Author: Jim Zellmer

11.26

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Previously described working for Microsoft as selling his soul

before it experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.

We urge the Board of Directors of OpenAI to take a firm stand against these unethical practices and launch an independent investigation into Sam and Greg’s conduct. We believe that OpenAI’s mission is too important to be compromised by the personal agendas of a few individuals.

Electronic health record giant Epic Systems will receive about $125 million in court-awarded payments from Tata Consultancy Services, the Mumbai, India-based information-technology and consulting firm said in a regulatory filing Tuesday.

And in his place, an obedient of the federal agencies called Gerald Ford, took over the White House. How did that happen? Well, it’s a long story, but here are the highlights, and they tell you a lot. Richard Nixon believed that elements in the federal bureaucracy were working to undermine the American system of government and had been doing that for a long time. He often said that.

But winning has an entirely different meaning at Ocean Spray, whose farmers are responsible for 65% of the world’s cranberries. It’s not a publicly traded company. It’s not a traditional private company, either. It’s a cooperative founded nearly a century ago and owned by roughly 700 families.

The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. The ultimate reason for this is Moore’s law, or rather its generalization of continued exponentially falling cost per unit of computation. Most AI research has been conducted as if the computation available to the agent were constant (in which case leveraging human knowledge would be one of the only ways to improve performance) but, over a slightly longer time than a typical research project, massively more computation inevitably becomes available. Seeking an improvement that makes a difference in the shorter term, researchers seek to leverage their human knowledge of the domain, but the only thing that matters in the long run is the leveraging of computation. These two need not run counter to each other, but in practice they tend to. Time spent on one is time not spent on the other. There are psychological commitments to investment in one approach or the other. And the human-knowledge approach tends to complicate methods in ways that make them less suited to taking advantage of general methods leveraging computation. There were many examples of AI researchers’ belated learning of this bitter lesson, and it is instructive to review some of the most prominent.

Only ~one out of seven TV news viewers are between ages 25-54.

Scrapping the peso, which Milei said in an October interview was worth “less than excrement”, and “blowing up” the central bank were central to the bold plan he pitched during his campaign as a way to revitalise Argentina’s economy, slash triple-digit annual inflation and repair the public finances.

The movie will run on United’s social nets, onboard flights, in movie theaters, across Peacock and other digital platforms. There’s even a partnership with Bumble. “It’s a rom-com, after all,” says Schmerin.

Joshi notes that a platform carrying a fleet of eight drones has the capacity to harvest up to 600 kilos of apples in a day. The drones are currently being tested on farms in Italy and are expected to be launched commercially in North American in two years.

There’s a basic conflict of interest at the heart of American health care. Obamacare caused health care payers to combine with health care providers. We need a health care Glass-Steagall.

“A majority of the Members of the Committee did not agree to establish an [Investigative Subcommittee] or report to the House regarding Representative Bowman’s conduct,” said Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) and ranking member Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.).

11.19

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With the Porsche FOSS Movement, we are continuing our open-source journey and creating a common understanding of values, principles and goals – in all teams, all subsidiaries and across all national borders.

Who better to help him take over China, Wylie thought, than Henry Kissinger? In the 1970s, as US national security adviser and secretary of state under President Nixon, Kissinger had presided over a historic rapprochement between the US and China. Since then, he had been an important interlocutor between China and the west. Kissinger was not a Wylie client, but that was an easy problem to solve. When Wylie Googled Kissinger’s name in 2008, he was confronted with books attacking his humanitarian record. “Kissinger was depicted as a war criminal who enjoyed killing babies – basically a monster,” Wylie said. “So I went to him and said: ‘Henry, this is not good legacy management.’” Wylie told Kissinger to fire his agent. Then, he added, “You need to get all three volumes of your memoirs back in print, and write a new book, a strong book.” Kissinger quickly became a client of The Wylie Agency.

Miles and miles of unpaved roads are carved into the eastern half of California City, intersecting and folding into themselves only to bottom out into empty cul de sacs. Even though there are no houses in sight, the roads are marked with street signs — with names like Lincoln Boulevard, Rutgers Road and Aristotle Drive — that stand among the prickly creosote bushes.

The main goal of HTML First is to substantially widen the pool of people who can work on web software codebases. This is good from an individual perspective because it allows a greater number of people to become web programmers, to build great web software, and increase their income. It’s also good from a business perspective as it decreases the cost of building software, and decreases the amount of resources required to hire – a notoriously resource intensive process.

“We’re too slow, too sluggish, too complicated – as it is, that’s not survivable.” (difficult to translate with 100% precision – what he’s saying is that if VW doesn’t change these things, survival is at stake. original quote: “Wir sind zu langsam, zu träge, zu kompliziert – das ist nicht überlebensfähig.“)

The truth is that nobody really knows what will happen in 2026 because the relevant legislation gives an incredible amount of leeway to government regulators. Based on how the law is written, the NHTSA can basically interpret impairment any way it likes and decide how driver monitoring systems assess this and ultimately respond. I would wager that’s a problem in itself.

The Packers, meanwhile, have entered the gauntlet portion of their schedule in the same familiar rut. They’ll find a way to keep one or two of these games against contenders close. But then? Chances are, they’ll find a way to lose.

Six nuclear reactors just 9 feet across planned for Idaho were supposed to prove out the dream of cheap, small-scale nuclear energy. Now the project has been canceled.

“It’s clearly going to be a vacuum for a while,” said Cannon Michael, a melon and tomato farmer. Michael also chairs the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, which supplies water to 1.2 million acres of irrigated farmland in the Valley.

