Week 11

Instagram: "End-to-end encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after May 8, 2026.. If you have chats that are impacted by this change, you will see instructions on how you can download any media or messages you may want to keep."

"@eunews@mastodon.social

Historic Chat Control Vote in the EU Parliament: MEPs Vote to End Untargeted Mass Scanning of Private Chats

In a sensational turn of events in the fight against Chat Control, a majority in the European Parliament voted today to end the untargeted mass scanning of private communications. In doing so, the Parliament firmly rejected the error-prone and unconstitutional surveillance practices of recent years."

DW: "Germany news: Greens narrowly win Baden-Württemberg election.. In a close race, the Greens won the state election in Baden-Württemberg, ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU... Green Party candidate Cem Özdemir will become the state's next premier"

Liman: "In 2009, Ticketmaster was facing an existential threat. The world’s largest concert promoter, Live Nation Entertainment, the result of a roll-up of promoters, was sponsoring a rival ticketing service to displace Ticketmaster. The ticketing company had been a monopoly for decades, after buying a series of rivals in the 1980s and early 1990s.. Instead of competing and lowering profit margins, however, Ticketmaster and Live Nation chose to merge.

The Antitrust Division began investigating, and heard wails of criticism... Nevertheless, the Obama administration, led by AAG Christine Varney and a subordinate named Gene Kimmelman, allowed the combination, reshaping the live entertainment business into a series of alleged interlinked monopolies."

HT: "Are Trump cabinet members buying bunkers amid Iran conflict? Shelter firm claims surge.. A US bunker manufacturer says the surge in interest includes wealthy executives and possibly even members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet."

US has global reach, but even a global player needs local friends or stooges. Near Russia US had its stooge Ukraine, near Iran the many neighbors with bases, near China there is Taiwan, near NK there is SK. If attacked, the opposition can beat the shit out of the friendly neighbor, to give a message to the big dog.

IMO North Korea's deterrence rests mostly on its conventional capability, directed towards the South. Maybe Iran learned from that, and is holding US allies over the barrel like NK does for SK. Obviously having nukes would not hurt.

RAND: "[2020] North Korea maintains nearly 6,000 artillery systems within range of major South Korean population centers, which it could use to kill many thousands in just an hour, even without resorting to chemical or nuclear weapons... Estimated total casualties from the attacks ranged from about 4,500 to more than 200,000. The authors conclude that because so much harm could be done so quickly, the United States and South Korea should try to avoid military provocation cycles that could lead to these attacks."

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"@rysiek@mstdn.social

I am absolutely loving the fact that fedi is the kind of place where people still not only know the terms 'scrip' and 'company town', not only understand why these are dangerous ideas, but are also violently vocal about how bad they are as soon as something shaped like them is mentioned."

AA: "The closure of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.. has already sent oil prices soaring to alarming highs. But experts say fertilizer exports from the Gulf, food imports into the region and global agricultural supply chains could also face pressure if the crisis drags on, potentially driving higher food prices worldwide.

The Gulf is a major center for fertilizer production and exports, with Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain all depending on the Strait of Hormuz for their shipments. Together, these five accounted for 23% of global ammonia trade and 34% of global urea trade in 2024"

WSJ: "Iran’s Control of Hormuz Means It’s Exporting More Oil Today Than Before the War"

The Lever: "New War, Same Neocons.. The new Iran war follows a road map drafted by a revived neocon network of Iraq War defense hawks, Israel lobby allies, and dark money groups."

CNBC: "Asia-Pacific markets tumble as investors brace for a prolonged war in Middle East"

"@tante@tldr.nettime.org

The whole 'AI' industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever.

It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain."

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Don't go to Dubai. They keep arresting people using a broad cybercrime law."

BBC: "British man charged in Dubai for alleged filming of Iranian missiles"

CNBC: "U.S. launches fresh Section 301 probes into 60 economies over forced-labor trade practices.. The forced-labor probes follow Section 301 investigations launched on Wednesday, targeting excess industrial capacity across more than a dozen economies."

