It's pulling the headline above but when I tap through it shows

MP once on benefits calls cuts 'brutal' - but colleague says 'moral' case for reform

Labour rebellion brewing over welfare changes

A bill to enact cuts – part of a package aimed at saving £5bn by 2030 – arrives in Parliament on Wednesday.

^{Iain Watson (BBC News)}

https://www.newarab.com/news/while-bombing-iran-heres-what-israel-did-gaza-west-bank

Scientists and engineers at UNSW Sydney, who previously developed a method for making green ammonia, have now turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning to make the process even more efficient.

Ammonia, a nitrogen-rich substance found in fertilizer, is often credited with saving much of the world from famine in the 20th century. But its benefit to humankind has come at a cost, with one of the largest carbon footprints of all industrial processes.
[...]
But in 2021, a UNSW team discovered a way to make ammonia from air and water using renewable energy, at about the same temperature as a warm summer's day.

New eco-friendly way to make ammonia could be boon for agriculture, hydrogen economy

Ammonia has sustained humanity since the early 20th century, but its production leaves a huge carbon footprint. Now researchers have found a way to make it 100 percent renewable.

^{Lachlan Gilbert (Tech Xplore)}

The CfMM report, published this week, examined more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content related to Israel’s war on Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 6 October 2024.

The BBC used the word “massacre” 18 times more often to describe Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones. It offered almost equal numbers of victim profiles for both populations - even though a vastly higher number of Palestinians have been killed. This is not a neutral editorial choice; it is a devaluation of Palestinian lives.

And it doesn’t stop there. Palestinian guests on BBC programmes were routinely interrogated, interrupted, and pushed to condemn Hamas - as if that were the price of being allowed to speak. Israeli spokespeople, many of whom defended war crimes on air, were treated with deference. Not one Israeli guest was asked to condemn the deliberate bombing of hospitals, refugee camps or schools - despite mountains of evidence and international outrage.

The asymmetry extends to reporting on hostages and prisoners. Israeli hostages were the subject of intense coverage, complete with emotional interviews, wall-to-wall updates, and sombre, humanising details. Palestinian prisoners - thousands of whom have been held without charge or trial - barely registered.

Even in cases of prisoner exchanges, BBC coverage focused almost exclusively on Israeli returnees. Who were the Palestinian prisoners? How long had they been imprisoned? Were they tortured, abused, or denied due process? These questions were largely left unasked and unanswered.

War on Gaza: How the BBC sanitises Israel's genocide

New report highlights a pattern in which the network relentlessly privileges Israeli voices, while dehumanising Palestinians 

^{Middle East Eye}

Conservative shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel has called on the UK government to back the US if it attacks Iran

Fuck off Priti Patel!

Priti Patel calls on the government to repatriate Britons in Israel

The UK's shadow foreign secretary says the government needs to do more to ensure Britons can return home from Israel.

^{Cachella Smith (BBC News)}

https://www.reuters.com/world/hungarian-opposition-party-has-15-point-lead-ahead-orbans-fidesz-poll-says-2025-06-18/

Recent versions of Lemmy have the ability to set a custom thumbnail for a post:

Is this possible with PieFed? This is especially helpful when some sites fail to get a thumbnail (e.g. YT videos is a common one).

Salesforce will increase prices by an average of 6% across key products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Field Service, and select Industry Clouds. The change applies to Enterprise and Unlimited plans, taking effect August 17, 2025 for renewals, and immediately for new customers. Renewals before that date can postpone the higher rates for about a year.

https://alternativeto.net/news/2025/6/salesforce-and-slack-announce-price-hikes-following-expansion-of-ai-integrations/

North Korea slammed on Tuesday US President Donald Trump's "Golden Dome" missile shield plan as a "very dangerous" threat that could spark nuclear war in space, state media said.

Trump announced new details and initial funding for the missile shield system last week, calling it "very important for the success and even survival of our country".

The initiative faces significant technical and political challenges, according to analysts, and could come at a hefty price tag.

North Korea says US missile shield plans risk 'nuclear war' in space

^{France 24 (FRANCE 24)}

And by haters I just mean folks who think $12B isn’t a low enough cap…

We are not focused on class war between the majority and the 1%, because (by the numbers) they are not the direct threat to the sustainability of the system. They are not where our money has gone to.

The difference between someone with even $12B and Musk level wealth is the difference between a single story house and a 36 story skyscraper. We are focused on tearing down the skyscraper and taxing the house appropriately. To be frank, the wealth of people with less than a billion dollars is not on our radar as a problem. In contrast, we would like their help in tearing down the skyscrapers. That is the point of our community. We are only after the excess wealth of 250 people in the world.

