Week 10
ZDNet: "Office EU is a European open-source office suite. The creators are counting on Europe's demand for digital sovereignty. It aims to rival Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
Digital sovereignty in Europe is taking another step forward. Office.eu has officially launched in The Hague. This new cloud service is positioning itself as a fully European, open‑source‑based alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace."
ProPublica: "The Navy is no longer allowed to shroud its criminal trials in secrecy and must provide public access to hearings and records, a federal judge ruled last month... ProPublica sued the Navy in 2022 after the service refused to release almost all court documents in a high-profile arson case, in which a sailor faced life imprisonment for a fire that destroyed a Navy assault ship. A ProPublica investigation found that the service decided to prosecute Ryan Mays despite little evidence connecting him to the fire — or that the fire was a result of arson in the first place — and a military judge’s recommendation to drop the charges."
"@ben@werd.social
Just to say it: sinking a ship on its way home from a friendly international exercise that we were also taking part in is such cowardice."
"Iranian warship sunk by the US was sailing home after taking part in an exhibition hosted by India"
#99Homes
Good recommendation from new code, 99 Homes, the 2014 movie
"Why is the UK media selling this war?" #JamesOBrien
"Israeli media is reporting that Iranian missiles hit Israel's Ben Gurion Airport"
NHK: "US operation against Iran costs nearly $900 million a day, think tank estimates"
F24: "Iran hits Kurdish groups in Iraq as conflict widens"
CNN: "CIA working to arm Kurdish forces to spark uprising in Iran, sources say"
"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social
What the (neoliberal) right fails to understand is that it is precisely unregulated market capitalism that produces the constant change, unreliability and insecurity that undermines stable communities and environments, and with them the social bonds that cohere societies. They propagate the very thing they fear most"
Lula da Silva: "Brazil demands an immediate ceasefire and the opening of a negotiation table that is not tainted by arms trade interests" #Iran #US
The Guardian: "The global economy must be reordered to ensure it serves ordinary people around the world rather than the 'frivolous and destructive demands of the ultra-rich', according to a leading UN figure...
[W]hile many within the UN have been convinced of the 'imperative of moving beyond growth' for years, their 'existing mandate does not always allow them to say this politically at the highest level, and there is a taboo still about questioning growth'.
That could change next month, according to De Schutter, with his roadmap and the other initiatives allowing high-profile figures to 'come out of the closet' on growth."
Ah the usage of the word "regime" on governments you don't like.. Maybe we should call USG as the "American regime".. It is part authoritarian isn't it? Its leaders do not listen to their people, nor seem to care about their well-being.. The system is a type of "corporate Ba'ath". This is the American regime.
#TuckerCarlson #TheThirdTemple
Imma connect strategic lines, North to South, area of influence bro, form a triangle, polygon of integrated defenses, uh, do a synergy of energies protecting areas of influence within concomitant circles. The grand plan.
But on a second thought let's bomb, create chaos in the Middle East again.
"We are now focusing on the Western hemisphere bro". Then all of a sudden we are back in the Middle East... What happened to focusing on your own region?
US was so mad communists took power in the mainland, they refused to recognize their country, and kept calling the little tiny island off the coast of mainland, Taiwan, as "China", for decades. Taiwan sat at the permanent seat at the UN instead of the PRC, representing a mainland it had no control over. This is the lengths the West can go denying reality, because it is inconvenient, non-palatable and they think they have all the power, they can define / shape reality.
Wiki: "The People's Republic of China.. was established in 1949 and was not recognized by the United Nations (UN) as the legitimate government of China until 1971. Prior to then.. Taiwan represented the interests of China"
"@jonsnow@mastodon.online
Windows 12 reportedly set for release this year as a subscription-based, AI-focused OS
So there can be something worse than Windows 11..."
This is like vanilla machine learning / data science level output. ML could "cluster customers", some customers could end up in wrong clusters, but overall, you'd have enough positive hits esp. in marketing terms that can bring in some reveue via improved "targeting". But AGI level thinking cannot be mere fuzzy fishing. We will expect these things to work for us, perform better than us, at least as accurate as us.
