"A factious man (hairetikos) after a first and second admonition refuse; knowing that such a one is perverted, and sinneth, being self-condemned" (Tit. 3)

The Party Spirit

In Egypt, the government ordered gov't-authorized ISPs shut down. The Gaddafi gov't severed Libya to totally vanish from the Internet. Al-Assad hacked Harvard to threaten the US and cut off all Internet access in Syria. The Tunisian gov't used malicious code to steal passwords from Facebook and other sites. Facebook users have been killed by Saudi security forces, with authorities taking the body to remove any evidence. Bahrain beat a journalist to death, arrested photographers, and decreed it unlawful to publish information. View quoted note →

Trump's tariffs are meant to keep vehicles artificially expensive and shelter Elon from free market competition.

Two AI-based startups in #Israel are joining forces to combat the #pests and #plantdiseases that destroy up to 40 percent of all food grown globally. #AI #crop #grower

The 'Effective Accelerationism' movement doesn't care if humans are replaced by AI as long as they're there to make money from it. "Rather than fear, we have faith in the adaptation process and wish to accelerate this to the asymptotic limit: the technocapital singularity." — Business Insider

Larger players such as Meta, have made a big deal about releasing what they call ‘open’ large language models. In this case, they’re only partly open, and there’s a growing call for the definition of its LlaMa models to be changed from ‘open source’ to ‘open weights’.

Tom

Open source is crucial for the future of AI — here

A true hidden power

2000 Kgs of Hashish, 370 Kgs of Ice and 50 Kgs of Heroin. The US Federal Reserve's Kashkari has just said that very few transactions happen in crypto, unless its for drugs or illegal activity. View quoted note →

The Defense Department relies on him to get most of its satellites to orbit. View quoted note →

Signal says it has never taken money from investors (unlike the Telegram app, which relies on them). Snap between 2016-2023 made nearly $300m from interest alone. View quoted note →

Waterless #urinals use a low-density liquid seal, typically a biodegradable fluid, which creates a scent barrier by remaining on the surface.