First rule of committing cool crimes on the Internet:
- Do not talk about your cool crimes on the Internet.
Boxing was initially taken off the 2028 Olympic program due to the IOC's dispute the with International Boxing Association. Basically, the IOC wants to have an alternative governing body for the sport.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/boxing/65838021
https://apnews.com/article/olympics-boxing-los-angeles-2028-iba-dbd2a1d19715881d0718353092d03a9d
Trump as reverse Guaido is becoming more real by the day:
"If something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we'll meet the next time in Venezuela, because it'll be a far safer place to meet than our country," Trump said to Musk. "OK, so we'll go. You and I will go, and we'll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela."
Trump had alleged that Venezuela has released violent criminals from its jails and sent them to the United States to reduce its own crime rate.
"Their crime rate is coming down and our crime rate is going through the roof. And it's so simple. And you haven't seen anything yet because these people have come into our country and they're just getting acclimated and they don't know about being politically correct, law enforcement or lack of law enforcement and our police. I have to just end with this. We have great police," he said.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-flee-venezuela-loses-election-elon-musk-interview-1938321
Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are Israeli puppets used by the zionist entity to help police and discipline the West Bank. There are wings of Fatah, including its armed wing, that aren't in line with Abbas/the PA, but overall the organization is mostly compradors at this point.
I've seen Joe Rogan and Tim Pool. Idk who else.
What would the GOP even do? Vance is obviously unacceptable on the top of the ticket, both to the general public and the majority of the GOP's factions. They've already had the convention.
Would be hilarious if they somehow turn what was a likely win a few months ago to destroying the party.
Are they going to pick and choose which subreddits get paywalled, or pull some revenue sharing scheme with the moderators to get them to voluntarily paywall their subs? I could see the latter "working" by getting enough buy-in with super-users.
If the Ukrainians do interrupt the gas flow, wouldn't that have massive political blowback? There's no "plausible" deniability like Nordstream.
The dark cowboy rides again.
Republican [ ]
Democract [ ]
Gay Guy for
TrumpKamala [ X ]
It would be the other way around. They'd be suing you for shopping at their competitiors and thereby acting against your economic self-interest (as determined by Walmart.)
Looks like the State Department may be backing down on the Venezuelan elections: https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/venezuela-cne-turns-over-electoral-data-to-supreme-court-us-walks-back-gonzalez-recognition/
In response to a question, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the Biden administration had not recognized González as president, a departure from the position assumed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken who declared González as the “winner” of the election.
Miller instead pointed to ongoing mediation efforts by Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. He further emphasized the need for Venezuela to “transition back to democratic norms”, stopping short of calling for González to take office.
I'm surprised that Walz got the nod. I really thought it was going to Shapiro to reassure AIPAC and the Israel lobby that Kamala wasn't got to rock the boat on that front (the same reason that Biden was picked in '08). It doesn't mean that she's changing anything about the Biden policy, I am sure some zionists are freaking out regardless.
A good article on the security measures in Venezuela's election. It includes details of the anti-fraud and cryptographic measures, some thoughts on the potential nature of the cyberattacks, and why the CNE and PSUV have delayed publishing their tallies.
I thought that this was in particular interesting in explaining the electoral court's involvement:
Why doesn’t the PSUV publish its tally sheets?
Another frequently asked question is: If María Corina Machado’s team has published 24,000 tally sheets (or 9,000 according to Jorge Rodríguez), why doesn’t the United Socialist Party (PSUV) publish its own tally sheets to back up the results? It is worth noting that the PSUV has done this in the past, for example after the 2013 elections.
A PSUV source, an expert in legal matters who requested not to be named, shared the following information:
They explained that the PSUV had witnesses at all polling stations across the country (about 30,000), and therefore has all the issued tally sheets. In contrast, González’s team had witnesses at only 30 or 35 percent of all polling stations (Vente Venezuela claims to have tally sheets from 80% of the stations, around 24,000, but Jorge Rodríguez said in a press conference last Friday that they only had 9,000 tally sheets).
The PSUV suspects that the opposition might be falsifying the tally sheets, a claim that Rodríguez and Diosdado Cabello have publicly made in recent days.
