Key Findings. Only Arkansas had an overall relative price below 170 percent of Medicare prices, while other states (California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, New York, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin) had relative prices that were above 300 percent of Medicare prices.

You will struggle mightily inside American technocapitalism to afford a home insulated from crime caused by deluded politicians, private school to avoid woke social experiments, and you’ll still see a homeless guy taking a shit on your sidewalk.

The “most transparent administration in history” has spent years trying to hide embarrassing financial secrets from the public

Apple Vision Series and Smart Glasses Roadmap (2025–2028): Smart Glasses Set to Drive the Next Wave in Consumer Electronics

Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, in particular. They have long been viewed with cautious optimism in clean energy circles. In China, they are quickly becoming an emerging backbone of the country’s AI infrastructure strategy. The logic is simple: If compute (industry jargon for the infrastructure powering AI) is the engine of AI progress, energy is the fuel. And China wants control over the pump.

Trends come and go—cottagecore, coastal grandma, goblin mode, clean girl, brat summer, whatever’s next. But the people who endure aren’t optimizing for today. They’re building libraries. Languages. Signature worlds that last.

https://climatedrift.substack.com/p/whats-stopping-america-from-goingWhat’s important to understand is that a heat pump does not create heat. It also doesn’t create cold (cold is the absence of heat, just like darkness is the absence of light). A heat pump simply transfers – pumps! – heat from one place to another.

What did they create? Two key innovations:

1. SDBench: A testing environment using 304 real medical mysteries from NEJM where AI starts with just “29yo woman with sore throat” and must decide what to ask/test next

If they were average members of the S&P 500, trading at a trailing price-earnings (P/E) ratio of 27 to 1, Fannie and Freddie’s combined market capitalization would be almost $780 billion. But they are not; they are financial companies, with a “special relationship” with the government. That special relationship resulted in their being forced into conservatorship in 2008—in spite of  being in full compliance with their applicable capital standards—by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who was not comfortable having to rely on them as shareholder-owned companies to get the country through the mortgage crisis, after the private-label securities market had imploded in the fall of 2007 and commercial banks had greatly pulled back on their residential mortgage lending because of soaring delinquencies. For virtually all of the time since their conservatorships, Fannie and Freddie’s P/Es have rounded to zero, and even with the recent optimism about their potential release, their average P/E still is languishing at under 3 to 1, or less than 11 percent of the S&P 500 P/E.

Last week, I wrote about some challenges of accessing and analyzing Epic’s EHI exports. Let’s leave access challenges for another time; today I’m sharing a draft of an open-source project to help with analysis: The EHI Living Manual. This guide is for anyone who has been handed a folder of TSV files and needs to make them useful — whether you’re an individual with your own health data, a developer building a new application, or a data engineer tasked with integrating a large-scale export.

Ultimately, the 5 series was so successful that it was a major factor in the demise of Canon’s previous professional full-frame series of cameras, the 1Ds series.   The 5 series prompted Canon to rethink how to provide value to its professional and prosumer user base. 

According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal.

This isn’t just about abortion. It’s also about judicial respect for democracy and the legislative process. Even if you want broader abortion rights, you need to be concerned about who decides. 5/5

An Enormous Scandal, Dwarfing Watergate & The Pentagon Papers.

A quick steel man of the $55 billion number: We can be confident this is Apple’s internal figure—just as the author claims—because multiplying this 2016 number by five yields the exact $275 billion five-year deal reported by The Information in 2021, part of Apple’s MOU with the NDRC.

On Monday, ASTP/ONC announced (link) they will no longer enforce most Real World Testing (RWT) requirements for Certified Health IT. To most, this is an obscure policy shift. But it effectively ends a short-lived, and arguably unintentional, era of transparency into how health IT systems actually perform.

Whether or not one can comprehend all of the elements above as genuinely additive to Moby Dick itself (a feat unworthy of lesser minds), one cannot deny their literary-historical significance in opening up the form of the novel beyond simple storytelling. Sure, there is no Infinite Jestwithout Melville, but there is no Grapes of Wrath, either.

A puffin was found in a Hereford garden after being blown more than 100 miles from her seaside nest.

I started off by asking him whether there is a unifying theme to his seemingly diffuse life’s work, which has included old-school magazines and books, bleeding-edge technology, conservationism, photographing Asia, and teaching. “Following my interests,” he said simply.

While many voters have become skeptical toward the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of Democrats embrace restrictive policies, including punitive measures against those who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine. 2022.

A few dozen people of all ages arrived ahead of the 8 am opening of the Bras Marie swimming zone – one of three open in Paris this summer – donning swim caps and goggles as they prepared to dive in and celebrate the long-awaited return of bathing in the Seine. The seasonal opening of the Seine for swimming is seen as a key legacy of the Paris 2024 Olympics, when open-water swimmers and triathletes competed in its waters which were specially cleaned for the event.

Seems possible if not probable that while every open-source reporter in the world was watching very public and eventually government-confirmed B-2 flights westward, a guy in his backyard in Missouri saw the real, undisclosed and untracked mission heading east.

The idea of a “Python dev” or “React dev” is outdated. Going forward, I won’t be hiring for languages, I’ll hire devs who can solve problems, no matter the stack. The language barrier is completely gone.

Hawaii Highways.

The main strongpoint for TPUs is in their scalability. This is achieved through a co-design of both the hardware side (e.g. energy efficiency and modularity) and the software side (e.g. XLA compiler).

While the Covid mRNA vaccines may have provided a therapeutic effect during the fall 2021 B.1.617.2 variant wave, helping to keep some vulnerable individuals out of the hospital, this benefit did not translate into reduced infection rates or into any arguable offset in overall mortality. In contrast, the Week 14, 2021 inception of the mRNA vaccine has led to a pronounced and pervasive inflection in mortality across multiple-dozens of ICD codes. This shift has resulted in more than 840,000 excess deaths from causes other than Covid or non-natural means (see Charts 3b and 4c). These deaths have come mainly as a result of the vaccine itself (see Charts 3c and 3d) – a mortality total which is 25 times greater than the 33,000 lives the CDC claimed could have been saved by the B.1.617.2-valent vaccine during the Delta Variant wave. Nations with a low rate of Covid and high rate of mRNA vaccination serve to confirm both the timing and cause of this excess mortality.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is the only rocket among Amazon’s launch providers that has actually flown at the kind of cadence envisioned for the Kuiper network. The Falcon 9 currently flies at an average rate of once every two days, primarily on missions with SpaceX’s own Starlink broadband satellites. So Amazon went to SpaceX in 2023 and booked three initial rides on the Falcon 9. SpaceX’s Starlink network dominates the satellite broadband market, with more than 5 million subscribers connecting to approximately 7,000 satellites currently active in the constellation.

