The shallow Yangtze river produced a smooth reflection of the setting autumn sun. Here, a few dozen kilometres north of Shanghai, one could barely perceive the giant metropolis nearby. Like so often in the early September days, an immovable heat dome rested over the river delta, heavy, as though its crushing presence had produced the flat terrain underneath.

Many families from the city were using the river to cool down after work, and the Yinghe family was no exception. The mother of the house, De, had enthusiastically left the Department of Pharmacology looking forward to some family time on the beach; while her boyfriend, Xing, could only reluctantly emerge from his pleasantly cool office at the Mathematics Department. He loved his kids, too, but he hated both the humidity and the lack of modern amenities this pristinely natural portion of the beach provided. Still, he buckled to the decision that was reached democratically by his girlfriend and kids.

Shanghai was incredibly pleasant to get around with its state-of-the-art public transit system, but foregoing the purchase of a mostly useless family car sometimes meant having to carry heavy bags of towels, sunshades, and other miscellanea all the way to the beach. Fortunately, the kids were as enthusiastic about enforcing their decision as they were about making it, so Xing was at least spared the literal burdens of this trip.

Xing and De had met at Jiao Tong university; she was attending his tutorial group on mathematics for natural scientists. Although outstanding in her own field, De had needed his help the most. Xing, four semesters ahead, was earning some cash teaching her class about calculus and deductive reasoning, and after she graduated a few years later, she returned the favour by teaching him about the wonders of human reproductive biology. The certificate for the course came in duplicate: Yang and Yue, twin boys and now age ten, were living proof that Xing had passed with flying colours; though not without receiving a forceful slap in the face after jokingly insinuating that De now had the perfect setup for a twin study.

The extra mischief the twins would enjoy causing by looking alike was offset by a sort of harmony which only that same symmetry could provide, currently materialising in the precious sight of them working on a little dam to back up some water from the river. It was backing up the water inside a narrow channel fed by the river proper. Right now, De had given up on trying to take pictures against the fading sun, and it was Xing's turn to watch them, away from the textbooks and papers he packed to distract himself from the inauspicious number 44 that the thermometer kept producing.

Crouching over the shallow stretch of water that has been building up behind the dam, Xing was fascinated by an effect he had recently learned that linear mathematics could not explain: He dipped a little plastic shovel into the water which caused a soliton - A lone wave, expanding in both directions, travelling the entire length of the channel without losing any of its energy. His play was interrupted by Yang, who managed to cause another such soliton, but with a different shape and speed. It was about to reach Xing's wave shortly before the dam, when something happened that seemed like witchcraft to the twins:

Instead of the heights adding up like normal, periodic water waves, soliton heights do not add linearly. When one soliton reaches another, their combined height can greatly exceed the sum of their individual heights. The result of this strange kind of addition was the unfortunate demise of the little dam they had just built, but due to Xing's incessantly honed ability to eloquently explain what just happened, the evening miraculously remained without tears.

When the family finally came home in the last twilight, they had already forgotten about this neat little demonstration. Subconsciously though, it had irreversibly forged the future lifes of the twins: Yue, with a newfound respect for the hidden dangers of nature, was preoccupied to learn how to better protect his constructions and became an engineer; while Yang would become engrossed with more such otherworldly phenomena hiding in plain sight, and follow his father's footsteps to also become a mathematician working on nonlinear phenomena.

This paper describes a method by which an LLM can be used to hide a text, list, or programming code using a prompt with the right key, by masking it as an output text of the same token size. The same method can also be used for jailbreaks, i.e. circumventing censorship of the answers given by the model

The eagle has reddened its claws today
The pig has bared its tusk
The sun, it seems to have slipped away
As if into eternal dusk

No longer clear is the blue of the sky
The fires spread far through the night
In the country of Xerxes, the mothers cry
As the sons leave their house for the fight

In the face of its wrath, the battle seems vain
Too vast and barbaric the foes
But already with even the tiniest pain
They yank from the beehive their nose

Behind their imposing silhouettes
Their claws and their tusks swift and able
Hide hollow and purposeless marionettes
From the clay of the tower of Babel

One day, and they look for escape from the mess
One week, and their people oppose them
One month, they will stand against pain and duress
To demand to defy and depose them

Iran´s revolution is far from its end
Its people are seeing it through
And while they, invaders, against you defend
They will carry it over to you

Text of the article:

*Raytheon Technology Corp. (RTX) has been assessed a $200 million fine for violating export laws involving exchanging information on U.S. combat aircraft with prohibited countries. The laws are associated with the International Traffic in Arm Regulations. According to the U.S. State Department, RTX is guilty of improperly classifying and controlling exports of defense articles, including classified material.

