Controversial US influencer Jackson Hinkle has been filmed chanting ‘down with the USA’ at the funeral of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran. The self-styled ‘MAGA communist’ is one of a handful of US content creators allowed to attend the funeral in Iran.

…MAGA Communist?

I had to look up this guy, and found it morbidly fascinating:

Born in San Clemente, California, Hinkle has dubbed himself an "American Conservative Marxist–Leninist".[21] Promoting a syncretic mix of cultural conservative and communist ideas, he is a self-described proponent of "MAGA communism", an ideology which calls for supporting Donald Trump voters but opposes Trump himself for his pro-Israel stance.[22] As such, Hinkle has called on those who support the American working class to ally with the MAGA movement against an alleged globalist threat.[23][24] Initially an environmentalist during his high school years,[25] Hinkle has turned to promoting pro-fossil fuels stances in recent years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Hinkle

…Nor Piefed.

This particular post encapsulates it perfectly:

https://lemmy.world/post/48552575/24407224

It rose to #1 on the front page.

Yet check the source, and it’s a blue checkmark Tweeter. He pays for Twitter, he appears to be a stereotypical Silicon Valley vulture, all-in on OpenAI and Anthropic. And assuming they aren’t AI generated, he a posts a deluge engagement bait garbage all day:

He doesn’t care. People like him are the reason the internet is broken, yet the vast majority of Lemmy just nodded away.

But this is just one of a hundred examples. Every day I scroll here, I see a repost of some ragebait Tweet, and when I go check the source, it’s some bot or content farmer, completely disingenuous.

And they’re paying Elon Musk for extra attention.

And it’s all from a site that, to me, represents everything wrong with the internet. The purely algorithmic discovery, the engagement rat race, the echo chamber effects, the hot takes from pro influencers without even the pretense of selecting for credibility. Not to speak of the influence campaigns, all funding Elon Musk.

I downvote every blue checkmark post I see.

It makes me sad to see them on the front page.

With rare exceptions, it doesn’t belong on the Fediverse. It goes against its spirit. And it pollutes the site with X’s engagement bait.

I assume this means their RAM and SSDs?

For RAM it kinda makes sense; others brands can just buy the ICs. But that’s quite an SSD brand to throw away.

"I love solutions that teeter on appearing almost naive in their simplicity," Ive said. "I also love incredibly intelligent, sophisticated products that you want to touch — and you feel no intimidation, and you want to use almost carelessly, that you use them almost without thought, that they're just tools."

Altman, elaborating on Ive's simplicity mindset, said that AI "can do so much for you that so much can fall away. And the degree to which Jony has chipped away at every little thing that this doesn't need to do or doesn't need to be in there is remarkable."

"We just started talking about: What does it mean that this thing is going to be able to know everything you've ever thought about, read, said? ... And finally, we have the first prototypes."

Altman recalled that Ive once said they'd know they had the design right when the user wants "to lick it or take a bite out of it, or something like that."

"There was an earlier prototype that we were quite excited about, but I did not have any feeling of: 'I want to pick up that thing and take a bite out of it.' And then finally we got there all of a sudden."

Driving the news: Texas A&M's Andrew Dessler and Rutgers' Robert Kopp organized the response.

• It gets into the "greening" and agricultural benefits of higher CO2 levels; disputes whether climate change is making hurricanes more intense; and disagrees with many scientists on the potential lower bound of expected warming from doubling CO2 concentrations, among many divides.

• "When I read the DOE report, I saw a document that does not respect science," he tells Axios via email. "Instead, I saw a document that's a mockery of science."

Axios is short and light on ads, so the whole thing's worth a read.

Maybe this instrumental cover is closer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZj2ufaIne4

But the guitar in the original sounds so "Rimworld" even if the lyrics/vocals aren't as topical.

"We're seeing a unifying moment. The band is back together," MAGA podcaster Jack Posobiec told Axios.

"He gets attacked just relentlessly by the Wall Street Journal in such an uncalled for way, and we have his back 100% against this smearing and this slandering," Charlie Kirk added on his show.

Similar to: https://lemmy.world/post/32961209

But I find the extra quotes interesting:

Two sources told Axios the plan would include long-range missiles that could strike deep inside Russia.

Trump said Monday that whenever he speaks to Putin, "I always hang up and say, 'Well, that was a nice phone call.' And then missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city. And after that happens three or four times, you say, 'Talk doesn't mean anything.'"

A bill circulating in the Senate would impose 500% tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil, but Trump suggested that number was too high and that he could impose 100% tariffs without Senate approval.

As to why it (IMO) qualifies:

"My children are 22, 25, and 27. I will literally fight ANYONE for their future," Greene wrote. "And their future and their entire generation's future MUST be free of America LAST foreign wars that provoke terrorists attacks on our homeland, military drafts, and NUCLEAR WAR."

Hence, she feels her support is threatening her kids.