The Nicene Creed in Old English, translated by Ælfric

Live data from all US ISOs/RTOs in a single, intuitive platform. Gain seamless visibility into the grid, stay ahead of market shifts, and never miss critical events with instant, customizable alerts.

That was the theory at least, but the economic case was always confused. Stewart is (correctly) a fan of the book ‘How Big Things Get Done’ and quotes a line from it: “Projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong.” HS2’s problems started with the vision: while the strategic case was about capacity, the economic case focused on travel times, which were easier to measure and talk about, and more in line with how the Department for Transport typically talks about projects. The conflict between the strategic case and how the economic case was talked about led to constant confusion about the purpose of HS2 in the public discourse (epitomised by Jenkins above), but also made it hard to know how to evaluate proposed solutions.

“We have 50 people that have given $50,000 or more,” Gee said.

Gifts of $1 million or more came from the state of Wisconsin, Dane County, Ascendium, American Family Insurance Dreams Foundation, Summit Credit Union and TruStage. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Rep. Mark Pocan helped the center secure federal grants for the project, too.

The gift that pushed the campaign to meet its goal was actually a second donation from Ascendium, the Madison-based nonprofit that supports education and workforce training. Ascendium gave the final $626,000 to help the center meet its fundraising goal.

Steve Vig, 51, of Madison, had just left the produce section with his shopping cart and was walking up the meats aisle toward the back of the store about 8:40 p.m. when he heard a loud crash behind him. “For a moment I thought a display had fallen over but realized the sound was too loud for that,” Vig said. When he turned around, a veritable Niagara Falls was pouring through the roof onto the sale items between the produce and meat sections.

Anthropic purchased millions of physical print books to digitally scan them for Claude.

Tanden confirmed that during her tenure as White House staff secretary, she oversaw the many documents coming to and from the president’s desk, and she noted that her role included authorization to direct autopen use.

One also starts understanding how much the American NGO community, by blathering on about future monetary opportunities for nation-building, contributes to the unending nature of all these crises. National collapse of Iran is in none of the primary three demographics I named above. Urban elites are aware of the results of chaos. The IRGC and the mullahs lose their retirement plan. And the rural poor are still bereft, and powerless. There is no land war even for their sons to be drafted into. And the Iran-Iraq War is not that long ago – only 38 years.

German automotive industry signs Memorandum of Understanding for joint software development based on open source.

San Francisco Streets.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur (The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.)

— attributed to Petronius (c. 27-66 AD)

But the city has taken well to the vacuum of our present national drift. Here a new, more bloody-minded politics thrives, in which eccentrics and civic entrepreneurs can achieve cult status by picking up the litter where the council will not, invading Cineworld to cancel a screening of an Indian film deemed anti-Islam and calling the Prime Minister a “wasteman” in a viral TikTok.

The vast majority of Americans (83%) say they have not paid for news in the past year, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. Another 17% say they have directly paid or given money to a news source by subscribing, donating or becoming a member during that time.

At the same time, 74% run into paywalls at least sometimes when they are looking for news online. This includes 38% who say they come across paywalled articles extremely often or often.

I continue to hold that feminism is the KEY movement that has undermined the success of western culture. Their zealotry has led to the destruction of the nuclear family (the most important factor in a healthy nation). They have helped to facilitate the near collapse of the west and this problem needs to be addressed before it’s too late.

During my time in Ukraine, I collected statistics on the success of our drone operations. I found that 43 percent of our sorties resulted in a hit on the intended target in the sense that the drone was able to successfully fly all the way to the target, identify it correctly, hit it, and the drone’s explosive charge detonated as it was supposed to. This number does not include instances when our higher command requested a sortie but we had to decline because we knew that we could not strike the target for reasons such as weather, technical problems, or electronic interference. If this type of pre-aborted mission is included in the total, the success rate drops to between 20 and 30 percent. On the face of it, this success rate is bad, but that is not the whole story.

This is not a niche opportunity; it’s a growing, scalable energy resource. More than 100,000 EVs will come off U.S. roads this year alone. Today, over 5 million EVs are active on U.S. roads, representing an estimated 350 GWh of energy that will reach end-of-life in the coming years. And with another 150 GWh entering the operational fleet annually, that total is increasing fast and could supply 50% or more of the entire energy storage market.  

Log rolling is a sport with deep historical roots, derived almost 200 years ago on river drives, according to Verstegen. “Lumberjacks put the timber into the rivers, and they had to steer the timber down the rivers and kind of prevent log jams.”

But the move has been canceled, and the brick house at 427 W. Mifflin St. — deemed historically significant by the city in part because it was designed by a noted Madison architect — will be demolished to make way for a larger residential development at the site.

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that’s about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

Society said in its suit, filed Nov. 6, that “while responding to the fire call, the Madison Fire Department discovered several city-owned fire hydrants were under-pressurized or not pressurized at all.”

Now with the full set of nearly a thousand comments on the CMS RFI.

Chief Justice Roberts Speaks at Fourth Circuit Conference.

Available on this site is a complete history of cycling maps, including well over a hundred carefully-selected and restored extracts from the main providers of such maps. It has been created specifically and wholly for that purpose for the general public with an interest in such matters. it was first published in 2021 and is now much expanded. 

An underappreciated passage of Justice Jackson’s dissent in CASA is her appeal to the authority of a fictional space alien.

Last June, alders greenlit the rezoning of parcels from 6610 to 6706 Old Sauk Road that would have allowed the space to be developed into a new three-story apartment building. However, the rezoning was vacated after Judge Rhonda Lanford ruled that city officials didn’t follow the law in the process of rezoning the parcels.

Once I was in office, we restored the limits to cover those living in poverty and eliminated the waiting list. Today, my state is the only one in the nation to have no gap in insurance coverage despite not having taken the expansion. Second, I did not want to put more people on government assistance. For those who are able, public assistance should be more like a trampoline than a hammock. True freedom and prosperity do not come from the clumsy hand of the government. They come from empowering people to control their own destiny through the dignity of work.

Toyota released a pro-life ad highlighting Lauren Woolstencroft—born without legs—who went on to defy the odds and become an 8X Paralympic gold medalist.

Lifting the ban on supersonic flight.

Note that this is the inevitable result of mass immigration that was predicted by proto-nationalists decades ago. It is why the entire immigration debate about crime and economics was always irrelevant and fundamentally missing the point. The reason for banning immigration and protecting the nation’s demographics, as was done in the early 1920s, is to preserve the nature of the society.

Boeing now hopes the 777X will be certified later this year and first deliveries in 2026. But all the Xs that have been built and stored must go through Change Incorporation to whatever new standards the FAA requires for certification; and upgrades that happen in the normal course of elapsed time. The airplanes also must be pulled out of long-term storage, all systems tested, and if necessary repaired or replaced.

This glossy rebrand rings hollow when juxtaposed with the company’s actions. USAA is close to becoming a corporate zombie, animated by its historical association with U.S. military members and veterans but rotting on the inside.

In experiments with mice and studies with human tissue samples, the researchers conducting the new study saw that anaerobic microbes from the colon not only colonized the small bowel after a single transplant but also persisted there for months. These microbes also changed their new intestinal environments to their advantage, “terraforming” them in ways that caused changes in the recipient’s metabolism, behavior, and energy balance.

As for the business’s iconic green and yellow color scheme, Lance said it was his dad who came up with it some time after he returned from Korea. Back then they had to mix the colors carefully to get the correct shade, he said. Apparently it worked. People would always recognize the colors. A woman in Waterloo hand-lettered the trucks and signs until probably 2000, Lance said, when they started wrapping the trucks.

However the other name in the email raised some eyebrows, coming so soon after the announcement that New Glenn’s cadence would be significantly slower than expected. Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president running the New Glenn program, was said to be “stepping away from his role and taking a well deserved year off” starting on August 15. It is not clear whether this departure was linked to Bezos’ displeasure with the rocket program. One company official said Jones’ sabbatical had been planned, but the timing is curious.

For those new to ACIP who want to know why RFK blew up the entire racket today, you need only watch this clip of a typical meeting.

As a result, people began contacting the Armstrong company asking for the contact information for the artist who “made those beautiful stools.” Esherick received dozens of letters from people inquiring about purchasing his stools from all across the country including Alaska, Georgia, Nebraska, Massachusetts, California, Ohio, and New York. Esherick, and later Miriam Phillips, would answer each letter, letting the potential customer know what was available, how much each stool cost, and on several occasions letting designers know very pointedly that he was not a mass production studio!

I also now deeply understand why experienced business people have a strict “no assholes” policy. I always thought this was throwaway advice, but it only takes one lawsuit to make it clear how incredibly valuable it is to work with people you trust.

“Now, I have a question for you,” Federer said, looking out across a sea of umbrellas at the commencement ceremony for Dartmouth College. “What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches?”

He paused.

“Only 54 percent,” he said.

It was one of those statistics that at first seemed incorrect. Federer was one of the most dominant athletic forces of this century. That guy lost nearly half of his points?

Two differing game styles collided in the women’s final with Aryna Sabalenka’s willingness to produce winners and Coco Gauff’s defensive skills and tennis IQ. To understand the difference between the players, one needs to understand the difference in mentality. Players with an aggressive mindset (like Aryna) value winners hit more than unforced errors gained. It’s almost as if a clean winner counts double the points in terms of how it feels to the player. Whereas an extracted unforced error from the opponent is brushed over like it never happened. For Coco and players of Coco’s mindset, on the other hand, an unforced error from the other side is just as much confirmation for doing things right as a down-the-line shot nobody can reach. If you think of the quarterfinal match between Novak Djokovic and Alexander Zverev, for example, every mistake Zverev made was a confirmation of the strategy applied by Djokovic.

Technology development is inherently risky and the book goes into detail on the many false starts and near misses. Although the focus of the book is usually on hardware and physical concerns such as wire propagation delay, the book pays attention to software concerns in parallel to market changes. Early on, supercomputer customers wrote almost all of their own software but, as the market grew, customers expected more software support from vendors. The latter half of the book includes discussion of operating system development, evolution of compilers (mostly Fortran) and their interplay with instruction sets, and specialized tools for specific industries (e.g. computational fluid dynamics). I was unaware of the early resistance to Unix and the concern that it was “slow.”

Mapbox MCP Server.

Open Planet Data:  first project offers daily snapshots of OpenStreetMap.

Ikuyo Travel Planning

Today’s web development tools are undeniably more powerful, but they’ve also introduced significant complexity:

JetZero has daunting tasks ahead to successfully bring its BWB, called the Z4, to the market. It needs $7bn to $10bn (it has, publicly, less than $300m). JetZero plans to make a site selection announcement any day now, before the air show. An entirely new production plant is required. It needs to build the plant, production tooling and the final assembly line

Following his visit May 1-2, Phelan ordered Marines and sailors be moved out of the Air Force-owned barracks within 10 days and that new housing aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz be opened about a month ahead of schedule in response to the squalid conditions, according to POGO and confirmed by the Navy. “I actually thought the buildings were condemned,” Phelan told POGO in an interview. “When we pulled up to them and saw what shape they’re in, I was shocked.”

Since 2010, Illinois has increased taxes and fees 70 times at a cost of $110 billions with 49 of the tax and fee hikes coming under Pritzker.

Similar to Mike Posner’s mindset: Instead of trying to figure out what your audience likes, just create what you like. That’ll help sustain motivation when your audience doesn’t really exist. You’ll be more likely to push through plateaus, and you’ll enjoy the process. You’ll also just produce better work.

this was a Techbuilt, which was a prefab home manufacturer started by a group of Harvard architecture professors and based in Cambridge, MA

Shortly after New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen spoke with the Transportation Security Administration about her husband, William Shaheen, TSA officials removed him from a list of people subjected to additional scrutiny under TSA’s “Quiet Skies” domestic surveillance program. 

“Here you don’t second-guess,” a friend of Winters says. “In London if someone is not drinking, you think they have an alcohol problem. Here it is either that, or they’re Mormon or have other religious reasons, or because they look at health.”

Then there’s the newfound ability of non-technical people in the humanities to write their own code. This is a bigger deal than many in my field seem to recognize. I suspect this will change soon. The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.

Based on intelligence files, field investigations, and dozens of interviews, it lays out a stark diagnosis: The Muslim Brotherhood has built an extensive ideological infrastructure in France—not through violence, but through schools, charities, mosques, and soft power. It states: “The Brotherhood’s strategy is to install a form of ideological hegemony by infiltrating civil society under the guise of religious and educational activities.”. The report is the most detailed government study to date of the Brotherhood’s presence in Europe. Written by two civil servants, it draws on months of fieldwork and analysis conducted in France and abroad, with input from diplomats, intelligence officials, academics, and religious figures. Its conclusion is blunt: The Brotherhood operates as a political project. Its goal is not sudden revolution, but gradual transformation. Its targets are hearts and minds. Its strength lies not in secrecy, but in strategic ambiguity. And it is not coming just for France. It is coming for all of the West.

Hovde Properties plans to start the renovation of the Churchill Building this fall and open the hotel about a year later, Schwenker said, though he noted that the opening date is tentative. “We’re going to take our time and do it right,” he said. The renovation will begin with a meticulous interior demolition, informed by an extensive documentation and planning process, he said.

