A new book argues that “Democracy Needs the Rich.” In fact, concentrated wealth destroys any semblance of a democratic society.
I wanted to see how far AI could actually help with CAM programming, so I ran an experiment. I gave Claude AI a humanoid robot knee joint and asked it to generate the machining strategy for Fusion 360. Then I took those recommendations, built the CAM setup, and machined the actual aluminum part. The result surprised me. It wasn't perfect, and I definitely wouldn't run AI-generated toolpaths without reviewing them, but it got much closer than I expected. A few things I'm curious about: Where do you think AI helps most: setup planning, tool selection, workholding, feeds/speeds, or actual toolpaths? What would it need to do before you'd trust it on your machine? Video here if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1HeTR-Eawg For context, this part is for an asimov open-source humanoid robot I'm building in my garage. submitted by /u/e-mando [link] [Kommentare]
It turns out LLMs have strong priors over character names that are model-specific and version-specific. If you find Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen together on a website, there's a good chance Claude generated it. We stumbled on this as a side finding while working on a model diffing method (CDD), and it grew into its own paper. The short version: these names travel as correlated ensembles, appear across dozens of websites as volcano experts, podcast hosts, thriller protagonists, and authors of 1000+ papers published in two months. Then we found a third name in the ensemble. The collage in the comments shows three different websites independently hallucinating the same trio with AI stock photo faces. Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02184 submitted by /u/CebulkaZapiekana [link] [Kommentare]
If you walked through a marketplace thousands of years ago, you would have heard the exact same sales pitch Bitcoin promoters use today. Amulet sellers didn’t sell objects, but "fixes". They’d look a desperate buyer in the eye and say: Worried about your crops dying? This carved bone fixes it. Sick relative? This little stone fixes it. Terrified of bad luck? This scrap of cloth fixes it. In reality, those objects were just ordinary junk with zero power to fix anything. The only thing that had any power was the story, mixed with how desperate the buyer was for a solution. Today, Bitcoin promoters are running the exact same play, they’ve just moved the pitch from a dusty marketplace to the internet. They talk endlessly about the fixes Bitcoin delivers. It will end inflation and other financial problems. It will free you from corrupt banks and governments. It will give you unbreakable security, borderless money, and a true store of value no one can seize. Sounds powerful, right? Yet underneath the hype, Bitcoin is nothing more than fractions of an arbitrary number, 21 million, imagined by a guy on a cryptography forum and recorded in a decentralized spreadsheet. Just like the amulet, this has no actual power to fix anything. Financial problems are problems of bad, broken, or excessive obligations. Trust in money is trust that those obligations will be fulfilled. How on earth is holding a tiny decimal point of an imaginary number going to fix this? It's crazy to even think about it. Value storage? How is trading away assets to hold a number actually storing value? It is like joining a pyramid scheme and hoping you will get your investment back later from someone else. Freedom from government? You still have to pay taxes. You still obey the law. The government does not care how many satoshis you stack. Holding those numbers will not shield you from regulation, seizure, or political reality. Unbreakable security? That's a joke. In finance, security means protecting a claim born from obligations tracked by the system. Anywhere else, it means protecting a useful product. Bitcoin turns this into pure nonsense. All that intense encryption is literally just securing fractions of a number someone made up. It is exactly like installing a high-tech, triple-reinforced vault to protect the air inside. In short, holding fractions of an imagined number and having them stored across a bunch of random computers cannot fix a single real-world problem. Meanwhile, the people promoting this are doing great. Book authors, seminar hosts, exchange operators, and influencers make serious money by presenting Bitcoin as the ultimate fix for every financial ill. They thrive on the same human impulse that kept amulet sellers in business for thousands of years: hope mixed with fear, wrapped in a compelling narrative. So how is Bitcoin not just a digital amulet? The honest answer is that it is exactly that. It is the same ancient trick, updated with better marketing. Technology changed, human nature did not. The shape of the amulet evolved from carved bone to blockchain entry, but the game remains identical: sell belief, collect value. submitted by /u/BinaryLyric [link] [Kommentare]
(Stockholm, 8 June 2026) SIPRI today launches its annual assessment of the state of armaments, disarmament and international security.
BackgroundAdvanced Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is generally regarded as a stage of irreversible functional decline. Psilocybin is known to transiently alter lar...
