Week 12
"Germany has just made the standard Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory"
Le Monde: "France's aircraft carrier located in real time.. through fitness app.. As the Charles de Gaulle and its strike group approach the Middle East, [we] identified a French sailor using the Strava fitness application in the Mediterranean Sea."
Obviously Linux is more stable than a commercial product Windoze, but lawyers still need their name and phone number on their sheet.
Companies like Red Hat Linux arose for the same reason; Linux is free and open source, but clients needed a suable entity they could put on their sheet, ergo solutions like Red Hat sprung up providing that. They offer their brand of Linux distribution which they curated, providing certain guarantees and services around, and their name went on the sheet, not Linus Torvalds.
Why wouldn't a company allow Ronny Douche from sales LLM develop his own code, create a massive project from start to finish for his own department? Even he was able to do that somewhat acceptably with these roulette wheels that are called "AI", the edge cases, the "catastrophic situations" (which vibe coded systems are actually more prone to) go against internal risk management, hedging mechanisms of modern firms.
I remember back in the day, on an IT consulting project, a programmer coworker wanted to use a free tool for a certain task. He was told to drop the tool, why? Because our client NEEDED SOMEONE TO SUE if "something went wrong" with the underlying software. An entity, a suable entity had to be behind every pick. We the consultants were already contractually obligated for certain deliveries, but beyond that, if the tools we used started to crap out, our client still needed someone's name and number on their sheets. The sheet had to have it all. Shit goes wrong, they go through it, find the party who is "responsible" and sue them for the damage incurred.
Situation will be no different for "AI" generated code. Consultants will deliver them, and for stuff that are outside their control, someone's name will go on that sheet, their ass will be liable. Companies utilizing said solutions will make sure of that. CYA.
Le Monde: "Donald Trump, the euro's best ally in spite of himself.. The single currency has returned to its highest level since the election of the US president in November 2024 and is increasingly seen as a credible substitute for the dollar, at a time when Washington's economic policies are beginning to worry markets."
Private interests have a carte blanche to do anything they want in America. It is hilarious gov wanting to get some of that action has to tag along their capability.
The Verge: "The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that law enforcement agencies need a warrant to obtain people’s location data from cellphone providers. By getting this information from private data brokers, the FBI can get information on anyone it wants without a warrant"
WaPo: "Pentagon seeks more than $200 billion in budget request for Iran war"
The historian Ilber Ortayli has passed away also, we'd mentioned the ultra-nationalist pseudo-academic in this site very recently. What up.
Just when we were referencing the man..
Chuck Norris RIP
Shot down by the Iranian air defense that was supposed to have been "wiped out"?
TRT World: "US F-35 stealth jet hit by suspected Iranian fire in combat mission"
#JoeKent #Tucker
BBC: "Top US counterterrorism official resigns over Iran war, urging Trump to 'reverse course'.. Kent said that Iran posed 'no imminent threat' to the US"
Futurism: "A.. study recently featured in Wired claims to mathematically prove that large language models 'are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity' — that level of complexity being, crucially, pretty low. The paper.. was written by Vishal Sikka, a former CTO at the German software giant SAP, and his son Varin Sikka. Sikka senior knows a thing or two about AI: he studied under John McCarthy, the Turing Award-winning computer scientist who literally founded the entire field of artificial intelligence, and in fact helped coin the very term.
Vishal Sikka: "[2025/07] Hallucination Stations: On Some Basic Limitations of Transformer-Based Language Models.. In this paper we explore hallucinations and related capability limitations in LLMs and LLM-based agents from the perspective of computational complexity. We show that beyond a certain complexity, LLMs are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks or verifying their accuracy."
Wired: "The Math on AI Agents Doesn’t Add Up.. A research paper suggests AI agents are mathematically doomed to fail"
"@CiaraNi@mastodon.green
’Denmark Switches.’ A national campaign to collectively move off Big Tech. March 20th is Big Switch Day. I’ve named my goal now. I’m already almost deMicrosofted, except for my photo archive. I moved to Libre & Tuta mail and have been purging photos as I await the release of Tuta drive. Now I’m committing myself to just get the photos off OneDrive and on to my computer, that I own, in my house, by March 20th. Then I’ll delete Microsoft. Then I’ll boast about it on the Fediverse."