Thus, according to the confidential answer provided, the PSUV plans to go to the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, submit all the tally sheets, and wait for the opposition to do the same. The TSJ will use the CNE’s authentication mechanisms to determine which set is genuine.
There is concern that if the PSUV publishes its records on a website without first having them certified by the TSJ, the opposition might obtain and use them (especially those they do not have) to create or falsify tally sheets (facsimiles), potentially generating media noise or sowing doubts.
The fact that González did not appear before the Electoral Chamber last Friday raises many questions. If they have the evidence, why not challenge the elections before the appropriate body? Are they willing to have their election evidence verified?
On the other hand, Professor Theoktisto reminded us that, legally speaking, the valid tally sheet is the electronic record transmitted by the voting machine to the tallying center. “By law, the valid tally sheet is the digital package, electronically signed with the various encryption schemes used to protect both the security and authenticity of the data and its transmission.”
The first printed tally sheet, which is placed in an envelope and sent to the CNE, is also important, although it serves as a physical backup to the electronic tally sheet. The copies held by political parties are merely backups and have no legal standing unless there is a challenge to the election.
The reliance on personal transportation to get from A to B changes the class character, and thus actions, of unrest and dissidents in the US. Compare the various actions during 2020, the urban-based George Floyd uprisings, and the right-wing anti-lockdown and Stop-the-Steal movements. Raising the barrier to entry by adding an hour-plus driving time, and more importantly risking your own car getting damaged, limits who's attending demonstrations and limits their tenor. Obviously, you have events like Charlottesville and January 6th, but those were pre-planned events put together by an array of right-wing organizations working in relative concert. There may be a lot of angry racists in the American exurbs, but there's a limited number of far-right ideologues who are going to invest the time and personal risk.
The example of white nationalist riots in the UK does have me worried, but the US doesn't have the same urbanized white underclass that the UK has. The US certainly has a lot of reactionaries, but they're either dispersed in rural areas or dispersed in the suburbs. They can't easily be cajoled into spontaneous violence.
Can you imagine if another country demanded a foreign audit of a US election? The entire political class would be united in hysterical indignation.
Those are all common vexological motifs. What matters is that the original claim is spurious and racist.
Have you looked at the Minnesota flag and Somalian flag side-by-side?
I've had a lot of anxiety over the Venezuelan elections, out of a misplaced yearning to feel vindication. Do I think Maduro won the most votes? Yes, I still think so. But in the end, it doesn't matter what I think, or even which narrative is correct. Either way, the most likely outcome is that the US will find an excuse to impose a fiercer sanction regime and the PSUV will remain in power, a pattern that has repeated for every coup and political crisis since Maduro's first election.
If Maduro's electoral claims are validated, then I'll be happy. If the PSUV's narrative ends up being clearly hollow, then I'll be disappointed. Regardless, the takeover of Venezuela by far-right compradors would be a disaster, and a fire-sale of Venenzuela's state assets, even in exchange for lifting sanctions, could only deepen Venezuela's economic issues. The only way for Venezuela to move forward (other than the US withdrawing its illegal and unilateral coercive measures voluntarily), is overcoming the US global sanction regime with the help of the US's adversaries.
Swiss tech startup FinalSpark is now selling access to biocomputers that combine up to four tiny lab-grown human brains with silicon chips.
>The lab is available to researchers 24/7, uses real human neurons and uses the Python programming language, creating a “dream bridge between biology and data scientists,” according to Jordan.
>After accessing the provided login/password, researchers gain the ability to remotely send electrical signals to neurons and receive their responses. It is then the responsibility of researchers to devise optimal algorithms for controlling the behavior of the organoids.
>Users can mimic memory function by using periodic electrical stimulation to reinforce synapses through repetition, thus making desired pathways stronger.
>Researchers do this by training the organoids through a reward system. The organoids are rewarded with dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for pleasure (and addiction).
>Meanwhile, as “punishment,” the organoids are exposed to chaotic stimuli, such as irregular electrical activity.
>A live view of the biochips working in real-time can be found at www.finalspark.com/live.
Still think it's kinda neat, but with clearly disturbing implications.
OpenAI's Preferred Publisher Program offers media companies licensing deals.
Very funny enshitification coming from OpenAI. In exchange for access to real time data, it looks like they're planning to bake in partner ads. Wouldn't be surprised if this becomes just as pay-to-play as Google search.