“We want to make it cheap and easy to get anywhere in the Solar System.”

in 2008 William Burns – then Ambassador to Moscow, now CIA Director – warned that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite.” NATO’s overthrow of its elected gov’t & de facto takeover of Ukraine is what they feared.

In the second installment of Truth in Media’s series on the “curious case of Ray Epps,” host Lara Logan dug deeper into Epps’ background as an Oathkeeper in Queen Creek, Arizona, which coincidentally is the very same town Gionet is from

“Miyazaki, in my estimation, is the greatest director of animation ever, and he has made his films as full of dialogues and questions as he is,” continued Del Toro. “These are not easy films, but these are films that portray him so intimately, that you feel you’re having a conversation with him. And they are paradoxical because he understands that beauty cannot exist without horror, and delicacy cannot exist without brutality.”

It’s a remarkable level of productivity, made all the more remarkable by one simple fact: Vernon Smith is 96 years old. Smith, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences at the tender age of 75, says he feels the same passion as he did then, and even as he did when he embarked on his career more than seven decades ago.

Selfie-related injuries and deaths at tourist hotspots have become such a massive risk that they should be viewed as a “public health problem”, researchers suggest.

Senate investigators caught Fauci’s right-hand man David Morens advising scientists to hide communications by emailing him at his Gmail. Morens also admits not retaining documents, as required by law.

A Bernstein survey of more than 1,500 consumers in China in August and September found that BYD was the top brand that Chinese buyers of electric vehicles would consider. Tesla was next, followed by Nio.

“For the first time, I came face to face with the competitiveness of Chinese components,” Kato said. After seeing equipment and manufacturing processes not used in Japan, Kato thought, “We’re in trouble!”

But amid the outrage, Apple’s muted public response has been perplexing, obfuscatory, and contradictory. So far, the iPhone manufacturer has not released a formal public statement. Attributions have been made to sources, government officials, or what Apple has purportedly said when contacted for a response. The absence of any clear or constituent articulation from the American technology giant has left the space wide open for random mudslinging and unverifiable claims and counterclaims.

Interactions between Presidents and the Federal Reserve (Fed) can arise in response to what’s going on in the economy – they do not always reflect political pressure.

A number of essays on UOJ that I have seen would be characterized by teachers who assign essays as “read and regurgitate” papers. There is no effort to challenge the premises of trusted teachers. Such a procedure ultimately leads to blindly following the “traditions of the elders.” That there have been quite a number of such papers does not establish the validity of any of the argumentations.

The Rev. Eugene Cho, Bread’s current president and CEO, summed up Simon’s legacy in a statement: “When I consider the many millions of people around the world whose lives have been changed for the better because of the policies and programs created and improved by anti-hunger activism; when I see the 200,000-strong citizen’s movement that Bread is today; when I hear from individuals about how Art’s message and work led to a new orientation in their life toward justice; I feel an enormous weight of gratitude.”

Johnson’s opening moves seem masterful. The very first thing he did was tie aid for Israel to a cut in IRS funding. He had to know that would go nowhere, but it put capital in the bank with the hard-right. Then he averted a government shutdown — and even an eleventh hour deal — by making pretty much the same deal with Democrats that got McCarthy sacked just several weeks ago.

John Boyd (Patterns of Conflict) Thanks to Jason Brown. He converted these from BETA tapes located in the Marine Corps University archives.

11.12

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In a joint fundraising message, Clancy and Madison — Milwaukee Democrats who say they align with socialists — try to justify their decision to sit on their hands during the Oct. 12 vote on the Hamas resolution, which accused the terrorist group of attacking Israel “without provocation” days earlier. The measure passed on a 95-0 vote. “Whether on the floor of the assembly, or in the streets in solidarity,” the email said, “we’ve been consistent: we’ll stand with the people, and we’ll vote and take action accordingly.” Except they didn’t vote and take action in this case. They opted out of voting.

“The way Toyota builds cars has been considered the standard but it’s extremely shocking to think that what Tesla is proposing is likely to become the standard for producing EVs. The impact on Japan’s car manufacturing will be monumental,” said Takaki Nakanishi, a veteran automotive analyst who runs his own research group.

The source of this crisis goes back about a decade, when Europe was trying to determine what would come after the Ariane 5. That rocket was largely successful and provided Europe with its assured access to space. However, it was costly, and already it was losing commercial business to emerging competitors like SpaceX and its Falcon 9 booster.

Read it all and you can see that even with all he says, he just doesn’t get it. He also isn’t looking at the USA where the majority of those at pro-Hamas demonstrations are women. The mainstream center-left and center-right political leaders in Germany remain – even with movement towards the truth – unable to recognize the fire they’re sitting in. Anyway – how many times have I pointed out the “military aged males” problem here, the OG Blog, and on twitter? I’m not alone. Anyway … if that is the center-right leader, the German people and the alternative to the SDP/Greens, the support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) will only grow.

The last four presidents have issued a total of 106 publicly available War Powers Resolution (WPR) letters. The letters, all of which are listed with links at the end of this article, provide detailed descriptions of U.S. military operations around the globe since January 20, 2001. What follows is not a comprehensive description of the WPR letters; but instead seven takeaways from the letters and notable revelations from additional, non-WPR, war powers reporting.

