An accessible summary of trying to control wild pigs in the US; specifically in their destruction of corn.

I hadn't realized they updated this model last month! You can use it here.

Apertus 1.5 70B is Switzerland's latest fully open multilingual large language model developed by the Swiss AI Initiative. It is designed to advance transparent, compliant, and high-performance AI while remaining fully open throughout the entire training pipeline.

from

• Swiss AI Initiative : Developed by the Swiss AI Initiative to provide a fully open, transparent, and compliant foundation model.
• Fully Open : Open model weights, open training data, complete training recipes, and publicly documented training methodology.
• Massively Multilingual – Native support for 1,811 languages, enabling broad multilingual understanding and generation.
• Compliance First – Trained using fully compliant datasets while respecting retrospective opt-out requests and reducing memorization through the Goldfish loss methodology.
• Long Context – Supports context windows of up to 262,144 tokens, enabling large document analysis and extended conversations.
• Tool Calling Support – Supports agentic workflows and tool use when deployed with compatible inference frameworks such as recent versions of vLLM.
• Open Deployment Ecosystem – Compatible with Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, MLX and GGUF deployment formats.

In any discussion about AI’s potential, it’s important to separate the technology from the socio-political system it’s embedded in. That AIs can lack context, mix up facts, or fall for stupid tricks are all technological problems. Because the giant developers like OpenAI and Anthropic have prioritized solving them, AIs can now more easily access resources like the web or email, are more disciplined about using those resources, and are better at staying within their guardrails.

Yet AI developers do not seem to be prioritizing other technological problems. Major AI models still act far more sycophantic than humans, telling people what they want to hear even when untrue or not in their best interests. Popular AI models tend to answer questions confidently even when they lack training, knowledge, or evidence to back their claims. In both cases, AI developers choose to train models that please users with flattery and the appearance of competence, rather than constraining them to act in users’ and society’s best interests.

...

In a different political and economic system, Chinese developers are producing—and then giving away—smaller, more efficient, more affordable models. While the US government seeks to restrict China’s access to the most advanced chips, China is betting that incentivizing their tech giants to create leaner, more open models using more commodity hardware—models that can be trained with older chips and run even on personal computers—will be an advantage in achieving widespread use and, perhaps, Chinese national influence.

There's a green powered, ethically trained LLM out there: Apertus. But we're not (currently) choosing that route.

With advice for both the enthusiast and the activist.

After securing vacatur of the convictions of eight Defendants in this case—all members of a group known as the Oath Keepers—the United States now moves pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a) to dismiss the indictment. Reluctantly, the court grants the motion.

Page 4 has a lovely chart of trial outcomes for those considered.

On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term in office, President Trump issued a proclamation titled “Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Events at or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021”(the “Proclamation”). Proclamation No. 10887, 90 Fed. Reg. 8331 (Jan. 29, 2025). The Proclamation pardoned all persons convicted of January 6–related offenses except 14 named individuals. Among them were the nine defendants in this matter.

Before turning to the government’s proffered justifications for dismissal, it is important to note the reasons it has not offered. The government does not say that the charges were legallydeficient5 or that the evidence presented is insufficient to sustain Defendants’ convictions.

Clothing to fool tracking software sounds great! Sadly, there's little research done for what's on the market, as soon as you can buy something the software has likely changed, and fast fashion has no interest in an R&D department.

A grift for the security conscious!

Long article of who, what, and how there's been such an uptick in violence in Sinaloa. Despite their president seeing violence drop in almost all the states, there's quite the turf war in Sinaloa.

Whole lotta folks who are more interested in their team than in the rules of the game. I find it interesting, in that the basic principles are pretty easy to argue for, and it's not asking that much for a political party to be pro democracy...

Old link, but I hadn't realized the caveat until today. Basically, most of the waste that's accumulated in the GPGP is from industrial scale fishing (US, China, etc). I've long known that it isn't a big island (you can't even photograph it; it's just slightly murky water for miles and miles), but for some reason I thought this implied that most oceanic waste is fishing related. That's not right, see the wikipedia page.

Denver is ditching its Flock arrays, but that wont improve privacy or law enforcement behavior if it just gets replaced with a different brand.

archive link

Short piece on how burnout, as a term, came into use, and how very capitalist and intentional the framing/records we have about it are.

A short blurb on raccoon parenting that was new to me!

One of my favorite examples appears in the PBS documentary “Raccoon Nation,” where a raccoon mom takes her kits on a field trip to teach them how to collapse their spines to slide past a wooden garage door. For hours, she models the behavior for her young – then observes their attempts, catching them when they fall and nudging them to try again.

Perhaps more accurate to say that early spring thaws (followed by frosts) kill the harvest; trees start their blossoms as soon as they think it's heading toward summer, but humanity has gunked that signal up.

Recently finished this one. This is a pop philosophy book on why, epistimologically, it makes sense to just use expert opinion (without checking their reasoning or reasons carefully yourself) generally. It was written just before widespread AI use, with more of a focus on vaccine denial and conspiracy theory. But I think it has a lot to do with AI use, especially in schools and conversation. Many students are turning to an AI to complete homework and study, with mixed (and often disastrous) results.

Importantly, the book only makes the moral case in a weak sense. The main good is 'justified, true beliefs held' with a minimum of error, time, and effort. It does argue that we have to use expert testimony for most of our beliefs (wikipedia) anyway; and that the best way to manage expert incentives and opinion is institutional (and not trying to become an expert in everything yourself).

Overall, I found it troubling to read. The rationalization is pretty compelling, and there are few glaringly obvious leaps or gaps. Worse, the rationalizations aren't hard.

Rep. Kelly Morrison of Minnesota reintroduced the bill, which provides grants for municipalities who give RCV a try.

The Voter Choice Act does not require that any city, county, or state adopt ranked choice voting. It would make ranked choice voting accessible to more communities by offsetting implementation costs, like upgrading outdated voting equipment and tabulation software, changes to ballot design, and voter education and outreach. However, many cities actually save money with RCV – because it is often used to replace costly runoffs or two-round elections.

Wikipedia page for the problem. I hadn't thought about this conjecture before hearing the solution, but otoh it seems both interesting and hard.

They use muscles! To hide/reveal colors

TL;DR: Gov owns a private company -> no regulation, gov wants the company to be very profitable. Having a public competitor -> we regulate its competitors heavily, and ensure the tech is made/used (as) ethically (as possible).

Though Schneier seems un-opposed to doing both to various degrees. He seems very excited about Sovereign AI.