The GOP's warnings about violence at Saturday's "No Kings" rallies proved unwarranted, President Trump posted an AI video that depicts him doing vile things to protestors in New York City, and former Congressman George Santos was released from prison after the president commuted his sentence for wire fraud and identity theft.
"Donald Trump’s disgusting racism is what he uses to convince his supporters to ignore his pathetic job performance. And it works. Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally." Nothing Works in Trump’s America—Except for Racism https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/newsletter-laguardia-tsa-baseball/
Iran's military has warned that hotels housing US soldiers across the region would be targets in its war with the United States and Israel.
"When all the Americans (forces) go into a hotel, then from our perspective that hotel becomes American," armed forces spokesman Abolfazl Shekarchi told state television on Thursday.
"Should we just stand by and let the Americans strike us? When we respond, naturally we have to strike wherever they are."
On February 28, Israel and the United States launched strikes on Iran, killing its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and triggering a war that spread across the Middle East.
The war has since spread across the Middle East, with Iran responding with drone and missile attacks on Israel and US interests in the region.
On Thursday, Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had accused US soldiers of using people in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as "human shields".
"From the outset of this war, US soldiers fled military bases in the GCC to hide in hotels and offices," he said in a post on X, calling on hotels in the region to deny them bookings.
The Fars news agency, quoting unnamed sources, said Iran had sent "firm warnings" to hotels in the region, particularly in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
It added that Iran's military had identified US forces using similar locations in Syria, Lebanon and Djibouti.
Iran accuses its neighbours of allowing US forces to carry out attacks from their territory, but Gulf states have repeatedly denied the accusations, saying even before the war that they would not allow their territory or airspace to be used to attack Iran.
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. :/
Daniel
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •like this
Neil E. Hodges and Luna Dragofelis ΘΔ🏳️⚧️🐱 like this.
Neil E. Hodges reshared this.
Neil E. Hodges
in reply to Daniel • •Daniel
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •Neil E. Hodges likes this.
Neil E. Hodges reshared this.