It was widely known Ford was near Iran, not Norfolk.
I had an LLM parse a Web page for US Navy ship locations. On USS Ford, there was contradicting information on the page, one line said it was docked at port, another said it was at Eastern Mediterrenian. LLM displayed no alerts on this contradiction, and chose the port location by default, when the other info was the correct one and showed up later in the page. When I told LLM about the problem, it changed its mind, chose Eastern Medi.
Is this thinking? It looks like blind prompt execution
#F24 #Iran
MAGA, America First folk are not happy
#GroundInvasion #Iran #Davis
AA: "Spain's premier urges immediate end to 'spiral of violence' in Middle East"
#TelAviv
#USNavy
"@katemorley@hachyderm.io
The first UK opinion poll conducted following the Green Party’s win in the Gorton And Denton by-election is quite something:
Reform: 23% (-1)
Green: 21% (+4)
Labour: 16% (-2)
Conservative: 16% (-2)
Lib Dem: 14% (=)
'The Greens are now the most popular party in all age categories under 50. Some 49% of 18-24 year olds would back the Greens, as well as 27% of 25 to 49-year-olds'"
The Adhan was taken from Judaism BTW
I would like to become Shia if it means these loud preaching @#!! shut the fuck up. The practice makes people dislike religion, the screeching voice of muezzin is off-putting for many.
Bloomberg: "[2016] In Tehran, you can spend days at a time without hearing the wail of the call to prayer. For someone who once lived in Istanbul, where the muezzin compete to be heard over minaret-mounted loudspeakers cranked up to 11, that comes as quite a surprise.
This is, after all, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Women are obliged to cover their heads and every official speech or comment begins with an invocation of God. The Supreme Leader is a cleric; so is the current President of Iran, as were two of his three predecessors. And yet the volume on the call to prayer has been turned down, because people complained."
"@jalefkowit@vmst.io
'Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica has terminated senior AI reporter Benj Edwards following a controversy over his role in the publication and retraction of an article that included AI-fabricated quotes, Futurism has confirmed'"
Politico: "This House Democrat may lose her primary over past support for Israel.. The primary of Rep. Valerie Foushee, a North Carolina Democrat, is putting a spotlight on the shifting politics of Israel within the party."
Jonathan Larsen: "A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was 'anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,' according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer. From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night."
"@codinghorror@infosec.exchange
I need a plugin that replaces 'AI' with 'galaxy brain statistics' on every web page I visit 🎲🧠"
Bernie Sanders: "NORTH CAROLINA: On Tuesday, you have an opportunity to elect @nidaallam — someone who has spent her public life fighting for working people and taking on corporate power, billionaires and billionaire-funded Super PACs like AIPAC.
The future is in your hands. VOTE!"
Pat Ryan: "I lost friends in Iraq to Iran-backed terror groups.
To me, honoring them means preventing another generation of brave Americans from dying in regime-change wars.
The only winners are Lockheed Martin & chickenhawks talking tough from their gold-plated offices."
"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
Ian Miles Cheong is, as always, a complete moron."
The Independent: "Passengers leave Dubai on limited Emirates flights following Iran strikes"
BBC: "Influencers tell of shock as Iran hits Dubai's luxury landmarks"
The Guardian: "Private jet prices soar as wealthy scramble to leave Dubai"
Ian Miles Cheong: "I need for people to have some perspective of what it means to live in Dubai. So not a lot of people know this but India’s Bollywood stars all live in Dubai, and so do Russia’s UFC guys and their teams. European footballers live here. Tech CEOs. AI guys. Crypto guys. Bankers. The world’s richest men and women live here.
What I'm saying is that it’s the safest place in the world by default. It has to be. You wouldn’t skimp on air defenses to protect trillions of dollars in elite human capital. And beyond that, no cost is too great to pay to protect human lives."