We had to write programs using Punch cards. (From Sept 1, 1976 until Nov 5, 2023 I thought punch cards was one word. I also thought Stony Brook was one word. Wow- the things you learn from blogging!). It was awful. It took a long time to just write a simple program and mistakes were hard to avoid. The turn-around time for submitting the program and getting the output was 1 hour if you didn’t do the project the day before it was due but a lot longer if you did. I recall spending 6 hours debugging a program only to find that I had a 1 (the numeral) instead of a capital I (the letter). Very bad for time-put-in vs knowledge-gotten-out. I DID finish the course but decided to NOT major in Computer Science (I majored in Math and Applied Math instead). I had the following thought, though I could not possibly have expressed it this well back then:

Houston has taken the top slot as the best US city for foreign multinationals to do business in the second annual ranking compiled by the Financial Times and Nikkei. It gained the top spot by offering business friendly policies, excellent logistics, affordable cost of living, and a diverse community for overseas companies. To learn more about how Houston finished on top, read our winner’s profile here.

Tesla’s capture of BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, and Audi market share has been wild. Curious to see 2023’s end of year numbers.

charge planning for a 700 km route takes around 10 minutes – you cannot be serious, @AudiOfficial

Without diesel and jet fuel, there would also be an electricity problem because transmission lines are maintained using a combination of land-based vehicles powered by diesel and helicopters powered by jet fuel. Without electricity transmission, homes and offices without their own solar panels and batteries wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. Gasoline pumps require electricity to operate, so they wouldn’t operate either. Without diesel and electricity, the list of problems is endless. [3] Green energy is itself a dead end, but subsidizing greenhttps://ourfiniteworld.com/2023/10/25/todays-energy-bottleneck-may-bring-down-major-governments/ energy can temporarily hide other problems. Green energy sounds appealing, but it is terribly limited in what it can do. Green energy cannot operate agricultural machinery. It cannot make new wind turbines or solar panels. Green energy cannot exist without fossil fuels. It is simply an add-on to the current system.

How did Wisconsin finally land “Top Chef?” The answer involves money. According to documents obtained by the Cap Times, Travel Wisconsin coordinated a total of $1.3 million in incentives from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation ($500,000) as well as tourism partners and agricultural marketing organizations, like Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin.

Expect to hear a lot more about local on-device AI in 2024, and we will be publishing our own report on the AI PC as well as results from a generative AI survey we are running on generative AI use cases and IT decision-makers current thinking and plans around deploying generative AI in the workplace.

We develop a unique ranking methodology centred on capturing policy relevance for central banks. Our ranking is based on single impact factors. The main difference compared with existing rankings is that we do not include all citations, but only those in publications that are issued by a central bank, like its working paper series or policy journals. Our ranking facilitates a more granular understanding of policy impact within the field of central banking. Moreover, it offers a guide to researchers who want to target policy audiences and can help central banks more generally in gauging and optimising the policy impact of their analytical output and its evolution over time.

The future will be based on present parameters. Parameter number one: the Ukrainians cannot go to Moscow and force the Russians to end the war. Parameter number two: the Russians cannot enter Kiev, which is now a city where every grandmother has two anti-tank rockets. So this war is simply going to continue until Putin changes his mind, or else the Russian Federation changes its president. It will just go on and on, because our big weapon against the Russians is sanctions, and sanctions don’t work against a country that is both a food exporter and an energy exporter, and that can make everything that it needs.

Per his lawsuit, Smith believed ASP acquired his book through fraud, by concealing that the publisher to which he had sold a work critical of Soros, “globalists,” and American high finance was in fact owned by a Soros protege and Wall Streeter with active investments in China. In the case’s complaint, Smith maintained that Bessent’s objections to the content of the planned book were the reason for ASP’s repeated attempts to strong-arm him into renegotiating his contract in the months after Hartson’s abrupt departure from the company, with the publisher eventually threatening legal action if Smith didn’t repay his advance along with an additional $30,000. Smith believed ASP misrepresented and concealed their true ulterior motive and intention, which was to contract with Smith and pay him an advance in order to “to take Smith’s book off the market and destroy its value.”

This is even more excruciating in retrospect, since we now know that Kristallnacht (increasingly known in Germany as Pogromnacht due to the euphemistic elements of the former term) turned out to be a crucial turning point in German policy regarding the Jews. Leipzig-based historian Dan Diner has called it “the catastrophe before the catastrophe”—in other words, the actual beginning of what is now known as the Holocaust.

Nikki Haley has the best Republican answer on abortion. The @GOP would be stronger if they used her language.

My notes from Anna Wintour’s biography turned into maxims: 1. Hire talented people as found, not as needed. 2. Taste is as rare as a unicorn. 3.Your employees should describe you as “easy to understand.” 4.Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

Alzaro had read on Instagram that people from around the world were donating and delivering eSIM cards to Palestinians. Despite the name, eSIM cards aren’t physical cards at all but pieces of software that act like traditional SIM cards, allowing people to activate a new cellular plan with phone and internet access on their existing phone. Alzaro wrote to Egyptian writer and journalist Mirna El Helbawi, who was organizing an eSIM distribution campaign, and she promptly sent him access information for an eSIM to share with his family in Gaza. His family couldn’t get it to work. When he told El Helbawi, she sent him access information for a second one.

‘Oh no, it’s going to change, it’s going to be sandwiches instead of opulent food,’

“The greatest credit event of all would be a recession in which US yields went up, not down

Rive Tez:

Riva Tez:

The key driver of the outlook change to negative is Moody’s assessment that the downside risks to the US’ fiscal strength have increased and may no longer be fully offset by the sovereign’s unique credit strengths.

2 This tech will need to track where the car is to know speed limit, appropriate driving behavior for the location, and where the car is disabled.