>Details from the pitch deck
>The Preferred Publisher Program has five primary components, according to the deck.
>First, it is available only to “select, high-quality editorial partners,” and its purpose is to help ChatGPT users more easily discover and engage with publishers’ brands and content.
>Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments. Finally, through PPP, OpenAI also offers licensed financial terms to publishers.
>The financial incentives participating publishers can expect to receive are grouped into two buckets: guaranteed value and variable value.
>Guaranteed value is a licensing payment that compensates the publisher for allowing OpenAI to access its backlog of data, while variable value is contingent on display success, a metric based on the number of users engaging with linked or displayed content.
>The resulting financial offer would combine the guaranteed and variable values into one payment, which would be structured on an annual basis.
>“The PPP program is more about scraping than training,” said one executive. “OpenAI has presumably already ingested and trained on these publishers’ archival data, but it needs access to contemporary content to answer contemporary queries.”
We are releasing the weights and architecture of our 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model Grok-1.
Obviously done so Elon looks like less of a hypocrite in his quixotic OpenAI lawsuit. However, it is notable in that it's the largest LLM to date with open and commercially licensed weights (314B params). It's way too large for any consumer to actually run, but having direct access to a model this big may benefit researchers looking into safety and bias in AI.
A US spacecraft launched from Florida to land on the lunar surface encounters propulsion problems.
Due to a power issue, it looks like the lander may now no longer have sufficient fuel to make a controlled landing on the moon. This was the lander that was set to carry human remains to the moon despite objections from the Navajo nation. Hopefully, this discourages any future attempts at such a stunt, since instead of a permanent mausoleum your ashes may instead be stranded in orbit or scattered amongst the moon dust if the thing crashes.
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Looks like they're scraping up some more copies somehow, but it looks like the game literally sold out within an hour or so of going live. Must have either been a very small print run, or there are more irony pilled folks willing to part with ~$80 for what looks like a kinda jank roll-and-move game than I thought.
EDIT: Apparently the additional copies have also sold out.
EDIT2: If you actually want the thing, it looks like they are accepting pre-orders for an another printing.
Researchers dubbed it Brainoware.
Pretty neat/horrifying.
The situation at OpenAI is getting even more dicey.
It looks like Microsoft's ambitions to completely cannibalize OpenAI is coming to pass. Apparently, Microsoft already has a perpetual license to all of OpenAI's IP (link), and owned all the physical hardware running the OpenAI GPTs. So now that they're about to acquire basically OpenAI's entire staff OpenAI literally has nothing.
I think the interesting angle is the anti-trust angle. The board's ouster of Altman has essentially allowed Microsoft to strip OpenAI for parts without having to compensate the other investors or receive anti-trust scrutiny. It is a massive win for MS.
My guess is that this is the beginning of Microsoft consuming OpenAI in its entirety. As for the firing reason, it's sudden enough that it's probably personal misconduct (i.e. fraud or sex crimes.)
A collection of emoji to help clarify your tone in the types of text-only environments that are so common on the internet. - GitHub - benhamill/tone-emoji: A collection of emoji to help clarify you...
There was discussion on trying to have tone indicators used more often on Hexbear to make the space more ND inclusive. This is a slick looking set of tone indicator emojis that could be integrated relatively easily. Having tone indicators as emojis might make then more convenient for users and would also make them stand out much more clearly in a post.
Here is the list in this set: /gen (genuine) /hj (half joking) /ij (inside joke) /j (joking) /lit (literal) /- (negative) /+ (positive) /ref (reference) /rh (rhetorical) /s (sarcastic) /srs (serious) /? (what tone is this)
- Instance: hexbear.net [http://hexbear.net] - Type: Defederation - Affects: Pawb.Social, furry.engineer, pawb.fun - Reason: Trolling, disruptive behavior, tankie instance, harassment and abuse towards instances defederating them. ::: spoiler screenshots [https://pawb.social/pictrs/image/0b922ebe-62...
I just wanted to say mea culpa (partially responsible) to our furry users. I saw the thread and immediately thought of the Grover Pasta and had to post.
Anyways, Slurp Juice V3 is in the works. I'm drunk right now, drinking for the first time after working (and procrastinating) on a paper for 3 weeks. Do not AMA.
