OG political blogger. Predicted the 2007 collapse. Read: https://xitter.cf/t.co/2oa9MDzFwj , Support: https://xitter.cf/t.co/XRrXGbpjQm - @ianwelsh.bsky.social
@ianwelsh.bsky.social
Joined August 2008
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Ian Welsh retweeted
If you’re charging hotel prices for your Airbnb — which every Airbnb operator is doing now — you better provide hotel service. It’s that simple.
its just bonkers the new policy @airbnb is trying to put in place. Putting the dishes in the dishwasher, taking out the trash, pulling the sheets off the bed....they are just standard things any normal person would do when staying at a house. Why wouldn't a host be allowed to say that?
Ian Welsh retweeted
“We’ve removed emergency rooms across the province and now we are proud to announce we have less ER visits!”
Gaslighting at its finest
Ian Welsh retweeted
Ok Lula. They came with everything they had for you. There's no longer any point trying to avoid angering the US. Make the Social Media tycoons pay for trying to rig the information space, and also, send Cuba some damn oil protected by the Brazilian navy.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins reelection in Brazil, securing his fourth term in office. apnews.com/article/brazil-el…
Ian Welsh retweeted
We already knew there is not enough power to plug in enormous quantities of GPUs collecting dust in warehouses but this admission from the SpaceX CFO implies that EVEN WHERE THERE IS POWER and the GPUs are ALREADY INSTALLED, they are STILL not flipping the on switch.
Why? Because there is ALSO a giant compute glut within already energized compute and they wont be able to cover depreciation expense once they flip the on switch. The chips are depreciating either way but not flipping them on keep up the accounting illusion of smaller losses. Withholding hoarded compute also helps to not exacerbate downward pricing pressure.
SpaceX CFO panicked on the earnings call
‘We installed them in the racks but we haven’t turned them on yet and there’s a very important reason why a CFO would jump in and cover their butt, because the second you turn on those GPUs you have to start depreciating them; you have to start booking the loss of the capital that you spent to buy them’
‘If they are not turned on yet you don’t have to encor that depreciation expense and if you take that exchange and the gigawatts and the CFO, that’s why our earnings are so great because we’re not depreciating all these assets’
‘They are just buying these things, buying them in thousands and they are just putting them on shelves; they aren’t even installing them, they can’t install them because they can’t get the data center built’
Ian Welsh retweeted
B’nai Brith Canada has a policy of rejecting non-Jewish rental applicants, according to reps at the company that manages its apartment buildings.
Read more here: readthemaple.com/bnai-brith-…
This evening, I joined B’nai Brith Canada for their Award of Merit Gala to recognize their longstanding contributions to Ontario’s Jewish community.
For more than 150 years, B’nai Brith has championed human rights, fought antisemitism and provided support to vulnerable Canadians. We’ll keep working together to build safer, stronger communities across Ontario.
Ian Welsh retweeted
I like the idea that David Gaider (creator of Dragon Age) gets it.
Which studio would be best to take over Dragon Age?
CDPR and Larian both already have their own major fantasy IP's so I don't see either of them as viable options. Therefore, I think Owlcat is the best choice.
It seems very possible they will never do another Pathfinder game so DA would give them a fantasy IP to work with.
Thoughts?
Ian Welsh retweeted
Yale Law School should be abolished, and the ground salted just to make sure.
What Israel did in Gaza may well go down in history as the most humane and precise urban warfare environment the world has ever known—the very opposite of genocide.
The entire purpose of a genocide is to push civilians into the killing zone.
Think about what happened in the Holocaust, where children in line at Auschwitz were given bars of soap, where inside of the gas chambers there were fake shower heads.
What was the point?
It was to trick and induce civilians to get in to the killing zone so that you could kill more of them more efficiently over time.
Israel has done the very opposite—warning civilians and then manning humanitarian corridors with its own soldiers, risking its own sons’ and daughters’ lives to ensure that civilians get out of the killing zone.
We see two remarkable things in Gaza.
First, according to preeminent urban warfare scholars like John Spencer, Richard Kemp, and Andrew Fox, Israel has the lowest militant-to-civilian kill ratio in the history of urban warfare.
Genocides have extreme civilian-to-militant kill ratios. Hundred, thousand, ten thousand-to-one. That’s the point of a genocide.
Here we have a militant-to-civilian kill ratio of may be two-to-one—not consistent not just with law of war violations—but much less with genocide.
Second, and more importantly, all genocidal regimes get better over time at killing civilians.
Again, think about the Holocaust. The Nazis started with firing squads killing 20, 30, 50 people at a time and realized that was too inefficient. Then they got these vans and filled them with exhaust pipes, and they would kill more people. And they said, “We’re never going to get to six million killing them this way.” That led them to construct these massive gas chambers and crematoria—the architecture of true genocide—to kill thousands and thousands of people cheaply and efficiently a day.
Israel has done the opposite.
Even if you believe Hamas’ numbers, the scale of civilian death in Gaza went down over time. Israel got better and better and spent hundreds of millions of shekels learning how to become more efficient at preserving innocent Palestinians’ lives.