TAC: "Even in Texas, Democrats Can’t Leave Woke Behind.. James Talarico is too woke for conservatives and too white for liberals.. In one statement, he claimed God could be considered trans."

"@maxschrems@mastodon.social

😵 🤯 Last year a Meta Lobbyist became a new head of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). Today, the former head of the DPC announced that she is now working for MHC - the Irish law firm for Meta that was previously defending Meta before the DPC in GPDR cases - basically a 360° seat swap between the Irish regulator and Meta."

u.get_fred(2025,"DCOILWTICO").plot(title="Crude Price WTI")

CNN: "US Air Force refueling aircraft lost over Iraq"

Firstpost: "China's first North Korea-bound passenger train to depart from Beijing today"

"@pojntfx@mastodon.social

The fact that I can use a Linux phone in China and be a fully participating member of society, including mobile payments and everything, but I can't do that in any EU country, the US or Canada due to the payment methods there requiring SafetyNet and China not requiring that, has really broken my brain a little bit"

There is always excessive deragotary wording against Iranians... The goal is to frame them as subhuman (oldest trick in war propaganda), creating another justification for never-ending attacks. In the aughts you heard this stuff all the time. One, attributed to Holbroke (former Clinton advisor, amb), goes like this: "Negotiating with [Iran] is like playing chess with a donkey. You can make the most brilliant opening move in the history of the game, and the donkey just eats the knight.". As you see, we are not even dealing with a human here who deserve some amount of respect, we are dealing with a donkey. It is not listening to reason, of course, because it is a donkey. Bomb!

That has to be entertaining

"Movie: Chuck Norris vs. Communism. Plot summary: In late eighties, in Ceausescu's Romania, a black market VHS bootlegger and a courageous female translator brought the magic of Western films to the Romanian people and sowed the seeds of a revolution."

"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social

While I think it's true that one of the central political questions of our time is why the European left was so successful in the 'Trente Glorieuses' (as the French call the 30 years or so after the war) in building welfare states, legislating for greater social justice and equality, human rights, etc, I think there are deeper reasons than the 1980s neoliberal ideological attack for the difficulty of reviving this momentum.

First, the horror of fascism and the central role the left had played in resisting, then defeating it, cowed the right. Even centre-right conservatives recognised that unregulated capitalism, and its consequent social inequality and division, had led to fascism, so were open to ideas from a left full of self-confidence from its defeat of fascism.

Second, the institutional bases of the left depended mainly on large industrial workplaces and their surrounding housing estates, in which organisation took place directly between friends and neighbours, not through mass media. Globalisation, and the export of mining and manufacturing jobs to low-wage, low regulation economies undermined the physical infrastructure of left organisation.

Third, the left generally told a simple coherent story: capitalism exploited working people, and if they didn't resist it together it would get worse and worse. But the emergence of identity politics undermined this story too - people began to understand their oppression more in terms of identities like gender, colour or sexuality than social class, and indeed others of their own class as maybe their greatest oppressors. Emerging environmental concerns had some of the same impact, appearing as attacks on workers employed in dirty industries.

So in fact the neoliberal ideological attack of the 1980s-90s was pushing at a door already being forced open by structural economic and social changes."

Mongabay: "Thailand is experiencing a rapid data center boom, with more than 70 projects planned or underway, many clustered in the industrial Eastern Economic Corridor. Residents and farmers in Chonburi and Rayong provinces say they fear the facilities will intensify water shortages and pollution in a region already struggling with industrial impacts. Data centers require large volumes of water for cooling and major electricity supply, raising concerns about wastewater contamination and increased burning of fossil fuels."

Al Monitor: "US intelligence says Iran government is not at risk of collapse, say sources"

NYT: "First 6 Days of Iran War Cost U.S. $11.3 Billion, Pentagon Says"

CleanTechnica: "US Farmers Need Green Ammonia, And China Has It.. The Green Hydrogen Horses Have Left The Barn.. On February 26, the Chinese firm Envision announced the first commercial shipment of green ammonia from its sprawling facility in the Mongolian city of Chifeng to the leading chemicals firm LOTTE Fine Chemical in South Korea.

