timelets

The princes of the Catholic Church listened intently as Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.

“Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor,” Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals, who stood and cheered for their new pontiff and his unlikely cause.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/pope-leo-ai-tech-771cca48

This is quite unexpected, although it seems quite logical in the context of Harari's Nexus

The transition from the ‘red’ of awareness to the ‘red’ of thought is accompanied by a definite loss of content, namely by the transition from the factor ‘red’ to the entity ‘red.’ This loss in the transition to thought is compensated by the fact that thought is communicable whereas sense-awareness is incommunicable.

-- Whitehead, The Concept of Nature.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18835/18835-h/18835-h.htm

This is different for AI. Even more specifically, Jeff Dean introduced a mode of "teacher-student" transmission where both weights and elements of the model transferred between entities.

write about assholes drunk on power in the White House:

But the White House, led by deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, wants to deport everyone here illegally. This means millions of people who arrived illegally but have since led law-abiding, productive lives. They have formed families and taken jobs that employers say they struggle to fill—in construction, hospitality, agriculture, healthcare, and much more.

Mr. Miller and the restrictionists want to deport everyone to send a message never to come again. But the lost contributions to the U.S. labor force will be great, especially since neither Mr. Miller nor Big Labor will tolerate more legal immigration. The labor-market impact is already showing up in the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

There is also the risk of unrest, as we’ve seen in California. It’s fanciful to think that raiding restaurants to snatch busboys, or Home Depot to grab stock clerks, won’t inspire a backlash. All the more so when ICE acts in heavy-handed fashion, as its agents sometimes do. Some on the pro-migrant left will do the same, and that’s when things get ugly. The political risks for Mr. Trump will grow if families are broken up, legal migrants are deported by mistake, or tales of hardship proliferate.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-deportation-wars-begin-d3cb4f8d

“Konrad Heiden’s exposé A History of National Socialism (Zurich, 1934). To wit: “Hitler, unable to control himself, simply does not know what he promises; his promises cannot be considered the promises of a solid partner. He breaks his promises as soon as it is in his interest to do so, and all the while continues to view himself as an honest person.”

--- Kotkin, Stephen. “[Stalin 02] • Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941.”

Sounds like trump.

Словом, якщо хтось каже, що він підтримує Україну і при цьому вважає нормальним голосувати за республіканців США, то це одне з трьох:
* Або брехня
* Або дурість
* Або підлість
Інших варіантів нема, всі сценарії -- суміш цих трьох.
...
Одному американцю допомогло таке пояснення: ми згодні, що гамбургери з Макдональдса -- гівно, але якщо вже треба щось зʼїсти, то краще той гамбургер, ніж справжній кізяк. Так і з партіями: демократи, багато в чому -- гімно метафоричне, але нинішні республіканці -- гімно справжнє, нерозбавлене і неприкрите.
https://malyj-gorgan.dreamwidth.org/217796.html

Это еще Спиноза доказал (Spinoza, B. The Ethics, Proposition LXV).

The conventional view of Mr. Trump is that he’s above all transactional. He wants deals, at home and abroad, that he can sell as great successes. But the way his second term is unfolding, this may undersell his ambition. Mr. Trump’s strategy seems to be moving toward that of Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, who view America as in decline and no longer able to lead or defend the West.

All of this would amount to an epochal return to the world of great power competition and balance of power that prevailed before World War II. It’s less a brave new world than a reversion to a dangerous old one.

Mr. Trump hasn’t articulated this, but some of the intellectuals surrounding him have. Elbridge Colby, nominated for the chief strategy post at the Pentagon, has argued that the U.S. must leave Europe and the Middle East to their own devices to focus on the Asia-Pacific. But Mr. Colby has also said that South Korea might have to fend for itself, and he said in a letter to us last year that “Taiwan isn’t itself of existential importance to America.”

