tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

Elon Musk’s Twitter backers gain windfall from xAI deal - Investors hit by losses following Musk's takeover reap rewards from shares in AI start-up - Musk has given investors that backed his $44bn Twitter acquisition 25% of shares in xAI

xAI is set to close a new $5bn fundraising round doubling valuation to $50bn in 6 months. Those to benefit include Fidelity, Larry Ellison, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Jack Dorsey, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz.

#Musk #Xai

https://www.ft.com/content/5c9ca1f6-b6fe-4c96-84e2-38e3eee90f3b

Felon #Musk's attacks on #Wikipedia have done more for their fundraising in three days than Jimmy's constant guilt-tripping in the last three years

A Christmas story
#Christmas #LoveActually #MichaelGove

Happy birthday Jesus, inventor of the poisson distribution

Joe Biden just signed the most significant anti-trans law ever.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-signs-defense-bill-despite-objections_n_676ac305e4b077ae3eb574b5

This is Joe Biden's legacy. This is the most significant thing he did in four years as President. His final act, his final fuck you on the way out the door, will be to reify— and make bipartisan— the notion that the Federal government should be instrumentalized to exterminate trans children. He could have let Trump do that. But no, he did it himself.

I repeat: https://mastodon.social/deck/@mcc/113501640933213236

in switzerland you aren't allowed to have a train with exactly 256 axles because of an integer overflow in the axle counting machine

i wish i could fix my software bugs by making it illegal to cause them

"Genocides can happen with gas chambers. Or with machetes. Or they can be carried out with 2,000lb bombs and aid blockades. Genocides rarely look the same. But they are all designed to arrive at the same endpoint: the elimination of a people"

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) agree that Israel is striving for extermination. It has not hidden its intent, and that intent is confirmed by its actions on the ground.

#Israel #Gaza
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/another-expert-report-finds-israel?publication_id=476450&post_id=153574998&isFreemail=true&r=96cfk&triedRedirect=true

Very aptly put, David Frum.
👍
https://bsky.app/profile/davidfrum.bsky.social/post/3ldtps2hxps2m
#Politics #Bitcoin

Take care to follow the instructions carefully for maintenance of your slotin-loader iMac g4.

Because we aren't engaged in economically rational activity. We're doing something essential - essential to us, first and foremost, and essential to the audiences and peers our work reaches and changes and challenges.

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These writers - the ones who are still alive - are living proof of the fact that you have to break our fingers to get us to stop writing. Some of them haven't had a mainstream publisher in *decades*, but they're *still* writing, and self-publishing, or publishing with small presses, and often they're doing the best work of their careers, and almost no one is seeing it, and they're *still* doing it.

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“It is a great shame that Ireland is a special case, but the shame is not Ireland’s.”
~Mark O’Connell

The Irish Times

☕️🥐

Luigi Mangione fan art, merch, and photos are getting hit with bogus copyright takedown requests all over the internet. Artists and journalists affected. Very difficult to tell who is doing it, but one company says they received a request from United Healthcare:

https://www.404media.co/copyright-abuse-is-getting-luigi-mangione-merch-removed-from-the-internet/

A senior U.S. military official said yesterday that Ukrainian troops had killed or wounded “several hundred” North Korean soldiers in Russia’s Kursk region. The North Koreans are “not battle-hardened,” and Ukraine “struck their command and control sites as well as infantry positions.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/us/politics/ukraine-aid-biden-trump.html

Vladimir Putin, 72, says, "We need more girls" and expresses concern that too much Russian land is being left empty. Maybe cool it with the annexations and tend to that unpopulated territory, my dude. https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/12/19/territory-is-good-but-it-must-be-populated-says-putin-telling-russians-we-need-more-girls

Taught my parrot to swear in Finnish, no body in the house speaks the language, the family are confused but it fills me with warmth when he says "vittu" or "perkele". Childish I know but so much fun.

16 months ago, these young people sued the state of Montana and won. A judge ruled that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions are “a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment, and harm and injury to the youth plaintiffs.” The judge rolled back two Montana laws that prevent the state from considering climate impacts when deciding whether to approve permits for energy and mining projects.

The state of Montana appealed the decision.

But today the Montana Supreme Court upheld the judge's ruling! It affirmed that the youth plaintiffs have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment”. And it said:

"Plaintiffs showed at trial—without dispute—that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future."

The battle is far from done. It will probably go to the Supreme Court, packed with judges appointed by Trump. But this is a sign: as the climate crisis worsens, more and more of us will fight to make governments treat it as the calamity that it is.

Think of the world these kids will face.

More details here:

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/12/18/montana-supreme-court-affirms-decision-in-held-historic-youth-climate-case/

"...a power outage at #SpaceX’s California facility caused a loss of #GroundControl, meaning that the mission control team was briefly unable to command the #spacecraft."

Single outage brought GROUND CONTROL down?! On the ground where power grids & diesel generators at a nearby home improvement store are! Have they never heard of battery backups and generators?! They have no idea what 3 points-safe₁ means, nor failover₂, and have no business trying to send so much as a spatula to #space.

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