





Energy is not only a property of matter. Photons have energy, no mass, and are not matter but in fact force carrier particles.


It’s cover. They’re not laying off because of AI. They’re laying off to make line go up.


An inquiry could ultimately see justice department officials, including the acting attorney general, brought before her court to testify.
Don’t waste time having them testify. They have no qualms lying under oath. Subpoena documents. That’s the only way to get at the truth.


I’m skeptical of just a mathematical model without tying it to real data, no matter how hard the researchers try to make it “realistic.” You can make a mathematical model that says anything. That said, I did find this part interesting:
Burgess and his colleagues delved into the mechanics of ambition after earlier work found that fisheries performed best when boats stopped searching for more fish once they reached higher-than-average catches. They wanted to see if the mathematics supported the strategy in other realms of life, too.


Some details that seemed important to me:
The protesters tried to stop ICE from transferring Martin Soto – who announced the strike – but officials said that they were able to move him to the Elizabeth contract detention facility.
Laura Herman, who serves as legal director of the advocacy organization Make The Road New Jersey, said that lawyers had communicated with the US attorney’s office. The US attorney’s office claimed he would not be transferred Sunday because of a federal judge’s order prohibiting him from being moved out of state as his habeas petition proceeds through court, according to the City.
So federal court has forbidden them from transferring him out of state, and they decide to transfer him. They moved him to another ICE facility in New Jersey (where he was initially), so this doesn’t break that order, but who would trust ICE to do that?


“Iran now knows without doubt it needs a nuclear weapon to survive, and will probably threaten the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity,” the Nato source added.
This is Trump’s legacy. There’s no way to undo this. No amount of diplomacy or military action will ever be able to change their minds after what the US has done. It doesn’t matter who gets voted into office for the next 30 years. The Iranians won’t forget this.


No, sales are going down because prices are going up. If you have a fixed inventory and sales go down, you lower prices to increase demand and move the product and keep your revenue stream. But in this case, they’re moving supply away from this market (consumer hardware) to a different market (AI data centers). So the supply is going down with (previously) fixed demand, driving prices up. The “motherboard sales are collapsing” headline comes from looking at the consumer hardware slice of the computing hardware market. If you look at total sales from each manufacturer, so include the AI data center sales in the analysis, they’re not having any trouble moving inventory nor keeping up their revenue stream overall.


Wholeheartedly agree. The point I’m more trying to make is that they can survive much longer without popular support than other kinds of movements. So Palantir can be very successful for a long time aligning with the regime, even if it will ultimately fall. They can (and probably plan to) jump ship before that fall, like German companies that aided the Nazis did after WWII.


Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.
I keep seeing this logic that:
That may be true of a lot of movements, but fascism doesn’t work like that. They don’t need popularity, they just need control over the levers of power. The Heritage Foundation and many, many other conservative groups have been working for decades, some since the 1950s, to seize control of those levers of power.
Palantir aligning with this fascism is not nearly the clearly failing strategy the author believes it to be. There’s a very real chance they are successful for years or even decades aligning with the current fascist regime. It has a lot of momentum, and I haven’t seen good evidence that that momentum is reliably ebbing. It’s seeing speed bumps, but I haven’t seen any kind of turning point. I really hope the midterm elections are that turning point. Either conservatives lose Congress or the public realizes they can’t stop it by working within the system anymore.


In the ruling, Judge Kyle Duncan, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, agreed with the state of Louisiana’s contention that allowing the drug to be mailed there makes moot the state’s ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy.
“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,’” the ruling states.
Yeah, it’s called the Supremacy Clause. You know, the one the federal government is using right now in multiple cases to remove other rights citizens are getting through state laws and constitutions? I guess it can only be used to take rights, not grant them?


To bone and to debone both mean to remove bones from something, typically food.


For enthusiasts, AI promises to usher in something that socialists have long dreamed of: a world without scarcity in which human beings can move finally from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
Like many problems techbros try to solve, this is a problem of politics and social organization, not technology. We have had the technology to free the entire human population from several fundamental scarcities for decades (food and housing most prominently, but also many diseases), but the groups with the resources to do so actively choose not to solve those problems. Mostly because they are antisocial psychopathic billionaires.


He’s a bit early for hurricane season.
Read their license. It does not meet the definition of open source.

Across a lot of media, impressions are so cheap now they don’t even charge for them, just the clicks cost (“CPC” is the charge type, “cost per click”). They track impressions to give advertisers metrics on conversion rates, but they don’t charge for them.


The article discusses that IP-based limiting doesn’t work as well as it used to. Because of NATs, proxies, etc., IP addresses are a lot more ephemeral and flexible, so they’ve seen the same big perpetrators adapt and change IPs when rate-limited. I expect we will start to see support for anonymous downloads go away in the next several months in many major OSS registries.


705,809 births and about 1.61 million deaths, leading to a net population decrease of 899,845. Wikipedia says the total population is about 123.4 million, so they lost about 0.73%.


This looks like someone took regular expressions, expanded them to a full programming language, and used Unicode to deal with the explosion of required symbols. I have a hard enough time reading my own regular expressions. I can’t imagine writing full programs like this.


The result of all this may be catastrophic. Should a worst-case scenario ever occur — a cyberattack, a natural disaster, an internet outage — there may be no human workers left with the skills that once kept food on the shelves.
Very nerdy of me, but this reminds me of a Stargate SG-1 episode “the Sentinel.” The team travels to a planet whose civilization relies on fully automated technology. The people don’t have to operate or maintain it (normally), so their society has completely forgotten how. In the episode, one set of antagonists comes in and sabotages their defense system, and another set sees the opportunity and invades. The protagonists have to then figure out the defense system and fix it.
We don’t live in a TV series. There aren’t benevolent outsiders who will swoop down and save our systems in the nick of time when they break down. We’re headed in a bad direction.