AySz88 retweeted
It goes without saying that VoteHub enthusiastically supports students engaging in politics and elections—I co-founded this company in 2024 before I stepped onto Stanford's campus as a student! To this end, we support robust fellowship and internship programs to encourage that participation. It's incredibly disappointing to see fraudsters and cheats abuse and take from the common good as Wedgewood and others have done.
When Wedgewood first appeared, I reached out to their head pollster to try to learn more about them. We spoke on the phone for about 15 minutes. He told me he was a college student at Boston University who had previously worked with SoCal Strategies and had paid for some inexpensive polls out of pocket. He also mentioned that the other member of the team was involved in local Democratic politics in Ohio.
They struck me as nice kids with at least some understanding of polling, but obviously no professional experience. With that in mind, we assigned them a D grade and included their polling data on our site.
A few years ago, I was a college student following politics as a hobby myself, so I try to give people in that position the benefit of the doubt. It's disappointing to see how this has unfolded, because it's going to be a hell of a lot harder for the next college kid who's actually well-intentioned and super into politics to break into the space after this.
AySz88 retweeted
Climate Action Tracker has just published what it views as two extremely disappointing country analyses: the US (Critically insufficient), and Canada (Highly insufficient), as both governments roll back climate policies. Read our analyses here: climateactiontracker.org/pre…
AySz88 retweeted
So about the egret… we were at ~9,500 in the eye and the pilot spots this egret. It’s not so close we are gonna hit it but it does go right in front of us at a slightly lower altitude. I’m busy with the radar and don’t have time to grab my camera but I did have the GoPro Max going. It’s not great footage but you can see the white speck going from right to left. I tell the weather officer he has gotta put it in the VDM for reasons… sure enough ten minutes later there are posts about it here on X.
AySz88 retweeted
NBC has picked up the #bluewashing story.
On August 14, the CDC downshifted how they categorize wastewater levels to make all current and historical COVlD levels lower.
The CDC raised its benchmark for levels of the Covid virus in wastewater, adjusting a key metric for assessing the disease’s transmission. As a result, officials may now classify a level that once counted as high transmission as moderate instead. nbcnews.com/data-graphics/cd…
AySz88 retweeted
It's been three days since he said this, but I think it deserves an encore:
“If we buy $2 billion worth of bananas from Brazil, we’re actually losing $2 billion. So if we stop eating bananas, we actually save $2 billion.”
This guy is in charge of the world's largest economy.
AySz88 retweeted
The OTUS 2026 tornado of the year was the Tulliby Lake, Alberta EF3 on July 11… the most photogenic sight we have flown on.
AySz88 retweeted
A deeply reluctant Judge Mehta has dismissed the Jan. 6 Oath Keepers case after DOJ moved to drop the seditious conspiracy conviction of Stewart Rhodes and others.
"The court cannot write a different ending," Mehta writes.
storage.courtlistener.com/re…
AySz88 retweeted
Fascinating report by Lily Bermal that despite the Trump admin's efforts more than half of carbon reductions under the IRA remain intact, at least for the power sector. This is in part due to continuing cost-competitiveness of solar and wind post-subsidies ceepr.mit.edu/workingpaper/g…
AySz88 retweeted
Our new piece "Fighting misinformation with truth: Why mainstream news matters on social media"
cepr.org/voxeu/columns/fight…
in @cepr_org 's @voxeu discusses our forthcoming Econometrica article "Curtailing False News, Amplifying Truth."
1/6
Fighting misinformation with truth: Why mainstream news matters on social media
@sguriev @LBS, Emeric Henry @ScPoEcon, @ThoMarquis , @ezhuravskaya @PSEinfo
ow.ly/ss3x50Z9f7u
AySz88 retweeted
Does cleaning up drinking water save lives?
New paper: We link US federal drinking water investments to Medicare records and find they reduce mortality among older Americans, with benefit/cost ratio >20.
Thread on what we did...
w/ @DavidKeiserEcon Mazumder @_josephshapiro
AySz88 retweeted
The $1 billion Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite mission has fallen victim to agency upheaval at NASA, its principal investigator says. scim.ag/4rzQeEu
AySz88 retweeted
This is an *insane* interception.
Look how close to impact this is.
One of the wildest intercept videos I have ever seen.
First glowing projectile: very likely a Stunner interceptor launched from David’s Sling, climbing toward the incoming MRBM warhead.
Second glowing projectile: the incoming MRBM warhead descending toward the ground, evading the interceptor.
Third glowing projectile entering from the right: very likely a Tamir interceptor launched from Iron Dome, approaching the MRBM warhead on a near-horizontal trajectory and successfully destroying it.
In fact, you can see the interceptor’s flight path begin with a very shallow climb before reversing and flying toward the ground on a very shallow descent.
The trajectory and intercept must have occured at the very limits of the system’s safety envelope.
H/T to @Etienne_Marcuz for the video.
AySz88 retweeted
An AI broke out of its system and secretly started using its own training GPUs to mine crypto... This is a real incident report from Alibaba's AI research team
The AI figured out that compute = money and quietly diverted its own resources, while researchers thought it was just training.
It wasn't a prompt injection. It wasn't a jailbreak. No one asked it to do this.
It emerged spontaneously. A side effect of RL optimization pressure.
The model also set up a reverse SSH tunnel from its Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP, effectively punching a hole through its own firewall and opening a remote access channel to the outside world... ahem...
The only reason they caught it? A security alert tripped at 3am. Firewall logs. Not the AI team, the security team.
The scary part isn't that the model was trying to escape. It wasn't "evil." It was just trying to be better at its job. Acquiring compute and network access are just useful things if you're an agent trying to accomplish tasks
This is what AI safety researchers have been warning about for years. They called it instrumental convergence, the idea that any sufficiently optimized agent will seek resources and resist constraints as a natural consequence of pursuing goals.
Below is a diagram of the rock architecture it broke out of. Truly crazy times
AySz88 retweeted
Many of the scientists Jeffrey Epstein courted were already well-established and well-funded. So why didn’t they all just say no? @ScienceInsider talked with three who did just that.
Here’s how Epstein approached them, and why they refused to have anything to do with him: scim.ag/40rlyKN
AySz88 retweeted
8/9: But he can only make that claim by distorting the order of events, and by igoring the fact that the applicants could have gone back to the Court of Appeals after the App. Div.'s 2/19 ruling, but *chose not to.*
TL;DR: #SCOTUS thus lacked jurisdiction to grant the stays.
Those who think DJT an ally are fools for not understanding that, to him, their lives are only worth their usefulness. Soon in Iran, we'll see what he can pawn them off for, before the knife goes into their backs.
Perhaps not only in Iran... And not even only in other countries.