American Proverb: "You can't ride two horses with one ass."
"@DrewKadel@social.coop
My daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:
'Something that seems fundamental to me about ChatGPT, which gets lost over and over again: When you enter text into it, you're asking "What would a response to this sound like?" If you put in a scientific question, and it comes back with a response citing a non-existent paper with a plausible title, using a real journal name and an author name who's written things related to your question, it's not being tricky or telling lies or doing anything at all surprising! This is what a response to that question would sound like! It did the thing! But people keep wanting the "say something that sounds like an answer" machine to be doing something else, and believing it is doing something else. It's good at generating things that sound like responses to being told it was wrong, so people think that it's engaging in introspection or looking up more information or something, but it's not, it's only, ever, saying something that sounds like the next bit of the conversation'"
The rest of the article points to other related interesting dynamics: there was pushback as well, from what I gather were basically "AI true believers" who just like bright shiny things and want to keep using them. They laugh hysterically as if they are on gas, frantically typing away in their chat attempting to get their next fix.
"Academic journals increasingly face a problem: papers citing hallucinated references. We are talking about citations that simply don’t exist – fake titles, fake journals, and fake authors. When I suggested on LinkedIn that such papers should be desk-rejected and authors banned for one year, the support was overwhelming."
#SteveJermy #NeutralityStudies
African Proverb: "When the water rises, the fish eats the ant. When the water falls, the ant eats the fish"
TWZ: "In a follow-up to our recent story about a pair of U.S. Navy Independence class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) configured for minesweeping appearing in the Pacific, those vessels have now moved further east from Malaysia to Singapore. USS Tulsa and USS Santa Barbara remain thousands of miles away from their primary assigned operating area in the Middle East, where the conflict with Iran grinds on...
As to why the Navy sent two of its three mine hunters in the Middle East not just out of the line of fire, but literally across the globe at a time when the U.S. and its allies could be facing the mining of one of the world’s most critical waterways remains a mystery."
CNBC: "Oil jumps 4% as Iranian retaliatory strikes on Qatar’s key energy facility stoke supply worries"
"MIT Study Finds Artificial Intelligence Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline"
"Amazon is regretting AI" #Bitar
I guess that was an Epstein files dig.. or a Charlie Kirk dig..
"Dan Bon-jina". A play on words of Dan Bongino? Made to rhyme with vajina? Is he calling him a p--sy??
"AI Coding Is Making Devs Miserable" #theSeniorDev
There is something wrong with the outputs "AI" produces.. Its legibility partly rests on humans interpreting it that way, in many ways, we fill in the blanks. But the output is crooked, even impercetibly so.. That's why when the output is fed into another llm as input during training, and this process is repeated a few times, the final output is garbage.
"AI Cognitive Debt: The Crisis Nobody Sees Coming"
#Davis #TYT
Zack Polanski: "The very basics, the things we rely on to build the foundations of a good life, have been taken out of our hands, sold for profit – and then sold or rented back to us at crushing rates. The water that keeps us alive. The energy that warms us. The home that keeps us safe"
"@mttaggart@infosec.exchange
Office 365 and Copilot are down.
Run. Now's your chance. Don't look back; just GO"
"@gnome@floss.social
We signed https://keepandroidopen.org/open-letter ! We strongly believe open ecosystems are of paramount importance for user freedom, and that is currently in danger for Android.
"We, the undersigned organizations representing civil society, nonprofit institutions, and technology companies, write to express our strong opposition to Google’s announced policy requiring all Android app developers to register centrally with Google themselves in order to distribute applications outside of the Google Play Store, set to take effect worldwide in the coming months."
"AI is making CEOs delusional" #MoBitar
"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
Add this to the long list of execs fucking up their entire company using GenAI - CEO decides he doesn’t want to pay $250m bonus to staff, asks ChatGPT how to avoid it, his legal team tell him ‘are u fuckin dumb’, he does it anyway, gets sued, and loses in court."