The statement comes some 40 hours after the Postupdated its initial story without an editor’s note or correction notice. One of the authors, former Al Jazeera correspondent Louisa Loveluck, was part of the Post team named as a Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting on Gaza. She celebrated the affair with a speech to the Post newsroom that condemned the “level of suffering” in Gaza but did not mention Hamas or the Israeli hostages. Loveluck also has a history of receiving editor’s notes on Israel-related coverage.

“This is America’s, and the world’s, Achilles’ heel, which China continuously exploits,” said Nazak Nikakhtar, who was the assistant secretary of commerce overseeing export controls during Mr. Trump’s first term.

The essay isn’t just poorly argued: It has policy implications. Samson both insults and threatens allied governments, implying there will be some kind of US punishment if European states do not change their policies on free speech, election administration, and (for some reason) migration.

A person still has to stare at the results and discriminate if they are good. This is my major criticism of LLM coding in that they casually spit out way too much code per query at arbitrary complexity, pretending there is no stage 2. Getting that much code is bad and scary. Instead, the LLM has to actively work with you to break down problems into little incremental steps, each more easily verifiable. It has to anticipate the computational work of (2) and reduce it as much as possible. It has to really care. and that means knowing the topic well enough to correct the AI

“The agency is doing a lot of littles, a lot of things that other agencies, departments, companies are capable of doing,” Isaacman said. “That’s not why the taxpayers fund NASA. NASA’s funded to do the near impossible that no one else can do.”

These depth maps, along with other imagery, are stored in High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) container files. These files can contain multiple images and vast amounts of metadata. This format was originally designed between 2013 and 2015 and Apple adopted its HEIC variant in 2017.

The tell-tale element is neatly hidden at the back: a church tower like no other in Berlin today. The only original baroque church tower, in fact. It belongs to Sophienkirche – built in 1712-1713 and, as if by a miracle, not hit by massive bombs in the WW2 air-raids or pulverised during the battle for Berlin in April-May 1945.

Went into Chicago yesterday. Some sticker shock. Uber wanted $38 for a 1.7 mi ride from the train station to the Sheraton hotel (it was raining otherwise would have walked). A regular cab was $8. Our breakfast companion said the hotel wanted $500/nite. Ridiculous.

2a. If they have expired, what is the legal basis you think the family has to stay? Particularly in light of the fact that their illegally here father is an antisemite accused of some pretty heinous crimes. (see 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3)(B))

county officials told her it would be “quite a while before any real estate transactions would take place.” Baron said she reached out to politicians and county officials but came away with the impression no one knew how long rebuilding the system would take.

“Fighting drones isn’t so different from fighting malware: both are a cat-and-mouse game,” Hypponen said. “We try to detect threats that don’t want to be seen. Our adversaries study our methods and adapt, and we update our defenses in response. I’m bringing decades of expertise to this area, tackling a fight that matters now more than ever.”

BREAKING: I have obtained the internal memo outlining reasons behind Microsoft Build’s(@Microsoft) exit from Seattle. This is an absolute indictment on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s(@MayorofSeattle) administration and shows his failure to get the homeless drug crisis under control. ??

As part of the transaction, the new ownership group did two things: 
1?? Sold the land to Prudential for $29M and entered into a 114 ground lease (with rent payments going down over time, this is important)  2?? Raised $33 million from over 3,000 shareholders in Empire State Building Associates.

I told him I had to finish my PhD, a required credential for researching brains and consciousness. But Jef would not take “No” for an answer, and sent me roundtrip airplane tickets with a note: “Just visit for a weekend, no strings attached.” My dad lived in nearby Los Gatos so I decided to visit.

If you want even more understanding, you can go further and test the tap water that comes out of your faucet. Doing so is not cheap — but it is much more affordable and far less of a hassle than a lifetime of maintaining a filtration system that you may not have needed in the first place. (Because about 15% of the US populace, or 43 million people, uses water from unregulated private wells, we include both utility and well-water test kits in our guide.)

BREAKING: Apple just proved AI “reasoning” models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don’t actually reason at all. They just memorize patterns really well.

Furthermore, look at the libertarian & green parties. They have been working for years & still don’t have complete ballot access.

This approach reflected a belief by the policymakers that property ownership could strengthen community responsibility and social stability. During the war, the federal government rented these homes to workers at regulated rates designed to be fair, while covering maintenance costs. After the war, the government began selling the homes – often to the tenants living in them – through affordable installment plans that provided a practical path to ownership.

One thing I’ve noticed in watching people photograph—and I do that any chance I can get, because it’s so informative—is just how many people are (a) get to a place; (b) pick up the camera; (c) take a quick photo; and (d) move on. No time contemplating, no time checking or making settings, no questioning their choices, and often very bad handling because they’re moving so quickly doing things. I expect those folk to fail. 

The propaganda was the purpose, all ramping up Islamophobia to justify the Western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. When the Manchester Arena attack eventually did happen, it turned out that MI5 had been the perpetrator’s sponsor and he and his father had been ferried from Libya by the British armed forces. Sponsorship of terrorism abroad is always likely to result in blowback at home.

Just in: The American Land Title Association (@ALTAonline) has compiled title insurance industry financial data? for 2024. I always like to break this down in a big ?to share what I think is important. Glad to hear your thoughts, too.

Toyota mounts software challenge to Tesla and Chinese rivals.

It is easy to think of examples of software which has made work more prescriptive or structured, from real-time tracking of logistics workers to the use of tools which allow managers to keep track of white-collar workers’ productivity. Felstead describes this trend as “discretion-sapping technological change.”

The in-house system, known as Arene, will provide over-the-air updates to help drivers with manoeuvres such as lane keeping and parking, as well as multimedia and entertainment features. It will debut in the next-generation RAV4 sport utility vehicle.

The software platform is central to Toyota’s efforts to lay the groundwork for autonomous driving, accumulate driving data and catch up with competitors that have banked on the provision of digital services — paid and unpaid — to add value to cars.

It is the first fruit of seven years of labour by the entity that became Woven by Toyota, a subsidiary established by the automaker to boost software development competitiveness and break from its slower-moving car manufacturing culture.

Anton has risen to the top by playing his cards close to his chest and deftly navigating the right’s warring foreign policy camps.

If Mark Papko is confirmed this spring as the Dane County Regional Airport’s new leader, one of his first priorities will be securing an international designation for the travel hub.

That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.

“We weren’t expecting to automate so many processes in China, but the Chinese suppliers’ pricing is very low,” says Tobias Liebeck, Audi’s head of manufacturing engineering at the Changchun plant. China now has more robots per 10,000 workers than Germany.

That was the case, until Frank Luntz (American political commentator commonly seen on CNBC, Bloomberg, who also has a 400,000+ follower count on Twitter) somehow saw my tweet and took interest in the site.

Tariff court decision

Once implemented, the second-home tax approach will divide residential properties into two tiers, applying higher rates to second homes and short-term rental properties in an effort to backfill residential cuts and minimize spillover onto business properties. The package also includes several rate tiers that lean the tax system harder on high-value homes in an effort to focus more relief on lower-value properties.

