Week 14

Futurism: "Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed... The data centers powering your favorite AI chatbot are running low on helium, cash, and neighbors who don’t hate them, and that’s not even the worst of it. According to reporting by Bloomberg, about half of the data centers slated to open in the US in 2026 will either face delays or outright cancellations."

The geography was tough, that part is true.

People also forget a German was commanding the entire Ottoman Fifth Army at the time, Liman von Sanders, the "Grand Ancestor Turk" reported to him

So-called Turks make a big deal out of Gallipoli bcz their "Grand Ancestor Turk" made his mint there. On the Western side Kiwis and Ozzies (Anzac) have some ritual around those rememberences bcz bunch of their people died needlessly for King and Country that wasn't even theirs.

There are some comparisons being made btw Hormuz vs Gallipoli. Gallipoli attack could have succeeded, the battle was Britain's to lose. Ottomans won the battle simply by not making mistakes, acceptable but not a stellar performance. Nationalists lose their shit whenever Galipoli is mentioned.

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"@d4m1n@twitter.com

So let me get this straight

• OpenAI renamed their whole division 'AGI Deployment'

• Jensen said AGI is 'already in the room'

And then ARC-AGI-3 drops and on a scale from 0 to 100% SOTA models score:

GPT-5.4: 0.26%

Gemini Pro: 0.37%

Claude Opus 4.6: 0.25%

Grok: literally 0%

meanwhile 100% of human testers solved every single environment.

first try.

no instructions.

no training.

AGI is 'in the room' brother it couldn't find the room"

[-]

Jen Rubin: "No one.. should be surprised that the war may end with the United States and its allies (or, rather, countries that used to be allies) worse off than when the war started."

MIT Technology Review: "The Artemis program is supposed to usher in a new age of lunar mining, especially for water ice... The moon is a treasure trove of valuable resources... But there’s one resource in particular that has excited scientists, rocket engineers, space agency officials.. It’s water.

Why? If you split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then liquefy those constituents, you have rocket fuel. If you can stop at the moon’s orbit or a lunar base to refuel, you no longer need to bring all your propellant with you as you take off, making your spacecraft significantly lighter and cheaper to launch. That’s important because Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational pull necessitate use of tons of fuel per second when rockets launch. Creating a sustainable source of fuel in space could reduce the costs and hazards associated with heavy liftoffs. One NASA estimate suggests there might be 600 million metric tons of lunar ice to harvest, and other higher-end estimates say one billion metric tons is a possibility."

CNN: "Engineers pioneered the use of hydrogen as rocket fuel in the mid-20th century before it was used for the Apollo moon rockets... Hydrogen is known to have a very favorable specific impulse because it’s so lightweight — and it packs a considerable punch at liftoff. In fact, it’s the best in the business, boasting the highest efficiency of all the rocket fuel options, 'which is why we end up using it a lot,' [an expert] said.... NASA’s Artemis moon rocket, called the Space Launch System or SLS, uses hydrogen for both the upper and first-stage portions of the vehicle."

BBC: "Nasa spacecraft orbiting Earth after spectacular Artemis II Moon mission launch"

"@grmpyprogrammer@grumpy-learning.com

'Governments are unable to meet their goals without heavy borrowing because they are not bringing in enough in tax revenue. The solution, of course, is to continue to reduce the amount of taxes we ask corporations, rich people, and high-income earners to pay. We believe it is the great masses, who have seen their productivity slashed in half due to working conditions, wage theft, and affordability issues who will magically solve everything. I am a high-income earner from the elite classes working for rich people and corporate interests, this makes total sense!'

u.econ_stats()

"@mrtazz@chaos.social

2016: every line of code is immediately tech debt, the most important design paradigm is simplicity, I maintain a curated personal blog about minimalism

2026: haha I just have my stochastic labubu generate tons of code all the time, I don't even look at it. More is more. I regularly have nervous breakdowns about what it all means on all social media platforms"

IBM: "What is technical debt? Technical debt refers to the future costs associated with relying on shortcuts or suboptimal decisions made during software development."

Ars Technica: "The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System, or OCX, is designed for command and control of the military’s constellation of more than 30 GPS satellites... RTX Corporation, formerly known as Raytheon, won a Pentagon contract in 2010 to develop and deliver the control system. The program was supposed to be complete in 2016 at a cost of $3.7 billion.

Today, the official cost for the ground system stands at $7.6 billion. RTX is developing an OCX augmentation projected to cost more than 400 million, bringing the total effort to 8 billion. Although RTX delivered OCX to the Space Force last July, the ground segment is still not operational. Nine months later, the Pentagon may soon call it quits on the program."

"@thisissethsblog@c.im

Redundancy and resilience

If it's important, don't ask the team to try harder. Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises. If quality is a problem, look at the system, not the people."

Why did gold fall recently? Gulf countries have less dollars coming in due to selling less oil (Iran blockage) they need to maintain their currency peg so they sell gold to get more dollars. Oil importers sell gold to be able to buy same amt of oil at higner price (Asia Minor, India).

"Russia is set to restrict gold exports from May 1, limiting individuals, legal entities, and individual entrepreneurs to carrying no more than 100 grams of gold bars out of the country."

