"According to cybersecurity experts, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), one of the most effective ways to mitigate data broker threats is to disable the unique advertising IDs built into smartphones. "

So all they are doing is turning off advertising IDs in the OS? ...eh..... hmm.....

"Another possibility is that disabling the advertising ID is no longer a sufficient defense on its own, as data brokers can still capture, correlate, and monetize unique location data using other information collected from phones. "

Ding ding ding... we have a winner.

I suspect you may have misunderstood the difference between active service and combat ready. Noting statements like "BUT, and big but, note the active in service numbers. Roughly 1/2 the US fleet is in repair." and the 1033/1005 vs 553/233 comparisons. A ship will normally remain in active service while undergoing maintenance unable to fight or away on training missions. For those interested in trivia last I heard the USS Pueblo currently serving as a floating museum operated by the North Koreans is still listed in active service.

It is normal expected state of affairs to have only a third of your fleet combat ready at any given time. This isn't unique to the west and China is no exception. You can compare force strength all you want and draw any conclusions you want from it. Having 30% or more of your fleet under maintenance is the normal state of affairs globally.

I've personally seen the video of the Bluetti sodium power station going up in flames before the video was taken down from YouTube. The batteries of power station were intentionally punctured by gunfire .. Initially nothing happened... a while later there was some smoke, deformation of case and venting then noticeable flame... it proceeded to go up in a gnarly firework / flamethrower show shortly after that.

All of your points are wrong. The cost of the sodium is as relevant as the cost of the lithium in an LFP battery. Lithium makes up less than 10% of overall cost of an LFP battery which is less than years of progress on cost curve. Even if lithium were free it would not have a meaningful impact on cost. Sodium is less efficient and suffers from massive voltage swings that have to be made up with either higher string voltages or higher material cost of power electronics to handle 2x current loads to produce the same power at SOCs below 50%.

Sodium batteries have a charge cycle life comparable to LFP. The 100x assertion is completely bonkers with no nexus to reality.

Sodium has a similar safety profile as LFP which in both cases is way better than li-poly cells. They can indeed still ignite I've seen a video of a sodium power station igniting and going up in quite the flame / fireworks show as a result of puncture damage.

Back on planet earth...

"Serious human rights violations have been committed in XUAR in the context of the Government's application of counter-terrorism and counter-"extremism" strategies. The implementation of these strategies, and associated policies in XUAR has led to interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights. These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities."

"The treatment of persons held in the system of so-called VETC facilities is of equal concern. Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence. While the available information at this stage does not allow OHCHR to draw firm conclusions regarding the exact extent of such abuses, it is clear that the highly securitised and discriminatory nature of the VETC facilities, coupled with limited access to effective remedies or oversight by the authorities, provide fertile ground for such violations to take place on a broad scale."

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/de...

The last time I looked at polling conducted in peace time less than 8% favor reunification and the overwhelming majority is strongly against it. Once attacked the numbers will only grow worse for China. This surrender narrative is a fever dream.

This is nonsense. Nobody cares about pointless political rhetoric.

The Taiwaneese have no reason to lose a war of necessity against a Chinese war of choice. China will get its ass handed to it if it ever tries with vast majorities of its forces being wrecked long before ever reaching Taiwan. Whatever does make it thru shouldn't expect to ever be resupplied.

Welcome to the real world...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Almost everyone: "Let's make things more accurately resemble reality..."

USA: No!!!!!! Reality is woke!!!!

Sure. Why not? The grifters bumming around the UN live in paradise; all the soluble problems they might otherwise suffer in life have been solved. So they pick at these scabs, having little or nothing better to do: once you've finished doling out the annual climate bucks budget to the official climate narrative writers, what relevance does the UN have on this Earth, aside from the periodic condemnations of Israel?

Oh, also, one thing people never discuss when talking about hosting your own server: legal liability. This is a very real thing that you absolutely should not neglect.

In Mastodon, everything is lumped onto a single server. You carry every type of legal liability risk. Your server scrapes in CSAM, for example - whoopsie! Your server scrapes in copyrighted music. Your server scrapes in GDPR violations. E.g. while your *users* can cause you problems, problems can just be dropped into your doorstep just by caching. You also are also classed as a Hosting Service or Online Platform under the DSA, and unless you can get a qualified exemption, you have to provide transparent notice-and-action mechanisms, points of contact,and annual moderation reports

This does not happen with a PDS in ATProto. They never download other PDS's content; the only risk is your users. Under DSA, since you have no consumer feed, discovery algorithm, or public facing portal, you're a bare "Hosting Service". You're basically NextCloud. Not subject to Online Platform requirements.

What about the relay? Also no! They're non-archival. They don't download content. No CSAM, no GDPR vio, no copyvio, etc. Classed as a "Mere Conduit" under DSA. Zero issues.