• U.S. providers conducted 42 orbital launches in Q1
• Chinese providers conducted 17 launches
• A total of 900 spacecraft were launched globally
• Satellites under 1,200 kg accounted for 98% of spacecraft launched and 85% of total upmass

If you go more south and inland, you get the edge of the Sahara Desert. I’ve seen plenty of that before in Mauritania but I didn’t have much experiences with oases, which are quite cool with their palm groves growing in the middle of the desert. Better yet, completely unbeknownst to me before going and presumably to the rest of the world too, Tunisia has an Aral Sea thing going on with at least two large lakes in the south called Chott el Djerrid and Chott el Gharsa. If you look at them on Google Maps, you’ll see two blue bubbles:

Congress can’t give this power over from the legislature to the executive just by passing a normal law. That would take a constitutional amendment. But it can pass laws to delegate part of its power to the president in limited ways.

On Henry James and the State of Literary Criticism

As things stand today, he said, “I will not recommend this for anyone else unless they have a stomach of titanium.”. The relocation, if it takes place, will come almost exactly a year after Madison developer Brandon Cook transported a four-story brick apartment building about two blocks — from 438 W. Dayton St. to 531 W. Mifflin St. — over the course of three days, at a cost that topped $1 million. Cook’s ambitious project nearly fell through at the last minute, and he ran out of time to move a second structure to the West Mifflin Street lot before it was demolished. But the main building reached its destination intact.

Graham’s crackers were intentionally bland and reportedly tasted like bran saltine crackers without the salt. Free from spices or sugar, these graham crackers were invented with the goal of suppressing undesirable passions.

If we do this well, AI models will become capable of the same kind of online learning that humans can do: instead of having to work inside bespoke RL environments with custom graders, we will be able to deploy them in the real world for them to learn from their successes and failures. The most plausible way for models to reach this level of meta-learning skill goes through RL, which will require environments of much greater volume and quality than the ones that are available today.

Terrible legacy media and how they went after Elon Musk. Now they are defending Cory Booker for the same hand gesture

That fit people have a reduced risk of premature death from various diseases is a recurring result in many studies. New research from Uppsala University shows that people with high fitness levels in their late teens also have a reduced risk of dying from random accidents. This suggests that the associations seen in previous studies have probably been misleading.

I have done the same thing using an Economist subscription as the singular item in the basket, rather than a hamburger. What picture of the world emerges and how does it compare to the Big Mac index?

There’s one catch: Tunkhannock’s plan to go solar is contingent upon winning more than $1 million in funding from the state’s Solar for Schools program. Currently in its inaugural year, Solar for Schools was born from a bill that faced an uphill battle in a legislature where environmental bills often die by attrition — a battle that required its creator, progressive Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D-Philadelphia) to reach across the aisle and help marry what are often competing interests in the state — labor, education and climate. 

State of the art PFAS

Elon Musk’s change to the Twitter block – which renders tweets from people who have blocked you visible, but you can’t interact with them – is actually useful in continuing to show you opposing views.

Miracle of miracles, it worked. Critics and audiences from coast to coast raved at the couple’s onstage antics, as Lucy clowned with a battered cello while Desi sang and drummed his heart out. A.H. Weiler of The Times pronouncedthe pair “a couple who bid fair to become the busiest husband-and- wife team extant.” Soon enough, they were.

“Three-Body Computing Constellation,” which will directly process data in space, rather than on the ground, reducing reliance on ground-based computing infrastructure. The constellation will be capable of a combined 5 peta operations per second (POPS) with 30 terabytes of onboard storage. 

But nearly all maritime accidents and failures occur in complex systems by illustrating how multiple layers of defense, each with vulnerabilities, can align to allow a hazard to pass through. This is what investigators call the Swiss cheese model.

The EIB plans to launch this initiative, dubbed TechEU, later this year, creating a centralized hub for financing requests from researchers and companies. This initiative aims to streamline the process, making EU funding processes faster and simpler. A quicker decision-making process can differentiate between the survival and failure of startups navigating tight cash flows and competitive markets.

At the heart of the accusations are Nestlé Waters’s allegedly unauthorized use of carbon filters and ultraviolet light — methods normally used on tap water — to treat mineral water for several of its brands, including its flagship sparkling water Perrier. But France’s stringent regulations aim to ensure that natural mineral water remains pure and unaltered, justifying the steep price tag paid by consumers.

The alternative is for the U.S. to reject the resource-rich Gulf States and drive them into the arms of China, which is eager to sell them a Huawei+DeepSeek tech stack. And China won’t gainsay the opportunity by asking local partners why they aren’t building their data centers in Beijing or Shanghai instead. China will just fill out the purchase orders and ship the chips, making Chinese technology the standard. We shouldn’t let this happen. We still have a limited window to ensure American technology dominance in global AI infrastructure. Let’s seize it.

The second-largest supplier of Spanish gas? Russia

“You have no intention of paying off your collateralized burrito obligations, do you?”

Both Microsoft and Google are locking down search APIs not because of “access control,” but because search is now an input to AI.

Not even Jackson, though, could have wished for a disaster as complete as the panic of 1837 produced. Nearly half the banks in the United States failed, leaving businesses and individuals in the lurch. Millions of Americans were without jobs. In those days of no social safety net, joblessness often led to homelessness and hopelessness. As Americans had done for generations, many headed west. But where previous waves of westering had been fueled by hope, this one was driven by despair.

The Biden administration’s policy on AI:
— Insert DEI requirements into AI, making it WokeAI.
— Hobble American AI companies with a hundred pages of unnecessary regulation (Biden E.O.).
— Burden American semiconductor, data center, and cloud companies with 200 pages of unnecessary regulation (Biden Diffusion Rule).
— Limit energy production and permitting, making massive data center build-out impossible.
— Exclude the countries with the largest sovereign wealth funds from partnering with Team America on AI.

The rent-stabilized unit belonged to her grandmother, Gisela Venta-Perez. Vines, 22, is the fourth generation in her family to call the apartment home. She claims she lived there with Venta-Perez for about two-and-a-half years, until her grandmother’s death last spring. Now, Vines wants to stay in the apartment, which she said Venta-Perez rented for about $900 a month. But the owner of the building said she doesn’t meet the strict criteria to take on a deceased relative’s rent-stabilized lease.

In my view, one of OpenAI’s motives for announcing its collaboration with Jony Ive now is likely to shift market focus from recent Google I/O. Google’s ecosystem and AI integration, showcased in the I/O keynotes, pose a challenge that OpenAI currently struggles to address. As a result, OpenAI is leveraging a new narrative to redirect attention.