"Jesus vs. The Pax Romana: While often spiritualized, Jesus’s message challenged the Roman imperial cult and the religious elite (the Sadducees) who collaborated with Rome. His execution by crucifixion which was a punishment specifically reserved for political rebels and runaway slaves, underscores his status as an enemy of the state.

Husayn vs. The Umayyad Caliphate: Husayn refused to pledge allegiance to Yazid I, whom he viewed as a tyrant who had turned the Caliphate into a hereditary monarchy, abandoning the egalitarian principles of early Islam...

From a political science perspective, both deaths function as 'Tactical Martyrdom.' 1) By killing a figure of high moral standing, the state (Rome or the Umayyads) inadvertently proved the 'martyr’s' point. The brutality of the act stripped the regime of its moral authority. 2) In both cases, the followers were a small, persecuted minority (the early Christians and the early Shi'at Ali). The memory of the 'slain leader' became the glue that held the movement together against the 'system.'"

When you strip away the metaphysical language like 'atonement', 'intercession', you are left with a political reality: both figures were executed by tyrants of their time, and both represented a threat to the established order. The closeness between Shia Islam and Christianity isn't about the feeling of mourning, there is a common political "archetypology".

Both Shia Islam and Christianity are based on a martyrdom (Jesus and Husayn), they are more similar than different.

IMO the problem is LLM tries too much to be creative, being interpretive and coming up with its own take (as it is a roulette wheel, not a deterministic human replacement). Humans know when to be exact when to be intuitive / gray about things to be able to move forward, LLM seemingly has no concept of this

Axed LLM to translate a technical doc, it left out major chunks of the document. Wut

"@brian_greenberg@infosec.exchange

I teach cybersecurity. And I genuinely don't know what to tell my students after this one. Federal reviewers spent years trying to get basic encryption documentation from Microsoft for its GCC High government cloud. They couldn't get it. One reviewer called the system a "pile of spaghetti pies," with data traveling from point A to point B the way you'd get from Chicago to New York: a bus to St. Louis, a ferry to Pittsburgh, and a flight to Newark. Each leg is a potential hijacking. They knew this. They said this out loud in writing. Then they approved it anyway in December 2024, because too many agencies were already using it. 🔐"

"Federal cyber experts called Microsoft’s cloud a 'pile of shit,' approved it anyway.. ProPublica is exposing the government’s reservations about this popular product for the first time. We are also revealing Microsoft’s yearslong inability to provide the encryption documentation and evidence the federal reviewers sought."

The local version of both of these LLMs can be deployed on a local computer (it is the "training" phase that takes massive resources, using an already trained neural network runs faster, cheaper).

Wrote LLM interface code for qwen3.5:397b-cloud, gpt-oss:120b-cloud so far.. Can add more.

u.llm2("What is the first paragraph of the US constitution?")

"The opening clause of the United States Constitution is the Preamble, which reads:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

FOSS ollama tool lets you install / use local LLMs using command line via ollama run. Some installs can even route requests to remote (cloud) LLMs... I will some "wrapper" code so they are callable within documents here.

People really dislike Copilot. Somehow M$haft manages to turn every assistant into Clippy.

"Meta, YouTube found liable for social media addiction in landmark trial"

"@mellifluousbox@mastodon.social

The problem with Meta’s business model is that they’re beholden to shareholders, not their community. We are not publicly traded, we are publicly FUNDED.

Mastodon has no incentive to keep you addicted. Our incentive is to make you happy, and help you build friendships, because it’s the right thing to do for you, and it's the right thing to do for humanity.

If you believe in a better way forward for our digital social spaces, please help support us by donating:

https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors#donate

@thenewsdesk@flipboard.com

Meta ordered to pay $375 million in New Mexico child exploitation case"

#Ukraine 03/10 - 03/31

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NHK World Japan: "[03/18] A British newspaper has reported that a senior UK official attended US-Iran talks held late February and judged that the offer made by Tehran 'was significant enough to prevent a rush to war.'.. Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner attended the talks from the US side. The Guardian quoted a Gulf diplomat with knowledge of the talks as saying, 'We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets...'"

The last three posts are all connected, aren't they? The author of a well-liked work whose movie is cruising at the box office says the new Trek sucks (true, it is bunch of Woke shit) and guess what? The "new Trek" is officially dead, after STSA 🤷‍♂️

Variety: "‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ to End With Season 2"

The Holywood Reporter: "'Project Hail Mary' Author Andy Weir Says Paramount Rejected His 'Star Trek' Pitch: Their 'Shows Are Sh**'"

Variety: "Ryan Gosling's 'Project Hail Mary' Tops Box Office"

Nancy Mace: "[03/27] The justifications presented to the American public for the war in Iran were not the same military objectives we were briefed on today in the House Armed Services Committee. This gap is deeply troubling. The longer this war continues, the faster it will lose the support of Congress and the American people."

"@jalefkowit@vmst.io

Now I’m imagining an America of the 22nd century where we have a kind of minimal universal basic income that consists entirely of class-action lawsuit settlement payouts"