Sergey R

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Swiss farmers planted flowers between their crops and watched pest damage drop by over half. The UK is now running the same trial across 15 farms. The reason this works is embarrassingly simple.

A Swiss study on winter wheat found that fields with wildflower strips had 40 to 53% fewer leaf beetle pests than fields without. Crop damage dropped 61%.

The mechanism is simple. Wildflowers feed hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps, ladybugs, and ground beetles. Those insects eat the aphids, beetle larvae, and caterpillars that farmers would otherwise spray for. A few meters of wildflowers hosts an unpaid pest control crew that would jump at the chance to whoop some aphid ass.

In apple orchards where no insecticides had been used for five years, plots with wildflower alleyways had 9.2% damaged fruit. Control plots without flowers had 32.5%.

The UK is now running a five-year trial across 15 farms placing 6-meter flower strips through the middle of fields, not just at the edges, because the beneficial insects can't reach the center of a large field otherwise.

This works the same way in a backyard vegetable garden as it does on a commercial farm. Plant native flowering species near your tomatoes, beans, and squash. The pests still show up, but the predators show up too.

Study doi: 20151369

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Orwell was a genius

[Diana Panchenko 🇺🇦 @Panchenko_X]

Today I'll introduce the King of sex-industry in Ukraine, Vitaliy Klitchko (@Vitaliy_Klychko).
He controls the biggest network of strip-clubs. 100 brothels only in Kyiv!
He sells hundreds of girls to EU and the US. He sells drugs in Ukraine.
He also under investigation on corruption and state treason.

Please like or share!

1/6

[Motherland @Motherl28134473]

Will you boycott?

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Seems like this should be a bigger news story in the U.S.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Sergey Brin rarely speaks publicly. He sat down for an unscripted Q&A on Frontier AI.

He admits even the people building these models do not fully understand what they have created:

1. All the specialized AI models are converging into one. Google used to need separate models for different scientific problems. Now the main Gemini models are becoming state-of-the-art for math and other scientific questions at the same time. Brin says he would not have predicted this convergence at the outset, and watching it happen has been incredible.

2. Training an AI on one skill mysteriously improves unrelated skills. This is the concept of transfer. Train a model on coding, and its math reasoning gets better, and vice versa. Teaching it to process images can improve its ability to think through geometric word problems. The capabilities bleed into each other in ways nobody fully engineered.

3. Even Sergey Brin does not know how to prompt these models. He says he is genuinely confused about what level to prompt at. Do you tell it to debug a specific chunk of code, or ask it to write a better neural net training algorithm, or just say, " What should I do today. He admits that even at Google, they do not know exactly where the edges of Gemini's capabilities are.

4. One of the biggest leaps in AI came from the dumbest sounding trick. Chain-of-thought prompting is just telling the model to think step by step before giving your problem. Brin says it seemed like the dumbest thing ever, and there was no obvious reason it should work. But it did, and it spurred a significant increase in AI capability. Some of the most straightforward requests turn out to unlock the most.

5. Brin would not modify his own biology for today's AI. Asked how humans can keep up with the accelerating bandwidth of models, he acknowledged neural links and direct brain connections are being pursued. But he said he would personally wait for the technology to mature a lot before doing anything to change his biology. Today's models do not justify it.

6. Super intelligence does not mean solving the impossible. An audience member argued that true super intelligence would mean solving NP complete problems like the travelling salesman. Brin pushed back. Most computer scientists believe P is not equal to NP, which means no algorithm can reliably solve those problems optimally, and it does not matter how smart the AI is. Impossible stays impossible. Super intelligence just means being smarter than humans.

7. Computers mastering a skill has never stopped humans from pursuing it. Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess in the 1990s, and people kept playing chess. After AlphaGo, the human game of Go advanced dramatically, and the players who lost to it became vastly better. Brin's point: AI does not retire human ambition in an area; it often pushes the state of the art and pulls people up with it.

8. Brin thinks something close to transformers could get us to AGI. Asked directly if transformers are sufficient, he said his guess is yes, largely because they have proven weirdly flexible, working for image and video far beyond their original text purpose. But he was careful to note they have quietly changed a lot along the way and are not the same architecture as the original transformer paper.

9. AGI means two different things, and one requires understanding the physical world. Brin personally thinks of AGI as AI that can improve itself. But he concedes others define it as AI that can do anything a person can, and he thinks they are probably more correct. To do everything a person can, the AI must understand and interact with the physical world, which is why world models, and robotics, become essential.

10. Inside Google, they now use the AI to build the AI. Brin says the team has shifted a lot of energy toward having the AI do things like monitor training runs and generate its own training data. You start to use the tool to build the tool. That is most of what he spends his time on now, what he calls the self-improvement game.

11. Brin is unusually candid about where Google trails its competitors. He admits Google was a little late to focus deeply on coding. He says Gemini 3.0 and 3.1 were on top across the board six months ago, but other labs have since made strides, particularly in coding. He gives a competitor's model the edge now on deep coding and overnight tasks, while pitching Gemini's flash model as far faster for rapid interactive iteration. hindsight, he says, is that they should have focused on code earlier.

12. He sees his own role as a rabble-rouser, not a manager. Brin is honest that delivering Gemini is Corey and Demis's responsibility, not his. he describes his job as poking and prodding the team, asking, are you really doing that, reminding them of priorities they might be missing and ideas they are not paying enough attention to. He admits this is sometimes a little disruptive.

