Week 31
"@slothrop@chaos.social
Making a little mark in my calendar, because today was the first time I saw a tender requirement saying 'no part of the code or the other deliverables may be produced using AI'"
They are asking for the guillotine
Monbiot: "The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get...
Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund....
Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and Scott Bessent explained that they were redirecting counterterrorism efforts away from Islamic jihadism and towards 'the political left'. Most of the examples they cited to justify this shift were more than 30 years old."
@winter@translunar.academy
Back in my day you didn't need $2000 glasses to be a pervert
"@jonny@neuromatch.social
I feel like I am going to be saying the phrase 'get margin called, nerds' more in the next few months than perhaps any other phrase"
"@garrison@garrison.su
Thinking about that post where someone asked why there are pyramids in egypt and someone responded 'because they're too big to fit in the british museum'"
"The dog catches the car - then what?"
#Bracken #DeepDive
"Putin predicts Ukraine will lose western lands... 'I am convinced that sooner or later Ukraine will lose its western territories, lands that once belonged to Poland, Hungary and Romania", he said. "Maybe it won't happen tomorrow or the day after. It could take a year, two years, 10 or 15 years, but history will ultimately put everything in its place'.
He said those territories had only ended up under Kyiv's control because Soviet leader Josef Stalin folded them into Ukraine as part of a single unified state, never anticipating today's split between Moscow and Kyiv.
Putin also repeated Moscow's long-standing narrative that Russia, not the West, had been the true guarantor of Ukraine's territorial integrity, until Kyiv turned against Moscow and came to treat it as an enemy."
The Palestine Chronicle: "US commanders have increasingly turned to weapons that are more readily available or less difficult to replace. Aircraft are now using more GPS-guided bombs fitted with Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, kits, as well as Small Diameter Bombs.
These shorter-range precision weapons can be used against fixed targets and provide an alternative to more valuable long-range missiles.
During the earlier stages of the war, American forces frequently used Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, known as JASSMs, and Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Those weapons remain available, officials said, but are now being used more selectively."
ABC News: "US Patriot interceptor stockpile diminished by some 65% during Iran war, think tank estimates.. During combat between Feb. 28 and April 8, U.S. stocks of THAAD interceptors had dropped by roughly half. Experts say THAADs represent the most difficult air defense munition to replace."
The biggest proof that people are stupid about policies is Brexit
But when the challenger is elected saying yada yada yada, he can and should take that as a mandate that he should apply his viewpoints while governing. If he succeeds, and people's suffering eases, they will keep voting for him. The lesson for the challengers here is that they need to sound different while running for office, and of course, implement different policies once in charge.
TM makes a solid point. If people are suffering they do not intelligently judge policies, pick which serves them best and vote for the person holding those views. They just vote for "the other". They are hurting, and if the incumbent says "blah blah blah" they'll vote for someone who says "yada yada yada". Why? Because yada yada yada is different from blah blah blah.
Thomas Massie: "I thought that when people voted for Ron Paul, when they voted for Rand Paul, and when they voted for me in Republican primaries that they were voting for a constitutionalist or libertarian leaning Republican, but then Donald Trump went to Iowa and got all the people that had would have voted for Thomas Massie, Ron Ron Paul or Rand Paul. And that's when I had to recalibrate my thinking and I realized when they voted for me and Rand and Ron, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. They weren't voting for the libertarian or the constitutionalist because Trump came in and took all those votes"
Paul Waldman: "No president has ever deserved to be hoisted on the petard of gas prices more. That’s not only because of how [DJT] weaponized the issue against his opponents before, but because unlike almost every other president, he's actually responsible for where the price of gas is right now."
Use "AI" as augmentation for your own reasoning / research code. If they are used as replacement they will f--k shit up.
"@stefano@bsd.cafe
.. they replied that their plan is to replace every possible role with AI, including both devs and sysadmins, keeping only a few active contracts for emergencies and to fix issues they can't handle. I informed them of the termination of our working relationship as soon as possible, as the bond of trust has completely broken down. There was no financial hardship justifying the cost reduction they agreed upon with me - it was simply a unwillingness to increase costs, despite paying roughly the same amount for AI provider subscriptions."
"@stefano@bsd.cafe
A few months ago, a client asked me to shave about €200 a month off our agreement. 'We’re trying to cut back on expenses", he said, 'to boost our cash flow.' I was hesitant, but hey, I agreed.
Fast forward to this morning: one of his team members calls me asking for help because - and I quote - 'both Claude and ChatGPT are giving me answers that just don't feel right.'
I asked for a little context, only to find out they had upgraded to the top-tier plans for both AIs so they could 'solve problems on their own without bothering me.'
So, I dropped my client a line: we either revert to our original agreement, or we wrap up this collaboration effective immediately.
Asking me for a discount just to throw far more money at AI subscriptions - only to call me anyway when the bots fail - is, to say the least, a slap (or slop?) in the face."
"Most of the $37 million spent in the contentious GOP primary between Congressman Thomas Massie and Ed Gallrein was by PACs funded by pro-Trump billionaires, pro-Israel groups and dark money...
The $37 million of spending far-outpaced the previous record for a U.S. House primary, when 25 million was spent in a New York Democratic primary in 2024, where George Latimer defeated Rep. Jamaal Bowman. Just like in Massie race, pro-Israel groups were instrumental in funding PAC ads to defeat Bowman."