"@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green
When the US and Israel attacked #Iran on Saturday, the #GreenParty #Byelections victory at first felt dwarfed; our local elections campaign insignificant and hard to focus on.
But it is all linked, and hugely important:
Polanski now has the platform to articulate an anti-war stance clearly on MSM. And The Green Party is a real (the only!) political choice for those of us opposing illegal warmongering - and it keeps growing! A small glimmer of hope right there. #UKPolitics"
AP News: "Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead."
That didn't take long. The poodle yapped a little but at the end remembered who the master is.
BBC: "[03/02] UK will allow US to use bases to strike Iranian missile sites"
The Telegraph: "[02/19] Starmer blocks Trump from using RAF bases to strike Iran"
I run Linux on Android via alternate means. Plus thanks to some new droid keyboard remapping features (CAPS, Alt remaps are easy) I can go full-blown developer mode on a droid. It took a while to get here, but the env is now workable. But other (legit) avenues are welcome.
Android is now offering a Termux-like environment? That's good
"Many users have asked me: What are the pros and cons of using Android's upcoming Terminal app to run Linux apps versus something like Termux?"
Futurism: "While plenty of bad bacteria — like E. coli — can get you sick, many other types are beneficial.. Now, researchers at the University of Waterloo say they’ve developed a new way to treat cancer by engineering bacteria called Clostridium sporogenes, which are commonly found in soil and don’t need oxygen to grow, to literally eat tumors from the inside out."
"GrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility developed as a non-profit open source project."
"Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation"
Air strikes on their own could not topple Houthis. They endured and are still around.
How about the 1995 bombing of Serbia as a success story for air strikes? Did it "convince the Serbs" to accept an agreement? Actually it was US that made huge concession to the Serbs, the US bombing was for show, the usual "Clinton theater" to cover something up, in this case concessions, the bombings aimed to "strengthen their image" as Holbroke admitted back then.
IC: "Human activity has grown to challenge planetary limits, yet the official solution to any problem that arises is to grow more. Like fish unable to live anywhere but in water, our leaders find it hard to imagine any way of life outside the Growth paradigm... Measured as GDP and Standard of Living, we aspire to ever greater numbers... In the effort to keep GDP growing, many products are made to be used only once, to go out of style, or to break after minimal use. Even the solutions proposed for climate change are conceived within the Growth paradigm. Solar panels, electric cars, heat pumps, and the like help reduce CO2 emissions but they are all firmly rooted in the Growth economy. They require extensive mining, manufacture, distribution and eventually disposal."
HTW: "Amazon data centre hit in UAE, Emirates cancels Dubai flights"
HTW: "Iran says it targeted Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu amid escalating war"
TAC: "'President Trump is ending the forever war that Iran has waged against America for the last 47 years,' the [House Foreign Affairs Committee]'s X account shared, adding 'Thank You POTUS.'. So according to this bipartisan committee, a war has been going on between Iran and the U.S. for nearly half a century and Trump’s actions over the weekend were merely a decisive and strong president finally putting an end to it. The balls on these people!"
Aaaand like clockwork, we have another shooting war.. Let's draw down those stockpiles baby.. They need to hear the sound of ka-ching!
Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of US Militarism: "The [military-industrial complex] has evolved from a means of national security into an end in itself. Unlike past empires where arms production was dictated by war requirements, the private, market-driven character of the U.S. arms industry means that profit imperatives now drive the demand for war. This 'parasitic imperialism' requires occasional 'shooting wars' to draw down stockpiles of armaments, display the efficiency of new 'smart' weapons, and justify the military's continued appropriation of the lion’s share of public money."
CNBC: "Oil soars amid Strait of Hormuz shipping fears as Iran war drives prices to nearly $80"
Iran rejects talks, hits countries in the region hosting US bases. They want this to be a punishment on all, they are tired of getting beat like pinata year after year. They need to build some kind of deterrence against constant attacks.
CNBC: "Iran Rejects Talks, Accuses US of Undermining Diplomacy"
Collected the alternate theories we covered so far, below.