This is where Kohler Co., the industrial and hospitality juggernaut known for its toilets, steam showers, hotels and golf courses, wants to transform 247 aces of heavily wooded land into an 18-hole golf course.

The occasion for my own trip into that glorious space was the annual Willa Cather Conference, held that year in Red Cloud. I gave a talk about Cather’s 1922 novel, “One of Ours” — set, as so many of her novels are, on the prairie, but extraordinary for its vivid depiction of the 1918 flu pandemic and World War I. Ernest Hemingway, whose contempt was always a reliable marker of how threatened he felt by the gifts of another writer, quipped in a letter to critic Edmund Wilson that the war had been “Catherized” and suggested, falsely, that she’d lifted her battle scenes from D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” How peeved Hemingway must have been when “One of Ours” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

11.5

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For a decade, apps have dominated dating. But now singles are growing tired of swiping and are looking for new ways to meet people – or reverting to old ones

Against a Dystopian Farm-Free Future: In an effort to make diets and agriculture “sustainable,” urban bureaucrats make policy based on industrial agricultural data, completely ignoring experience and practices coming out of holistically managed operations.

Oil and gas company BP has agreed to purchase $100 million worth of electric vehicle chargers from Tesla. This marks the first time Tesla has ever sold chargers to another company, according to an announcement from BP.

This kind of literary criticism is a high-wire act; doing it well means ferrying the reader from the publisher’s office to the writer’s desk without inducing vertigo. McGurl and Sinykin tell compelling stories of the multinational conglomerates that bought up almost all of the independent publishers, enforced standards of efficiency that continue to repress creativity and diversity, and learned to thrive in a marketplace that does not distinguish between Henry James’ “The Golden Bowl”and Torre & Tagus’ Brava Spun Textured Metallic Gold Bowl Decorative Bowl for Living Room & Centerpiece Display. But they both go one step further as they attempt — with some success — to chart a new way of reading novels through an institutional lens, one that challenges the romantic myth of the solitary author that many writers, including Elizabeth Gilbert, have made the main substance of their careers.

Most of the doctors also started working at UnityPoint Health-Meriter in Madison in August, Sansone said. In addition, some are operating at SSM Health’s hospitals in Baraboo, Janesville and Madison, where they have maintained privileges even though they are no longer employees and despite lawsuits between SSM Health and the group.

Norway EV sales and related data. These data have been collated from data from Statens vegvesen (SVV) hosted by the Digitaliseringsdirektoratet and from ofv.no.

My growing frustration spurred me to find out why Apple’s weather app stinks. In speaking to experts, I was comforted by the fact that there’s actually a reason — algorithms, specifically — for my annoyance. It’s nice to be mad at something in particular. But in my search I also discovered newfound appreciation for local meteorologists and more about weather and weather forecasting than I had initially planned.

Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before.

Aryna Sabalenka & 20 other top players including Elena Rybakina, Ons Jabeur, Marketa Vondrousova signed the letter, which requested a more flexible calendar, expanded childcare, higher pay, & official representation on the WTA player’s council from their own independent player’s organization – the PTPA. The letter ended with a request for ‘a written, substantive response to this letter & each requested improvement with a clear commitment by the WTA to address the issues stated above by Friday, October 13th.’

Porsche has to save € on software development. A partnership with Google & deeper integration of Maps, Assistant, Play Store are planned. they call this ‘blended ecosystem’.

Time Magazine reports that Ukraine struggles to rally financial support after its failed counteroffensive and amid allegations of widespread corruption.

Israel might think that it is in a war with Hamas. It isn’t. It’s in an online war with a global, networked tribe for its very existence. A war it is losing. You can see it in this recent poll (one of many that say the same thing) just after the terrorist attack.

These are the key paragraphs of (threat) letter revealed yesterday from Google to Microsoft when it found out MSFT would make its search engine the default in its new browser. Google’s statements on power of defaults vs user choice undermine much of its defense to date.

As someone who has photographed San Francisco extensively, over the past 30 years, literally walking thousands of miles of our city streets, I can validate what @elonmusk is saying here about the zombie apocalypse in San Francisco. Walking around Market Street, Mission Street, the Tenderloin, you literally encounter zombies, strung out, high on fentanyl, standing and awake but completely zombified.

Most important, they were cheap. The 1968 eight-passenger Vista Cruiser and 1968 10-passenger Country Squire retailed for about $30,000 in today’s dollars. That would buy you a new Toyota Camry today. A top luxury option in 1969, the Chrysler Town & Country, cost about $39,000 in today’s dollars.

Excellent by @stevesi detailing the AI executive order and all that is problematic about the approach.
-Slows and perhaps arrests innovation
-Outside of democratic processes
-At the behest of incumbents and to their benefit

Why EVs Aren’t The GreenTech Panacea || Peter Zeihan

A new analysis by The Intercept provides evidence refuting that claim. Biden’s effort to delegitimize the numbers coming out of Gaza as fake news has created an opening for defenders of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign to dismiss the crisis; they note that Hamas governs Gaza and therefore runs the Ministry of Health and is inflating the figures. (Biden later clarified he meant to say he didn’t trust Hamas, not all Palestinians, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

The German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck’s video message is must watch

The limited availability of electric vehicles and low interest rates pushed prices sky-high in 2022. That has all since changed this year.

In addition to the report, the event marks the release of the CORE Score, a county-level dashboard of wellbeing. Together, the report and the dashboard make the case for a shift in national priorities, from a focus on how the economy is doing onto how Americans are doing.

