Dan Farber #Stand with Ukraine 🇺🇦 #NeverAgain

Former editor/writer at CBS Interactive, now at Salesforce. Opinions my own.

[Dan Farber #Stand with Ukraine 🇺🇦 #NeverAgain @dbfarber]

Facts vs. #alternatefacts

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.

I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.

1/ Here's what I can share:

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

sociopath thrilled with killing people about whom he knows nothing except they are "Iranians"-- not even pretending to have normal human feelings of regret or conscience.
contrast with the views of a military man like General Eisenhower--war is terrible, war is stupid... war should be a last & not a first resort.

[Tina Brown @TinaBrownLM]

In the first hours after the strike, Trump called on the Iranian people “to take back their country.” With what? Sticks and stones? For the sake of projected bravado, our bone-spur president is urging the Iranian people to come out of their houses and die.

[David Wallace-Wells @dwallacewells]

When the Secretary of War made these comments, about one in five people killed by Operation Epic Fury were elementary-age schoolgirls in the middle of a normal school day.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet.

1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.

The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.

Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.

And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one.

We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

[Dan Farber #Stand with Ukraine 🇺🇦 #NeverAgain @dbfarber]

@sbg1 @ron_fournier

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

“It’s just a couple dead Americans, I don't understand why do you care so much" is officially the new MAGA stance on national security.

[Tommy Vietor @TVietor08]

Your legacy, @elonmusk

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

350,000 people with nowhere to go will be rendered undocumented on Tuesday. Not because Haiti is safe, no, of course not. Because Secretary Noem and President Trump don’t think they should be here legally.

What the hell are we doing? Is this who we are?

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

This is a terribly misleading graphic which uses a non-zero-based Y axis to make a 1% difference seem much larger.

I recommend Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

In Springfield, Ohio, people are preparing in advance of a “large deportation” promised by Trump. To all appearances, the city is 2 or 3 days from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis.
https://t.co/f5L6m9Dmv7

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

The clash in Minneapolis and across the US is embodied by two men: Gregory Bovino, noted for a reckless, take-no-prisoners machismo, indifferent to the law, defined by his willingness to attack protesters and passersby in a way that a Chicago judge earlier said "shocks the conscience"; and Alex Pretti, a nurse for veterans whose life has been about helping others. Their choices should clarify ours. Which would we want our children to emulate? Do we want to live in Alex Pretti's America or in Gregory Bovino's?
https://t.co/Vut5uUPUHw

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

This is another Trump gift to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. When the American government arrests journalists for committing journalism, this devalues the image of American democracy worldwide and gives Putin and Xi an excuse for their own persecution of journalists.

[@jason @Jason]

https://t.co/Kl7dthSvIs

[Dan Farber #Stand with Ukraine 🇺🇦 #NeverAgain @dbfarber]

CPJ condemns arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort over Minnesota protests coverage https://t.co/DbgbXHIZHK via @CPJAmericas

[Chuck Todd @chucktodd]

When the desire to “own the libs” leads the executive branch to celebrate a blatant violation of someone’s Constitutional rights. And the media puppets celebrating this are proving they have no interest in protecting speech. They only want THEIR speech protected not the speech of people they disagree with.

[Dan Farber #Stand with Ukraine 🇺🇦 #NeverAgain @dbfarber]

The danger we face is not only the violence we see in our communities or on video. It is the narrative that follows: the official insistence that the victim was not a victim at all, but an enemy of the state. https://t.co/3KO2sQCp2x

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

Getting the impression that ICE is gearing up for a pogrom in Springfield, Ohio, which was ground zero of Vance’s lies about Haitians during the campaign. Haitians lose temporary protected status on February 3rd. Reporters, lawyers, neighbors — please get ready.

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

The Trump administration's “war on empathy,” @HillaryClinton writes, “threatens to pave the way for an extreme vision of Christian nationalism that seeks to replace democracy with theocracy in America”: https://t.co/UTI8jnNpS7

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

I sometimes wish the Democratic Party in Congress consisted of any 260 people in the Minneapolis telephone directory rather than the 260 dignitaries now representing us.