"MTG getting her face eaten" was not on my 2025 bingo card, though she is in the early stage of face eating.

"It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!

Video is linked. SFW, but keep your volume down.

In a nutshell, he’s allegedly frustrated by too few policies favorable to him.

• The IDF is planning to displace close to 2 million Palestinians to the Rafah area, where compounds for the delivery of humanitarian aid are being built.

• The compounds are to be managed by a new international foundation and private U.S. companies, though it's unclear how the plan will function after the UN and all aid organizations announced they won't take part

Qwen3 was apparently posted early, then quickly pulled from HuggingFace and Modelscope. The large ones are MoEs, per screenshots from Reddit:

screenshots

Including a 235B/22B active and a 30B/3B active.

Context appears to 'only' be 32K unfortunately: https://huggingface.co/qingy2024/Qwen3-0.6B/blob/main/config_4b.json

But its possible they're still training them to 256K:

from reddit

Take it all with a grain of salt, configs could change with the official release, but it appears it is happening today.

This is one of the "smartest" models you can fit on a 24GB GPU now, with no offloading and very little quantization loss. It feels big and insightful, like a better (albeit dry) Llama 3.3 70B with thinking, and with more STEM world knowledge than QwQ 32B, but comfortably fits thanks the new exl3 quantization!

You need to use a backend that support exl3, like (at the moment) text-gen-web-ui or (soon) TabbyAPI.

"It makes me think that maybe he [Putin] doesn't want to stop the war, he's just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through 'Banking' or 'Secondary Sanctions?' Too many people are dying!!!", Trump wrote.

The U.S. expects Ukraine's response Wednesday to a peace framework that includes U.S. recognition of Crimea as part of Russia and unofficial recognition of Russian control of nearly all areas occupied since the 2022 invasion, sources with direct knowledge of the proposal tell Axios.

What Russia gets under Trump's proposal:

• "De jure" U.S. recognition of Russian control in Crimea.
• "De-facto recognition" of the Russia's occupation of nearly all of Luhansk oblast and the occupied portions of Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
• A promise that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO. The text notes that Ukraine could become part of the European Union.
• The lifting of sanctions imposed since 2014.
• Enhanced economic cooperation with the U.S., particularly in the energy and industrial sectors.

What Ukraine gets under Trump's proposal:

• "A robust security guarantee" involving an ad hoc group of European countries and potentially also like-minded non-European countries. The document is vague in terms of how this peacekeeping operation would function and does not mention any U.S. participation.
• The return of the small part of Kharkiv oblast Russia has occupied.
• Unimpeded passage of the Dnieper River, which runs along the front line in parts of southern Ukraine.
• Compensation and assistance for rebuilding, though the document does not say where the funding will come from.

Whole article is worth a read, as it’s quite short/dense as Axios usually is. For those outside the US, this is an outlet that’s been well sourced in Washington for years.

Seems there's not a lot of talk about relatively unknown finetunes these days, so I'll start posting more!

Openbuddy's been on my radar, but this one is very interesting: QwQ 32B, post-trained on openbuddy's dataset, apparently with QAT applied (though it's kinda unclear) and context-extended. Observations:

• Quantized with exllamav2, it seems to show lower distortion levels than nomal QwQ. Its works conspicuously well at 4.0bpw and 3.5bpw.

• Seems good at long context. Have not tested 200K, but it's quite excellent in the 64K range.

• Works fine in English.

• The chat template is funky. It seems to mix up the and <|think|> tags in particular (why don't they just use ChatML?), and needs some wrangling with your own template.

• Seems smart, can't say if it's better or worse than QwQ yet, other than it doesn't seem to "suffer" below 3.75bpw like QwQ does.

Also, I reposted this from /r/locallama, as I feel the community generally should going forward. With its spirit, it seems like we should be on Lemmy instead?

So I had a clip I wanted to upload to a lemmy comment:

• Tried it as an (avc) mp4... Failed.
• OK, too big? I shrink it to 2MB, then 1MB. Failed.
• VP9 Webm maybe? 2MB, 1MB, failed. AV1? Failed.
• OK, fine, no video. Lets try an animated AVIF. Failed. It seems lemmy doesn't even take static AVIF images
• WebP animation then... Failed. Animated PNG, failed.

End result, I have to burden the server with a massive, crappy looking GIF after trying a dozen formats. With all due respect, this is worse than some aging service like Reddit that doesn't support new media formats.

For reference, I'm using the web interface. Is this just a format restriction of lemmy.world, or an underlying software support issue?

53% of Americans approve of Trump so far, according to a newly released CBS News/YouGov poll conducted Feb. 5 to 7, while 47% disapproved.

A large majority, 70%, said he was doing what he promised in the campaign, per the poll that was released on Sunday.

Yes, but: 66% said he was not focusing enough on lowering prices, a key campaign trail promise that propelled Trump to the White House.

44% of Republicans said Musk and DOGE should have "some" influence, while just 13% of Democrats agreed.