My take on #NetworkStates: Satoshi thought he was building e-cash for decentralized payments, but he actually discovered digital gold. @balajis thinks he’s building Network States for people to go claim land to live in, but he’s actually discovered phyles-as-a-service. The majority of people will not move to Moldova or Roatán to live in a startup city, but they do want phyles.

The diffusion of innovation and new ideas is fundamental for economic growth, cultural shifts, and institutional change. How are new ideas created, and how do they diffuse? Specifically, how do spatial con- nections affect the generation and diffusion of ideas? Intuitively, a denser network should increase the number of novel ideas and augment their diffu- sion. I study knowledge production in Germany in the 19th century, relying on the universe of bibliographic records and novel railway statistics, among other original data, as well as cutting-edge machine learning and topology to measure ideas. I show that the railroad network increased the creation of new ideas, but decreased their diffusion. This was a by-product of spe- cialization: with the railroad, groups of scholars could focus on narrower topics and co-locate with similar professionals; they learnt more from similar groups, but became disconnected from dissimilar ones. These patterns are those that paved the way for modern knowledge production, and they had important consequences for state institutions, on top of scientific discoveries and growth. Public officials and legislators were trained with narrower but deeper expertise. The bureaucracy became more specialized, and legislation more exhaustive.

In December, a new chief executive will take the reins at Blue Origin, an Amazon veteran named Dave Limp, who has Bezos’ trust. When he was hired, Bezos gave Limp a clear mandate: move faster. In particular, Bezos wants Blue Origin to deliver on the large New Glenn rocket and lunar lander for the Artemis Program. One way to cut costs and move faster would be to take the talented and experienced engineers on New Shepard and allocate them to the rocket and lander programs.

Airbus Industries The A300 Story Brochure 1974 from La Jetée Press

“For serving our customers so they don’t get confused”.

“Everybody has this green light to pursue more solar installations,” Kuntz said. “We’re at a moment when solar costs are at a historic low. We’ve got these terrific federal inflation reduction tax credits.”

The software, aimed at gamers annoyed by the sound from other players, used artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze more than 5,000 crunches.

The German-American former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about Germany’s asylum policy: “It was a grave mistake to admit so many people from entirely different cultures, religions, and beliefs, as it fosters interest groups within countries.”

10.29

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Why does Germany need a spaceport? “It is true for more and more industries: If you are not at the forefront in space, you will not be a technology leader on Earth,” BDI President Siegfried Russwurm said.

The year is 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, once an unassuming settlement in the middle of Lake Texcoco, now a bustling metropolis. It is the capital of an empire ruling over, and receiving tribute from, more than 5 million people. Tenochtitlan is home to 200.000 farmers, artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests and aristocrats. At this time, it is one of the largest cities in the world. Today, we call this city Ciudad de Mexico – Mexico City.

In a new report, the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) examined numbers from Statistics Canada and found that the country has 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs than it did 20 years ago — despite the fact that the population has grown by more than 10 million over the same period.

For the past 25 years or so, websites, news outlets, blogs and many others with a URL that wanted to get attention have used search engine optimization, or SEO, to “convince” search engines to share their content as high as possible in the results they provide to readers. This has helped drive traffic to their sites and has also spawned an industry of consultants and marketers who advise on how best to do that.

“So that’s the difference,” he adds. “They [the Americans] were security-centric, military-oriented. The Chinese are economic centric, development-oriented.”

Elon Musk seems to agree. Earlier this week, the Tesla boss warned of “enormous challenges in reaching volume production” on the model, which was first unveiled four years ago. “This is simply normal?.?.?.?when you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand-new vehicle programme, but especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck,” he told investors. “We dug our own grave.”

Data also shows that despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. These companies not only engage in this deployment “redlining,” but data also makes it clear they often charge these low income and minority neighborhoods more money for the same or slower broadband.

How did Wang become a literary icon in a country famed for its constraint? It helped that he was adroit at crafting narratives just oblique enough to elude the censors. But the political context was also crucial. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, in 1989, the Communist Party had risked falling into oblivion, behind its comrades in Moscow. It survived by offering the Chinese people a grand but pragmatic bargain: personal space in return for political loyalty. The Party leader Deng Xiaoping broke with the orthodoxy of the Mao era; he called for “courageous experiments” to insure that China would not be like “a woman with bound feet.” Soon, new N.G.O.s were lobbying for the rights of women and ethnic minorities, and foreign investors were funding startups, including Alibaba and Tencent, that grew into some of the wealthiest companies on earth. Young people were trying on new identities; I met a Chinese band that played only American rock, though their repertoire was so limited that they sang “Hotel California” twice a night. Above all, the Party sought to project confidence: Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, visited the New York Stock Exchange, in 1997, rang the opening bell, and boomed, in English, “I wish you good trading!”

Developer productivity can be a tricky concept to define. Performance metrics specialist Swarmia describes it as systematically eliminating anything that gets in the way of delivery. And, in a world where agile methods have long taught us that you can’t improve what you can’t measure, you first have to identify blockers before you can remove them. To do this, McKinsey has chosen to build on two popular engineering metrics frameworks: DORA and SPACE.

The first thing the Texts team will do at Automattic, it seems, is finish its mobile app. “To do this on mobile with push notifications, and efficient battery, and everything, is pretty tricky,” Mullenweg says. “But I think we’ve cracked it in a way that maintains all the end-to-end encryption, and where Automattic has no access to your keys, your anything.” Right now, Texts is a $15 a month power-user tool, but Mullenweg says that could change over time. “There might be some limited free version in the future,” he says. “But if you’re serious about this, you’ll want the paid — for less than like the price of one streaming service or two cups of coffee a month, you’ll get something that you’ll be able to use for hours a day.”

