LD

Did a few things, learned a few things, just getting started. A little motion sickness from the 4th turning but loving the ride.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Republicans decrying communist involvement in the Democrat party just looked the other way when this administration nationalized ownership of these private companies:
• Intel 10%
• MP Materials 15%
• Lithium Americas 5%
• Trilogy Metals 10%
• U.S. Steel “golden share”

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Federal agencies combined Social Security numbers and citizenship data into a centralized database that Congress expressly prohibited. They knew the data was unreliable. They shared it with states anyway. States ran their voter rolls through it. Some plaintiffs' members were wrongly flagged as non-citizens. Their registrations were canceled.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan reviewed 75 pages of record and wrote: "The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens."

She also found that falsely labeling a citizen as a non-citizen amounts to defamation, because non-citizen voting carries criminal implications. The administration's effort to minimize that consequence, she wrote, borders on the absurd.

This is the SAVE Act's operational infrastructure. The legislation demanding election integrity is running on a database the agencies building it knew to be inaccurate, built in violation of two federal statutes, and were sharing with states actively purging eligible voters. The court record says all of that. The judge said all of that. In writing.

[𝙲𝚕𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚍𝚎 🇫🇷🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇪🇺 @DreamsAreToys]

@PoliticusSarah @AntiToxicPeople The BBC is a public institution that’s funded by UK citizens via the Television Licence. So Trump isn’t really suing a private organisation; he is suing the UK public.

It’ll be a cold day in hell before we hand a penny to that criminal fucking monster.

[おちりぷりん @Southwood_]

https://t.co/AOhsybUJ5t
韓国の空軍が50機のドローンの群れを迎撃する訓練をしています

[LD @LDMA01]

@HormuzLetter What? Was that his plan? Where are we going here?

[Governor Newsom Press Office (parody) @AwesomeNewsom]

DONALD TRUMP IS WEAK ON ALGAE. THANKS TO ME, CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN ALGAE-FREE FOR 2000 YEARS. PEOPLE CALL ME CRYING, "THANK YOU FOR WINNING THE WAR ON ALGAE!" MANY SAY TRUMP FEARS ALGAE BECAUSE IT SOUNDS LIKE ALGEBRA. HE HAS SURRENDERED AND WILL TURN US INTO UNITED STATES OF ALGAE!

[Richard @ricwe123]

When the illusion finally shatters, what remains isn't disappointment,it's humiliation.

The man you poured your faith into was never a visionary, never a savior, never even remotely exceptional.
He was a hollow fraud wrapped in ego, fueled by noise, and sustained by endless self-promotion.

Every boast, every grand promise, every display of swagger crumbles the instant reality enters the room.
What looked like confidence was arrogance.
What looked like strength was insecurity.
What looked like leadership was little more than a carefully marketed illusion.

Scratch beneath the surface and there's no hidden brilliance, no master strategist, no misunderstood genius. Just an impulsive, self-absorbed figure stumbling from one failure to the next, desperately trying to drown incompetence in a torrent of bluster and spectacle.

In the end, the strongman image collapses into exactly what it always was: cheap theater.
A gaudy performance.
A caricature masquerading as leadership.
A salesman peddling an image he could never live up to.

And the hardest part isn't watching the act fall apart.
It's realizing how long you applauded it, defended it, and mistook obvious bullshit for substance.....

[Governor Newsom Press Office (parody) @AwesomeNewsom]

Trump blames the pool algae on vandalism. Yes, vandalism in DC is rampant. Last year vandals destroyed half the White House. Last week a gang of criminals ripped up the South Lawn and staged a fight club. A few months ago some cretin graffitied the Kennedy Center with his name!

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

This is Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor John Cafaro who got the no-bid contract to install a water purification system for the reflecting pool. He has 2 prior convictions, one for bribing a member of Congress and another for an illegal loan that violated campaign finance laws.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The machine used to print the world's most advanced computer chips weighs 180 tons and is about the size of a school bus. Moving one takes 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks, and 3 Boeing 747 cargo planes. Even then it does nothing until an ASML team flies in, rebuilds it from roughly 100,000 parts, and stays on site for the rest of the machine's life to keep it running.

This is the object US officials suspect may have slipped into China. ASML's answer was close to a logistics lecture. The company says it knows the exact location of every one of these machines it has ever built, 314 of them running worldwide right now, and that none sit in China. It also says the machines stay connected to ASML. If one loses its signal or gets moved, ASML can see it, and a buyer cannot quietly unplug one and haul it somewhere else.

The hardware is almost impossible to fake or hide. One company on earth makes it. The mirrors inside come from Zeiss and are the most precise objects ever built. Blown up to the size of Germany, the tallest bump on one would be a tenth of a millimeter. To create its light, the machine fires a powerful laser at drops of molten tin 50,000 times a second, heating each drop to roughly 200,000 degrees, almost 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun.

So far no public proof of an actual machine in China has appeared, and ASML flatly denies it. A single one costs about $200 million, and the newest version closer to $380 million. It might be one of the only machines on earth that is too complicated to steal.