'This shipment marks the world’s first end-to-end commercial delivery of green ammonia, encompassing the entire value chain from renewable hydrogen synthesis to international maritime logistics,' Envision emphasized in a press statement. 'The cargo originates from Envision’s Chifeng facility, recognized as the world’s largest green hydrogen-ammonia production base..'

The initial green ammonia delivery is all the more significant because LOTTE bills itself as “the largest ammonia distributor in Northeast Asia, supplying two-thirds of domestic ammonia demand.”

How about this? Get it now?

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Some don't seem to get the reference below

"@Kerplunk@mastodon.scot

Switzerland joins Spain in calling Trump's and Netanyahu's war in Iran a violation of international law.

Thank you Switzerland.

Meanwhile more US heavy bombers are arriving in UK.

Starmers Labour is embracing another war, legal or not"

#Ukraine 02/16 - 03/10

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The Guardian: "Sanctions on Israeli settlements are working – even without the US.. Israeli institutions are still scrambling to manage the fallout from economic sanctions imposed by other countries. At a moment when the United States is increasingly willing to sidestep the rules-based international order, the case for a coordinated escalation of multilateral sanctions has only grown stronger – regardless of Washington’s shifting priorities or the latest peace plan developments.

The international community must recognize that Israel’s extremist factions involved in human rights abuses and violations of international law are accustomed to running unchecked, and that Israel’s financial institutions are already bending to accommodate these sanctioned actors, much like the United States.

For emerging sanctions leaders – Canada, the EU, the UK, Australia, Japan, Norway, and Singapore – the task now is to restart and escalate employment of the world’s most widely used foreign policy tool: targeted economic sanctions against entities complicit in Israeli human rights abuses and violations of international law."

Today's Iran was forged from war. It was always unlikely they would surrender quickly.

Sad. Nobody won except certain someones in America

Wikipedia: "[The Iran–Iraq War] did not create any permanent border changes, and neither countries received war reparations afterwards."

Sure Saddam was worried after the Iranian revolution because he was a Sunni leader in a country of Shia majority. He was afraid the new regime built around Shi'ism could influence his citizens, they could get ideas, and attempt to topple him.

But why attack Iran just one year later? Could he not wait a while, observe? Nah, he lost no time to attack IMO he was encouraged to do so by the US government and the moneyed interests that control it. They made huge profits from that war. Arms flowed into Iraq, oil flowed out. A double win for them.

"Billionaires Want Us Homeless" #Wingardh

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New Scientist mag talks to a researcher who says the universe is isotropic, therefore GR, Big Bang blah blah.. But the universe is not isotropic. Where have the real scientists gone?

Link

The Independent: "Blair sparks row with Starmer after claiming UK 'should have backed Trump from the beginning' in Iran"

Probability vs optimization arg can apply to neural nets, even in their "deep" form (the building block of recent LLMs). Would they be better served if used purely probabilistic concepts? Maybe the spaghetti like neuron structure they have today which consumes the electricity requirement of Ireland to train can be simplified in some way. Maybe the new structure can be guided to certain forms of neuronal blocks easier, per topic, that can start to resemble know-how blocks in the logical structure of a human brain.

QM lack of anthology, relying on probabilities, that's a different issue. Here noise, uncertainty is intrinsic to the problem, not pulled out of a hat because classical phy math wasn't advanced enough

Implemented image denoising via optimization some time ago, and now with a probabilistic approach. I have to say the probabilistic method flows naturally, the definition of the problem is clearer, uncertainties get defined, captured easily via distributions. Implementation has a loop, sure, you sample, iterate, sample.. But so does optimization, follow a gradient, update, iterate. The downside is you can get stuck in local minima, whereas probabilistically you are visiting most regions of a distribution, do not get stuck, and have guaranteed convergence to true distribution via certain sampling methods.

Einstein himself made a similar point during a 1920 lecture titled Ether and the Theory of Relativity: "According to the general theory of relativity, space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there would not only be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time."

