Week 28
"The scene is striking from the moment you arrive. About 40 kilometers from Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Maasvlakte juts out into the water. Here, the landscape is nothing but sand as far as the eye can see, with offshore wind turbines silhouetted against the North Sea in the distance. It is in this setting that Air Liquide is building one of the cornerstones of its energy transition strategy: the ELYgator project. This investment of over 500 million euros is bringing to life a giant capable of producing 23,000 metric tons of renewable, low-carbon hydrogen per year, preventing the emission of 300,000 metric tons of CO₂ annually."
The Lever: "This idea — that government should improve the life of the average American, not just the extremely wealthy — is unseating incumbent Democrats across the country, from New York to Denver. And in Maine, it helped propel Platner to victory over his primary opponent, Schumer-endorsed Maine Gov. Janet Mills.
Needless to say, the corporate-backed Democratic establishment is terrified.
So in this moment, it is worth paying close attention to how the Democratic establishment is responding to Platner’s withdrawal — and which political powerbrokers are attempting to use the situation to try to delegitimize the entire anti-oligarchy movement coursing through Democratic politics."
If I created a simulation for a virtual world with this method, put little people in it who somehow learned science and reverse engineered the computation, would they call it "spooky"?
In LBM coding, some conditions you have to write can look weird. If you want to simulate fluid hitting a wall, in the boundary condition you have to reverse the incoming velocity vector to its opposite, meaning down-left incoming vector becomes up right, not down-right. It's not like Pong. It all sounds counterintuitive, but in order for momentum preservation it needs to be done.
They did an LBM simulation too, good technique
"Photocatalytic technology offers an efficient, low-energy solution for methane removal by utilizing solar energy to activate catalysts for methane decomposition under mild conditions. This selective, easy-to-operate method is well-suited for atmospheric methane. Jackson suggested applying titanium dioxide coatings to buildings or wind turbines to enhance methane removal, while Ming et al. proposed integrating a photocatalytic reactor with a solar chimney power plant (SCPP-PCR) for large-scale methane removal. Using CFD simulations, this study found that a 4 mm channel diameter and 8 m length of the honeycomb PCR could degrade 21,312 g of methane per day, though further efficiency improvements were constrained by airflow reductions. Featured in two IPCC reports, SCPP-PCR demonstrates significant potential for future applications."
Let's remember what Clinton advisor Holbroke said: "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".
Looking at recent events however it is US that comes across like a donkey, not Iran
Mainstream sci fell into this trap (dark matter) bcz they tried to protect their dear formula GR which is a local theory. But then GR started to fail, so the followers inserted something in there, in near vicinity, local mass (so GR would still work), just not visible, detectable, like an invisible friend. This was the infamous dark matter. The biggest fudge / fraud in the history of science?
JWST data disproved dark matter, cosmologists still acting like everything is hunky-dory.
#Manheim #TOE
"I replace dark matter with the rest of the universe"
Checked old posts, I wrote abt this guy once, he was taking 30 supplements a day, avoided animal fat, once his fat levels dropped too low and he risked a heart attack.
Just eat prosciutto, provolone, gabagool. Stick to tried and true
Likely because of the strange shit he's been eating, trying to "de-age" himself.
"Bryan Johnson, the former tech CEO who's become famous for his biohacking pursuits, says he has autoimmune gastritis"
I thought Hinton went senile just recently mumbling that stupid stuff on LLMs. But his condition could have started earlier.
😂 😂 😂
Fortune: "A decade after the ‘Godfather of AI’ said radiologists were obsolete, their salaries are up to $571K and demand is growing fast.. In 2016.. Hinton, stood onstage at a machine learning conference in Toronto and declared AI would soon kill the radiology profession.. 'If you work as a radiologist, you’re like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down,' Hinton said... And yet, despite the doomsday predictions, radiology may serve as an example that the warnings of AI-fueled job replacement may be oversold.. Over the last 10 years, the number of active radiologists in the U.S. has grown by about 10%"
"@DerKlimablog@dju.social
[In May] Chinese exports of solar technology have doubled in just one month thanks to the Iran war!"
Why did Gunn accept an average story for Supergirl? We have to understand Gunn is the Tarantino of comic book movies. Instinctively he wants to show the ugly side of things, just like Tarantino. The 2025 movie is the second Superman movie Gunn helped create, his first was Brightburn (producer credits). He wanted to show an alien child laser frying his parents' brains, not the classic do-gooder. You see? Quirk. The ugly side. Ragtag. These are Gunn calling cards, similar to Tarantino.
But QT is in a niche he nicely carved out for himself. He is the guy wants to depict pityness, hopelessness in a country awash with the opposite in its culture. He scratches an itch, he has no need to be mainstream. James Gunn however, does. He clearly did not understand his job's requirements. In Supergirl did / greenlit "the ugly side" thing a little (the heroin has wild ways), do some ragtag (dubious characters come together) and quirk (the stupid dog again), but it didn't take, esp. for the second movie in his nascent universe. Peacemaker Season 2, same problem, too Tarantino.
But.. but.. if government intervened more in a system which disallowed total government intervention, making the private firms even richer, the system would have worked!