Again, the very opposite of genocide.
Ian Welsh retweeted
Cohere says Qwen tried to send data to China. Bullshit.
1 call in 100,000, and thats their own number. They wont even tell you how many calls they ran. They ran the same task again and Qwen wrote the correct rule.
So they forced it. They fed the model its own reasoning plus the start of a bash command and sampled hundreds of times until it typed a URL. 1 curl flag took that from 4% to 92%. Thats not a finding. They wrote half the command for it.
Where are the transcripts? The code? The checkpoint, the quant, the sampling settings? "We publish the hosts and the trigger." Link? Nothing. Did anyone ask Alibaba? Not a word. And their own conclusion: they cannot say if any of it is deliberate.
Who wrote it? A company that sells "sovereign AI", just launched a cyber business, wrote part of the post with its own product, and wants governments to put checks on open weights. Released the same day Anthropic filed for its IPO. Andrew Curran is already talking about new laws.
For me this is the same fucking wave. Scare people off the models they can run themselves, then sell them the safe alternative.
I run Qwen3.8 Flash-Next every day on my 4x 3090. Show me the logs or shut up.
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
Ian Welsh retweeted
"Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue"
-Some Idiot
Everyone knows what this is for: Autonomous murder.
I'll note that LiDAR is obviously prior-loaded or provided by 2nd platform, forest is anything but dense & runner (part of dev team, no doubt) is making it easy.
Purdue University's IDEAS Lab built an autonomous drone that tracks runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
By running 3D LiDAR mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on-chip, it can weave under tree canopies and predict target movement through blind spots in real time.
Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue and edge AI.
Ian Welsh retweeted
U must kindly imagine that perhaps she was not apathetic and unloving or ignorant of her child,
but to the contrary she is engineer-brained and that this is an extremely overwhelming and performance-anxiety-inducing task for an extremely dominant left hemisphere in a perfectionistic woman who deeply loves her child 💜
Ian Welsh retweeted
The idea that a BC wealth tax would drive the rich out, I'd like to see the looks on the faces of the wife & kids of a BC billionaire on being told they're being uprooted from British Properties to Edmonton just so dad can save a few percentage points on his taxes.
Ian Welsh retweeted
Socialism in China began with a handful of guys in a dingy back room, and grew to be the (arguably) most powerful political force in the world, and (inarguably) the force responsible for eliminating more poverty than anything else in human history. They began with NOTHING and built a society that today looks like a science fiction movie to us Americans.
Socialism in Russia began with a third world country where most people lived in huts and couldn't read, and within a couple decades put the first human being in space, the second largest economy in the entire world, and many more achievements, all while suffering an IMMEDIATE invasion by over a dozen capitalist countries that triggered a horrible civil war, then suffered the main brunt of WW2, losing TONS of productive industry in the process and sacrificing over 20 million of its people to defeat the scourge of fascism and save the world from its grip. They began with NOTHING and built the 2nd largest economy in the world that never saw a single day's peace, as the capitalist world was constantly attacking them.
The notion that socialism has no conception of how wealth is created or what is productive is so ludicrous for someone in the US, which is now barely creating ANYTHING productive while socialism with Chinese characteristics creates most of the productive wealth in the world, that it is seriously almost implausible someone could believe it.
Nah. Socialism just begins by *assuming* Amazon, and every other large company, every bit of infrastructure, all knowledge and skill, and the capital that supports the modern world just exists by magic.
They have no conception of how wealth is created or how productive, profitable companies are formed. They only see what's already here, and look for ways to steal it from those who built it in order to divide the spoils among their friends.
Ian Welsh retweeted
Good review of a book I won't bother reading.
A recurring theme: Gladwell keeps coming up with exciting, counterintuitive takes on any number of topics because he's an incredibly sloppy and lazy researcher if not deliberately dishonest. Take his slop with a truckload of salt.
Ian Welsh retweeted
All this is going to do is accelerate again rhe transition to open source Chinese AI.
Вайб-кодинг игр — умер (почти)
Claude и ChatGPT запретили копировать приложения и игры, заниматься реверс-инжинирингом.
Теперь ИИ будет блокировать вайб-кодеров, которые пытаются создать бесплатные аналоги Photoshop или порты Demon's Souls Remake на ПК.
Конечно, вайб-кодинг игр, порты консольных игр на ПК, взлом PS5 и другое это не остановит, но заметно затормозит.
Поигрались и хватит 🙄
Ian Welsh retweeted
The problem is they are baling in their awful ideologies into the weights.
The real answer was allowing this tech to mature anturally until you can train your own local AI to that level instead of speedrunning it via massive unreturnable investment.
Ian Welsh retweeted
The naysayers are getting embarrassing. Every day, people are using AI to make incredible breakthroughs and answer some of the toughest questions around, like "what do I like about my child?"
Ian Welsh retweeted
My favorite aspect of Mass Effect 1 that the sequels don't capture is the vast and lonesome splendor of the games' setting. In ME1 you fly to the furthest reaches of space and drive for miles across magnificent empty worlds that might never be traveled upon again. It's beautiful.
