Russia has unilaterally redrawn its maritime borders in the Baltic Sea with Lithuania and Finland, claiming additional areas as internal waters. The move, announced in a government decree, affects parts of the eastern Gulf of Finland and waters near the Kaliningrad cities of Baltiysk and Zelenogradsk.
The decree cites outdated geographic coordinates from a 1985 USSR Council of Ministers decree as the reason for the change. It argues that the old coordinates, based on mid-20th century maps, are no longer accurate and hinder the determination of Russia’s internal sea waters.
The proposed adjustments target areas near several Finnish islands and the northern entrance of the Narva River. On the Lithuanian border, the Curonian Spit, Cape Taran, and the Baltic Spit are under review.
The timing of these events, coupled with Latvia’s recent investment in a new maritime border surveillance system, suggests a growing unease in the region.
Joe Biden was ready to have his main political rival Donald Trump and his family killed for a publicity stunt!
Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday unsealed numerous motions related to Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Trump.
One filing revealed Biden’s FBI authorized the use of deadly force during their raid on Mar-a-Lago authorized by US Attorney General Merrick Garland in August 2022.
“Should FPOTUS [Trump] arrive at MAL [Mar-a-Lago], FBI MM EM and OSCs will be prepared to engage with FPOTUS and USSS Security Team.”
“Should USSS provide resistance or interfere with FBI timeline or accesses, FBI MM EM will engage with [redacted] and [redacted] will engage with USSS POC’s per existing liaison relationships.”
Sweden is bordering on “civil war” as the country has become gripped by migrant violence, according to a leading expert.
Göran Adamson, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Uppsala University, told Express.co.uk that his country was becoming a “capital of violence” – partly due to a wave of suspected criminals moving there.
According to official figures from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), the number of fatalities a year per million from gun violence is more than double the European average.
At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called “Recall” for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research. Despite encryption and local storage, the new feature raises privacy concerns for certain Windows users.
“Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds,” Microsoft says on its website. “The snapshots are encrypted and saved on your PC’s hard drive. You can use Recall to locate the content you have viewed on your PC using search or on a timeline bar that allows you to scroll through your snapshots.”
At first glance, the Recall feature seems like it may set the stage for potential gross violations of user privacy. Despite reassurances from Microsoft, that impression persists for second and third glances as well. For example, someone with access to your Windows account could potentially use Recall to see everything you’ve been doing recently on your PC, which might extend beyond the embarrassing implications of pornography viewing and actually threaten the lives of journalists or perceived enemies of the state.
Despite the privacy concerns, Microsoft says that the Recall index remains local and private on-device, encrypted in a way that is linked to a particular user’s account. “Recall screenshots are only linked to a specific user profile and Recall does not share them with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements. Screenshots are only available to the person whose profile was used to sign in to the device,” Microsoft says.
An example of a shrimp Jesus image on Facebook with no caption or context information included in the post. Credit: Facebook
If you search “shrimp Jesus” on Facebook, you might encounter dozens of images of artificial intelligence (AI) generated crustaceans meshed in various forms with a stereotypical image of Jesus Christ.
Some of these hyper-realistic images have garnered more than 20,000 likes and comments. So what exactly is going on here?
The “dead internet theory” has an explanation: AI and bot-generated content has surpassed the human-generated internet. But where did this idea come from, and does it have any basis in reality?
What is the dead internet theory?
The dead internet theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents.
These agents can rapidly create posts alongside AI-generated images designed to farm engagement (clicks, likes, comments) on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. As for shrimp Jesus, it appears AI has learned it’s the current, latest mix of absurdity and religious iconography to go viral.
But the dead internet theory goes even further. Many of the accounts that engage with such content also appear to be managed by artificial intelligence agents. This creates a vicious cycle of artificial engagement, one that has no clear agenda and no longer involves humans at all.
Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s trip to China apparently failed last week to secure a project key to the hopes of Moscow’s struggling energy sector.
Putin’s state visit produced a joint statement heralding a “new era” for Beijing and Moscow’s “no limits partnership,” while the hug shared with Chinese counterpart Xi made headlines. But the long-ruling Russian leader walked away without a contract for a pipeline between his country and its largest export market.
Russia has offset some of the business it lost over its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by rerouting natural gas and oil to China. This relationship continues to deepen with the first Power of Siberia pipeline expected to reach full capacity this year and pipe 38 billion cubic meters (bcm) into China annually.
However, the outsized importance of the Chinese market gives Beijing more control over the terms. Gas is flowing into China at a rate of $257 per 1,000 cubic meters, compared to the $320 for its remaining European markets, and this discount is set to increase to 28 percent next year.
Our manual analysis shows that ChatGPT produces incorrect answers more than 50% of the time. Moreover, ChatGPT suffers from other quality issues such as verbosity, inconsistency, etc. Results of the in-depth manual analysis also point towards a large number of conceptual and logical errors in ChatGPT answers. Additionally, our linguistic analysis results show that ChatGPT answers are very formal, and rarely portray negative sentiments. Although our user study shows higher user preference and quality rating for human answers, users make occasional mistakes by preferring incorrect ChatGPT answers based on ChatGPT’s articulated language styles, as well as seemingly correct logic that is presented with positive assertions.
The thing about trade wars is they really stop you from trading…
Reports have piled up about how Big Tech companies have turned on their money hoses to poach top AI talent from each other. They’ve also turned on the charm — both OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have reportedly been personally involved in courting candidates and offering lavish salaries. But a larger and more intractable talent war is brewing between the US and China.
U-S-A-I
China has had a habit of overtaking the US in technology, like EV adoption or 5G rollout. But when it comes to the hype-beast of generative AI, the US holds the reins. That’s partly because of how the tech industry is set up — Big Tech companies are developing AI in-house, but they’re also forging partnerships with startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, and France-based Mistral AI, because the cloud and computing infrastructure needed to run AI models is dominated by Microsoft, Amazon, and to a lesser extent, Google.
Meanwhile, the US wants to box China out of AI development, arguing that it might use it for military or otherwise nefarious purposes. Its ever-escalating chip trade war is aimed at depriving China of physical infrastructure, and the US is reportedly considering banning exports of AI models (although that seems a little nonsensical). The US is even fighting by proxy: The New York Timesreported in November that US officials were feverishly dissuading Dubai-based G42 to cut its AI links to Chinese businesses.
In another example of how truth is often stranger than fiction, scientists have taken a significant step towards turning the sci-fi concept of “warp drives” into a feasible reality.
New research, led by Dr. Jared Fuchs from Applied Physics and published in the prestigious Classical and Quantum Gravity journal, presents a new solution to one of the long-standing challenges in realizing warp drive technology.
Applied Physics researchers identified a new way in which warp technology might one day be possible. The team introduced the concept of a “constant-velocity subluminal warp drive” aligned with the principles of relativity.
The new model eliminates the need for exotic energy, using instead a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics.
“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” said lead author Dr. Fuchs. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”
There isn’t one big development today, but a series of smaller but still relevant items to update on to keep things within scope as the overall picture continues to escalate in the war in Ukraine and elsewhere. So, this report will be a bit scattershot as I cover many topics.
The biggest news is that yesterday, May 18th, the Ukrainian new mobilization strictures officially and finally went into effect. This has resulted in a flood of videos showing deserted streets, with claims that men are now in hiding like never before.
The below compilation starts with Poltava, then progresses to other cities:
[see link below for video]
Additionally, Ukrainian truckers even staged a mass protest, blocking roads. It will be not only ‘interesting’ to see where this goes and how successful it is, but in fact this will be one of the critical bellwethers for Ukraine as a whole. We know that the manpower issue is paramount and the entire future of this war rests on how successful—or not—this mobilization will be.
In the coming months, after lowering the draft bar to 25 years, an additional 100 thousand men born in 1998-1999 will be called up to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. During these years, 416,349 boys were born. About half of them are already abroad. Summon the remaining half.
Further, it obviously converges with the end of Zelensky’s legitimacy in only two days hence, which even big Western media co’s like Economist are now beginning to seed into the public consciousness for a reason. This is significant because if the ‘enhanced mobilization’ takes a wrong turn, Zelensky’s lack of legitimacy will present an easy, ready scapegoat, and things can escalate against him very quickly.
High Plains Drifter is a 1973 American Western film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. The movie follows a mysterious gunfighter, known only as “The Stranger” (Clint Eastwood), who rides into the small town of Lago, a mining community in the American West. The townspeople are initially wary of the Stranger, but after he guns down three outlaws who try to kill him, they begin to see him as a hero and hire him to defend them against a group of ruthless outlaws who are planning to attack the town.
As the Stranger becomes embroiled in the town’s affairs, he begins to uncover a web of corruption and deceit that threatens the very existence of the community. With his unique skills and mysterious past, the Stranger must use his wits and his guns to protect the town and its people from the outlaws and the corrupt officials who are working against them.
Throughout the film, the Stranger’s true identity and motivations remain unclear, adding to the sense of mystery and intrigue. The movie’s climax features a dramatic showdown between the Stranger and the outlaws, and the film’s ending is open to interpretation, leaving audiences to ponder the Stranger’s true nature and the fate of the town.
High Plains Drifter is a critically acclaimed film that explores themes of justice, morality, and the American West, and features Eastwood’s characteristic blend of action, suspense, and dry humor.
A comment on X from TES I saw this morning:
Since I often post links to TES’s work, I feel mildly compelled to post an answer to the above. From it and some of his other writings, I diagnosis a commonplace Western (mis)understanding of religion which entails seeing all of them as similar in important ways to the Abrahamics. There are literally thousands of competent Buddhist teachers who could disabuse TES of his wrong views if he would but ask. Since Buddhism is both complex and fundamentally a mind-to-mind and experiential body of knowledge, deeper understanding will take some time but it is there for the taking if he wants it. TES has been first-rate in his analyses of covid and frequently claims to have expert skills based on both his understanding of how to interpret real-world data and his experience in the real-world doing that. A good Buddhist teacher could be described in just that way. I have a great deal of respect for TES and will continue to post links to his work on covid and global warming and maybe some other stuff. ABN
UPDATE: I should add that TES has a way out since the Buddha himself asked that his teachings never be written down to prevent them from becoming ‘religious scriptures’ people worshipped without understanding. That said, in other places TES has displayed deep ignorance of Buddhism and lumped it together with other traditions in ways that are seriously misleading. Incidentally, for many years Buddhism was considered a philosophy in the West rather than a religion. American tax laws settled that argument. In truth, Buddhism is both a religion and a philosophy. It is the philosophical side of Buddhism that is most often misunderstood, not unlike how skepticism is often misunderstood. Moreover, ironically, it is highly likely skepticism has been influenced by Buddhism and vice versa. ABN
American Buddhist Net 