France's Finance Minister Roland Lescure revealed on Wednesday that between 30 and 40 per cent of Gulf refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed by Iran's retaliatory strikes, leaving a shortage of 11 million barrels a day on global oil markets…
War is universally regarded as a scenario with no true winners, as all parties suffer massive losses in life, humanity, and resources, making victory an illusion.
The concept itself of "totalitarianism" was developed by thinkers like Hannah Arendt to describe systems that seek to control all the aspects of society and of individual life. She applied it notably to two regimes that everything opposes ideologically on paper:
Nazi Germany (extreme right) Stalinist Soviet Union (extreme left)
There were so many cyclists headed out for a group ride around Bainbridge Island. One of them told me it was a route based on the Chilly Hilly's, but longer...I also chatted with a guy who was riding a Triumph Tiger 900 and was headed for wherever on the peninsula. I really should've gotten his number since that's my kind of riding!
What if the main reason why these AI corporations are buying up so much hardware is to prevent the consumers from buying hardware because they don't want people to be able to run local LLMs? They're afraid that their business models will collapse when people can use AI without paying them subscription fees, etc.
SomeOrdinaryGamers recently put up this video saying exactly that: their business models will collapse if people can run local LLMs on their PCs, laptops, smartphones, etc.
But the real kicker comes in when Bezos mentions a brewery he visited, and this company had to build its own power station to "improve the efficiency of their brewery with electricity." Since there was no power grid, they had to build their own form of electricity.
"At the time, that's what everyone did. If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric generator," Bezos explains. "I looked at this, and I thought, this is what computation is like today; everyone has their own data center."
Interestingly, he continues to say, "that's not going to last. It makes no sense. You're going to buy compute off the grid. That's AWS."
>their business models will collapse if people can run local LLMs on their PCs, laptops, smartphones, etc. True but their business model is already collapsing as currently even when people pay they actually loose money for each "token". It is sold to the average joe as if it was gonna power boost people jobs and so far their models have no usage outside of research, programming and a few niche sectors. They are lying simply because that what they are which is not surprising coming from companies that distributes proprietary software/hardware.
He gets some things pretty wrong, like Copilot can have access to Anthropic (Claude) models too depending on what you or your company pays for and enables. He tends to confuse the company/model names a lot.
As far as Sora goes, I'm not surprised OpenAI was losing money. I know 5 seconds of video using hunyuanvideo1.5_720p_fp16 can take 8~10 hours on an AMD R9700. I've heard this is significantly faster on consumer nVidia cards, but they also eat a lot more power. (Curious how long it takes on a 5090).
I've heard xAI/Grok charges $60/month for making up to 50x 5sec clips per day, and it only takes 1~2 min. I imagine they're probably hemorrhaging money there as well.
In electricity we went from big to small. Only solar and battery systems of the last 5-15 years made it possible to generate electricity cheaply at home.
With computers we went from big to very small, but that shift happened with Intel years ago and raspberry is another example of that shift.
Expanding the grid to reach far-flung customers can be a costly fire hazard. So utilities like PG&E are testing out microgrids using solar, batteries, and…
It's kind of wild that we as a society were blasted with evil corporation trope by the entertainment industry for decades but never connected the dots. :/
Urban noise is a common problem, and the vast majority of it is created by motor vehicles. Noise is far too often dismissed as a minor nuisance, rather than the legitimate health issue that it is.
The book "Curbing Traffic" has a chapter about the health impacts of noise pollution. I explore the research in the book, and visit Delft, the city that is highlighted in the book as being a shining example of what can happen when noise pollution is taken seriously.
This video explores the problem that farting cars, farting motorcycles, and farting mopeds create in our cities.
#US #army raises upper age for recruits to 42 and scraps marijuana restrictions
The US army has raised the maximum enlistment age to 42 years old and scrapped a barrier for potential recruits who have a legal #conviction for #marijuana or #drug #paraphernalia #possession.
People aged up to 42 can now enlist in the army, the army national guard and the army reserves, according to the new US army regulation, lifting the previous ceiling of 35 years old.
A whole industry of data brokers buys up vast quantities of electronic information from cell phone apps and web browsers and sells it to advertisers who use that data to target ads. The same industry also sells that data, including bulk cell phone location data, to police departments and federal government agencies in ways that can reveal intimate details about Americans without a warrant.\ \ Now, privacy advocates say that the best chance for Congress to close the well-known loophole around the Fourth Amendment that allows for that sort of governmental snooping is coming up in just a few weeks.\ \ That's when Congress is expected to take up reauthorization of what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to expire on April 20.
CNN Data Guru Harry Enten Predicts Major Disaster for Donald Trump After Dems Flip Mar-a-Lago
A Democratic victory in a state special election in President Donald Trump’s backyard is the latest sign that Democrats are on track to take back the House of Representatives in November, according to CNN’s resident data guru.
Democrat Emily Gregory beat Republican Jon Maples 51 percent to 49 percent to represent parts of West Palm Beach—including Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago estate—in the Florida state House.
Trump ... won the district in 2024 by 11 points. Gregory’s predecessor, state Rep. Mike Caruso, had won by 19 points before resigning to become county clerk and comptroller.
I periodically get pushback on "petrodollars"... they are real, and we are boned #ThanksNixon
Iran, the $39 trillion national debt and dedollarization: How Trump exposed America's Achilles Heel | Fortune
The year was 1974 and President Richard Nixon had dispatched his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret deal. Three years earlier, in August 1971, Nixon had already administered the “shock” that ended the Bretton Woods system governing global finance since World War II — suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold in a televised address that transformed every major currency overnight. By 1973, the system had fully unraveled.
The world wouldn’t know for another 50 years what Nixon and Kissinger replaced it with, striking a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees—a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century.
The existence of this secret agreement wasn’t even publicly confirmed until 2016, when Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives.
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