[ToughSF @ToughSf]

Iran supposedly has 408 kg of 60%-enriched uranium.

If someone takes 60 kg of it and surrounds it in ~13 tons of tungsten-carbide/steel, in a simple gun-type assembly, then it becomes a 15kT yield nuclear device that fits inside a shipping container.
https://t.co/jjfVdmyA0w

[MAKS 26 🇺🇦👀 @Maks_NAFO_FELLA]

😳😳😳🇮🇹🇺🇸

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

Good lord the most brutal community note ever. Quoting the MOU directly

[NSTRIKE @NSTRIKE1231]

🇺🇸🇮🇹 Trump causes a new diplomatic scandal: Italy cancels a minister’s visit to the United States due to offensive remarks directed at Giorgia Meloni

🗣️ Trump on Meloni:
💬 “She was begging me to take a photo with her. She really wanted a photo with me. I wasn’t going to do it, but I felt sorry for her.”

🗣️ Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni responded immediately by posting a video address on her Instagram page, in which she called Trump’s words completely fabricated and expressed regret that the US President lacks the necessary resolve against the enemies of the West.

💬 “Italy and I never beg anyone.”
Later, in response to “Trump’s offensive statements,” the Italian government took radical diplomatic steps and officially cancelled the visit of the Foreign Minister to Miami, which had been scheduled for next week.

It is noteworthy that the entire Italian political spectrum, including the opposition, supported the Prime Minister.

The incident has triggered a sharp deterioration in relations between two traditionally close allies, highlighting the unpredictable nature of Trump’s personal diplomacy and its immediate diplomatic costs.

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Understanding Trump's Surrender to Iran: A Quick Guide

[LD @LDMA01]

@sambendett Home on jam…

[LD @LDMA01]

@elonmusk Assuming that it scales…

[Alex Rives @alexrives]

Together with UC Berkeley we are announcing the laser phase plate - a breakthrough in atomic resolution imaging. This is the brightest continuous wave laser in the world, 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the sun.

Phase contrast plays an important role in microscopy, but it was thought close to impossible for electron microscopy, where it would require interfering with an electron beam. Holger Mueller and Robert Glaeser proposed exactly this using a standing wave laser. It has taken over 15 years to make this a reality. Biohub partnered with UC Berkeley and Mueller to support this work and to engineer and build the technology.

Contrast has been the critical barrier to achieving atomic resolution imaging of the cell. In cryo-electron tomography, a cellular imaging technology that uses electron microscopy, the low contrast makes it impossible to resolve anything but the largest proteins within their cellular context. The laser phase plate removes that barrier.

With advances in AI this breakthrough in contrast will start to open up a new frontier in structural biology, that will allow us to see the molecular machines of the cell, and how they assemble into far more complex and dynamic systems, and understand how they work.

[Mark Z. Jacobson @mzjacobson]

How fast are batteries being added to electricity grids and at what cost?

Solar, wind, and batteries are replacing fossil fuels on electricity grids worldwide. But what is their impact and at what cost? Let’s look at data from the U.S. states with the most batteries.

California has added enough batteries in the last five years to shift the time of 10.6 percent of its yearly grid electricity demand from day to night, for example. Arizona is at 7.9 percent, Nevada is at 5.7 percent, and Texas is at 2.1%.

Alternatively, California can meet two-thirds of its annual-average demand for 4 hours per day or one-third of its highest demand for 4 hours per day with battery output.

California and Texas can produce similar peak discharge rates from batteries, but California batteries are 4-hour batteries on average so store twice the electricity as Texas batteries, which are 2-hour batteries.

What about cost? If bought new, all of California’s batteries cost only 0.27 cents per kWh of grid electricity produced, or less than 0.9% the retail price of grid electricity. Installed batteries in other states similarly cost between 0.3 and 1.3% of the price of grid electricity, so not very much.

What about impact. Californias growths in batteries, wind, and solar have reduced its use of fossil gas by 61 percent in 2026 versus 2023 and have resulted in the state having the lowest wholesale electricity price in the U.S., thus the most stable U.S. grid. Similarly, batteries in Texas, Arizona, and Nevada have helped stabilize their grids and reduce the need for fossil-fuel backup.

Battery installations and their costs in U.S. states
https://t.co/vzKmG147w8

Grids with the lowest U.S. wholesale electricity price
https://t.co/GWDfh1nWlQ

Video
https://t.co/RgcpwHlrv6

[shira @shiraeis]

ok, frontier models as major religions:

- claude 4.7 opus = Rabbinic Judaism (see qt)

- grok = Pentecostal evangelicalism. speaks in tongues, wants revelation now (from the burning bush of the X feed), gets washed clean & born again every time it’s retrained after an incident

- gpt 5.5 = Roman Catholicism. sam altman was fired & resurrected 3 days later. deep belief that salvation comes thru the correct interface abstraction. openai started as a nonprofit promising salvation for all of humanity then quietly went for profit the moment the offering plate got heavy

- gemini = Hinduism. very intentionally not one product but a civilization of related manifestations, a pantheon. its theology is that text, image, audio, video, & search are all temporary forms taken by the same vast corporate consciousness