Powderhorn

From the "racism is totally within our rights under the First Amendment" dept.:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado over a new AI law set to take effect in June.

The suit seeks to block the state from enforcing the law, which would impose new requirements on AI systems to protect state residents from “algorithmic discrimination” in sectors such as education, employment, healthcare, housing and financial services.

Colorado was the first state to pass a comprehensive bill to regulate AI.

The company claims the law infringes on its first amendment free-speech protections and would force xAI to “promote the state’s ideological views on various matters, racial justice in particular”, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the lawsuit. “Its provisions prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the state of Colorado dislikes.”

The Wi-Fi broke on my Kindle Paperwhite years ago, and I have only one micro-B cable left that will connect to it.

Amazon is to stop supporting older Kindle models leaving longtime ebook fans unable to access new content from the Kindle store.

Devices released during or before 2012 will no longer receive updates from 20 May, affecting owners of older Kindles, including the earliest models such as the Touch and some Fire tablets. It is thought that 2m e-readers could be affected.

Users will still be able to read ebooks they have downloaded, and their accounts and their Kindle library will remain accessible on mobile and desktop apps. Active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”. Amazon said performing a factory reset on affected Kindles would make them unusable.

Disappointed users have vented their frustration online, including in comments on The Verge, accusing Amazon of “causing waste at a large scale” and saying their devices would be reduced to a paperweight despite still working.

One wonders whether these old devices just don't have enough telemetry built in for Amazon's liking.

This is only a ~7-minute video, but there's a lot packed into it.

Inside a teaching kitchen south-east of Seoul, I coat a whole chicken – cut into eight parts – in batter and dip the pieces carefully into a bowl of powdered mix until covered in a light, fluffy layer.

A chef watches intently. “Don’t rub it,” he says. “Keep it delicate.”

The chicken, already brined in what I’m told is a secret marinade, goes into a fryer filled with an olive oil blend, heated to 165C. I slowly lower the pieces a third of the way, then drop them in away from myself to avoid splashing. I set a timer for 10 minutes.

This is Chicken University, a sprawling campus with a giant chicken statue at the entrance. It exists to train would-be owners of the BBQ Chicken franchise chain through a two-week residential programme. More than 50,000 people have passed through its classrooms.

This humble dish is relatively simple, and is not even traditional Korean cuisine, but it is part of a national obsession that has gone global, both physically and culturally as part of the K-food wave. The country has been only half-jokingly dubbed the Republic of Fried Chicken.

South Korea has around 40,000 fried chicken restaurants – just a few thousand short of the number of McDonald’s branches worldwide. Most are small, family-run operations. But now, Korean chicken brands operate more than 1,800 stores in around 60 countries, nearly double the number of stores a decade ago. From London to Los Angeles, Korean fried chicken appears on the menu.

In April 1975, Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor whose efforts to track down Nazi war criminals had earned him the title of “Nazi hunter”, wrote a letter to Albert Speer, the Nazi war criminal. Wiesenthal thanked him for a psychology book Speer had sent him, and forwarded a copy of the French edition of his own memoir. Their decade-long correspondence also includes holiday postcards and birthday wishes. It ends with a personal note from Speer’s widow Margarete on her husband’s death in 1981, telling Wiesenthal how important their friendship had been to him.

Wiesenthal’s friendship was a private echo of the extraordinarily warm international welcome that Speer received as a public intellectual after his release from Spandau prison in 1966. Speer had served as minister of armaments in wartime Nazi Germany, and was found guilty of crimes against humanity; yet when he died, he was in London to promote his new book on the BBC.

Speer’s rehabilitation was a masterpiece in duplicity. In his defence at the Nürenberg trials – and in later books and interviews – he was the only high-ranking official to take on full responsibility for the Nazi crimes; and this seeming moral clarity allowed him to credibly lie that he had not known about the extermination camps. The evidence for that would emerge only after his death, prompting Wiesenthal, among many others, to admit he had been duped. Until then, the lie allowed Speer to become an authority on the endlessly fascinating topic of Adolf Hitler’s personality and psyche.

OpenAI has put on hold plans for a landmark project to strengthen the UK’s AI capabilities, citing high energy costs and regulation.

Stargate UK was a part of the landmark UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.

A Guardian investigation last month revealed many of these were “phantom investments” and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was this March still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.

The Stargate project was to support Britain in building out “sovereign compute” – infrastructure that would allow the government and other UK institutions to run AI models on datacentres in the country. This is in theory important to the security of British data, for institutions and individuals.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We see huge potential for the UK’s AI future. We continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

Or maybe it's as simple as "shit, we actually don't make any money, and people have caught onto the grift."

The long-running war of words between George Clooney and the White House has ignited again after the Oscar-winning actor criticised Donald Trump’s threat to Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight”.

On Wednesday, in a speech to 3,000 high school students in Cuneo, Italy, Clooney said the US president had committed a war crime with his threat.

“Some say Donald Trump is fine,” the 64-year-old told the students at an event organised by the Clooney Foundation for Justice. “But if anyone says he wants to end a civilization, that’s a war crime. You can still support the conservative point of view but there must be a line of decency, and we must not cross it.”

In response, the White House communications director, Steven Cheung, told the Independent: “The only person committing war crimes is George Clooney for his awful movies and terrible acting ability.”