Despite Einstein's later admission, the "taboo" Laughlin describes persisted because the scientific community had already firmly associated "ether" with "wrong/obsolete physics." Modern physicists prefer terms like "the vacuum," "quantum field," or "the metric," even though these concepts describe space as a substance with physical properties which is the very definition of an ether.

Laughlin, A Different Universe: "[2005] Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry.

It turns out that such matter exists: About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.

The view of space-time as a nonsubstance with substance-like properties is neither logical nor consistent with the facts. It is instead an ideology that grew out of old battles one the validity of relativity. At its core is the belief that the symmetry of relativity is different from all other symmetries in being absolute."

Henry Lindner says (another) Nobel prize winner commented once "general relativity reinstitutes the ether, but we cant say that because it's taboo". He could not remember the name but I believe he meant Robert Laughlin, 98 Prize winner.

Wiki: "Wilczek.. is an American theoretical physicist. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and H. David Politzer 'for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction'"

Frank Wilczek: "Atomism doesn’t work. Quantum Field Theory [indicates] particles are excitations of fields that fill all space.. [Modern Ether = 'The Grid']: What we perceive as empty space is in reality a powerful medium whose activity molds the world...the physical reality from which all else is formed."

Told you so... A merger btw two companies saddled with debt.

"Paramount Skydance Corp. shares fell more than 8% after Fitch Ratings downgraded the film and TV company's debt rating to junk to reflect a surge in borrowings from the $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc."

I like the image a tuber made

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WSJ: "GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw Becomes First 2026 Incumbent to Lose Primary"

XDA: "When RAM prices started to rise in September last year, no one imagined the extent of the crisis we'd find ourselves in. Enterprise AI demand not only led to a DRAM shortage and consequent quadrupling of RAM prices, but also impacted graphics cards, SSDs, and hard drives. That last part is particularly concerning for users who aren't otherwise interested in new GPUs, SSDs, or DDR5 memory. Western Digital recently announced that it has sold all of its hard drive inventory for the year, and has orders till 2028 already...

News of manufacturers abandoning consumer hardware in favor of enterprise profits has been quite common in the last few months. Micron exited its 'Crucial' consumer business, and GPU companies like Nvidia and AMD have delayed their next-gen consumer GPUs already... Massive storage, memory, and GPU requirements from enterprise AI companies have outpriced the average consumer from the PC hardware market."

"Should Modern Physics Resurrect the Ether?" #TheDialectical

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Shia Islam is a decentralized religious order. Killing the Supreme Leader is not like killing the Pope. Iran has "Twelver Shi'ism" anyone can choose their own high-ranking cleric (Marja) and follow them. Religious taxes go directly to Marja's which affords them certain independence. The Sunni system is more centralized.

Ironically it was the mollahs who fired the upper echelons of their own military in 1979, then Saddam must have thought "aha here's my chance" and, egged on by the Americans, he attacked. So Iran removed the command structure of the military itself, soon after they were founded, and they still managed to fight a war against Iraq. I would not put too much stock on this "decapitation" business.

Iranian government was born into war, founded 1979, Saddam attacked them in 1980. They endured. Then they had constant conflicts with the US and the MIC lapdog Israel, they prepared themselves for that war for decades.

Iran's 250k number might sound crazy, but if Hezbollah has 150k it's not a stretch to conclude Iran to have 250k. They are acting like it too, standing firm as they have against US takes major cojones, or a big missile stockpile which they clearly have.

Reuters: "[2023] The Iran-backed [Hezbollah] possesses upwards of 150,000 missiles and rockets, according to the World Factbook of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency"

"Iran has declared that it possesses approximately 250000 missiles in its arsenal"

"AI" services will be provided by consultancy services in a similar way Web, database, hosting services are provided today. There will be projects for them, there will be people responsible for creating "AI" solutions, Ronny Douche from sales won't be able to vibe code a new project from start to finish. There will be experts responsible for delivering said AI, the systems will have to be checked / rechecked for edge cases, and QA tested. If you have the type of environment where the output expectation is "show me something interesting bro" that is fine as before, mistakes of such systems were always folded into enough successes anyway that stakeholders remain excited, and keep paying the consultancies their exorbitant fees.