Lindner: "Can [a] flowing space theory reproduce the other successful predictions of GR? Indeed it can, and with greater simplicity. In the early 1920’s, Alvar Gullstrand and Paul Painlevé demonstrated that the Schwarzschild metric could be represented by a flat space flowing radially inward towards matter at the Newtonian escape velocity. Herbert Ives and Robert Kirkwood published more detailed treatments of this model between 1939 and 1954. Ives demonstrated that if an object in a gravitational field were affected as if it had the Newtonian escape velocity for that height—if its frequency were redshifted, if it were shortened in the vertical direction, and if its effective mass were increased—then the successful predictions of GR were produced with greater simplicity, including gravitational lensing, the gravitational redshift, and the advance of Mercury’s perihelion"
Henry Lindner: "[My previous] paper.. described how [Relativity and Quantum Theory] followed directly from Bishop Berkeley’s idealistic, subjectivistic.. program of limiting the scope of natural philosophy to the mere modeling of the observer’s sensations and measurements, in the observer’s frame. He accomplished this only by denying that any physical Cosmos or causes existed. Albert Einstein imposed Berkeley’s metaphysics and epistemology on physics with his Special Theory of Relativity and his photonic model of light. For the last 100 years, physics has been locked into this subjectivistic paradigm...
Once we admit the existence of an EM space and of electrons as persistent EM wave structures in that space, then we can create a plausible physical explanation of the slowing of atomic clocks. (Other timekeeping devices, e.g. pendulum and spring-driven clocks, have different mechanisms and behave differently in gravity and in uniform translational motion). If space is physical, then we must assume that it is the velocity of atomic clocks relative to space (RTS) that causes them to slow. The electrons of the clocks, the electrons whose frequencies determine the time-keeping, are themselves bound to nuclei. Because they are bound to the nuclei, they do not “gain” waves (increase in frequency) like free electrons do when forced into higher velocity RTS. Neither do nuclear-bound electrons emit waves when decelerated as free electrons do. Bound electrons, being composed of circulating or oscillating EM waves, are physically analogous to the “bouncing light clock” found in introductions to Relativity... When a bound electron is forced into motion RTS, its waves must propagate through the greater spatial distance described by the Pythagorean theorem, causing a 2o Doppler red shift of their frequency and of the waves they absorb and emit. Atomic clocks actually measure the 'space wind' to which they are subjected—they are space speedometers"
Another aether theory, by Henry Lindner.
#Anthropic #Pentagon
Fortune: "[2025/08] MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing"
CNBC: "WBD employees fear coming wave of job losses as Paramount tops Netflix's bid to acquire company.. WBD employees fear potential job cuts, culture clashes and high debt loads as Paramount supplants Netflix as the company's acquirer"
#MarioAdrion
A German comedian.. He is good #MarioAdrion
Business Insider: "Amazon's Anthropic stake is now valued at $60.6 billion, a seven-fold increase. Amazon has invested 8 billion in Anthropic so far."
"[2024] Anthropic naming Amazon Web Services (AWS) its primary cloud provider and Amazon making a $4 billion investment in Anthropic"
PAK is attacking AFG mostly because of TTP (the so-called Pakistani Taliban). PAK wants AFG to control TTP but the central gov is refusing to do so. PAK is delivering a message to both.
Yahoo: "Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz.. One of the major global maritime passageways for oil transport, the Strait of Hormuz, has been closed, according to multiple reports."
Palestine Chronicle: "Iran’s IRGC announced the destruction of the US FP-132 radar in Qatar. The radar reportedly had a 5,000-kilometer missile detection range. Tehran described it as a major American surveillance hub in the region."
BBC: "Iran launches attacks across Middle East after US and Israel strikes on leadership sites.. Apparent Iranian attacks have been reported in Dubai, Doha, Bahrain, Kuwait - places with US military bases, or that are allied to the US - and elsewhere"
Reuters: "Iran confirms supreme leader Khamenei is dead"