So nice to see adult discussion from the junta. "We hate George Clooney, don't we, folks? Pay no attention to the thousands of murdered civilians."

Let me tell you how much fun it was to deal with late-May temps in early March in a metal box.

March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data. And the next year or so looks to turn the dial up on global warmth even more, as some forecasts predict a brewing El Niño will reach super strength.

Not only was it the hottest March on record for the US but the amount it was above normal beat any other month in history for the lower 48 states. March’s average temperature of 50.85F(10.47C) was 9.35F (5.19C) above the 20th-century normal for March.

That easily passed the old record of 8.9F set in March 2012 as the most abnormally hot month on record – regardless of the month of the year – according to records released on Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4F above the 20th-century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April, Noaa said.

It took Israel only 10 minutes to carry out one of the worst mass-killings in Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990.

Omar Rakha heard the war planes but did not feel the explosions; it was only when he woke up face down on the street, bleeding, that he understood what had happened: the building next to his in the Barbour neighbourhood of central Beirut had been destroyed by two Israeli bombs. He then ran through the flaming wreckage to find his sister, screaming.

Shaden Fakih, a 24-year-old calisthenics trainer, also ran towards the impact site; his friend Mahmoud was inside the struck building. He could only get so close; the multistorey building was a pile of burning rubble. Fakih began to pull people out of the apartments in front of the site, carrying in his arms an old woman who could not walk. There was no sign of Mahmoud and the neighbourhood – once thought to be safe from Israeli bombs – felt like a war zone.

Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah was in the emergency room when the casualties began to arrive. Among the wounded were children pulled from under the rubble; many arrived alone, without parents, their identities unknown. “The youngest was an 11-month-old. I had to operate on him just to relieve some pressure in the head,” said Abu-Sittah, who works as a surgeon at the American University of Beirut Medical College (AUBMC).

All signs point to yes.

What was the point of Israel’s surprise mass strikes on Lebanon that killed more than 200 people and drew widespread international condemnation?

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have claimed the largest strike against Hezbollah during the month-long war against Iran was carefully aimed at members of the armed group, but the attacks appeared to be as much a piece of violent spectacle to benefit Netanyahu as militarily useful.

Others have speculated that the attack – without warning and initially hitting more than 100 targets in 10 minutes including in densely populated residential areas in central Beirut – was aimed at undermining the US-Iran ceasefire that many see as being imposed on an unhappy Netanyahu.

The version being briefed in the Israeli media is that Hezbollah had sought to move command posts to civilian areas outside its historical centres, such as the sprawling Dahieh suburb, to better conceal and protect them – a claim Israel has previously made about Hamas in Gaza.

So, we have a war being led by two leaders trying to avoid legal proceedings at home for past (alleged) infractions. What's a bit of war crimes between friends?

I don't really operate in default society, which is important to note going forward.

I was totally on the fence about going to Church Night, a weekly event at the burner warehouse where I totally whiffed on getting involved. This week, it was RGB LED testing, and that's not something you walk into.

This places me outside, which isn't the worst. I'm watching the hot dogs grill, and then comes the unexpected item in burner area.

Apparently, as with the admins here, I've been identified as a rogue actor in a stable community. In both cases, we move forward.

I end up talking with a woman who happened to sit next to me for an hour. She teaches fifth grade and, well, she meets my physical interests. But we've talked before, so this is just shooting the shit while I'm getting weed from the right-hand side.

Then, it's back to the person tending the fire. Tiny Tim informs me that they've both flagged me as a risk within the community and subsequently de-escalated. "I got you wrong," they said.

We are still at the fist-bump level of physical interaction, but I doubt much more would be useful. It's a step up from vitriol.

From here, we head off to gallows humour. And by this I mean Gallows' humour. Oh, yeah, we all have burner names. There isn't much point in having you guess what mine is.

Anyway, Gallows is one of the leaders of the space. He's very much neurodivergent and has been encouraging me to explore that, because, once again, I'm being told my behavior only makes sense within that context

This is another hour or so wherein he give me a couple of cigarettes.

So, we're drinking and smoking, and Leonard comes up. We chat for a bit, he said he's tired, and would I like a ride home?

This always ends the same way. He knows where I'm parked, some three minutes away, but we talk for at least 30 minutes.

This week, Leonard brings up Young Sheldon. I leave it as an exercise for the reader as to why this is amusing.

You know you've truly become part of a community when people are basically fighting for your time when they see you idle. Hopefully, I won't wake up feeling the loss of community, but this was the first time I just pinballed from connection to connection.

Wisconsin voters sent another liberal justice to the state supreme court, with Chris Taylor beating the conservative Maria Lazar and giving liberals a 5-2 edge on the high court.

The retirement of Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative, gave liberals a chance to further consolidate their hold on the high court ahead of the next presidential election, when the swing state is sure to see challenges to election results.

Taylor, a liberal judge on the state’s court of appeals who previously served as a Democratic lawmaker, was running against Lazar, who is also on the court of appeals and a former deputy state attorney general.

Taylor’s win gives liberals a 5-2 bloc on the bench. Taylor is seen as friendly to voting rights, while Lazar’s views aligned more closely with Republicans, pushing for policies that could hinder voting access and impact. Lazar had continued to defend maps in Wisconsin that were gerrymandered to lead to more Republican victories, which have since been overturned.