Tech billionaires have raised more than $340m to defeat Prop 40, a one-time 5% wealth tax that will fund healthcare and education Tech billionaires have been dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the fight against a wealth tax in California . They’ve raised more than $340m, and the campaign they’re funding is spending more than $1m a day to defeat the measure, according to state financial disclosures. Californians will vote on the ballot measure, Proposition 40, in early November. If passed, it would require a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires, with the proceeds mostly funding healthcare programs, along with some education and food assistance. The measure has divided
The Guardian / Technology2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
Watch: BBC follows Ukraine's Operation Vivaldi pushing Russia back on frontline A Russian drone zips across the computer screen, startling the commanders keeping watch over the battlefield via a live stream in their bunker. Cigarette in one hand, radio in the other, one of them calls in their own drone to bring it down and warns the soldiers below of the threat. The men are dangerously exposed, on the long walk across open ground from their front line positions. They are being replaced after three months forcing the Russians back. This is part of Operation Vivaldi, a Ukrainian counter-offensive which they say has liberated 277 sq km (106 square miles) in the eastern Donbas region in recent
BBC World2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
This essay introduces the concept of decoherence : the accumulation of locally valid but mutually incompatible or redundant models within a system, such that the cost of change is dominated by translating among those models and preventing unintended side-effects. In other words, it's what happens when slop drowns out the signal in an endless sea of noise. Decoherence grows relative to the rate of change of a system, and it increases faster the more decoherent a system is, resulting in runaway exponential growth. It is not a new phenomenon, and humans have always countered it through carefully finding ways to do more with less, unifying disparate patterns and models into a cohesive whole.
Lobsters2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
Men and women across India are being paid to record themselves doing domestic jobs as developers train AI robots to do household chores. SCOTT DETROW, HOST: Earlier this month, NPR's international correspondent Diaa Hadid went to a small town in southern India called Karur. She reported on how factory workers are made to train the AI robots that would replace them. She also found a thriving industry to train robots to perform domestic work. (SOUNDBITE OF CHOPPING CARROTS) DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Twenty-four-year-old Sneha Jegadish chops a carrot in her kitchen. Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio.
NPR Technology2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump says he wants voters to pretend that he's on the ballot in this year's midterm elections. READ MORE: Democrats see voter enthusiasm in fundraising haul from small-dollar donors before the midterms Democratic candidates and their allies have spent more than $163 million since Sept. 1 on television advertising that mentions the Republican president, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from AdImpact, which charts media spending. That includes airing ads that reference Trump on broadcast, cable and streaming nearly 180,000 times, the data shows. Republicans, meanwhile, have run ads that talk about the president just 16,000 times, at an
PBS NewsHour2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
William Chapman, 24, was mauled to death at Yorkshire Wildlife Park on Saturday. Medical records belonging to a man killed by a tiger at Yorkshire Wildlife Park may have been accessed "without a legitimate reason" by staff at Yorkshire Ambulance Service, a spokesperson has said. William Chapman, 24, was mauled to death at the park near Doncaster on Saturday. In a statement, the trust said following Chapman's death it had identified two possible incidents of staff "accessing or attempting to access incident/medical information" about the case. It said an investigation had been launched "to establish the full circumstances surrounding these potential breaches".
BBC News2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
As a millennial, I’ve developed a baseline immunity to once in a lifetime devastating economic collapse. Tanking the financial system by means of the AI bubble bursting, right? An AI CEO advising people to stock cash, food and a hand crank radio in case AI takes down banking is some spectacular product marketing. Silicon Valley spent years insisting AI would run everything. Now the contingency plan is to make sure nothing you own needs a computer. Progress! 😳 plus, if the financial system collapses the cash won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.
Lemmy / Technology2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
Millions kept changing hands long after the election outcomes were effectively settled. Prediction market boosters often tout the platforms as barometers of public opinion, or even “truth machines” offering a clearer picture of where things are headed than polling or other data. In 2024, for example, Kalshi beat many pollsters in forecasting the outcome of the US presidential race. But their trading activity can also tell more perplexing stories. Two global election markets on Polymarket’s offshore platform , for instance, generated over $600 million in trading volume, far more than most political markets typically attract. Most of the activity took place buying and selling contracts tied
Ars Technica2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
The StarSkirmish Bench evaluates how strong of a StarCraft bot can each LLM write given 1 hour of wall clock time. v0.2 updates StarSkirmish Bench v0.1 with flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, each running in its lab's 1st party CLI harness. An LLM’s score reflects its win rate against a roster of competitive human written bots and demo bots. 1 hour runs, in its 1st party CLI harness. Scores are average win rates (0–100) of each model's 5 runs against a roster of competitive human written bots. Gemini 4 Argon runs at high , the highest reasoning effort available to it; every other model runs at max . GPT-6 Astra is the top scoring StarSkirmish Bench v0.2 LLM, a clear
Hacker News / Show2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
Start using accurate IP data for cybersecurity, compliance, and personalization—no limits, no cost. The Internet relies on networks telling each other which IP addresses they can deliver traffic to, using BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). These routing announcements have historically depended heavily on trust. When a network announces addresses it shouldn’t, accidentally or deliberately, traffic can be sent to the wrong place and services can become unreachable. On February 24, 2008, Pakistan Telecom (AS17557) tried to block YouTube inside Pakistan by announcing a more specific route for YouTube's addresses. Its upstream provider, PCCW Global (AS3491), accepted the announcement and passed it
Hacker News2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
Architects worked with harsh environment to create sustainable buildings in location where fossils were found. The result is something that looks – vaguely – like pterosaur eggs in the sand. Designed with underground exhibition halls, giant light funnels and sprawling solar farms, the museum is able to operate sustainably while withstanding an extremely harsh environment.
Lemmy / Science2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
Nvidia’s new Arm-based laptop chip is an exciting new challenger, but exclusively for the high-end. If you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Nvidia’s RTX Spark N1X processor is finally here, and we’ve been collectively testing a small fortune’s worth of powerful laptops sporting this new “superchip.” RTX Spark is designed to be a high-performing Arm-based SoC for laptops and small desktop computers, rivaling the best from Apple, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. It has loads of cores, Nvidia RTX Blackwell graphics, and enough power and unified memory to run sizable local AI models. The flagship placement is inside Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra
The Verge / AI2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
submitted by cypherpunks to world 46 points | 1 comments https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c65ynk7212vqo
Lemmy / World2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
been running puppeteer in docker for automated screenshots and the font rendering drives me nuts. same page looks completely different between my mac and the container because different font stacks. installed google fonts in the dockerfile which helped but theres still subtle differences in kerning and hinting. antialiasing is different too depending on whether the container has fontconfig set up properly. the really annoying part is screenshots of text-heavy pages where the line breaks end up in different places because of font metrics differences. a heading that fits on one line locally wraps to two lines in the container. tried using web fonts exclusively (loading them via @font-face)
Lemmy / Programming2h ago
Sign in to keep a line, pass it, or challenge it.
0 likes0 comments
