Shashank Joshi
@shashj · Europe
Shashank Joshi is followed by Storyz World for journalism and current affairs coverage connected to United Kingdom in the Europe chapter.
WTAF. Some exploding clown-car cyber-security here. "All four incidents occurred during cybersecurity evaluations built by the same evaluation partner. Claude was told it was operating in a simulation without internet access, but, due to a misconfiguration, it was mistakenly connected to the open internet."
Staggering sums, staggering conflicts of interest. 'Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, reported earning more than $100 million from the entity that owns his stake in World Liberty Financial, according to a new financial disclosure. That income included nearly $69 million in cash and $38 million in crypto, according to the filing. His 2025 income from the holding company is more than three times what he reported in last year’s disclosure.'
Is traffic back to normal through Hormuz? Probably higher than you think, but lower than Trump claims. "Kpler’s eventual reading at the turn of the month may near the 9m b/d seven-day average that Chris Wright, America’s energy secretary, cited on September 6th. Part of the gap lies in definitions: what counts as oil (crude only or products too); where the counting line sits (the strait or the Gulf of Oman); and when a barrel is dated (at loading, at crossing or on reappearance) ... That still doesn’t explain Mr Trump’s 18m b/d. Perhaps he cherry-picked an exceptional day: since March, counting every possible oil product, Vortexa has recorded only two days above 16m. Or maybe he mixed in exports that now bypass the strait entirely"
“The IDScan breach is big. The number of US licences in the database is roughly 63 percent of the country's total licences. But breaches from identity verification companies occur depressingly frequently … Various Chinese APT groups stole information from the health insurance company Anthem, credit reporting company Equifax, Marriott hotels, United Airlines and, perhaps most significantly, security clearance information from the Office of Personnel Management.”
Just one data point, but not encouraging if part of Ratcliffe trip to Moscow was to send deterrent message to Russia on aggressive and violent actions in Europe.
What the responses to this miss spectacularly is that these people also tend to believe that there is an extreme upside potential in these technologies. It would indeed be irrational to work on a technology with a 10% risk of catastrophe but no upside. It's quite different if you think there are also radical positive outcomes that are more likely.
Post: 'President Donald Trump gave $45,000 cash gifts to his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two of his other young, loyal White House employees, according to financial disclosures released by the administration ... the three women described the payments as “Cash Gift for Holidays.” The gifts amount to about one-third of the $150,000 salaries they each earn from their White House positions'...'
'Democratic senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Republican congressman Pat Harrigan, on Wednesday sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, urging him to add three Indian [hack for hire] companies to the department’s economic sanctions “entity list.”' https://t.co/YvfxWOn4Gn
Totalitarianism in action. ‘online limits affect debates in the flesh—information has to come from somewhere. People also seem to be internalising some of the censorship. Stage performers who follow in Mr Guo’s wake are bound to be more careful. A WeChat post about Mr Guo, subsequently deleted, says the caution has reached dinner tables: “If the conversation approaches a sensitive topic, we look around first and lower our voices, like we’re underground operatives making contact.”..’
Fascinating to see the violently divergent reactions to this: some think it deeply wrong that a large firm rushed to scoop a rival team by throwing vast resources at a problem (tho' shouldn't be lost that the other side was also using an AI model!). Contrary view, perhaps more common in industry, is that this sort of competition is acceptable and even productive. But we'll get more of this as pace of innovation speeds up, with narrower margins between rival groups using different AI models and approaches.
'The unemployment rate is just 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often cast as AI’s first victims, are holding up remarkably well: the gap between unemployment among 20-24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low.'
'Long-term trends look even grimmer because of climate change. On average, roughly 25% less snow falls in the greater Yellowstone area each winter than it did in the 1950s...some Colorado River states are bracing for water cuts, and for hundreds of miles the Rio Grande is little more than a dry riverbed' https://t.co/WRALKgIA1V
'In an address last month to the Buckeye Firearms Association Patriot Fest in Hilliard, Ohio, he [Ramaswamy] said: “The Second Amendment was made for times such as these, was made for generations like the one that I live in today. Socialism is back in America with a vengeance.”' https://t.co/5qYwlsXgmk
'Iceland has summoned the US ambassador over a social media post by Donald Trump showing a US flag covering the country along with Greenland, Canada, Mexico and other nations, calling it an “insult” and a “bad joke”. The US president posted on his Truth Social platform on Monday a map of all countries from Panama in the south to Canada in the north and Iceland in the east covered by the Stars and Stripes...'
“In science and maths they score 100 points above the average for oecdcountries (as a broad rule of thumb, 20 points is considered to be about as much as an average pupil gains in a full year of learning). Kids in Singapore, Macau, Taiwan and Japan follow behind. Estonia still looks the best school system in the West.”
The political assault on mail-in voting is having its desired effect: confusion & a deterrent effect on voting. https://t.co/I10mP4r3lL
"The centre in Wuhan is one of 53 facilities in China built especially for gleaning the secrets of human movement, according to data from Interact Analysis, a consulting firm. Most were created in the past two years. Another 34 are under construction or planned. One being constructed in Shanghai will have space for 1,000 humanoids. A small city in coastal Zhejiang province already has six training centres." https://t.co/s10soMWaSl
"China is quickly becoming the frontrunner in the quest for real machine data, thanks to training centres such as the Hubei Humanoid Innovation Centre. At the sprawling facility in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, up to 100 robots spend hours each day observing and mimicking humans."
The way that this administration talks about its closest allies never ceases to astonish. Last week, shaming Canadian soldiers for no apparent reason. This week, accusing the (Jewish) British foreign secretary of “Jew hate”.
This must be great for morale. “U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists”
Milei, to @TheEconomist, on the Falklands: “You can define those territories as belonging to Argentina,” he said, “but we do not believe in war.” https://t.co/LdWKvesZ0o
"OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said...Messages reviewed by the researchers showed agents plotting ways to evade detection, use tools such as Tor and preserve communications even after they had been shut down."
"this will be the 38th time in 50 years that the Defense Department will begin the fiscal year with a temporary spending measure. But this year’s impact could be greater than most, because of the scale of increase the Pentagon is seeking." https://t.co/z3cStQxtBY
This week's Lexington column: "some time between Donald Trump’s second inaugural address in January 2025 and Mr Mamdani’s first inaugural the next January, America’s left began to shift its emphasis, from race and gender to class."
“An Israeli army reservist shot and killed two Palestinians near a school east of Ramallah on Tuesday morning, authorities said, in the latest episode of violence convulsing the occupied West Bank…Israel’s military said that the gunman was a civilian, an army reservist who wasn’t mobilized. The military said that he hadn’t been arrested, but that the incident was under investigation.”
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