tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

Trump rage-quite Nato, again, did mock impressions of Macron, insulted Saudi Arabia, and hand-mimed US missile strikes on Tehran.

https://euobserver.com/208880/breaking-scoop-us-diplomacy-hits-rock-bottom-again/

Let's make the "empowerment" claim, that is somewhat true, here: it's true that most people experience computers as black boxes, and for a long time it has been the case that only the "hacker class" has access to "sieze the means of computation", as it were.

I think the "everyone can instruct their computer to do the kinds of things they would *like* their computer to help them with" is actually a good goal.

That said:

- Current tools appear to do so, but there are so many gotchas in terms of how they operate, and when things go badly, users are stuck.
- The approach is incomplete. I believe to successfully achieve the goal requires a *combination* of machine learning and constraint solver techniques. Without this, contemporary AI tech tends towards high amounts of dangerous failure cases.
- We need to be very concerned about deskilling and where expertise develops from.
- There are a lot of opportunities to improve that *aren't just LLMs*!
- AI industry power dynamics are very bad.

I think something that's worth highlighting is that both communities are concerned with empowerment and disempowerment. And I tend to think these tools tend to *appear* empowering, but are actually disempowering, in their current configuration.

I don't believe LLMs are fundamentally disempowering, and could be part of an empowering future, but the present *industrial deployment* of AI tech within our *socio-economic environment* is net-disempowering. And I worry that there is a big rush to adopt with so little settled about the legal implications on the one side, and with *well known* problems for AI generated code on the other.

Not all AI coding usage is necessarily doomed to be a problem: using local models to "lint" or discover vulnerabilities/bugs is actually probably very good, in the way that having fuzzers is good. But there is so much pressure to adopt beyond the space of what's good and to dismiss real concerns that I am worried it is going to take a long time to undo damage

Fotade denna i östra Ukraina 19 november. Behållaren med minor satt på en rysk drönare av Shahed-typ som släppte ut minorna slumpvis under flygning.

UPDATE – Suspected Ukrainian drones crash in southeastern Finland
https://yle.fi/a/74-20217947/64-3-296061

"Kenya is facing the aftermath of several weeks of torrential rains and severe flooding that have now killed at least 108 people.

Across the country, the floods have disrupted daily life, forcing the closure of schools, rendering roads impassable, and interrupting business activity, particularly in low-lying and informal settlements."

https://www.africanews.com/amp/2026/03/29/kenya-faces-deadly-flooding-with-at-least-108-people-killed/

The Moonroe Doctrine.

i made my own patch for openttd to add a bulk export for routes and i guess that is better than playing openttd but i am in danger

so this is very dumb but recently JGR's patches to OpenTTD added JSON export for vehicle orders

which after like an hour of hacking away at i got more or less converted into GTFS

which then means you can use GTFS tools on them, like https://github.com/ad-freiburg/loom/ (which i never got PDF export working for so you'll have to bear with GeoJSON)

so now i can have little pretend route maps for my little pretend trains

A review of Polymarket's social media feeds found it has published hundreds of false and misleading posts, as the betting market presents itself as "News 2.0" (New York Times)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/technology/polymarket-social-feeds-falsehoods.html?unlocked_article_code=1.UlA.qYkC.JYmTAX7wKyYZ&smid=nytcore-ios-share
http://mediagazer.com/260320/p7#a260320p7

#ESA:
"
Proba-3’s Coronagraph is alive!
"
"A month after an anomaly onboard the Proba-3 mission caused ground control to lose contact .. the mission team shares great news: the spacecraft has phoned home, re-establishing the lost connection."

"The Coronagraph is now in safe mode and stable, .."

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/Proba-3_s_Coronagraph_is_alive

"What happened to the Coronagraph?"
https://blogs.esa.int/proba-3/2026/03/19/what-happened-to-the-coronagraph/

19.3.2026

Yeah!

#Coronagraph #counter #CSC #ESEC #Proba3 #Raumfahrt #Raumsonde #SafeMode #Software #SpaceFlight

After retaking part of Kupyansk, Ukrainian forces are successfully continuing their counteroffensive at the junction of the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. At the same time, Russia has launched a new offensive toward Dobropillia.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/03/19/ukraine-s-counteroffensive-brings-gains-in-the-south-but-weakens-other-sectors-of-the-front-meduza-analyzes-the-latest-battlefield-developments

A first in Sweden: Government retracts an official report after made up sources by AI. www.dn.se/sverige/rege...

Regeringen drar tillbaka rappo...

De är emot abort, motsätter sig ”sexualisering” i skolan, förespråkar den ”naturliga familjen” – och har kopplingar till Bolsonarofamiljen. Nu ska organisationen få svenska biståndspengar från Sida genom den SD-kopplade biståndsorganisationen Hepatica, kan DN avslöja. www.dn.se/sverige/sds-...

SD:s bistånd stöttar Bolsonaro...

All 5 DNA, RNA bases found in Ryugu asteroid samples: Japan research team https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260318/p2a/00m/0sc/019000c

3/ More from Lederberg, 1996:

"I take the literature very seriously. To me it’s holy writ and I want to be sure that, in whatever format it is distributed, it will be accessible, its veracity can be attested by its being observable by everyone at will, and it should be an achievement that cannot be altered. But it’s also a dynamic place, as it should be, and effectively is an open forum. It could be more open than it is. We don’t have enough dialectic in our current modes of publication after the fact. There has to be almost a federal case before you can have a comment published on a prior article, and the electronic media will help to lower the threshold in that regard. It’s a ‘rumen’, which is a place for fermentation, for digestion, for re-examination of the given truths over a period of time, and it certainly has a dynamic quality taken in its totality, even if every brick of the edifice has been put firmly into place in a severely qualified process."

Regeringen vet att deras klimatpolitik är dålig. Därför försöker de undvika oberoende granskning. Förra året uteblev Klimatministern från Klimatpolitiska rådets rapportöverlämning. Nu tvingar de rådet att presentera i slutet möte, utan offentlig insyn. SD vill lägga ner rådet helt omni.se/a/k0wzPX

MEPs are going to press ahead with a vote to approve the EU-US trade pact —despite most observers believing that it clear favours the US.

https://euobserver.com/207269/meps-set-to-finally-green-light-eu-us-trade-deal-in-thursday-vote/