"@emilymbender@dair-community.social

Gone are the days when 'cloud' as a metaphor could hide the material impacts of data centers, so now they are sold with AI hype."

♬ Yeah I stay busy, stay out my business ♬

♬ Cause I ride Benzes, ay that's my binness ♪♪

♪ Gucci's a hustler, and he got clientele ♪

♪ Always got something to sell, just pulling your coattail ♪ ♬

Rick Ross - Hustlin' #music

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America likes winners. Be a winner. Hustle..

"@MissConstrue@mefi.social

New documents have surfaced revealing details about Israel's conduct during the 1948 War in which it ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. The documents confirm Israeli leaders carried out more war crimes & premeditated massacres than previously thought."

No wonder Hidalgo says tacit knowledge, the type that can be transmitted person-to-person while working on research / products, is the defining feature of a strong economy, not education per se. If education, reading some books was the defining feature, "AI" would have mastered every skill imaginable by now. It would have learned to play grandmaster level chess, there are so many books written about chess that LLMs naturally subsume as part of their training. But not only LLMs suck at the task, they make illegal moves while playing.

LLMs don't seem to maintain knowledge blocks that correspond to experience. Experience is a combination of rule-of-thumb, best-known-approaches associated with learning a craft. IMO you can only form these by living, while working on problems and actively seeking to collect those skill sets.

Can LLM acquire these by just parsing some comments written by a douche poster on Stackoverflow, or Stackexchange? On those environments people write about things, they can show only certain aspects of their experience / knowledge, not all.

Vibed LLM to write a clustering approach based on a probabilistic method. My data point distances are best calculated via certain metric, so a projection method that respects it was required. That was done fine, but then LLM writes the final clustering in the most retarded way imaginable. It was like university freshman code, it had three nested for loops (in Python!). I said no, that wont fly, I gave it an example of fast clustering on a basic example [using "vectorized" computation], it goes "great!" applies the approach, the execution speed improved 100-fold.

Why not supply the optimal example from get-go? LLM knows about the method. But via the maze of successive prompts, the twists and turns led it to a different path.

Altman literally told the Pentagon the same things Anthropic did - no mass surveillance, no autonomous weapons, and got a deal. Anthropic got labeled a national security threat. The article quotes a Trump policy advisor saying the Pentagon 'just does not like Anthropic's general political vibe and wants to destroy its entire business'; that's a remarkable thing for someone from that side of the aisle to say.

NYT: "Mr. Altman and OpenAI also worked on their own contract with the Pentagon. Just hours after Anthropic missed its deadline, he announced that they had reached an agreement.. OpenAI agreed to let the Pentagon use its A.I. systems for any lawful purpose. But OpenAI also said it had negotiated terms that allowed the company to uphold its safety principles by installing specific technical guardrails on its systems."

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The Guardian: "US grants waiver to allow India to buy Russian oil amid Iran war"

Reuters: "[TR] intelligence agency asked ​its British counterpart MI6 last month to take a larger role in protecting Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa after recent assassination plots... The request highlights efforts by foreign allies to shore up a country still shaken by sporadic violence 15 months after the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.. The sources, including Syrian and foreign officials, all cited rising anxiety over a series of reported Islamic State plots to kill Sharaa."

"@jensorensen@mastodon.social

This week's comic: The Big Dumb War Cycle"

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"@opensecrets@mastodon.social

24 states have asked Congress to propose a constitutional amendment restoring authority to limit election spending. SCOTUS decisions including Citizens United enabled unlimited outside spending. Oklahoma is the latest, per American Promise."

This is the third hit? How many are left?

The Times of India: "Iran destroys $300mn THAAD Radar System in Jordan"

Xinhua: "[03/03] Iran's IRGC says hit 2nd U.S. THAAD system in West Asia.. According to the statement, the IRGC on Monday destroyed the radar of a U.S. THAAD system stationed in a military base in the United Arab Emirates"