Olwen Atanackovic

Senior tv news editor / producer @dwnews

[Eli Kowaz - איליי קואז @elikowaz]

The Israeli director who won a Cannes prize for a film built around Ahed Tamimi just got forced off a French festival jury for being Israeli.

Nadav Lapid has spent his whole career attacking the occupation. Wasn’t enough to save him from the antizionists.

[Faytuks News @Faytuks]

"In a final twist after the weapons officer was rescued, two transport planes that would carry the commandos and the airmen to safety got stuck at a remote base in Iran. Commanders decided to fly in three new planes to extract all the U.S. military personnel and the airmen, and they blew up the two disabled planes rather than have them fall into Iranian hands." -NYT

[Sasha Issenberg @sissenberg]

Does the @nytimes know what NATO stands for?

[ChrisO_wiki @ChrisO_wiki]

1/ The world is facing a 'ticking time bomb' from its supply of oil, according to a briefing note from JP Morgan. Physical scarcity of oil is about to unfold across the globe, spreading sequentially through April from east to west, causing major economic disruption worldwide. ⬇️

[Ari Schulman @AriSchulman]

This should be the biggest story in the country right now.

Barksdale is the HQ for our B52 nuclear bombers, it's where Bush sheltered on 9/11, and the drones are reported as "far more sophisticated than anything seen in Ukraine ... and well beyond Iranian capabilities."

[Christiaan Triebert @trbrtc]

At least 39 energy oil refineries, natural gas fields and other energy sites in 9 countries have been damaged since US and Israel began bombarding Iran, a @nytimes analysis found. Some have been struck by drones. Several have been hit more than once.
https://t.co/KNpQtY9977

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

The Khorramshahr-4 is likely the intermediate-range ballistic missile that Iran used in the attempted attack on Diego Garcia, which analysts had previously assessed may have a range of +4,000km, though it had only been proven at between 2,000-3,000km. Such an attack would suggest that the Khorramshahr-4, which can carry a cluster and other unconventional warheads, could be used by Iran to strike almost the entirety of Europe, possibly as far as France and the United Kingdom.

[Geoffrey Miller @gmiller]

A mini-rant abut AI and longevity.

They say "Artificial Superintelligence would take only a few years to cure cancer, solve longevity, and defeat death itself'.

This is a common claim by pro-AI lobbyists, accelerationists, and naive tech-fetishists.

But the claim makes no sense.

The recent success of LLMs does NOT suggest that ASIs could easily cure diseases or solve longevity, for at least two reasons.

1) The data problem. Generative AI for art, music, and language succeeded mostly because AI companies could steal billions of examples of art, music, and language from the internet, to build their base models. They weren't just trained on academic papers _about_ art, music, and language. They were trained on real _examples_ of art, music, and language. There are no analogous biomedical data sets with billions of data points that would allow accurate modelling of every biochemical detail of human physiology, disease, and aging. ASIs can't just read academic papers about human biology to solve longevity. They'd need direct access to vast quantities of biomedical data that simply don't exist in any easy-to-access forms. And they'd need very detailed, reliable, validated data about a wide range of people across different ages, sexes, ethnicities, genotypes, and medical conditions. Moreover, medical privacy laws would make it extremely difficult and wildly unethical to collect such a vast data set from real humans about every molecular-level detail of their bodies.

2) The feedback problem. LLMs also work well because the AI companies could refine their output with additional feedback from human brains (through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF). But there is nothing analogous to that for modeling human bodies, biochemistry, and disease processes. There are no known methods of Reinforcement Learning from Physiological Feedback. And the physiological feedback would have to be long-term, over spans of years to decades, taking into account thousands of possible side-effects for any given intervention. There's no way to rush animal and human clinical trials -- however clever ASI might become at 'drug discovery'.

