The recent "Odd Lots" episode, "How a Trade War With China Could Become a Hot War," is a critical listen

It moves beyond typical economic analysis to model the escalatory pathways from trade disputes to kinetic warfare

The historical parallels drawn, not just to the American Revolution but more pointedly to 1930s Japan, provide a sobering framework for analyzing current US-China tensions

This is the kind of second-order thinking that's desperately needed in policy discussions right now.

"A skeletal 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq is the lead picture for the Guardian, which reports on Israeli attacks on aid hubs and worsening starvation in Gaza. Palestinian Faiza Abdul Rahman, who is "constantly dizzy" from lack of food says: "We have faced hunger before, but never like this", a quote the paper uses as its main headline"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20rxyjp28mo

If you want to know the truth about AI then read the comments in this thread from @npub1zjpsp...

TL:DR large language models (LLMs) were a big breakthrough and are an incredibly useful tool for searching and summarization, but the language fluency of their chatbot frontends fools us into thinking they are intelligent

https://bsky.app/profile/mims.bsky.social/post/3ltp5rmep6k2r

It's troubling that police are using generative AI to produce legally significant text like police reports, given the known risks of bias and hallucination

What's worse is when there's no audit trail or any kind of transparency to prove the claimed "officer-in-the-loop"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/axons-draft-one-designed-defy-transparency

Astounding imagery of how far ahead China is in solar

even as the U.S. is now undoing its own clean energy initiatives in a national self-sabotaging, rolling-coal fuck-you

https://www.theatlantic.com/photography/archive/2025/07/photos-china-solar-power-energy/683488/?gift=gMReAEZrj7mjk32ksRk4mM_QVHhFveaZt4zHOULXoe4&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

This is a really excellent overview of the privacy challenges that anyone building generative AI systems should consider

It's a good primer for anyone interested in this field

Barberá and Popa-Fabre, "Privacy and Data Protection Risks in Large Language Models (LLMs)"

https://rm.coe.int/privacy-and-data-protection-risks-in-large-language-models-llms-/1680b68fe9

Hey, if anyone will be looking for someone with a technical background to work on privacy or AI safety later this year, I might be available for a new gig starting around October

I’m a computer scientist by background, with a history of managing engineering teams in compliance, privacy, trust, and AI safety

I’d be particularly keen to help in the non-profit or benefit-corp space

Meta was caught red-handed using its Facebook app to eavesdrops on your browser sessions even if you had taken privacy precautions such as using incognito mode

https://localmess.github.io/

Oh great. Now all personal data the the US government knows about us will be collected by Palantir, the Blackwater of tech

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

Concerning that the Republican in the US Congress want to prevent AI regulations by the states

If the example of privacy regulation is anything to go by, the only hope of any reasonable AI regulations in the US is from the states

https://techpolicy.press/us-house-passes-10year-moratorium-on-state-ai-laws

From Florida, comes some good news for privacy…

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/09/florida-bill-requiring-encryption-backdoors-for-social-media-accounts-has-failed/

This is insane

A judge allowed a post-mortem, AI-generated video to influence a sentencing decision

"It was the first time in Arizona judicial history — and possibly nationwide — that AI has been used to create a deceased victim’s own impact statement."

There is no way to know whether this represents the views of the dead person

https://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/chandler/family-uses-ai-to-create-video-for-deadly-chandler-road-rage-victims-own-impact-statement