HaraldvonBlauzahn

cross-posted from: https://thebrainbin.org/m/nottheonion@lemmy.world/t/1223961

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/55496692

"The force-feeding will continue until morale improves"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39004845

Major central banks are now openly warning that the AI hype is inflating a dangerous equity bubble. After the Bank of England’s alarm over “stretched” valuations and the risk of a sharp correction, the European Central Bank (ECB) is also warning that AI-driven stock prices could fall abruptly, with systemic consequences for global markets.

The title is the original title from the Guardian article, but does not match the content accurately. The fundamental problem is that Icelandic is a small language, and English-language media is already dominating. This puts Icelandic in danger of dying. Now, AI threatens to accelerate that process, especially since of all things the AI company Anthropic is now working with teachers to provide teaching material for them:

“Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that,” she said, not least because young people in Iceland “are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and other media”.

Katrín has said that Iceland has been “quite proactive” in pushing for AI to be usable in Icelandic. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Iceland’s ministry of education, one of the world’s first national AI education pilots. The partnership is a nationwide pilot across Iceland – giving hundreds of teachers across Iceland access to AI tools.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of supercomputer chip-maker Nvidia, has for years claimed that his company’s artificial intelligence products, as some of the most advanced scientific tools in history, will help the world solve climate change, warning last year that “climate disasters are now normal.”

Yet Huang is now loudly cozying up to U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, even though Wright is fully on board with the Trump administration’s climate denial policies.

A so-called “climate science” report Wright’s Department of Energy released in July has been condemned by scores of scientists as “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.” The report is part of the administration’s effort to overturn the scientific basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions as pollution — the 2009 endangerment finding — under the Clean Air Act.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38830376

The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38830374

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economist article

archive.is paywall bypass

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38830374

For a short overview, see for example:

https://mondediplo.com/2025/11/02tech

Beyond Palantir, under the banner of ‘patriotic tech’, a coalition of firms, funders and ideologues is engineering a planetary infrastructure for techno-political control. It’s a stacked system – cloud platforms, AI models, financial rails, drone networks, orbital systems – forming what I call the ‘Authoritarian Stack’. Where traditional authoritarianism relies on mass mobilisation and state violence, this system operates through technological infrastructure and financial coordination, making classic resistance appear not just difficult but obsolete. At its helm stand Silicon Valley’s most rightwing figures – Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Palmer Luckey and Alexander Karp – whose investments align with a political project: the remaking of sovereignty as a private asset class.

(The above summary is sadly partially paywalled, perhaps a better source exists? But the website linked as OP is freely accessible. )

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/20433891

This is a FOSS project that supports to connect a charger for an electric vehicle (EV) with a photovoltaic generation system. Being open source, it is free to use and supports components from many vendors.

Using these two things in combination is much more economical than using them separately: The PV system provides energy to the EV that is much cheaper than electricity from the grid. In addition, using the car's battery makes the PV installation more useful - it could also serve to store extra energy for the house.

But why open source? In many areas, vendors try to sell integrated systems, trying to get higher prices. And customers sometimes like the convenience.

But for home power systems, there are clear advantages to open systems with open Interfaces:

• You don't want to buy a new car when you move house or get a new home battery.
• You might want to start with an ultra-cheap balkony solar panel which you can put just flat on top of your garage. And later you might want to install a heat pump when you have the money or subsidies are available. This requires flexibility, which integrated systems ain't (ever tried to add more RAM to your old Macbook?)
• Technology is changing at a rapid pace. Especially battery prices are falling fast. So, things like extra batteries for the house will become economically interesting long before your car reaches its end of life.
• The cost structures: For rooftop solar, costs for plumbing and electrical installation are already often the most expensive part. Prices for solar panels are falling rapidly along an exponential curve.
• Software quality: While home power systems often provide great hardware, the software quality is often pretty shite. (My brother just confirmed that, he bought a heat pump and its Modbus interface does not match documentation, so it is not fully controllable ...).
• Complexity: Charging a car from the grid, at a fixed price, is not so complicated. But taking into account battery storage, variable solar production and dynamic prices makes this a complex task. Plus, every household has different individual needs. Can you work sometimes at home so that your car can charge at noon? Pre-canned systems are unlikely to get the most out if it.
• Breadth of hardware support: Panels, cars, wall boxes, inverters, batteries, controls: There are thousands of components on the market. Hardware vendors can however usually only support a few interfaces. Interacting with every common piece of hardware is beyound their capabilities, and impossible to fit to their business model. Open source in contrast can muster the manpower (and womanpower) to make many things work, as the Linux kernel shows.

Open source is a collaborative project, where many people contribute to something which is much more than the sum of its parts.

Enters the transition to renewable energy. Bidding farewell to fossil energy is urgently needed to ensure our survival as a human civilization. And if you think about it, it is perhaps the biggest and most far-reaching technical endeavour since the invention of fire. In future, we must survive and operate without burning things (or liquids), and this is not a small feat, as it means re-inventing so many things we do. Nobody can do this alone. We'll need every intelligent person and every alive brain cell to get there.

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/52207193

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/20041175

Hagen

One of the stories we have in the book is about that Apple Crush ad. There was that ad where they had all these instruments and drawing materials, et cetera, like all these art related things. on the hydraulic press, and then the hydraulic press crushes it. The piano keys shudder, the trumpet gets crushed, the paint gushes out, and at the end of the hydraulic press, there’s, the iPad.

BITM

And people hated it. They had to apologize for it.

Hagen

Yeah, they apologized—for an ad. So there’s this sense of, “yes, this is actually about transferring knowledge and skills into a tool so that you can pay people who use the tool less.” This is happening over and over again in capitalism. And we’re going to dismantle by force all of these things that you love and that create beautiful art.

It’s such a useful metaphor that they handed us. It was so beautifully clear that this is a way of bulldozing precisely the aspects of like human creative activity, which labor should be. Labor should be, you’re changing something in the world in accordance with your will. And that’s what it means to be alive as a human.