Sensitive information on the F-22 Raptor, F-35 Lightning II, and B-2 Spirit bomber was mistakenly made available to Russia, China, and Iran.

According to a Reuters report, RTX voluntarily disclosed its errors. At a July 25 earnings call with investors, the company said it had earmarked $1 billion to resolve three separate legal issues that it said were primarily identified during the integration of firms Rockwell Collins and Raytheon/United Technologies into RTX in April 2020.

According to a U.S. State Department document released last week, one of the transgressions involved providing Chinese nationals in Shanghai with information that was more sensitive than RTX employees realized on “an aluminum display housing component of the F-22 Raptor Fighter Aircraft.”

On the earnings call, RTX told investors, "As part of the resolution of each of these three matters, we will be required to retain independent compliance monitors over the three-year term of the agreements." Half of the fine will be spent to fund a remedial compliance program.*

Own take:

First of all, hahahahaha!! This is what you get for being such a free market fundamentalist shithole that you leave war production in the hands of the private sector! Also China wins again by doing absolutely nothing lol

I think this punishment is extremely lenient considering this could be viewed as treason. It's barely .012% of their market cap, so it's like a speeding ticket for a normal person. Also it mentions they are having three other violations at the same time, so this is apparently a regular occurrence. In my opinion, this just goes to show how deep the US government is in the pocket of these companies.

Costa Rica is a tropical country and has only two seasons; a dry season from January to March and a wet season during the rest of the year. It is geographically impossible for there to be a Four Seasons hotel in this country. If anyone has sold you a stay at such a resort, you have been scammed! Contrary to what is advertised, you will not experience autumn, winter, or spring in the way temperate latitudes do, nor do these hotels undertake any actions to emulate such an experience.

As the abstraction of the act of streaming from its individual particularities, NPC streaming presents the distillation of the streaming profession, resulting in maximal efficiency in revenue generation. A quantitative increase in this kind of stream will eventually result in a qualitative transformation of the industry where it will be sublated by an entirely novel mode of production, namely the streamer-capitalist who relies entirely on the viewer for both the production and the consumption of their product, and who will eventually become a node in a never-ending tree of subcontractors.

Comrades, today I had the pleasure of participating in our city's First of May demonstration, and to purchase two books from the local chapter of the MLPD (Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany). One of them is pretty well-known, it is the Dialectics of Nature by Friedrich Engels; the other was an obscure philosophy tract written by one Mr Oscar Creydt where he attempts to reframe the entire history of the universe from a ML point of view, which is why I went in there with high expectations, namely that it would use recent discoveries from natural science to develop new ML philosophy.

Unfortunately for me however, whilst the book started promising and ambitious and it does demonstrate a good grasp of the historical developments of quantum mechanics, by page 60 of 220 it occurs to the author that he wants to deny Einstein's theory of general relativity, arguably the most well-tested and internally consistent theory in all of physics. But this was only the hors-d'oeuvre of the work, he goes on to try and reduce every single phenomenon in the universe to the vibration inherent to photons (which he calls "radions"), he spouts metaphysical nonsense about why the speed of light is constant, he declares the cosmic microwave background radiation to be the "primitive stage" of this vibration because Big Bang cosmology isn't real either, and he makes no attempt to explain cosmological redshift, gravitational lensing, or the perihelion precession of Mercury with his mental construction.

Now bear in mind that I don't necessarily want to accuse the author of being bad at science. The foreword of the book explicitly remarks that due to the anticommunist Stroessner regime in Paraguay, he couldn't rely on qualified people to empirically test or mathematically proofread his work, it is possible that the libraries he frequented just didn't have reliable books on the topics, and even the best scientists might publish utter drivel after having to work in isolation for decades. However, it is obvious that the mistake with this approach is that you cannot start with your own interpretation of dialectical materialism, and then change science to fit into it. This is a misconception of ML philosophy which many theoretically-minded comrades have already exposed, including on this very website. The refutation to it is that rather than relying on some rigid dogma formulated by humans, nature begets the shape of her own dialectics via her own interactions with herself; which is why we must study nature to arrive at natural philosophy and not vice versa.

The last thing I want to remark is that, if instead it had been let's say a Christian fanfic of science, one would immediately have noticed from the lack of footnotes and historical background knowledge, the presence of biblical and other nonscientific references, the use of odd figures and diagrams derived from gnosticism, or the extensive use of all-capital letter words. Here, there were no such signs. Marxist-Leninist scientific malpractice is especially worrisome because you might not even notice it until several pages into the book and even then the errors are of a much more subtle nature and require background knowledge.

btw China has quadrupled its green energy production since 2008