The gene editing technology used for KJ is not exactly new, nor is the delivery system. CRISPR has already proven to be a successful gene therapy. What’s stunning is the speed. KJ’s mutation was identified within days of his birth. Within weeks, researchers were growing cells in petri dishes that carried genetic sequences copied from KJ. In month two, they used those cells to train molecular gene-editing machinery to target and correct KJ’s mutation—a spot in the DNA coding for the liver enzyme where there’s a T (thymine) instead of a C (cytosine). At the beginning of the third month, researchers had created genetically engineered mice that carry KJ’s specific mutation, too.

“In other words, if the US’s rating were commensurate with the current US CDS spread of 58bps, the US’s credit rating would be six credit-rating notches lower … it’s perhaps a good thing that the rating agencies typically lag the market.” – Macquarie

Another geriatric Democratic congressman dies in office, and then within hours the Republicans pass their Big Beautiful Behemoth legislation by literally one vote. Fitting encapsulation for the current era

At Kure, National Bulk Carriers built a series of record-breakingly large ships: the 38,000 deadweight ton Petro Kure in 1952, the 45,000 deadweight ton Phoenix in 1954, and the 55,000 deadweight ton Sinclair Petro-Lore in 1955. The Universe Apollo, launched at Kure in 1958, was the first tanker in the world to exceed 100,000 deadweight tons. Altogether Ludwig built 42 ships at Kure, many of them the largest in the world when completed. When his lease at Kure expired, the shipyards were acquired by Japanese shipbuilder IHI, which continued to build enormous tankers for Ludwig.

Primarily a liturgical composer, Zelenka was not simply working over or within forms perfected by Bach, whom he personally knew. Zelenka spoke in his own voice. As Heinz Holliger, the brilliant oboist who has helped revive Zelenka’s music, puts it: “Zelenka (like Bach) obviously has absorbed the total compositional knowledge of the previous generations, and, by virtue of his most individual personality, exposes it to a breaking test, thus setting free a critical element opposing the tradition.” 

Paul Ryan runs the American Idea Foundation, a small nonprofit where the vast majority of contributions fund salaries for his former staffers.

Prior to termination, Wimmer believed he would have a long-term career with Generac, having earned glowing performance reviews, merit-based raises, and multiple promotions into a leadership role. He lost his job after almost 5 years of dedicated service.

Senator Jones, and others, including this author, have long warned that California’s restrictive policies and costly regulations have contributed to make the price of gasoline in California the highest in the nation and have precipitated the imminent shutdown of two major refineries by April 2026. The exiting of the two refineries from California represents the possible loss of up to 10.5 million gallons a day of in-state gasoline production. Consequently, California’s need for foreign sourced gasoline is likely to increase, and with regulatory costs associated with the state excise tax, cap and trade, and the new LCFS likely increasing the cost of gasoline, Californians are facing the potential for gasoline price increases to possibly $6.04 to over $8.00 a gallon, inclusive of the replacement costs to make-up the nearly 10.5 million gallons a day deficit in in-state gasoline production. 

Comparison of spreadsheet software

The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.

Some quotes are too good to cut.

The coverup of @JoeBiden’s condition is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated by the media and an administration against the American people

in 1936 only some 32% of Berlin flats had a bathroom or a bath tub as such

This is a common pattern: America doesn’t just survive crises, it gets stronger because of them. America is blessed with geography, abundant natural resources, and the most valuable resource of all: a driving entrepreneurial spirit that can overcome any obstacle put in our way and build technological solutions to short-term challenges that lead to long-term strength.  Today, once again, the economic data paints a different picture than the political sentiment, one that speaks to the difference between America and the Roman Empire, or any empire that’s come before. 

We investigate the information content of personal stock trades by IRS officials. We collect transaction-level data on over five thousand IRS officials’ personal investments and document substantial trading activity in individual stocks by officials across IRS departments. We find that IRS officials’ trades, predominantly their purchases, generate positive abnormal returns on average, consistent with officials’ information being not yet fully impounded into stock price. Next, we examine whether stock trades by these officials are associated with the firm’s future tax enforcement outcomes. For a given firm, we find IRS officials’ purchases are associated with subsequent decreases in tax reserves and specifically lapses in the statute of limitations. We also find that IRS officials’ sales are associated with subsequent unfavorable tax settlements. These findings suggest that IRS officials possess, and trade on, material tax-related information and that these trades are associated with future tax enforcement outcomes for firms.

Despite paying dramatically more than any other country for healthcare, the United States has fewer physicians per capita than most developed nations.

“It was very fast — when they were refuelling in those days — and there were a few shots which suddenly reminded us of the problem we were facing. Essentially, if you look down on the pitstop from above, there’s your [driver] in the car and all the people looking after that precious parcel and when you look down on a baby on a trolley moving from one place to the other, it’s the same thing.”

Using ‘virtual unwrapping’, the scroll PHerc. 172 which is housed at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has been identified as On Vices by the Greek philosopher Philodemus. The ethical treatise, known in full as On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and In Whom They Are and About What, provides guidance for cultivating a virtuous life. In recognition of this achievement, researchers have been awarded the Vesuvius Challenge First Title Prize which includes prize money of $60,000.

Jones was routinely unavailable to make key decisions about the airport, neglecting messages from her staff as well as representatives of Southwest Airlines who had reached out about starting service at the airport, according to documents obtained by the Wisconsin State Journal.

5 Powerful Persuasion Methods for Engineering Managers

Experts predicted that artificial intelligence would steal radiology jobs. But at the Mayo Clinic, the technology has been more friend than foe.

A new crowd-sourced transit platform allows riders to propose, vote on, and activate new bus lines in as little as three days.

MICHELIN Guide Distinctions are now on Apple Maps!

“Millions for defense, but not a penny for tribute.”

These factors of high costs and low prices all led to much of rural America being gutted. Equipment dealers, feed mills, hardware stores all took big hits, if they survived at all.

Delays and cost overruns are in part driven by the Navy’s ship design and acquisition process. Broadly speaking, the Navy creates high-level requirements for complex, multi-role ships, and then outsources the design of these ships to third-party contractors. Once a design is selected, it is turned into production drawings (so-called “detail designs”), which are used to produce the ships. In an effort to reduce the time it takes to deliver a ship, ship construction is often started before ship design is complete. However, this strategy frequently backfires: as design work is completed, changes to under-construction ships are often required, resulting in costly and time-consuming rework.

As consumers begin to use AI agents to do their shopping, retailers are trying to figure out how to market to bots in addition to humans.

We seem to be moving to a world where there will be four major AI powers — adding Saudi and UAE — rather than just two, namely the US and China.  But if energy is what is scarce here, perhaps we were headed for additional AI powers anyway, and best for the US to be in on the deal?