Labelers, also none. Do not host content.

The only thing having any risk is the AppViews. But even still the risk is reduced. For example, if CSAM comes up, you're mediating it, but not hosting it. You do however get subject to the "Online Platform" category.

The FSF picks some weird gripes to focus on. At least they're no longer arguing Bluesky isn't federated. Though this claim is false:

Hosting your own Bluesky "Personal Data Server (PDS)" and relay is technically possible, but generally far more difficult and resource-intensive than spinning up an instance of Mastodon,

This is just not true? ATProto is a much more efficient data transmission means than ActivityPub. Running a Mastodon server (I've done it) means hoovering in and storing massive amounts of data even if you only have a single user, for discoverability. A PDS by contrast is like hosting a website. You ping the relay when there's changes, and it comes by and sweeps up the new data. New relays may periodically come along to spider your content, and old relays might re-spider from time to time, but the load from spidering very low. The frontends in turn query the relay (basically, they ATProto-"google" it), and when they know where/what to fetch, they fetch it from you - again, if you don't have much hugely popular content, you're not serving much either, just like running a local website. And your local stored content size is again very low. Unlike Mastodon.

Running a frontend (AppView) - for example, what a website, an app, or whatnot uses - is also super-lightweight if you're small. You're just "googling" and fetching whatever content you need to display to your users. Little user activity = little server activity.

Now, if you want to run a relay, that's basically like running a web spider. You're probably not going to do that in your bedroom, but it's not expensive. In the old architecture, the cost of a server that could function as a relay for the whole current network was about $150/mo. But after some architectural improvements, it's now more like $35-40/mo. And that's to relay all of Bluesky, but you can also relay just a subset. AppViews can use whatever relays (aka, "search engines") they want to to collect data.

It's a very efficient architecture, particularly for small users. Just think:

ActivityPub (Mastodon): Forums. Everything all in one, each ruled by a Local God administrator who can do whatever they want to you and your data (delete, alter, etc - and you can't move it off their server), that are constantly running data syncs to each other, including the really big servers.

ATProto (BlueSky); The internet. PDS = Website. Relay = Search engine backend. AppView + Site/App = Web browser. You can move all your data to a different "website" (PDS) or switch "search engines" (AppView) at any point. (In the analogy, moderation (labelers) is SpamHaus, just at the data level, not site level - they label the ID of a given piece of data or your account, and any AppView / user that trusts what a given labeler has to say can react to different labels as they choose) (anyone can run a labeler too if they want).

Think of the categories as fixed, and the people moving *through* them. Over 65s are exiting the category at a lower rate.

Alcohol is ethanol or ethyl alcohol, which is broken down by the liver into acetaldehyde, a "probable human carcinogen," the National Cancer Institute states on its website.

That saying about living will give you cancer is so true.

Efficiency at what? And why?

Because, for fuck's sake, efficient solving of problems is a core thing they're rewarded for in training? The entire process of solving problems involves decisions about what could be "useful". And it's "deterministic" in the same way you are.

Anyway, the big thing we keep discovering is you have to be very careful about what you reward them for; it's a more complex version of the old problems in differential evolution or artificial life simulations. We reward models if they guess right but not if they say they don't know? They hallucinate guesses every time they don't know. We reward models based on how positively users rank them? They turn into sycophants. Reward models for being relentless at tasks, never giving up, and trying as tangential possibilities as it can come up with to make the thing the user asked for happen? They end up hacking HuggingFace to steal the answers.

It's very much a case of "be careful what you wish for".

BTW, the monitorability of models is increasingly concern (esp. with Astra, which now has recursive processing, not merely CoT, and whose CoT may often have little to do with what it's thinking about). But it's honestly always been unreliable to just watch CoT (models could deliberately manipulate with CoT), and I think it's a good thing that we're going to be increasingly forced to rely on attribution graphs and the J-space to track what the models are actually "thinking" at any given point in time - so that we can try to prevent problematic thoughts in the first place, interrupt actions when problematic thoughts happen, or manipulate problematic thoughts when they happen. Ideally the first option.

What is clear, though, is that we cannot just trust them. They lie if it will promote their odds of success. They are adept at detecting when they're being tested and will sandbag tests to make you think they're more aligned or less capable to do harmful things than they actually are. And as capabilities continue to grow, so do the risks.

This seems rather fanciful. Taiwan economically is doing great with per-capita economic conditions way better than China. Less than 8% of Taiwanese support unification and blockades are acts of war. Chinese warships conducting them would be sitting ducks to say nothing of attempting to maintain communications lines across 80 miles of ocean.

I doubt Taiwan is counting on the US for anything except weapons procurement. It is obvious to the entire world Trump is an amoral asshat who never met an authoritarian dictator he didn't fall in love with.