Over the past 5 years, we have conducted a study on public confidence in American institutions in part to answer questions like this. The American Institutional Confidence poll (“AIC”) is a nationally representative panel survey asking respondents about their confidence in different institutions, as well as their general support for democracy and various democratic norms. Over this time, we have had the opportunity to ask individuals how they feel broadly about technology’s role in their life and their confidence in particular tech companies. In doing so, we discovered a marked decrease in the confidence Americans profess for technology and, specifically, tech companies—greater and more widespread than for any other type of institution. In the remainder of this piece, we document this precipitous drop in faith between 2018 and 2021, illustrate where it came from and was most heavily concentrated, and discuss why it matters.

Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom

All these calls cost a lot of money. The rate varied, but it averaged about $4 for every 15 minutes in Connecticut during Jovaan’s incarceration. They often talked four times a day, the maximum allowed. The charges added up quickly. Every Friday, when Lewis collected her paycheck, the first thing she did was deposit money in Jovaan’s phone account. Many months, she had to pick: the calls or her other bills? “You always choose your kid,” she told me, even if it meant an empty stomach or talking to her son in the dark because her power was shut off.

Gov. Kathy Hochul reportedly authorized payment of nearly $2 million in taxpayer money for outside ghostwriters to help draft her State of the State speeches. Most of the money was paid to Deloitte Consulting and the Boston Consulting Group to help the state’s first female governor shape her vision, according to the New York Times.

Idemitsu Kosan, Japan’s second-largest oil refiner, may seem like an unlikely partner for the EV space. But Toyota says Idemitsu has been working on developing the “elemental technologies” for the batteries since 2001, five years before Toyota began pursuing them in 2006.

“The one message I want to convey today is that you will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.”

This video shows that everything Jamaal Bowman and his supporters said about this incident was a lie. Anyway, moving on…

X has released some highlights after one year of @elonmusk ownership.

• Users: 7.8B+ active minutes on X per day. Avg user spends more than 32 minutes per day on X.
• 1.5M avg signups per day
• Since mid-May, all major agencies have reversed their pause guidance against advertising on X. Last quarter alone over 1,700 advertisers returned to X, including 90 of the top 100 ad spenders from a year ago.
• Over half a billion people come to X every month
• Over 200 new products and features shipped post-acquisition with a significantly smaller team
• Paid out more than $20 million to creator community
• Community Notes now has over 100K contributors in 44 countries

Morris Chang, 92, said that cutting off China’s chip industry from the rest of the world would affect other players beyond China. “I think that decoupling will ultimately slow down everybody. Of course, the immediate purpose is to slow China down, and I think it’s doing that,” Chang said.

As the source said, there was a lot of “self-inflicted pain by the corporate defendants.” Let me quote my source again:

You could tell none of the tapes of the corporate folks and their scripts played well with them. The tape of Gino Blefari telling his story on how to script commissions played horribly in the room. It felt smarmy, with the clip they played. I wasn’t there for the Tom Ferry tape this week, which was a nightmare – and turned out not to have been admitted into evidence.

One of the more important pre-trial rulings and decisions was the one the plaintiffs made not to have over 600 telephone calls from REX introduced… except as a counter. Here’s the relevant page from the filing:

But you should also get to a jurisdiction that doesn’t have a sovereign debt crisis. And where property rights are respected.

George Soros 1998 60 minutes interview.

Nikon small world competition.

Testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.

The judge was hostile to the Deplorable lady, and she told the defendant to stop sharing her political views, but ultimately couldn’t find a basis to rule in favor of the plaintiffs.

What have we seen in the past few weeks? Muslim immigrants to the U.S., whose right to settle here was pushed by the ADL, rallying and pointing out that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) is not a terrorist organization, but the Israeli government and all supporters of Israel are (video). Twitter and Facebook jammed with anti-Israel content. A young woman in a hijab in NYC and her friend giving the finger to a billboard truck advocating for the return of hostages held by Hamas (video). Depending on your political point of view, you might agree with these anti-Israel positions, but I think that everyone can agree this is not what the ADL was trying to accomplish.

The absence of a major tax is a common factor among many of the top 10 states. Property taxes and unemployment insurance taxes are levied in every state, but there are several states that do without one or more of the major taxes: the corporate income tax, the individual income tax, or the sales tax. Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming have no corporate or individual income tax (though Nevada imposes gross receipts taxes); Alaska has no individual income or state-level sales tax; Florida has no individual income tax; and New Hampshire and Montana have no sales tax. This does not mean, however, that a state cannot rank in the top 10 while still levying all the major taxes. Indiana and Utah, for example, levy all the major tax types but do so with low rates on broad bases.

In a world that seems inexorably drawn towards an all-electric future, Toyota has consistently taken a different road. The Japanese automaker remains skeptical about an exclusive reliance on electric vehicles (EVs). While it’s true that Toyota has some exciting EVs in the pipeline for the upcoming year, they are also actively exploring alternative energy sources. However, a recent development could potentially turn the tables on the EV revolution — an ammonia-powered engine for passenger vehicles. An ammonia engine is a type of internal combustion engine that uses ammonia as its primary fuel source. What makes ammonia unique is its composition, consisting of one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. The absence of carbon atoms in ammonia translates to the absence of carbon dioxide emissions during combustion. This distinct characteristic is why ammonia engines are viewed as a promising solution to combat pollution.