John Garnham: "It has been suggested in some quarters that the Burnham premiership will take the country back to the 1970s. Here are just a few of the things that existed then. No food banks, little homelessness, little energy poverty, council houses, rent controls, British industry making things, a funded defence force, water, energy and public transport under the public’s control, and membership of the Common Market."
"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social
EU tells firms to label AI-generated content from Sunday" #LeMonde
"@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io
Got an email from my ISP yesterday telling me they were increasing my Internet speed, no need for action on my part, just a nice thing they were going to do for me. Then I got a separate email from them today telling me my monthly bill was going up"
Le Monde: "US diplomats walked out as their French counterparts were speaking at the United Nations on Monday, July 27, after America’s close European ally criticized the Trump administration's human rights record."
NYT: "The Democrats should be well positioned to make gains in this year’s midterms. But inside party headquarters, every week brings paranoia, worries about money and, on occasion, emotional eruptions... So much is going politically right for Democrats these days. President Trump’s approval is down, gas prices are up and an unpopular war with Iran drags on. But dysfunction and debt inside one of the party’s key institutions — which is getting crushed in fund-raising by its Republican counterpart — are creating rising anxiety for top Democrats."
#ClassicCars
Use solar or thorium reactor energy, take H2 from water, take nitrogen from the air, combine - you get green ammonia. No need to rely on natural gas producers and worrying about "chokepoints". Green ammonia gives you fertilizer and an efficient hydrogen carrier.
"Towards The Ammonia Economy" #DougMacfarlane
Green Ammonia
"Sweden is officially reversing its use of digital technologies in education and returning to handwriting and books"
"@ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk
[T]he Health Foundation in independent research.. has concluded (confirmed) the deployment of Palantir's software has made 'no meaningful difference' to discharge delays across the NHS"
The nuclear site / UFO calculation added to the main UFO page
"@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online
David Sirota on [Big Money Gretch] Whitmer's endorsement of Haley Stevens... 'Whitmer is the daughter of the former longtime CEO of health insurance giant Blue Cross & she's been bankrolled by Blue Cross. Her endorsing against the pro-Medicare For All candidate Abdul El-Sayed is extremely on brand. This is corporate power trying to protect its power.'"
u.calc_roce("TSLA")
TTM ending 2026-06-30: 4.22%
TTM ending 2026-03-31: 4.83%
TTM ending 2025-12-31: 4.11%
TTM ending 2025-09-30: 2.72%
Return on capital, Intel did terribly, NVidia made bank. The measure answers the question 'how much revenue can a company generate per capital spending'.
u.calc_roce("NVDA")
TTM ending 2026-04-30: 75.27%
TTM ending 2026-01-31: 74.66%
u.calc_roce("INTC")
TTM ending 2026-06-30: 2.58%
TTM ending 2026-03-31: 0.59%
.. or what? Will NATO invade? Are they trying to pull gobble gobble into doing wobble wobble towards its neighbor, Iran?
NATO: "The Ankara Summit Declaration, 08 July 2026, 'Allies.. call on Iran to fully respect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz'"
The Hispanic accents of Shaft (2000) were over the top. Kevin Hart topped that with his "Ricardo Montana" #72Hours
Green fuel production could produce NH3 as easily as H2. NH3 is ammonia which is fertilizer, the world does not have to depend on natural gas producers.
Ammonia can carry H2.
"@rahmstorf@fediscience.org
Holiday in the climate emergency.
No that’s not AI or edited, it is a photo I just took with my phone on Lacanau beach in France.
Ash is raining from the sky."
"@thedarktangent@defcon.social
Great new feature in the latest Signal app. If you enable disappearing messages the meta data of calls and missed calls gets deleted as well.
I know this was a long standing goal for them, but the engineering behind it took time."
Business Insider: "[2025/11] OpenAI cofounder says scaling compute is not enough to advance AI: 'It's back to the age of research again'..
The wisdom goes that the more compute you have or the more training data you have, the smarter your AI tool will be. Sutskever said in the interview that, for around the past half-decade, this "recipe" has produced impactful results. It's also efficient for companies because the method provides a simple and "very low-risk way" of investing resources compared to pouring money into research that could lead nowhere.
However, [now he].. believes that method is running out of runway; data is finite, and organizations already have access to a massive amount of compute, he said... 'is the belief that if you just 100x the scale, everything would be transformed? I don't think that's true,' Sutskever said. 'So it's back to the age of research again, just with big computers'"
Yung Gravy - Smells Like Money #music
72 Hours, good movie
The measure caught my eye bcz it said PDF of Sharpe ratio. SR is not a PDF, but they turned multiple SRs into one. They compute SR monthly for 5 years, so they have multiple datapoints, they could histogram those but used KDE giving a smoother probability distribution. Apply the method before / after a cutoff date, you have two PDFs to compare.
I see what you did right there
BIS: "Kernel distributions are constructed using monthly Sharpe ratios of an equally weighted portfolio of the 30 largest stocks in the S&P 500. Pre-pandemic period corresponds to January 2014 through December 2019. Post-pandemic period corresponds to January 2021 through January 2026."
