Monthly Archives: November 2023

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.”