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#usa

2K posts548 participants100 posts today
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"If you live in Mississippi, you may have noticed that you are no longer able to log into your Bluesky or Dreamwidth accounts from within the state. That’s because, in a chilling early warning sign for the U.S., both social platforms decided to block all users in Mississippi from their services rather than risk hefty fines under the state’s oppressive age verification mandate.

If this sounds like censorship to you, you’re right—it is. But it’s not these small platforms’ fault. This is the unfortunate result of Mississippi’s wide-sweeping age verification law, H.B. 1126. Though the law had previously been blocked by a federal district court, the Supreme Court lifted that injunction last month, even as one justice (Kavanaugh) concluded that the law is “likely unconstitutional.” This allows H.B. 1126 to go into effect while the broader constitutional challenge works its way through the courts. EFF has opposed H.B. 1126 from the start, arguing consistently and constantly that it violates all internet users’ First Amendment rights, seriously risks our privacy, and forces platforms to implement invasive surveillance systems that ruin our anonymity.

Lawmakers often sell age-verification mandates as a silver bullet for Big Tech’s harms, but in practice, these laws do nothing to rein in the tech giants. Instead, they end up crushing smaller platforms that can’t absorb the exorbitant costs. Now that Mississippi’s mandate has gone into effect, the reality is clear: age verification laws entrench Big Tech’s dominance, while pushing smaller communities like Bluesky and Dreamwidth offline altogether."

eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/age-

Electronic Frontier Foundation · Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller PlatformsIf you live in Mississippi, you may have noticed that you are no longer able to log into your Bluesky or Dreamwidth accounts from within the state. That’s because, in a chilling early warning sign for the U.S., both social platforms decided to block all users in Mississippi from their services...
#AgeVerification#Censorship#Surveillance
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Another day, another record high for the S&P 500, and another investment bank has a research note asking whether AI stocks are in a bubble. Today it is the turn of Goldman Sachs, where Ryan Hammond and his team have made a lengthy and thoughtful attempt to assess whether Nvidia et al. are heading for a crash.

Their conclusion: We’re not there yet.

The S&P was up 0.83% to 6,502.08 yesterday, a new record.

Valuations are high, but they are actually lower than they were in the dotcom boom of 2000, Goldman says. There is one danger looming, the bank notes, and that is the “inevitable slowdown” in capital expenditures by the “hyperscaler” AI companies, (Amazon, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle).

Under what Goldman calls “an extreme scenario in which the hyperscalers cut capex back to 2022 levels,” the “lost” revenues to AI companies would represent a 30% cut to Goldman’s estimate of $1 trillion in total sales growth across the S&P 500 companies next year. In turn, “a reversion of long-term growth estimates back to early 2023 levels would imply 15%–20% downside to the current valuation multiple of the S&P 500.”"

fortune.com/2025/09/05/ai-inev

Fortune · When AI’s ‘inevitable slowdown’ comes it could tank S&P 500’s valuation multiple by up to 20%, Goldman Sachs saysBy Jim Edwards
#USA#AI#GenerativeAI
Continued thread
Putin's IBS

The #USA has also begun importing eggs from #Saudi_Arabia ($518 thousand). The total volume of chicken egg imports to the #USA in July was $16.5 million. The largest suppliers were #Brazil ($8.8 million), #Mexico ($3.9 million), and #India ($933 thousand).

But the funniest thing is that egg prices in #Russia have risen by almost 12%.🤦‍♂️

🇷🇺 We will pay more ourselves, but we will deliver eggs to our geopolitical enemy!

#ukraine #putinisamasskiller #putinisawarcriminal @kardinal691

Miguel Afonso Caetano

"There was nothing in the encounter in the Caribbean Sea that is indicative of a war. There has been no suggestion that the alleged drug traffickers were firing at US forces or otherwise engaged in what could fairly be described as combat. The US military simply blew them out the water. It wrongly applied wartime rules in what should have been a law-enforcement situation.

That Trump calls drug-trafficking suspects “terrorists” doesn’t change the rules for law enforcement. Terrorists are criminals, not combatants. Absent an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, they must be arrested, not shot.

That illicit drugs such as fentanyl cause enormous harm also does not alter the rules governing law-enforcement operations. Much criminal activity causes serious harm, but unless that harm constitutes an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury and cannot be stopped by other means, law-enforcement standards require arrest and prosecution, not the use of lethal force."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/

The Guardian · Trump’s killing of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers sets a dangerous precedentBy Kenneth Roth
#USA#Trump#InternationalLaw
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Large language models can’t play chess at all. They make illegal moves. They’re not very good. But what they do do is: They have a vast amount of data. If you have more data, you have a more representative something-or-other. So, like, if you take a poll of voters, the more voters you have, the more accurate the poll is. So they have a very large sample of human writing—in fact, the entire internet. And they have a whole bunch of data that they’ve transcribed from video and so forth. So they have more than all of the written text in the internet. That’s an insane amount of data. And what they’re doing every time they answer a question is they’re trying to approximate what was said in this context before. They don’t have a deep understanding of the context. They just have the words. They don’t really understand what’s going on, but that deep pile of data allows them to present an illusion of intelligence. I wouldn’t actually call it intelligence. It does depend on what your definition of the term is, but what I would say is it’s still brute force.

So let me come back to chess for a second. If you ask a large language model, even a recent one, to play chess, it will often make illegal moves. That’s something that a six-year-old child won’t do."

theatlantic.com/podcasts/archi

The Atlantic · AI and the Fight Between Democracy and AutocracyBy Garry Kasparov
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs
*
Reto

Land of the Free, home of the brave:

«In der Annahme, es könnten nordkoreanische Sicherheitskräfte sein, eröffneten die US-Elitesoldaten mit ihren schallgedämpften Spezialwaffen das Feuer und töteten mehrere Zivilisten.»

Das war 2019 unter #Trump!

Können wir bitte den #USA nicht mehr in den Arsch kriechen?

watson.ch/international/armee/

Enthüllt: Wie eine streng geheime Mission des SEAL Team 6 in Nordkorea scheiterte
watson · Wie eine streng geheime Mission des SEAL Team 6 in Nordkorea missglückteBy Daniel Schurter
#Armee#Westen#Soldaten
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement, an estimated $3,000 per work. In a court motion on Friday, the plaintiffs emphasized that the terms of the settlement are “critical victories” and that going to trial would have been an “enormous” risk.

This is the first class action settlement centered on AI and copyright in the United States, and the outcome may shape how regulators and creative industries approach the legal debate over generative AI and intellectual property. According to the settlement agreement, the class action will apply to approximately 500,000 works, but that number may go up once the list of pirated materials is finalized. For every additional work, the artificial intelligence company will pay an extra $3,000. Plaintiffs plan to deliver a final list of works to the court by October."

wired.com/story/anthropic-sett

WIRED · Anthropic Agrees to Pay Authors at Least $1.5 Billion in AI Copyright SettlementBy Kate Knibbs
#AI#GenerativeAI#Chatbots
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