technocrit

Francis warned the Group of Seven industrialised nations last year that AI must remain human-centric, so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less-lethal tools would not fall to machines.

(not much AI-related info in the article TBH)

The event throws into question the perceived heightened accuracy of betting markets like Poymarket over conventional polls.

https://archive.is/Qc8RH

Dozens of community kitchens in Gaza were forced to shut down on Thursday due to lack of food, amidst Israel’s ongoing blockade aimed at starving the Palestinian population and annexing their land.

... Columbia University administrators called in the New York Police Department (NYPD) on Wednesday evening to violently suppress and shut down a pro-Palestinian student occupation of the campus’ Butler Library. Approximately 78 protesters were arrested just over a year after the police-state crackdown at Columbia last April, when the NYPD swarmed the campus to arrest over 100 students and break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

On Wednesday afternoon, a group of around 100 anti-genocide student protesters took over Butler’s main reading room and renamed it the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” after the Palestinian activist and writer killed by Israeli forces in 2017.

The students’ demands include Columbia’s financial divestment from Zionist organizations, an academic boycott of complicit institutions, cops and ICE off campus and amnesty for all university members unfairly targeted and disciplined for pro-Palestinian actions.

Columbia’s Public Safety officers immediately responded and violently barred protesters from leaving unless they showed identification, which created a prolonged standoff...

...The subject of Trump family corruption is an inexhaustible one. His first term was notorious for the use of his “branded” properties, various Trump hotels and resorts, as conduits for corporations and foreign governments to funnel cash into the family coffers. Behind the scenes, far greater sums were raked in through the overseas operations of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with more than a billion dollars “invested” by Saudi monarchs and Gulf sheiks alone.

However, Trump’s reelection last November and his return to the White House on January 20 have been accompanied by an even greater orgy of money-grubbing. By some estimates, the Trump family wealth has doubled since the election. His social media company Truth Social, despite negligible advertising and customer base, has seen its stock price soar. The president has made significant cash from the sale of branded items, ranging from replicas of his fascist executive orders to bibles, golf clubs and guitars. Trump has also raked in $500 million in contributions to various political action committees to fund future campaigns, although the Constitution bars him from seeking a third term in the White House.

But nothing compares to the vast fortune accumulated through the Trump family’s plunge into the cryptocurrency market, with the launching of World Liberty Financial, a venture that is 60 percent owned by the Trumps. It is overseen by sons Don Jr. and Eric and co-managed by Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s top Middle East envoy, billionaire Steve Witkoff. World Liberty has partnered with an array of companies whose financial flimflam is supposedly “regulated” by federal agencies now controlled by Trump himself.

There was little to no interest in World Liberty before the election, but after Trump’s victory, the value of its cryptocurrency, known as $WLFI, soared to a nominal $1.1 billion. Estimates reported by Fortune and Forbes magazines place the Trump family’s total crypto fortune at between $2.9 billion and $6.2 billion...

Things are undoubtedly bad at Tesla. Its sales are dwindling. Its profits are plunging, as is its share price. There are regular protests outside its showrooms. The Cybertruck is a flop. And somehow, it’s actually a lot worse than that.

The 71% drop in net income it just reported may have been overshadowed by CEO Elon Musk’s announcement that he would be stepping back from his controversial duties at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But that drop is just one indication of serious financial sickness at the EV maker, problems brought on by falling sales for the first time in its history and falling prices for electric vehicles.

The bottom line problem at Tesla is its vanishing bottom line. A deeper look at its first quarter report shows it’s now losing money on what should be its ostensible reason for existence – selling cars.

It was only able to post a $409 million profit in the quarter thanks to the sale of $595 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers.

But if the Trump administration gets its way, the company can kiss those regulatory credits keeping it in the black goodbye, too.

President Trump denounced the Biden-era Digital Equity Act as “woke handouts based on race,” raging in a social media post against a broad effort to improve high-speed internet access.

... there’s a whole voter base of millions of young men who turned to crypto because of their mistrust of Wall Street and Big Tech. The same mistrust Democrats share of those same centralized entities. Democrats don’t have to embrace hype coins or endorse bad legislation. In fact, they shouldn’t. But they do need to actually learn to embrace the core values of the builders in the crypto community: individual digital ownership and decentralization.

Democrats also need to start demonstrating this now. They can’t risk another cycle without bringing young men back under the tent. One cycle can be a blip, but two cycles in a row becomes a habit, and habits are hard to break.

The GENIUS Act is actually the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to show that they’re a party that is more interested in voters than soundbites against Trump. The current draft is 57 pages of legislative jargon to elevate the roles of centralized entities in overseeing stablecoins. No surprise. Remember those 50 individuals who raised $260 million for the crypto Super PAC? They’ll definitely benefit from an increased reliance on their intermediation.

But embedded in the draft legislation is a small definition that is doing a lot of work, and that’s the definition of “distributed ledger.” Instead of hating on Trump, the Democrats could band together to say that the definition doesn’t require decentralization or network security, and until that happens, they can’t advance a stablecoin bill that only promotes fee-taking central intermediaries. Now that could be the beginning of a real sea-change.

The Democrats wouldn’t even need to mention Trump. The reality would be that none of the Trump family crypto projects would survive a definition that required true decentralization.

So here’s the real question: do Democrats want to keep losing elections just to avoid learning new tech? Or are they finally ready to act like a party that wants to win votes again?

An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI avatar of Christopher Pelkey said. “In another life we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and a God who forgives. I still do.”

It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings.