All posts tagged: certainly

Peter Thiel’s ‘Fresh and Strange’ Ideas Are Certainly the Latter

Published by Sam

[ad_1] Just two years ago, Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed that many right-wing influencers didn’t believe a word of the stuff they were peddling to their audiences. In text messages that surfaced during litigation, top Fox anchors and executives poured scorn on the idea that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, even as the network amplified that conspiracy theory to its audience. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Tucker Carlson wrote in one message. Today, though, some of the country’s most mainstream, most influential conservatives are stoking paranoid conspiracism—and seem to genuinely believe what they’re saying. The venture capitalist Peter Thiel, for example, could not be more of an establishment figure: He was an early investor in Facebook, is now a mentor of Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance, and has strong links to the U.S. defense industry through his company Palantir. But in a recent opinion column in the ultra-establishment Financial Times, Thiel sounds like The X-Files’ Fox Mulder after a long night in the Bigfoot forums. …

Programmer: AI could certainly become conscious

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[ad_1] AI researcher Casper Wilstrup, founder of drug design firm Abzu, tells us that he has been obsessed with consciousness all his life. He first began to think about it seriously when he became aware of the concept of death: It was a gut-punch realization: the day I die, everything ceases to exist from my point of view. The world might as well go dark. It was like staring into “The Nothing” from Michael Ende’s “The Neverending Story.” It wasn’t even eternal darkness; the very notion of “eternity” itself felt empty if there were no experiences to fill it. Casper Wilstrup, “With Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind Has Become an Experimental Science,” Medium, Sep 10, 2023 That’s poetic as well as frightening. What happened next though feels like a distinct change in mood. We are presented with five propositions: ● Consciousness is real, not imaginary.● We know what it is, even if we’re still figuring out how it happens.● Consciousness is natural, so it’s something we can study.● AI can be conscious too. Saying otherwise …

Israeli talk of war with Hezbollah almost certainly fresh attempt at deterrence | Hezbollah

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[ad_1] A warning from Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, that a decision on “all-out war” with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is coming soon is almost certainly a fresh attempt at deterrence on his part – not least because both sides well understand how devastating full hostilities would be. The reality is that Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, is a more powerful adversary than Hamas in Gaza. It is estimated to have between 30,000 and 50,000 fighters available and a similar number in reserve – plus between 120,000 and 200,000 unguided missiles and rockets, plus attack and reconnaissance drones. Assaf Orion, a former brigadier-general in the Israel Defense Forces and its chief of strategy between 2010 and 2015, estimates that Hezbollah has “tens times the arsenal of Hamas” and implies that any conflict would be a similar order of magnitude greater than the hostilities in Gaza after 7 October. Katz, speaking on Tuesday, was responding to a nine-minute video of drone footage released by Hezbollah, showing detail of military and residential sites in Israel’s port of …

Elon Musk says Russia will ‘certainly gain more land’

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[ad_1] Vladimir Putin has signed a decree setting out the routine spring conscription campaign, calling up 150,000 citizens for statutory military service, a document posted on the Kremlin’s website showed on Sunday. Compulsory military service has long been a sensitive issue in Russia, where many men go to great lengths to avoid being handed conscription papers during the twice-yearly call-up periods. All men in Russia are required to do a year-long military service, or equivalent training during higher education, from the age of 18. In July Russia’s lower house of parliament voted to raise the maximum age at which men can be conscripted to 30 from 27. The new legislation came into effect on Jan 1, 2024. Conscripts cannot legally be deployed to fight outside Russia and were exempted from a limited mobilisation in 2022 that gathered at least 300,000 men with previous military training to fight in Ukraine – although some conscripts were sent to the front in error. In September Putin signed an order calling up 130,000 people for the autumn campaign and …

The U.S. wants ByteDance to sell TikTok. China is almost certainly going to refuse

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[ad_1] The U.S. could be about to force ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant that owns TikTok, to divest its U.S. business or effectively ban the app. But a sale looks unlikely — not least because China is expected to block it. The House on Wednesday approved a bill that requires ByteDance to divest TikTok, the social media platform it owns, within roughly six months for the app “to remain available in the United States.” This legislation is not yet law and needs approval from the Senate. Washington has long contended that TikTok poses a national security threat, as American data could get into the hands of the Chinese government. Lawmakers in the U.S. are also concerned about the short video app’s alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party, which the company has denied. If the bill is passed, however, the Chinese government is unlikely to approve the divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. business. “The problem is that the Chinese government is unlikely to approve this type of forced … merger and acquisition,” Paul Triolo, an associate partner at consulting …

British firms' exports are almost certainly bolstering Russia's war machine in Ukraine, Sky data analysis finds

British firms’ exports are almost certainly bolstering Russia’s war machine in Ukraine, Sky data analysis finds

Published by Sam

[ad_1] British companies are exporting hundreds of millions of pounds of equipment and machinery which almost certainly ends up in Russia, undermining the official sanctions regime and bolstering Vladimir Putin’s war machine, according to data analysis from Sky News. The items – which include drone equipment, optical supplies and heavy machinery – are being sent to countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan and others, from where they are understood to be forwarded on to Russia. Ukraine war latest: Russia hits out at UK after prison bosses sanctioned over Navalny death The numbers show that despite the sharp fall in the flow of goods to Russia, following the imposition of trade sanctions after its invasion of Ukraine two years ago, large volumes of sensitive, “dual use” British goods are still finding their way to Moscow. The analysis underlines the scale of Britain’s participation in a shadow economy which helps keep Russia’s military supplied with parts and hardware for the weaponry it uses against Ukraine Flows of British goods to Russia itself …

British firms’ exports are almost certainly bolstering Russia’s war machine in Ukraine, Sky data analysis finds | Business News

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[ad_1] British companies are exporting hundreds of millions of pounds of equipment and machinery which almost certainly ends up in Russia, undermining the official sanctions regime and bolstering Vladimir Putin’s war machine, according to data analysis from Sky News. The items – which include drone equipment, optical supplies and heavy machinery – are being sent to countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan and others, from where they are understood to be forwarded on to Russia. Ukraine war latest: Russia hits out at UK after prison bosses sanctioned over Navalny death The numbers show that despite the sharp fall in the flow of goods to Russia, following the imposition of trade sanctions after its invasion of Ukraine two years ago, large volumes of sensitive, “dual use” British goods are still finding their way to Moscow. The analysis underlines the scale of Britain’s participation in a shadow economy which helps keep Russia’s military supplied with parts and hardware for the weaponry it uses against Ukraine Flows of British goods to Russia itself …

Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump ‘Almost Certainly’ Won In 2020

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[ad_1] Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail. The Heartland Institute study tried to gauge the probable impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots cast for both then-candidate Joe Biden and his opponent, President Donald Trump, would have had on the overall 2020 election results. The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey in December that revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters admitted to potentially fraudulent actions in the presidential election. After the researchers carried out additional analyses of the data, they concluded that mail-in ballot fraud “significantly” impacted the 2020 presidential election. They also found that, absent the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, which was often done without legislative approval, President Trump would most likely have won. “Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the …

Rats are more human than you think – and they certainly like being around us

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[ad_1] Rats have a somewhat unfortunate tendency to enjoy living where people live. That’s how a biologist tried to explain people’s hatred for the rodents in a television news feature about rats gnawing electrical cables in parked cars in the southern Swedish town of Malmö. The brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, is one of the species best adapted to modern society. These rats have followed humans across the world to become one of the most abundant mammals, spreading from their native distribution in northern China and Mongolia and reaching Europe in the 1500s, possibly even earlier. Black rats, however, arrived in Europe as early as the 1st century AD. Today almost all wild brown rats are synanthropic, meaning they live in close association with humans, eating our leftovers and using human structures for shelter. The relationship between rats and humans is one of commensalism, a word derived from the Latin term “commensal”, meaning “eating at the same table”. Throughout the centuries, rats have been cast as humanity’s dark shadow. Rats have had an enormous impact on …

The ultimate swearword: an algorithm has come up with the ‘best’ expletive ever. It is certainly a surprise | Mathematics

Published by Sam

[ad_1] Name: The ultimate swearword. Age: Ber! Mind your own business. Sorry, age is just the way we normally start things around here. “Ber”, though, what does that mean? It’s short for banger. What, as in old car? Not as in old car. Or sausage. Or excellent tune. It’s a swearword. Is it? Says who? Says Sophie Maclean, with a bit of help from Andrey Markov. Who are they? He’s a Russian mathematician, who died in 1922. She’s an MSc mathematics student, very much alive and well and studying at King’s College London. OK, I think now is the time for some sort of explanation. Maclean, whose next project is a PhD in analytic number theory, wrote a code that she says has created the world’s best swearword. How does it work? She fed a list of swearwords into “the Markov chain”, a mathematical model that predicts the probability of a sequence based on previous input and figures out the chances of each letter following the one before … A bit like predictive text? Exactly. …