Wiki: "During the [1950] air campaign, conventional weapons including explosives, incendiary bombs, and napalm destroyed nearly all of North Korea’s villages, towns, and cities... The U.S. dropped approximately 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm during the war, mostly on North Korea (compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II). In other words, the United States dropped more bombs on North Korea during the Korean War than it had dropped on the entire Pacific theater during the Second World War"
Analyst Mark Sleboda makes an interesting point, even though US might be running out of expensive missiles, it has nearly inexhaustable supply of glide bombs, JDAMs (Russia's FAB equivalent, a JDAM kit converts a "dumb bomb" into a glide bomb with short range). Of course a bomber needs to be close to enemy territory to drop them. Therein lies the issue, Iran's air defense is not dead yet (that means "US having achieved air superiority" is a lie). The question is can US take out Iranian air defense completely to start making use of their JDAM inventory? Iran and its allies will probably find ways to keep the air defense intact.
But even in the case US succeeds, has air bombing campaigns ever force regime change? US bombed the hell out of North Korea in 1950, well that exact same regime is in charge today, perhaps more persistently so because the effort to unseat them was so draconian.
"@ethanschoonover@mastodon.social
Do billionaires know about some sort of a game where if they hoard enough wealth and cripple society enough they get some prize? Like do they get raptured if they hit 2 trillion dollars? If so I'm sure we could come up with a shortcut for them."
"@metin@graphics.social
150 nations warn that the obsession with growth is destroying nature"
"Iran is considering allowing limited oil tanker passage through the Strait of Hormuz on condition that cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, a senior Iranian official told CNN Friday"
Max Sedgley - Get Together (Lil'T PillowTalk Remix) #music
The distros mentioned are CachyOS, Bazzite, Pop!_OS, SteamOS. The latter is from gaming company Valve itself.
"[2025/12] Linux gaming is finally great, and these 4 distros are leading the way.. Microsoft has been fumbling the ball with Windows lately, and it’s hard not to notice. I’ve been seeing more and more people seriously talking about switching to Linux."
Simon Willison: "Delivering new code has dropped in price to almost free... but delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than that."
"@emilymbender@dair-community.social
[N]ext time someone says 'How dare you say LLMs are useless, they even helped cure a dog's cancer!' ... point them to this:
I've been seeing chatter about someone using ChatGPT to cure their dog's cancer, so decided to go find out what that was actually about.
[T]he meme version of this story is super misleading. The actual work of creating the treatment was done by people, using various tools, and to the extent that machine learning was involved it was in things like AlphaFold.
Also, the dog isn't cured -- even the dog's person acknowledges that."
Yahoo Finance: "JP Morgan marks down private credit loans amid AI jitters"
FT: "Partners Group sounds alarm on private credit default rates"
FT: "Morgan Stanley and Cliffwater limit private credit withdrawals"
Bloomberg: "[02/19] Blue Owl limits investor withdrawals, stirring private credit concerns"
ISR "decapitated" the other side many times... I dont wish death on anyone but the Zionist terrorist state provoked the other side long enough
Is it true? Netan kicked the bucket?
#BlackScoutSurvival #Netanyahoo
"@rom255@mastodon.social
Hmm, the Houthis in Yemen 🇾🇪 announced they want to support Iran 🇮🇷 by closing down the Bab El-Mandeb strait. Basically the passage from and to the Suez Canal. World economy RIP."
"In the 1600s and 1700s, the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company were essentially corporate nation-states. They minted their own coins, had their own massive private militaries, conquered foreign territory, and negotiated treaties. We are moving back toward a world where massive, transnational corporations rival the power of the governments that theoretically regulate them... So, while Apple won't be applying for a seat at the United Nations next week, they are already governing the digital lives of billions."
Nearly all aircraft carriers rushed towards the Gulf. Is US still a superpower, if one tiny Iran is causing so much trouble?
"@ProPublica@newsie.social
Under the Trump administration, two of the three major credit bureaus have sharply reduced the share of complaints they resolved in customers’ favor.
In 2024, Experian’s relief rate was 20%. Last year, that figure fell to less than 1%."
If the war was planned / sold as another Venezuella, short, fast, "achieves something", Iranians surely saw that - and they are making sure they do not fall in that category. They are racheting up their response early in the war, and after the death of Khamenei they chose Khamenei II (whereas after Maduro, there was Maduro Lite, not Chavez II).
"Meatball Ron".. I remember Jon Oliver had found that hilarious and declared Trump still "had it". It's a much darker world now.. there aren't many opportunities to laugh.