10.22

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Such innovations have propelled the family-owned toymaker to become one of Europe’s biggest corporate success stories of the past decade. Lego, with essentially just one product in endless iterations, has raced past Mattel and Hasbro — the listed US companies with stables of hundreds of different toy brands — to become by far the biggest toymaker in the world by sales, and on a different level altogether in terms of profits.

The year is 2007 and Ralph Baric of UNC Chapel-Hill is giving a presentation on the new and exciting science behind synthetically creating the SARS virus and making it more pathogenic.

Most recently, during the last two decades, the Soyuz-FG rocket launched cargo and crew missions from Gagarin’s Start, which is located on the Kazakhstan steppe near the small city of Baikonur. The final launch from the site took place in September 2019, with the Soyuz MS-15 mission carrying Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, and United Arab Emirates astronaut Hazza Al Mansouri to the International Space Station.

In recent months, according to SpaceX, its programs have had to compete with one another for reviews at the FAA. This has significantly slowed down the Starship program and put development of a Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis program at risk. Inefficient regulation, the officials said, is decreasing American competitiveness as space programs in China and elsewhere around the world rise. The discussion with Ars was convened by SpaceX in advance of a hearing on Wednesday before the US Subcommittee on Space and Science, at which William Gerstenmaier, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX, will be one of the people testifying. SpaceX hopes that Congress will provide guidance to the FAA on how to operate more efficiently.

The result is a leaf blower that emits just 45 decibels of noise at 50 feet and full throttle. In comparison, gas leaf blowers emit between 70-90 decibels of sound at the same condition, while the quietest electric leaf blowers on the market emit around 57-59 decibels.

Windows Longhorn and the Worst Code I’ve Ever Seen: Dave Cutler

Bacteria from the genus Coprococcus, which are associated with healthy aging, were significantly reduced in Alzheimer’s patients. They also had significantly more bacteria from the Desulfovibriogenus than cognitively healthy controls, similar to past research in animal models of Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease.

Peter Easton, an accounting professor at the University of Notre Dame brought in by the prosecution, says user deposits were reinvested into businesses and real estate, used to make political contributions, and donated to charity, reports CoinDesk Thursday.

Ten years ago today, on Friday, October 18, 2013, the effort to fix HealthCare.gov began in earnest. At 7:15 A.M. Eastern time, a small group assembled next to the entrance to the West Wing of the White House. The group included Todd Park, Brian Holcomb, Gabriel Burt, Ryan Panchadsaram, Greg Gershman, and myself. Later in the day we were joined by Mikey Dickerson via a long-running speakerphone call. Some of us were from outside of government (Gabe, Brian, Mikey, and me), and the others had jobs in government at the time (Todd, Ryan, and Greg). What we all had in common was that we were experienced technologists, having been at startups or at large established technology organizations.

10.15

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I do think that after decades of Iraq and Syria, financial crisis and coronavirus, inflation and deindustrialization, that the DC regime has lost the Mandate of Heaven. They inherited a hyperpower in 1991 and squandered perhaps the largest advantage in human history in just 30 years.

6) As a concrete example, Raytheon — a defense contractor! — admits that it can’t build without China.[2] That means the US military itself is made in China. And you can’t fight your factory.

We launched the widget on Android in March, which was a big engineering challenge since Android widgets can look and perform differently depending on the version and device type. And for our learners on iOS, we added a new type of widget learners can add to their lock screen that tracks their streak:

Blackmagic Camera unlocks the power of your iPhone by adding Blackmagic’s digital film camera controls and image processing! Now you can create the same cinematic ‘look’ as Hollywood feature films. You get the same intuitive and user friendly interface as Blackmagic Design’s award winning cameras

Matt Pottinger: “Courting China — as the Biden administration has done recently by sending senior officials to visit — gives “the wrong signal”. More to the point, Pottinger says, “[Beijing] treated them not all that well. [Treasury secretary] Janet Yellen was fed psychedelic mushrooms at a lunch. [Commerce secretary] Gina Raimondo — the moment she was leaving, [Huawei released a phone that] managed to subvert the export controls she’d put in place. [Climate envoy] John Kerry could barely even get a meeting. While John Kerry was in China [in July], Xi Jinping hosted Henry Kissinger for an intimate chat, but would have nothing to do with President Biden’s emissary. China is giving every indication that they view us as weak right now.” “Like President Reagan used to say, you can really get a lot done in Washington DC if you’re willing to give someone else the credit.” more.

The Lotus team showed Jobs an early prototype. “Steve Jobs thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Salas, now a professor at Brandeis University, tells Quartz. Jobs then convinced Lotus to develop the pivot table software exclusively for the NeXT computer. The software came out as Lotus Improv, and though the NeXT computer was a commercial failure, Lotus Improv would be hugely influential. The “flexible views” aspect of Improv would be built into both Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel (the latter was the first to actually use the term “pivot table”).

Nearly a decade after the selling of the Iran deal, it’s much easier now for Americans to see that it was the origin point in a series of hugely consequential lies that have shaped our country at home as surely as they have shaped the lives of people in the Middle East. They lied about Obama’s successor being a Russian spy to delegitimize the government and divide the country, in the hope of removing an elected president from office. They lied about an “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, to justify designating one half of the country as domestic terrorists, in order to put their political opponents in jail. They’ve lied about so many things because they’re certain that their communications infrastructure—where intelligence officers direct big tech and censor what was once America’s independent press—will shape the “information space” on their behalf, effectively controlling what we see, hear, and read. They first built their echo chamber to sell the idea that the Iran deal would stop Iran from getting a bomb; now the echo chamber is everywhere—a high-tech version of how the press is run in countries like Egypt, or Iran.

