Source: Now I Can't Lose

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/66183461

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/74936481

... as hundreds of billions of dollars are flooding into artificial intelligence, there are serious concerns that an AI bubble could trigger another bailout with taxpayer money.

In the interview that follows, leading progressive economist Gerald Epstein, who initiated and directs the Game Changers project at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, talks about AI’s impact on finance and the bailout problem and how a transformative public finance strategy can revive democracy, promote equity and social justice, and build strong and sustainable communities.

Today IFM is releasing K2 Horizon, a connected fleet of six models: 375B-A23B, 36B-A4B, 32B, 7B, 3.7B, and 0.9B. Across reasoning, mathematics, coding, agentic tasks, and general capabilities, K2 Horizon delivers top-tier performance in every size class—with the 0.9B, 3.7B, and 7B models setting new state of the art at their respective scales.

We are releasing intermediate checkpoints, training data or detailed data-construction recipes, open architecture, mixture compositions, training code, configurations, fine-grained logs, evaluation results, and final weights.

The models and code are released under the Apache 2.0 license. Datasets are released under their applicable licenses, such as ODC-BY; We disclose how the data was constructed and mixed when redistribution is not possible.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/57722641

New Zealand's exporters are diverting shipments originally bound for China into other markets as demand from the country's biggest trading partner cools, an official from the antipodean country's central bank said Thursday.

"We've certainly seen many of our exporters looking at, and actively diverting, product that they would have been looking to put into China, into other markets as well," said Karen Silk, assistant governor at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. "It is not the only export market."

Silk's remarks reflect how the slowdown in China's economy has rippled through to businesses elsewhere. Growth in the world's second-largest economy slowed to multi-year lows in the second quarter, weighed down by tepid domestic demand and a prolonged real estate slump. She spoke to CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" on Thursday, a day after the central bank delivered its second consecutive interest rate hike to curb inflation.

...

China has been New Zealand’s largest trading partner and top market, buying roughly a quarter of New Zealand’s total exports over the 12 months ending in July. New Zealand’s China-bound goods in 2025 were close to double that of the next two biggest export markets — the U.S. and Australia — combined, according to the New Zealand China Council.

...

Elevated global commodity prices, including for wheat, have handed New Zealand’s pasture-based farmers a relative cost advantage even as China-bound volumes soften, Silk said.

“In some ways, New Zealand actually benefits from a price perspective when we have those supply factors going on globally,” she said.

...

Web Archive link

2,000 leaked files expose Bauman University’s hidden Department No. 4, which trained GRU-linked hackers and propagandists linked to APT28 and Sandworm. Leaked Documents Expose Bauman University’s Hidden Department That Trained Hackers, Propagandists, and Malware Developers for the GRU More than 2,000 internal documents from Bauman Moscow State Technical University have been reviewed by an international […]

In collaboration with the SHARE Foundation, the Citizen Lab analyzed forensic artefacts from the iPhone of a member of Serbia’s student protest movement after they received an Apple Threat Notification warning of targeting with mercenary spyware.

Our analysis confirmed that an iMessage zero-click exploit was used to infect the device with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. We found high-confidence indicators of infection from a period across December 2025 – January 2026, however this does not preclude the possibility of additional infections.

We believe that the zero-click exploit used in this attack targeted Apple iMessage, and has subsequently been patched by Apple as of iOS 18.4.1.

This was THE summer hit of 2002...

This is what computer programming means for me. You can build your own tools. You can share them with others. When you build and share such tools, you meet other people that perceive and interact with the world in the same way as you do. You make new friends. I guess this is what I've been trying to do in my life. Get people to understand this process. With computers, you can make your own tools, and so you can augment yourself, and others, to accomplish more things. This is something special about computer and especially open source tools. It costs no money at all to try this.

This idea isn't really new, either. Steve Jobs called the Macintosh "a bicycle for the mind", referring to the fact that the human on a bicycle is the most efficient animal on the planet. And before Jobs, you can see similar ideas in Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos, where a whole section is about the human-computer interaction loop, and how their hardware (the mouse, the keyset, the realtime display) was designed to improve this loop and make the tool as transparent as possible (update: actually the segment I was thinking about is in a later talk from Douglas Engelbart in 1986). Just like when you ride a bicycle, and you're not particularly thinking about pedalling and braking and shifting gears and keeping your balance. It's as natural as walking.

But then, there is a limitation on that as soon as you're not the one building the tool. Say you buy a Macintosh or a Windows machine. Someone has designed it to work a certain way. And their design will shape how you perceive and interact with the world.

Vielleicht sollte jeder von uns was für die Autoindustrie spenden, so 1000€ vielleicht? Nächstes Jahr unterstützen wir dann die Banken.

Duration - 59:25 [A video podcast about Cuba from the podcast team Cuba Analysis Podcasts]

In this episode of Cuba Analysis, Helen Yaffe and Nina Blodau speak with Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who has served as the nation’s top diplomat for nearly two decades. They ask him to set aside diplomatic language to describe life in Cuba under the US blockade.

Rodríguez Parrilla outlines the impact of the ‘maximum pressure’ strategy pursued during President Trump’s first administration and the sharp escalation of US economic warfare in 2026, including two executive orders, an oil siege of the island, and an aggressive increase in sanctions threatened against Cuba’s global partners.

The Minister stresses the human consequences of these measures: Cuba’s infant mortality rate has doubled, and some 7,000 shipping containers carrying essential food and medical supplies are currently being prevented from unloading on the island. This continues despite almost unanimous international condemnation of the US blockade at the United Nations, where Cuba has become a symbol of the struggle for self-determination and sovereignty.

Alongside economic warfare, the US government has openly threatened a military attack. The Minister confirms that Cubans take these threats seriously and warns that any US military action would result in a bloodbath on both sides, with devastating consequences for the wider Caribbean. Rodríguez Parrilla rejects outright the labelling of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism and as a threat to US national security. He points to lies and fabrications by US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and argues that only ‘a small group of corrupt politicians’ would benefit from the destruction of Cuba.

After almost seven decades of US attempts to force political change in Cuba, why has the policy failed? The Minister reflects on Cuba’s resilience and on the possibility of a future based on dialogue, sovereignty, mutual respect and cooperation between neighbours.

Crossposted from https://slrpnk.net/post/42283411

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputies took a man into custody Wednesday after he showed up outside their headquarters with multiple Flock cameras in the back of his pickup truck.

Authorities arrested Jevon Martinez for damaging Flock cameras in Rio Rancho in May. Then, Wednesday, he posted video on social media appearing to show him driving around Albuquerque and taking down automated license plate readers once again.

In those videos, he comments that since the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office ended its contract with Flock last month, those cameras should no longer be out on the streets.

"Just for the record, I am not stealing these. I am not destroying them. I am simply returning them to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department,” he said in one video.