Funny story SBFs dad helped write the Dem tax plan for crypto (obv terrible). And Caroline’s parents contributed to the game theory paper on how to nudge the population into Covid compliance. Shocker

Never heard a room go quite as fast as when someone suggested to a room of aging HHMI Investigators that they should retire so postdocs can get jobs.

The influential venture capitalist Katherine Boyle is making the case that creating things for America—from weapons to rockets to nuclear-energy plants—is pro-family.

“Now, did we go spend a lot of money in the offseason, guys? Let’s call a spade a spade. No we didn’t.”

Car designs look more like each other than ever. Color is disappearing as most cars become white, gray, or black. From Sydney to Riyadh to Cleveland, an upscale coffee shop is more likely than ever to bear the same design features: reclaimed wood, hanging Edison bulbs, marble countertops. So is an Airbnb. Even celebrities increasingly look the same, with the rising ubiquity of “Instagram face” driven by cosmetic injectables and Photoshop touch-ups.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly
I’ll now cover the opposite case: my peers who see generative models as superior to their own output. I see this most often in professional communication, typically to produce fluff or fix the tone of their original prompts. Every single time, the model obscures the original meaning and adds layers of superfluous nonsense to even the simplest of ideas. If you’re lucky, it at least won’t be wrong, but most often the model will completely fabricate critical details of the original writing and produce something completely incomprehensible. No matter how bad any original human’s writing is, I can (hopefully?) trust that they have some kind of internal understanding to share; with a language model, there is no such luck.

“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.

The average crowd size for University of Wisconsin men’s basketball games slumped again this season.

…. and has used reserve funds to balance its budget in recent months.

You will then have a lean, mean combat-ready cadre of senior leaders, I promise.

The latest work builds on earlier breakthroughs from the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition launched in 2023, which offers prizes for progress in reading the scrolls from 3D X-rays. Last year, a team of computer-savvy students shared the $700,000 (£527,350) grand prize for developing artificial intelligence software that enabled them to read 2,000 ancient Greek letters from another scroll.

Good call. Tweet it from the official account.

And we STILL don’t know why U.S. taxpayers were paying China to alter a virus previously harmless to people so that it would be lethal to us. WHY did Fauci want this?

A $1 billion company has operated for 53 years with ZERO managers. Workers buy $500,000 machines without approval. Hire their own colleagues. Set their own salaries. And they’re outperforming every competitor in their industry. The coolest company you’ve never heard of ?

The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to apps using millions of lines of code to open a garage door, and other simple programs importing 1,600 external code libraries—dependencies—of unknown provenance. Software security is dire, which is a function both of the quality of the code and the sheer amount of it. Many of us programmers know the current situation is untenable. Many programmers (and their management) sadly haven’t ever experienced anything else. And for the rest of us, we rarely get the time to do a better job.

Because one day, when the machine stops, we’ll need to remember how to think.

WW2 Aircraft recognition posters.

In short, getting things done means getting them in a state where:

(a) executives at the company understand what’s happened, and (b) are happy with it

To many, this will be an unsatisfying definition of what it means to get things done. Lots of engineers will want a more solid definition than “it’s a social construct”. However, as someone with a philosophy background, I have a healthy respect for social constructs. The concept “chair” is a social construct, and chairs are plenty real[2]. In some ways, “getting things done” is even more real. It can pay your rent! If you don’t respect it, it can even get you fired.

“You think I’m gonna be sitting in line at United?!” The utter contempt for the victims of his own policies is just breathtaking. This is the Democrats FAR LEFT flank! Fighting the oligarchy and climate change from private jets, sentencing you to carbon taxes, sneering at coach.

That’s why, as uncomfortable and old-fashioned as it may sound, you should let someone set you up.

Among the most impressive manufacturing achievements of the US during WWII was the number of ships it produced. Prior to the war, the American shipbuilding industry had been moribund. Shipyards had been busy during and immediately following WWI, but the huge flood of wartime ships greatly reduced demand for new ones, and American shipyards didn’t produce a single oceangoing hull between 1922 and 1928. The onset of the Great Depression only made things worse, and by 1935 annual tonnage produced by US commercial shipbuilders had fallen to its lowest level in more than 100 years.

What’s unfolding now is a case study in how some progressive movements have become more invested in symbols than systems;

I suppose you could argue Sanders goal, of among other things, decreasing the amount of private jet flights, is so morally righteous he has to fly a few private jets to accomplish it.

At the heart of the energy plan is the construction of a small modular reactor, a type of transportable nuclear reactor assembled on site, which can power a wide range of applications, including AI data centers. If successful, Argentina could be the first country in the world to have a commercially available SMR, and only the third after China and Russia to have an operational one.

The absurdity is everywhere. You see it in music, where record labels prefer to invest in 50-year-old songs—instead of new hits. You see it in film, where a studio dumps 36 Marvel superhero movies on the market—and then acts surprised because audiences sicken of them. These ridiculous actions tell us that a reversal is at hand. We don’t measure that by anything logical. We measure it by the absurdity.

To fill the remaining vacancies, the Admiralty waived their “able-bodied” requirement and drafted 500 men from the “Corps of Invalids,” a stockpile of army veterans who were too old, injured, or otherwise infirm for further army service. Some of these men were barely able to stand unassisted, let alone walk, or handle rigging on a lurching deck. Among those who could walk, many of them did, directly away from the navy ships, before the squadron was even underway.

In 1981, the Hearst Corporation donated its newsreel collection to the University of California. In cooperation with the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Packard Humanities Institute is developing this website as part of a joint project to make the Hearst newsreel collection more easily accessible to the public.

Porsche and now Mercedes limiting charging performance of some of their EVs. Not knowing all the details, but mein Gott, german engineering: was hat dich bloß so ruiniert?

I know the series is cringe now but my theory remains that Jill Biden thought she could pull a Claire Underwood.

VW down a million cars. GM down a million cars. Jeep JV bankrupt. Suzuki out. Nissan deeply wounded.

There are unconfirmed reports that Riza Altun, a veteran PKK commander & hardliner, was killed in an alleged Turkish drone strike, a message no doubt of the risks of not falling in line with Ocalan’s call to disarm & disband.

Which brings me to Boston. Ever heard of Route 128? To my surprise, neither have any of my students at Duke or the entrepreneurs I’ve met in Silicon Valley. I’m surprised because it wasn’t so long ago that Silicon Valley was considered a poor cousin of Boston’s tech center—a cluster of technology companies located along this freeway which partially rings the city. Starting in the 1960s and on through the 1980s, Route 128 was, if anything, more closely associated with tech than Silicon Valley. Today few young technology workers even know where Route 128 is located, let alone its importance in the tech world. Silicon Valley has simply left Boston’s tech center behind.