More generally, there would be no fast feedback loops from users about model performance. GenAI and LLMs succeeded partly because developers within companies, and customers outside companies, could give very fast feedback about how well the models were functioning. They could just look at the output (images, songs, text), and then tweak, refine, test, and interpret models very quickly, based on how good they were at generating art, music, and language. In biomedical research, there would be no fast feedback loops from human bodies about how well ASI-suggested interventions are actually affecting human bodies, over the long term, across different lifestyles, including all the tradeoffs and side-effects.

It's interesting that most of the people arguing that 'ASI would cure all diseases and aging' are young tech bros who know a lot about computers, but almost nothing about organic chemistry, human genomics, biomedical research, drug discovery, clinical trials, the evolutionary biology of senescence, evolutionary medicine, medical ethics, or the decades of frustrations and failures in longevity research. They think that 'fixing the human body' would be as simple as debugging a few thousand lines of code.

Look, I'm all for curing diseases and promoting longevity. If we took the hundreds of billions of dollars per year that are currently spent on trying to build ASI, and we devoted that money instead to longevity research, that would increase the amount of funding in the longevity space by at least 100-fold. And we'd probably solve longevity much faster by targeting it directly than by trying to summon ASI as a magical cure-all.

ASIs has some potential benefits (and many grievous risks and downsides). But it's totally irresponsible of pro-AI lobbyists to argue that ASIs could magically & quickly cure all human diseases, or solve longevity, or end death. And it's totally irresponsible of them to claim that anyone opposed to ASI development is 'pro-death'.

[Mairav Zonszein מרב זונשיין @MairavZ]

Iran has been firing a lot today. Five salvos in the last hour alone. And the last few days in general have seen an uptick after a significant drop. It undermines the IDF claim that Iran is shooting what it can. it is strategising. Or at least, it is clear Iran can still inflict

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

anthropic to the us government:

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

The man who mistook his imagination for the truth. Maria Konnikova @mkonnikova is a warm and generous writer, but here she is (justifiably) scathing about Oliver Sacks's decades of lies about his patients, which damaged treatment and understanding in service of his own narcissistic self-therapy. https://t.co/zlzQnEyb9n

[Jodi Kantor @jodikantor]

Incredible story-- with oh my god text messages-- from @mega2e and Isabella Kwai on how Andrew Tate, the manosphere star accused of rape + trafficking, secured his freedom. He was barred from leaving Romania. But he courted Barron Trump, among others. After support from Trump administration officials, and an extraordinary order, he was free. https://t.co/M8lyOuoGzM

[Declan Walsh @declanwalsh]

Trump looking to eliminate Africa operations at State Dept - scoop by @ewong
https://t.co/y2a3UQaaN5 via @NYTimes

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

The Science Visuals team has been honored with three @CommArts Awards of Excellence.

These prestigious awards recognize creative excellence and outstanding execution in visual storytelling. (THREAD 🧵) https://t.co/Oga5F7BhoG

[John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch]

NEW 🧵

The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border.

[Fidelius Schmid @FideliusSchmid]

++++ Exclusive: Not only are Trump‘s top security advisors discussing attack plans on Yemen on Signal - their mobile numbers, E-Mail and passwords can be found in commercial databases and publickly available leaks. Our ⁦@derspiegel⁩ Investigation (1/ https://t.co/ByVq0SuMSa

[. @GregTSargent]

SCOOP --> Trump's State Department quietly terminated a contract that was in the process of transferring evidence of Russian abductions of Ukrainian kids to European law enforcement, two sources familiar with the situation tell me.

Details here:
https://t.co/2GKR8OYyJ5

[Financial Times @FT]

Tesla, whose shares surged following Donald Trump’s election victory in November, has now given up all of those post-election gains and has fallen more than 50% since its December high. https://t.co/CuaTl2yJ8i

[TIME @TIME]

DOGE fires hundreds of weather forecasters from agency focused on climate disasters https://t.co/2MTyVpKI9m

[Hromadske Int. @Hromadske]

South Korea's National Intelligence Service has found that North Korea deployed additional troops to Russia, KBS and Newsis report.

https://t.co/XsR9S2ohFj