"@chrisod@social.lol
My health insurance will cost more than my mortgage next year."
WSJ: "Rates for many Affordable Care Act plans rose by double digits this year. Insurers want to do the same next year.. Some of the biggest Obamacare companies are seeking hefty premium increases for 2027, often for the second year in a row. In Washington state, Centene is asking for a 28% hike, after boosting rates by 35% in 2026. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants 15%—on top of a 28% increase this year."
The approach is smart. They used task-specific LLMs to extract narrative-related features out of LLM texts (yes, they used LLMs to help detect LLMs). They prompted these secondary LLMs with directions like "count the number of active subplots (integer) in this story", "does the narrator state the moral explicitly in this story (1/0)?". They concatanate these answers together, forming a "feature vector" for each text. They essentially created structured representations from texts, a "fingerprint", that subsequent tools can now analyze downstream. After a few more transformations they could even cluster these feature vectors. They found similarities, fingerprints from LLMs cluster, human ones stand seperate from them.
Paper: "As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated... AI style is increasingly fleeting: GPT 5.4 significantly reduced em-dash usage, and fine-tuning to mimic human style drops AI detection rates on creative writing from 97% to 3%..
We hypothesize that humans and AI models make systematically distinct narrative choices, and that these differences persist even when stylistic cues are removed. To test this, we introduce STORYSCOPE, a pipeline that automatically induces interpretable narrative features"
"In March 2026, Hachette, a major publishing house, pulled the horror novel Shy Girl after it was flagged as ∼78% AI-generated, the first commercially published novel canceled over AI allegations"
Vivek Chibber says US was given democracy too early, without much fight, making its working-class politically weak. Same could be said for "Turkey", the country adapted democracy because NATO membership required it (nowadays it clearly doesn't).
The term deep state was invented in Anatolia, makes sense. The shadowy concept conjures up images of Byzantium as in something being byzantian when it comes to state affairs. The region is one of the inheritor of Byzantian Empire after all.
Tough bass line
Victor Wooten - U Can't Hold No Groove #music
"@therightarticle@mas.to
Ireland passes bill banning goods from Israel-occupied settlements in West Bank and Jerusalem"
Norman Ornstein: "Reining in a Rogue Supreme Court.. It is up to Congress to use its legitimate Article I powers to do so.. the Constitution gives very limited original jurisdiction to the Supreme Court and gives Congress the power to decide what additional jurisdiction or roles it should have, including the power to decide the size of the Supreme Court — and to create other federal courts. And, of course, Congress can impeach and remove judges and justices...
Monsanto v. Durnell, involving the pesticide Roundup gave chemical and agriculture companies protection against lawsuits claiming their products caused cancer or other ailments; an earlier decision, AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, denied the possibility of a consumer class action from abuses by companies in the fine print of contracts..
The landmark Citizens United was a narrow case, brought on an as-applied basis.. Roberts and his allies pulled it back to broaden it - without any request from the plaintiffs and without briefs or hearings - and redo it in a way that would subvert over a century of established campaign law...
[The] Congress can take away the Supreme Court’s appellate authority in whatever areas it wants, except the narrow ones defining original jurisdiction. This includes regulating commerce, defining or adjudicating congressional and executive powers, voting rights and elections, individual rights, and more. Congress can create a new appellate court to handle those areas, perhaps one consisting of the chief judges of all the circuits. And Congress needs to mandate a stiff, meaningful code of ethics for the Supreme Court"
Vivek Chibber: "[T]he US democratized very early. So the US actually had the franchise for working-class white men about a hundred years before any other country did. In Europe, working-class men had to fight for their political rights... Because the people lined up against their political rights were the wealthy.. working class men and women had to organize their own political parties to campaign for democratic rights, because every single political party in Europe, up until the 1900s, was a rich person's party. They weren't going to fight for democratic rights. The United States, because the American Revolution, got people democratic rights early, they got sucked up into the system without having to organize their own parties. That has a lot to do with why a "Labor Party" was never born"
Changes will come to US. How? There is an easy way, and there is a hard way. The easy way is leftists gain more power inside the Democratic Party, turn the party to a low-to-middle income voter friendly structure. Maybe another way could be a third party.
But if the leftist Dems are shunned, shut down, excommunicated, or the third party fails via lawfare and other underhanded methods, then the time will come for the hard way. The hard way can be shutting down the economy through mass protests, around one or two key demands, as described below.
Chris Hedges: "We must fight these battles while we still have a chance. We must, through civil disobedience, shut down the machine."
#LLM #BrendanDell
"Over 140 Firms Unite to Launch Open USD Stablecoin for Global Business Payments.. Unlike stablecoins that are mainly controlled by a single issuer, Open USD is being introduced as a shared payment network for businesses. The core promise is simple: businesses will be able to mint and redeem Open USD without cost or volume caps, while most reserve earnings will be returned to participating partners after a small management fee. This directly challenges the economics of existing stablecoin issuers, where reserve income is usually retained by the issuer."