Mr. Vance is the most vigorous promoter of the abandon Ukraine strategy, arguing that the war with Russia is little more than an ethnic dispute.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-brave-old-world-foreign-policy-ukraine-blow-up-china-russia-trade-allies-7e32b02a

WSJ video on Fox News
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/journal-editorial-report/wsj-opinion-trump-and-zelensky-go-off-the-rails/F9E63C17-7A56-47FB-A8A4-3DADC3B10112

Again, the ultra-leftist WSJ exposes Musk's lies about DOGE's supposed efficiency and shows that they exaggerate savings by the factor of 20 and the vast majority of cuts has nothing to do with DEI:

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency touts cuts of $55 billion in federal spending, often citing canceled DEI and climate contracts. However, a Wall Street Journal analysis of government contract data showed a much different picture: “Woke” cuts were a tiny fraction of the total, and many claims of savings were overstated.

The Journal analysis projects the actual savings could be closer to $2.6 billion over the next year if spending levels remained constant—and about 2% of the funds would have gone to contracts related to DEI.
...
Research-focused agencies were among the top targets for cuts.
...
DOGE terminated more than 60 Health and Human Services contracts including a clinical evaluation of an Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury drug and a study of smokers with chronic lung disease. DOGE described these as “administrative expenses.”
...
Many of the Education Department’s canceled contracts funded research on college costs, student career paths and early childhood development. DOGE said one $1.4 million contract funded “mailing and clerical operations.” The contract was used to mail surveys to respondents participating in studies and was nearly complete when canceled, creating no savings for terminating it.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/elon-musk-doge-federal-savings-claims-783b9507

From President Trump and Elon Musk’s Oval Office press conference, Feb. 11:

Q: Mr. Musk, you said on X that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms were sent to Gaza. But after fact-check this, it apparently Gaza [province] in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV. So can you correct the statements? It wasn’t sent to Hamas, actually. It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms were sent there. And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say?

Musk: Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody’s going to bat 1,000. We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes. I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly. I’m not sure that’s something Americans would be really excited about. That is really an enormous number of condoms, if you think about it. But if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I’m like, OK, that’s not as bad, but still, why are we doing that?

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/notable-quotable-condoms-gaza-mozambique-fact-check-6dd220d5

Трамп оказался гораздо бОльшим хуйлом, чем я предполагал. Вот как выглядит настоящий нож в спину:

Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.

The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved.

The agreement covers the “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine”, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”, leaving it unclear what else might be encompassed. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states.

The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’,” said one source close to the negotiations.

It states that “for all future licences, the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals”. Washington will have sovereign immunity and acquire near total control over most of Ukraine’s commodity and resource economy. The fund “shall have the exclusive right to establish the method, selection criteria, terms, and conditions” of all future licences and projects. And so forth, in this vein. It seems to have been written by private lawyers, not the US departments of state or commerce.

If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty, later whittled down at the London Conference in 1921, and by the Dawes Plan in 1924. At the same time, he seems willing to let Russia off the hook entirely.

Ukraine cannot possibly meet his $500bn demand in any meaningful timeframe, leaving aside the larger matter of whether it is honourable to treat a victim nation in this fashion after it has held the battle line for the liberal democracies at enormous sacrifice for three years.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/17/revealed-trump-confidential-plan-ukraine-stranglehold/

Thanks to the book I'm reading now, I've discovered the true identity of Elon Musk. He's an AI bot that, like Tay, was trained on Twitter. Tay was shut down by Microsoft when it became clear that it developed psychopathic, dictatorial tendencies. By contrast, Elon bought Twitter, so that nobody could shut him down:

“stories of Tay,2 the Twitter bot that Microsoft created and swiftly shut down after it turned into a Hitler-loving, non-consensual-sex-promoting bot. Tay was modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’. The bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, forcing Microsoft to shut down the service only sixteen hours after its launch. According to Microsoft, this was caused by trolls – people who deliberately start quarrels or upset others on the internet – who ‘attacked’ the service as the bot was making its replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter.”

Excerpt From: Mo Gawdat. “Scary Smart.”

p.s. this is not a joke