State legislature passed the law and "Guantanamo Ron" signed it into law?
FLORIDA FIRST
"The United States decision to wire $385 million to Israel has emerged as a campaign issue after Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback publicly criticised the transfer. Fishback stated that '385 million of our money was foolishly sent to Israel,' framing the transfer as a misuse of U.S. taxpayer resources. His remarks place the funding at the centre of his campaign messaging on foreign policy and government spending."
November 3... judgement day
DJT bringing up this issue constantly is more damaging for Netanyahoo than helpful.. He comes across like the crook that he is whenever the subject is raised.
The Times of Israel: "Trump has repeatedly blasted Herzog over his failure so far to issue a pardon to Netanyahu in his ongoing criminal corruption trial. Just last week, Trump called Herzog a 'disgrace' for not pardoning the prime minister."
Truthout: "DNC 'Autopsy' Finds Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Genocide Cost Her Votes"
AA: "Netanyahu dismisses claim he dragged Trump into conflict"
NYT: "There were few voices lobbying against military action. One exception was Tucker Carlson.. who has met with [Trump] in the Oval Office three times in the past month to argue against an attack... The president said he understood the risks of an attack, but he conveyed to Mr. Carlson that he had no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch."
"@MsHearthWitch@wandering.shop
Mastodon, you are a influence...
Since I joined I have ditched most subscription stuff like Spotify, Amazon and Netflix.
Made the swap to Linux.
Started painting.
Now I am considering whether or not I could be a Person Who Bikes Places."
"Careerminds polled 600 HR professionals from organizations that had made layoffs in the last year. It found that 32.7% of organisations that conducted AI-led layoffs had already rehired between 25% to 50% of the roles they initially let go. Another 35.6% said they had already rehired more than half of the roles that they cut"
Futurism: "BuzzFeed Nearing Bankruptcy After Disastrous Turn Toward AI"
Transport aircraft is slow, they will be easy targets for SAMs, even MANPADS. Once in, such troops will have no heavy weaponary, nor armor. Resupply would be a nightmare.
What is this, a Chuck Norris movie, you just paradrop bunch of "good guys", they take out whole regiments of "bad guys"?
"It's too hard to pass through Iranian mountains to get to Tehran (for ground troops), we'll just parachute them in bro" 😂 😂
TAC: "Iran War Enters Fourteenth Day: Six More U.S. Servicemembers Killed"
TAC: "Russia Wins the War on Iran.. Moscow is getting more oil revenue and Ukraine will get fewer defensive weapons."
F24: "Iranian strikes, Hezbollah rockets make regular life in Israel ‘simply impossible’"
Politico: "It's not just oil. Here comes Hormuz inflation. The war with Iran is driving up more than gasoline prices. It is beginning to hit semiconductors, medical imaging, backyard gardens and even children’s party balloons."
"An open-source intelligence investigation into how Meta Platforms built a multi-channel influence operation to pass age verification laws that shift regulatory burden from social media platforms onto Apple and Google's app stores...
Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a 'grassroots' child safety group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). The ASAA requires app stores to verify user ages before downloads but imposes no requirements on social media platforms. If it becomes law, Apple and Google absorb the compliance cost while Meta's apps face zero new mandates."
Reuters: "Maritime security specialists and analysts said securing the strait [of Hormouz] will be difficult, even if the effort involves an international coalition, because of Iran’s ability to deploy mines or cheaply made attack drones.
'Neither France, the United States, an international coalition or anybody is in a position to secure the Strait of Hormuz,' said Adel Bakawan, director of the European Institute for Studies on the Middle East and North Africa.
Last week, Iran used a remote-controlled boat laden with explosives to damage a crude oil tanker anchored in Iraqi waters, according to initial assessments from two Iraqi port security sources.
A maritime security source said securing the strait could require the U.S. to take control of Iran's vast coast.
'There are not enough naval vessels to do that and the risks remain high even with an escort. One or two vessels can be overwhelmed by a swarm (of fast boats or drones),' the source said."
Bloomberg: "Khamenei, IRGC Won't Give Trump Quick War, Iran Scholar Vali Nasr Says. 'Tehran believes time is on its side, and that a prolonged conflict can alter Washington's calculus'"