Photographer Christopher Dodd gets accidentally locked inside Tempelhof Airport…

Want to hear a new Steely Dan song? Well, it’s actually a 50-year-old song that was recently uncovered. And it’s not so much a “song” as it is an extended jingle. Oh, and that 109-second composition is about Schlitz. Still want to hear it? Of course you do.

The hardest thing about night photography is that you can’t see anything you’re shooting until after you’ve shot it. If there is a mountain in the distance that you want in the shot, you have to know where it is ahead of time. Our planet is always rotating, so if you’re wasting darkness time getting a perfectly composed foreground, the night sky will have moved by the time you’re ready. Preparation in daylight is essential.

For someone of his wealth, it’s unusual to not have myriad of estate planning done to avoid probate, keep affairs private, and to help out with incapacity. I can only suspect that because of his networth, his lawyers, associates, friends and family had inquired and encouraged estate planning, but that he made the decision to not put any plans in place. Nobody knows when they will die, but they nonetheless likely have the knowledge that their assets are well beyond the federal estate tax exemptions.

Home Assistant is disappointed that Mazda has decided to take this position. We’re also sad that Mazda’s first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead.

In this context, what distinguishes Banks’s work is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has also driven changes in the social structure, such that the social and political challenges people confront are new. Indeed, Banks distinguishes himself in having thought carefully about the social and political consequences of technological development. For example, once a society has semi-intelligent drones that can be assigned to supervise individuals at all times, what need is there for a criminal justice system? Thus in the Culture, an individual who commits a sufficiently serious crime is assigned – involuntarily – a “slap drone,” who simply prevents that person from committing any crime again. Not only does this reduce recidivism to zero, the prospect of being supervised by a drone for the rest of one’s life also serves as a powerful deterrent to crime.
This is an absolutely plausible extrapolation from current trends – even just looking at how ankle monitoring bracelets work today. But it also raises further questions. For instance, once there is no need for a criminal justice system, one of the central functions of the state has been eliminated. This is one of the social changes underlying the political anarchism that is a central feature of the Culture. There is, however, a more fundamental postulate. The core feature of Banks’s universe is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has freed culture from all functional constraints – and thus, he imagines a situation in which culture has become purely memetic. This is perhaps the most important idea in his work, but it requires some unpacking.

Apple and Privacy

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Jeffrey Paul:

Please take the time to go to Berlin, and visit the Stasi museum, if you think my warnings about the potential for abuse by the FBI when they are not constrained by the need for probable cause or search warrants are overblown.

This is the same FBI that wrote Martin Luther King Jr. anonymous letters telling him to kill himself.

Presently, the US government is accessing the full content of around seventy thousand(!) Apple accounts per year (as of 2022) without a search warrant, per Apple’s own transparency report. The numbers are much higher when you include warrants issued with probable cause.

Colleges used to encourage the exchange of challenging ideas. Now faculty members who challenge students’ beliefs are being forced to leave the profession.

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Francesca Block:

One sentence in a blog post almost ruined Thomas Smith’s career.

“If you believe that the coronavirus did not escape from the lab in Wuhan, you have to at least consider that you are an idiot who is swallowing whole a lot of Chinese cock swaddle,” commented Smith, 65, a law professor at the University of San Diego.

He wrote it back in 2021, in a piece questioning the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic on his personal legal blog, which usually received only a few hundred visitors per day. 

But the backlash was swift. Smith estimates 60 students submitted a formal complaint to the administration and accused him of being racist, using derogatory language, and promoting conspiracy theories with “detrimental consequences.” Smith later updated his post to clarify that his ire was directed at the Chinese government, not its people.

A week later, Robert Schapiro, the dean of San Diego’s law school, announced an investigation into Smith in an email to the student body, stressing that “University policies specifically prohibit harassment, including the use of epithets, derogatory comments, or slurs based on race or national origin.”

10.8

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Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether “terrorism” is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions. “The current political environment is not something that the FBI is necessarily responsible for, nor should it be,” says Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the world’s leading terrorism experts and senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation.

I am not envious of the team designing Apple’s Camera app. It has to be one app that does everything, and with every new iPhone that adds even more capabilities, that camera app runs the risk of getting heavier and more complex. However, this year they managed to integrate the new 28mm and 35mm quite well.

According to the report, when adjusting for inflation, tech salaries plunged to their lowest point in the past five years, decreasing 9% from $141,000 to $129,000 from 2022 to mid-2023. Additionally, salaries experienced their most significant year-over-year decline, dropping by 3% from $161,000 to $156,000. However, despite economic volatility, job seekers in the U.S. maintained their salary expectations at around $146,000.

Insurance companies acknowledged challenges in maintaining their directories, saying they struggle to get providers’ help in updating listings. Some support creating a national directory to ease the burden and give insurers and providers a single place where they can update and verify information.

In this paper, we study the relationship between stock fund managers’ facial attractiveness and fund outcomes. Utilizing the state-of-art deep learning technique to quantify facial attractiveness, we find that funds with facial unattractive managers outperform funds with attractive managers by over 2% per annum. We next show that good-looking managers attract significant higher fund flow especially if the funds are available on Fintech platforms where their photos are accessible to investors. Good-looking managers also have greater chance of promotion and tend to move to small firms. The potential explanations for their underperformance include inadequate ability, insufficient effort, overconfidence and inefficient site visits.

Now is the opportunity to be creative and explore divergent UIs.