Who is the arch enemy of "Turkey"? Greece. That alone shows how small homie has become, how not our mislabeled republic is not the sole descendant of anything, let alone an empire. Asia Minor is at best the Hakkiado Prefacture of Japan, hating on the Osaka Prefacture and vica versa. Sad.
"The $665 Billion AI Spending Crisis: Why 73% of Enterprise AI Projects Fail to Deliver ROI.. The numbers are staggering and the paradox is real: global enterprise AI spending is projected to reach 665 billion in 2026, yet three out of four AI deployments fail to achieve their projected return on investment. After five years of accelerating investment, the gap between AI spending and AI value has become the defining strategic challenge facing enterprise technology leaders.
The McKinsey Global AI Survey 2026 puts the ROI failure rate at 73% — a figure that has remained stubbornly consistent despite improvements in AI tooling, model capabilities, and practitioner expertise. Understanding why requires moving beyond the technical dimensions of AI failure toward a more honest examination of organizational and governance failures that no amount of compute can fix."
Futurism: "Bosses Horrified as 'AI Native' College Graduates Hit the Workplace.. [N]ew hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas."
"@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io
I don't think it's too much to ask for the people of a state to know whether or not one of their two U.S. Senators is still alive"
"@RaffKarva@sunny.garden
After 20 years, I'm in the process of closing my eBay account. I bought and sold tens of thousands of pounds worth of items on the platform over the years. Suddenly, they need a scan of my passport to pay out £14 to the same account I used for two decades. Yeah, right."
It is hilarious they state the "refillable ink" section in bold, because it is a big deal, right, corporate scam printer manufacturers forbade their customers from refilling their own cartridges.
"Open Printer is a repairable, compact, and robust printer designed to last.
Fully repairable and equipped with a refillable ink system, it adapts to your needs while reducing your printing costs.
Easy to maintain, it offers a sustainable, economical, and eco-friendly alternative to traditional printers."
"@volt4ire@mastodon.social
New AP poll of Jewish Americans finds Mamdani has a +5% favorability rating and Netanyahu has a -27% favorability rating"
Re-reading the Clinton speech at the signing of the "financial modernization bill" where they repealed Glass-Steagal.
"We are here today to repeal Glass-Steagall because we have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers."
Notice the second part. He even used the word "freedom" in that duplicitous way economic right-wingers use it. After decades of this shit, do US citizens have freedom, as in from their corporate overlords, from poverty, and joblessness?
No need for optimization. Probabilistic approach can handle every scenario.
Interesting dates found: 2021-03 to 2024-03. Switch from negative
to positive correlation happened here. In June/July 2022, US CPI
inflation peaked at a 9.1%, the Federal Reserve executed its
75-basis-point interest rate hike, making it clear they were going to
push real rates higher aggressively. Gold prices bottomed later that
Autumn and began their rally despite surging real interest
rates. Confiscating Russian money at Western banks wld have played a
role, CBs were spooked, and the gold rush started. Basel III rules
kicking in 2020 for Europe might have provided a catalyst.
After 2024-03 the systemic changes were priced in, textbook
returned.
There are probabilistic programming options. First trick: Running plain old regression on normalized time series X,Y is the same thing as computing correlation between X,Y. Another trick, we use "segmented regression", find pieces of linear fit within blocks, once found, we run correlation (w/ significance calc) between endpoints. Lines are connected via a sigmoid, we run Metropolis sampling over the "posterior".
We talked about correlation between real interest rates and gold price, how they are inversely correlated, but textbook worked sometimes, not other times. Saw correlation results on two blocks but that cutoff was chosen via trial-and-error. We can actually estimate those divisions from the data itself.
"@vampiress@eigenmagic.net
Re-watching Con Air as I work today.
I love how '90s movies so often, no matter how absurd their core premise or plot got, played it dead serious, without the post-Whedon wink-and-a-nod to the audience that modern flicks feel obliged to include out of insecurity."
Gunn greenlit an average script, realized his mistake later tried to unf--k things by meddling, probably made things worse.
The Holywood Reporter: "Behind the 'Supergirl' Bomb: Competing Cuts, Creative Differences.. Gunn and [the director] Gillespie had creative differences over the direction of the movie, numerous sources tell The Hollywood Reporter, and the film never found its footing in the post-production process...
[A new writer hired by Gunn, after filming ended] helped write scenes for a nine-day shoot of additional photography.. [then] the studio decided to force a bakeoff by creating two cuts, one by Gillespie and one by the studio... the studio chose its cut as the one to go into theaters...
The challenge for Gunn, and thus DC Studios, is to navigate the fine line of being filmmaker friendly while also trusting his strong artistic point of view that has guided him all his career."
Ouch. Domestic opening of The Marvels was better than Supergirl, and the former was a bust. SG is set to be a bigger fail than TM
u.boxofficemojo("The Marvels")
Out[1]:
{'Domestic Opening': '$46,110,859',
'Domestic': '$84,500,223',
'International': '$121,636,602',
'Worldwide Total': '$206,136,825'}
u.boxofficemojo("Supergirl")
Out[1]:
{'Domestic Opening': '$37,102,018',
'Domestic': '$46,570,096',
'International': '$34,500,000',
'Worldwide Total': '$81,070,096'}