OG political blogger. Predicted the 2007 collapse. Read: https://xitter.cf/t.co/2oa9MDzFwj , Support: https://xitter.cf/t.co/XRrXGbpjQm - @ianwelsh.bsky.social

@ianwelsh.bsky.social
Joined August 2008
Ian Welsh retweeted
There are probably dozens of people he has credible defamation lawsuits against at this point.
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Ian Welsh retweeted
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow's team has pulled together their summary of the numbers in the election last night, which the incumbent won emphatically over Brad Bradford. #TOpoli Here's an extract from their release:
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Since Doug Ford came into power in 2018, Homelessness has increased by 25% across Ontario. Since Chow came to power in Toronto, Homelessness decreased by 8% in the City.
If you voted for Olivia Chow… why? I genuinely want to try and understand.
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Saudi Private Equity that burdened EA with $18 Billion in debt. EA closed BioWare, & laid off over 400 employees. EA needs to pay $1.8 BILLION in interest payments every year. EA announced $700 million operation costs reductions. Yet Andrew Wilson still gets $38.6 million a YEAR
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The reason frontier LLMs will never be profitable is because the minute they stop spending, the free models catch up. You're in a constant loop of increased spending to stay ahead, while everyone behind you catches up at a fraction of the cost by using your model. LLMs are just commodity with no moat.
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Ian Welsh retweeted
Whoever said the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate should run on extraditing Zuckerberg to Lula’s Brazil deserves an award.
President Lula states that he will "go all out" against Meta, saying that Brazil will not accept a foreign company negatively influencing Brazilians and humanity with a "digital empire."
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evergreen.
In a new poll, 15% of Americans said they believe between 1 and 5% of NCAA athletes are transgender. 14% think between it's between 6 and 25%. Meanwhile, an NCAA spokesperson confirmed that the current number is "effectively" zero thebulwark.com/p/new-poll-bu…
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There's at least one more option: roll back the networkification of all software over the last 20 years. Some software must be networked, but a lot is networked only because that enables more lucrative subscription business models. We could undo that. xitter.cf/sachaservan/status/211…
There are two approaches to cybersecurity now that we’re in the vulnpolcalypse: 1. “patch the planet” by burning mountains of tokens, red teaming, and patching until you think there are no more exploitable bugs in the software 2. Shrink software components into their most minimal essence, tailor them to a particular system, and then formally verify it Both approches are now enabled by LLMs. But only the second one can be done on a budget and without having access to frontier cyber models like mythos. This is why I’m excited to see more legacy software get boiled down, hardened, and verified
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Ian Welsh retweeted
Votes received by Toronto mayors since amalgamation. (In addition to the candidate/campaign, this is also impacted by the quality of the opponents, number of ways the vote splits, city population, off-year elections, etc.)
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BREAKING:Bradford has fled the Tronto mainland following its fall to socialist Olivia Chow. Sources say he will establish a new govt on the Toronto Islands with the goal of eventually reclaiming the entire city. Chow has promised to purge all remaining Fordmintang on the mainland
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Ian Welsh retweeted
This is the most important part of Anthropic's S-1 filing. It tells you that if Anthropic fails to IPO and convert the huge amount of promissory notes it issued into shares that can be dumped right away in the market for cash, its $ 100B+ cash will go poof in the blink of an eye
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Your bodymind runs with --dangerously-skip-permissions on A new essay on the autopilot, which has become a important concept in my work expandingawareness.org/blog/…
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Vučić was ready to make Serbia into a lithium colony for the German auto industry and in doing so to contaminate riverways and drinking water for a large portion of Serbia’s population. My guess it’s why German mainstream media like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung tried to slander the student movement for so long. They relentlessly went after the students in their coverage with false claims. I don’t think people realize the protests came about because of a situation that was truly existential.
It’s crazy Vucic had a German advisor since 2013 paid by the German government. They were making deals about lithium behind the scenes.
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Ian Welsh retweeted
Evidence for representation of non-hierarchical structures in language does not mean language representation in the brain is devoid of hierarchical structure. Humans have top level plans before speaking so clearly there is something missing in this study.
Chomsky was wrong. Researchers found your brain doesn’t store language the way every textbook since 1957 claims. For decades, the undisputed rule of linguistics, led by Noam Chomsky, was that human language is hierarchical. We were told our brains process language using complex "grammar trees." That we secretly build deep, abstract, mathematical rules in our heads before we speak. This new paper proves that is completely wrong. Researchers at Cornell University analyzed how people actually process and produce language in real time. They found sequences. Linear chunks. When we speak, we aren't calculating deep syntactic rules. We are just predicting the next most logical sequence of words based on the context of the words right before it. We string linear chunks together. If this sounds familiar, it should. This is exactly how Large Language Models like ChatGPT work. For years, critics have dismissed AI as "just a next-token predictor." They said it isn't truly intelligent because it doesn't understand deep grammatical hierarchies like humans do. But this paper suggests humans don't use those hierarchies either. We are just predicting the next chunk. Language isn't a rigid tree of mathematical rules. It's a linear stream of contextual predictions. We thought we were building AI to mimic the complexity of the human brain. It turns out, the human brain was just running a simpler algorithm all along.
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Ian Welsh retweeted
The fact that financial markets are reacting poorly to Lula’s victory is a sure sign that markets are not some amorphous intelligence but simply a bunch of right wing traders who follow the herd. We forget that at our peril.
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Ian Welsh retweeted
My take on Israel: Netanyahu winning is worse for Palestinians short term but has the highest chance of a real break in US support where the Democrats actually meaningfully hamper Israel with policy levers not just occasional rhetoric. If that happens, Israel is done.
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Meanwhile, every intersection in Toronto between 4-6pm. You have to be a real clown to think that it’s pedestrians crossing against a flashing red hand that are the problem.
The ticket for starting the walk across a downtown Toronto intersection, between 4-6pm, when the red hand is flashing & the clock is at “2”, should be $46,932 for a FIRST offence.
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again, this is insane framing and objectively wrong based on the math in no universe is a 13 point margin considered tighter than expected, especially when coupled with the fact that chow got more votes than any other mayoral candidate in the city’s history
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Ian Welsh retweeted
Lula surrendered to justice, faced his accusers, went to jail on tampered evidence, proved his innocence and then won 2 elections in a row. Flavio fled a day after he won 60 million votes and a congressional majority.
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Ian Welsh retweeted
Flavio Bolsonaro fled Brazil to the U.S.
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