13. Confidence comes from ignoring the monthly temperature. Brin says if he judged Google's position every month by which competitor just shipped a model, he would lose his confidence very quickly. Instead, he watches the longer arc. Things shift around constantly; one lab leads on one thing, another pulls ahead somewhere else, and he feels good about where Gemini actually is despite the day-to-day noise.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

NOW PATENTLY PSYCHOS
NYT: "US believes Israel was plotting to kill top Iranian negotiators Ghalibaf and Araghchi while Trump administration was in talks with Iran."

Since Herodotus (& before the Egyptian-Hittite treaties) civilization meant sparing negociators; diplomaticide is banned by the Geneva convention; Sharia imposes safe passage, etc.

[Israel Exposed @xIsraelExposedx]

It took a little longer than expected, but we have created a website for people to view the footage collected from Gaza in one place. You no longer have to download the entire archives to see them.

It includes:

64,537 videos
17,905 photos
Ability to download individual videos
Searchable index
Exhaustive sources list (300+ journalists)
Geolocation data
Livemap with minute to minute updates
Victim list

It can be accessed here: https://t.co/s0Se94PXWF

Please share & quote tweet to help this post break out of the twitter algorithm prison.

We will keep adding the rest of the archives to the site, be patient- it is difficult work. Continue to seed the torrents provided, as that is the best way to ensure the footage remains stored in decentalized way.

God bless all those who sacrificed their lives to get this footage out, and everyone invovled in collecting/archiving it.

Join our telegram:
https://t.co/bvcis3b9GT
Follow our backup accounts:
@ZionismExposedx & @IsraelExposedAr

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Brutes

[REJOIN CAMPAIGN @sonofr]

IF OUR GOVERNMENT WON��T SANCTION ISRAEL YOU CAN DO YOUR BIT BY NOT BUYING ANYTHING MADE OR GROWN IN ISRAEL!

Check the barcode…729, remember it next time you shop.

Every little helps!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Wow

[Edouard Husson @edouardhusson]

Nostalgie. Mais projection dans l'avenir, aussi.

[Ce jour-là dans l'Histoire @CeJour_Histoire]

Pendant deux siècles, le monde ne s'est pas mesuré à partir de Greenwich. Mais à partir de Paris.

Une ligne invisible traverse encore la capitale du nord au sud. Le méridien de Paris.

Tout commence en 1667, un 21 juin. Jour du solstice d'été. On fonde l'Observatoire de Paris, et l'on trace cette ligne de référence pile à travers le bâtiment.

Pendant plus de deux cents ans, les cartes françaises comptent les longitudes depuis Paris. Pas depuis Londres.

Et ce méridien va servir à une chose immense.

À la Révolution, on veut une mesure universelle, identique pour tous les hommes. On décide de mesurer la Terre. Deux astronomes, Delambre et Méchain, partent arpenter la France, de Dunkerque à Barcelone, le long de ce méridien.

De leur calcul naîtra une unité que vous utilisez tous les jours.

Le mètre.

En 1884, le monde finit par choisir Greenwich comme référence mondiale. Paris s'incline.

Mais la ligne, elle, est restée.

Aujourd'hui, 135 médaillons de bronze frappés du nom Arago sont scellés dans les rues de Paris. Ils suivent le tracé exact du vieux méridien.

Vous en avez déjà repéré un sous vos pieds ?

[WW2 The Eastern Front @ShoahUkraine]

85 years ago, on June 22, 1941, at exactly 4:15 AM Moscow time, more than 3 million German soldiers opened artillery fire and began pouring into the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, the greatest invasion in human history, had officially begun.

Almost four years later, at the cost of 27 million Soviet lives, Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and the rest of the German scum would be dead, and the flag of workers and peasants would fly high over the Reichstag in central Berlin.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Good idea

[Southampton Times @sotontimes]

🔺Telegram founder Pavel Durov compares the lack of panic during the sinking of the Titanic with the current lack of awareness in Europe as citizens freedoms are stripped away: “I came here today to tell you-that we find ourselves in a similar predicament. In a similar situation. Our ship. Has already hit the iceberg. We have already started to sink. Without even realizing it. And I'm talking about the ship of our personal freedoms”

Continuing giving examples of his personal experiences of fraud and corruption with Russia, the EU and France. Before moving onto Keir Starmer’s UK clampdown on social media:

“Thousands of people are getting arrested every year in the United Kingdom for social media posts. You say somethingpolitically incorrect online, you may end up being fined or spend some time in prison in Germany”

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Trump is figuring out that Zionistan is committing LITERAL acts of TERRORISM by KNOWLINGLY killing uninvolved civilians.

Next step: he will figure out that the Zionistan PROJECT is to terrorize civilians into LEAVING, something they have been doing since 1936.

[LesNews @LesNews]

G7 à Évian : la France reçoit les grands de ce monde… et la Suisse récupère les bouchons, les barrières et la facture sécurité.

Quand le sommet est côté lac, mais les complications côté Genève. 🇫🇷🇨🇭

#G7 #Evian #Genève #Suisse #France #Caricature

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

WHY are we letting Israeli soldiers destroy every inch of Palestine? Is it ''a war''? Would you accept others do this to you and your home?

Let's stop this genocide together.
Diplomats
Politicians
Judges
Police officers
Journalists
Citizens
Anyone can and must take action.