A U.S. defense official told TWZ yesterday that Yemeni militants have or are suspected to have brought down six MQ-9s since March 15. Fox News reported today that U.S. officials have acknowledged the loss of another Reaper, the seventh one since the beginning of last month. Back in March, an unnamed U.S. defense official told Stars and Stripes that the Houthis had downed 12 Reapers since October 2023.

the pipe organ is a big box of whistles. Each pipe sits on top of a hollow wind chest that is filled with compressed air provided by a bellows or blower. Each ‘stop’ at the organ console represents a set of pipes (a rank) of a particular tone color, with a different pipe for every note on the keyboard. Pulling the stop activates a slider under that specific set of pipes on the windchest, making them available as a sound-source. The wind chest also contains a series of valves (pallets) connected to the keyboard by a mechanical linkage. These pallets govern the flow of air to each pipe, and even though a stop may be on, no pipes will sound until a key is depressed and its respective pallet opens. This allows the compressed air to pass up through the pipe for that note, creating sound

Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

And… Not every address is relevant. Some benches are on streets. But we probably don’t want to imply that the bench is inside or belongs to a specific nearby house.

In China, doing business there meant providing “benefit” to its new and growing industries. “Benefit” was a loosely defined term that generally meant transferring technology, helping create a supply chain and ordering parts and components made in China. For some, it meant providing kickbacks. (This is not suggesting Airbus engaged in kickbacks, but corruption is a matter of public record. Such was suggested to me when I was doing business in China between 1989 and 1993.)

Informants weren’t just deployed to sabotage group activities and implement Zersetzung plans, but also to gather intelligence on individuals and groups (around 160km worth of Stasi archives survived the end of the GDR). Most intelligence was used to evaluate relationships and activities (which then led to an extension of intelligence gathering to previously untargeted individuals and groups), and as a basis for planning Zersetzung operations. Obviously plans for actions and activities were also reported, but these were acted upon only in rare and serious cases – if intelligence were used to disrupt the activities in any obvious way then suspicion could be drawn to the informant.

“Subsidence has become a huge challenge,” said Mehdi Pirhadi, a member of Tehran city council. He warned the “massive land sinking will destroy infrastructure and threaten lives” unless it was addressed urgently.

This interactive tool allows you to toggle between 5 different maps of Milwaukee from different points in its history. Much changes between them. Two of the most dramatic changes to explore are the demolition of many neighborhoods to create freeways and the creation of much of the modern-day lakefront via infill.

Zhaoxin is a Chinese x86 CPU designer. The KaiXian KX-7000 is Zhaoxin’s latest CPU, and features a new architecture dubbed “????”. ???? is a road in Shanghai called “Century Avenue”, following Zhaoxin’s practice of naming architectures after Shanghai landmarks. Zhaoxin is notable because it’s a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai municipal government. It inherits VIA’s x86-64 license, and also enjoys powerful government backing. That’s a potent combination, because Zhaoxin’s cores are positioned to take advantage of the strong x86-64 software ecosystem.

Between 1960 and 1967, the almost forgotten Lebanese Rocket Society, led by its founder Manoug Manougian, competed with the great powers of the Cold War to create a space program in Lebanon. Founded as a student association within the Haigazian College in Beirut in November 1960, the Rocket Society operated without any official funding from the state or the university. Relying on the dedication of a few professors, seven students, and a modest donation from the Lebanese entrepreneur and Parliamentarian Emile Bustani, what the burgeoning Society lacked in resources, it made up for in ingenuity, drive, and vision.

Regardless of how one feels about DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, it is a clear indication that innovation is moving rapidly around the world, with or without leading U.S. tech. If U.S. platforms are absent, companies will turn to strategic competitors like Huawei to fill the gap. This is why leadership in AI depends not just on what we restrict—but on what we enable.

If you or someone you love has lost the ability to speak, you can sign up to our Patient Registry today and help shape the future of communication. (3/3)

For the first time in US Gov history, 25 people are retiring online only, to inform scaling to everyone. This is a big win for retirees to get their full check faster, and testament to how quickly @USOPM is working towards the President’s software modernization Exec Order ????

The budget contains some notable changes for the US space agency. Overall, NASA is asked to take a 25 percent cut in its budget, from about $25 billion to $18.8 billion. Ars has previously reported on some of these proposed cuts, most notably to its science budget. These include a $2.265 billion reduction in Space science and a $1.161 billion reduction in Earth science. Perhaps the most notable cancellation here is the Mars Sample Return mission, which the budget proposal says will be achieved by human missions to Mars.

100x better models running on 100x better chips running in data centers with 100x more chips is a total increase of 1,000,000x. A million times more artificial intelligence.

This is the story of the people who made music visible.

The Altair was created by a small company called MITS, which initially stood for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry. In 1974 MITS had been selling calculator kits via mail order. Later in the year they started working on a computer based on the then-new Intel 8080 8-bit CPU. About this time they were contacted by Popular Electronics magazine who was looking to do a feature on a computer project.

So why are American SOF used almost exclusively at the tactical level?  Because the people employing them, the staffs of major commanders, don’t understand operational art.  Some service schools claim to teach it but they don’t.  They reduce it to processes, as Second Generation war does with everything.  But an art reduced to process results in crap.  One U.S. military school goes so far as to say that all you have to do is write a paragraph where this is a noun, that is a verb, and presto!  You know what to do at the operational level.  That’s operational art for dogs.  As General Hermann Balck said, “It is an art; only a few can do it, most can never learn.  The world is not full of Raphaels either.”

The MNP is the world’s first purpose-built drone carrier.  And it costs only about $135 million, approximately one-hundredth of the price of a Ford-class American aircraft carrier.

“Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all my generals know how to do.”

One of the core questions discussed in the breakouts and in the halls was how to broaden the geospatial audience. How can we better communicate geo data’s utility, in all industries and domains? Many tactics and case studies were debated, but the one I kept coming back to is that of DuckDB.

There are so many solutions to this problem. We don’t need to list them all here. I documented some of them one time, but there are many more.

Ultimately, SpaceX’s simplified Starlink deployment architecture has fewer parts and eliminates the need for a carrier structure. This allows SpaceX to devote a higher share of the rocket’s mass and volume capacity to the Starlink satellites themselves, replacing dead weight with revenue-earning capability. The dispenser architecture used by Amazon is a more conventional design, and gives satellite engineers more flexibility in designing their spacecraft. It also allows satellites to spread out faster in orbit.

We paid $50 million for half of GEICO in 1976, what turned out to be half of GEICO, $50 million. We now own 100%, but 50% of $2 billion that we earned in the first quarter is $1 billion, which on a $50 million investment… The only thing I’d like to add is in addition to the underwriting profit, GEICO provides $39 billion of float.

It improved coverage but not care. It was the result of complete regulatory capture from health insurance companies (requiring 85% Medical Loss Ratio) and medical record/billing vendors (requiring Meaningful Use).