magnitude, they needed 10k (rather than 100) agents to go from Euler to [Navier Stokes]?
Interestingly, they also give their agents access to user data [where the researcher whose work was 'borrowed from' discussed their ideas]"
More one-to-one, live, verbal quizzes, less reliance on written work so people cannot cheat. Even though LLMs do not fundamentally understand anything, they can recall, adapt formulations for problems. They can handle drudgery, so testing must go beyond that.
Harvard Paper: "PhD Math Education in the Age of AI.. While the highest aims of mathematics PhD programs remain stable, we suggest substantial changes in the implementation of our programs to achieve their goals. These include new emphasis on communication, detailed discussions with advisors about AI use, and changing assessments to not use written work as the primary proxy for measuring understanding."
Reddit: "Infamous letter from Sun Microsystems CEO to shareholders after DotCom burst.. Sun peaked at a $200bn market cap in 2000, then crashed and was finally sold for 7bn to Oracle a decade later. Their Price to Revenue ratio at the peak was only 10!
At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?
Moves like Jagger is one funky song
"@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place
... we finally found someone besides NVidia who's profiting off AI"
In 2023, Anguilla’s government made about US$32 million from fees collected for registering .ai domains. That amounted to more than 10% of gross domestic product for the territory.
Look at that jump in 10 Yr treasury yields.. massive
DW: "The Left Party was one of the main supporters of a successful, years-long grassroots campaign called ["Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen"]... Deutsche Wohnen is a major property developer that owns over 140,000 units across Germany, and 100,000 in Berlin alone.
The campaign and the Left Party argued that by expropriating this and a handful of other major companies like it, the Berlin government could put some 270,000 apartments in Berlin into public ownership, and make them available at affordable rent prices. Other estimates put the number at around 240,000...
The original referendum, held in September 2021, asked Berliners to vote yes or no [57.6% of Berliners voted yes]... In 2023, the commission concluded that expropriation was legal and possible.. [but later], a new conservative-led government, headed by the Christian Democratic Union's (CDU).., had been voted into office, and announced that it would not expropriate any real estate companies, regardless of what the commission said. At the same time, it emerged that the Berlin CDU was receiving hundreds of thousands of euros in donations from property companies."
DW: "Elif Eralp: ‘Germany’s Zohran Mamdani’.. vows to be a mayor for all Berliners"
DW: "The socialist Left Party won the Berlin election partly on the promise to implement the city's 2021 expropriation referendum"