So again, I welcome you 100% to the tent if you are interested, but politically our goals will always remain simple and be augmented by simple arguments. If that means we are not the community for you, I understand. We’re seeking to act rationally in pursuit of a more ethical world, not to demand ethical perfection from the outset. To be honest I personally believe that ethical perfectionism, infighting, and shrinking the tent are major reasons why progressive movements to rectify wealth inequality constantly fail.

Louis Sachar once wrote an entire book based around the concept that “if you want to fight your way upstream in a river, you have to take small steps”. We arent looking at the end of the river, were looking at the first small steps. (Also that book is a great sequel to Holes for anyone who has never heard of it)

Our argument may seem reductive, but anyone can see the simple nature of the problem. The skyscrapers are a head and shoulders above the single story house. Its a simple problem to see, and an exponential one. 6 people in the world owned half of all the money before covid. Now the problem is even worse. I would venture that the richest 250 people in the world probably own 3/4ths of all the money at this point, at least.

Money was made to move. When that money is parked it doesnt change hands. When it doesnt change hands it doesnt get taxed, things dont get bought. When that happens the government doesnt have the resources it needs, and the economy goes out of whack as well. Its a simple problem that ties into literally every issue imaginable just on that basis. Climate change? We could use more resources to fight it. Materials science to solve the plastic problem? More resources to fight it. People cant afford rent? More resources to pay them. People cant afford healthcare? Do you wish we had bridges to drive over that arent 60+ years old? Are you tired of paying for a fishing/hunting license to subsidize conservation? Everything big and small is impacted in some way by the wealth of the richest 250 people not moving, both inside the US and around the world.

The goal of the movement is not to change the system, really. We arent arguing for moving away from capitalism, even if many of us would like to see that. What we are arguing for is fixing the most unsustainable problem within the system we already have, so that we can continue to fight for a better system in general.

A primary goal is to keep the tent as wide as is possible. The point being that we are fighting specifically on this one issue that should, at least hypothetically, bridge the gap between even people who want radical change and people who want to see no change at all. For people who want radical changes, this is the first step in the right direction. For people who want to see no change at all, this is a step that will prevent the collapse of what they dont want to see changed.

For anyone too broke to afford cost of living, this is what will raise them up to afford a base level of comfort. For the 1%ers, this is what will ensure they get to keep the standard of living they already have, as well as make a shit ton of money off the rest of us. If anything I see this community as an incubation for a political bridge party that can actually bring enough people under one tent to affect change, and breakthrough the various distractions that the richest people in the world rely on so we dont come after them. Red vs blue, black vs white, majority vs 1%ers, and so on and so forth. Its all just bullshit to keep us from paying attention to the 0.0001% who have almost all of the money.

This isnt about redistribution of much of anything from the 1% at large. Its about dislodging the 5 trillion dollars that sit largely in the hands of like 10 people. Just that $5T moving would be enough to allow the rest of the 1% unaffected. Thats like 1/3rd of the federal deficit.

The point of targeting that $5T specifically is because its $5T that is virtually guaranteed to never move otherwise. Its just feel good money for the mega billionaires, which even 1%ers cant relate to nor justify.

We are focused on making the system we have, flawed as it is, a base level of sustainable in the interest of everybody. Capitalism with the bumper guards up. Regardless of what they would want to see next.

To analogize: if were all in one car together right now that is a hunk of shit, and we got a flat tire, the goal for us is to fix the tire so we can make it down the road. Some might want to abandon the car right now even if it means chaos. Some might want to fix the flat so we can get a different car. And some might want to fix the flat so we can keep driving the same hunk of shit. But the goal of our community would be centered on fixing the tire, to avoid chaos and to leave our options open for the future

• ToastedRavioli

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ntsb-wants-action-cfm-leap-1b-engines-over-smoke-entering-cockpit-2025-06-18/

Alt Text:

I would rather you help me with a small task than waste 20 minutes praying for me to have been born with a different genome

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/eu-court-adviser-sides-with-regulators-googles-fight-against-eu-antitrust-fine-2025-06-19/

Sensitive content Clicca per aprire/chiudere

last month, a federal appeals court tossed out their victory and declared that only the federal government can sue over violations of the Voting Rights Act, a devastating blow to the ability of these tribes—and others in the region—to seek legal recourse.

“A Law Without a Way to Enforce It” - Bolts

In North Dakota as elsewhere, Native groups face a triple threat on voting rights: judges targeting the VRA, Trump officials hostile to enforcing it, and a funding crunch depleting their work.

^{Daniel Nichanian (Bolts)}

https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0619/1519280-eu-israel/

cross-posted from: rss.ponder.cat/post/210840

Where’s the best place for a datacenter? It’s an increasing problem as the AI buildup continues seemingly without pause. It’s not just a problem of NIMBYism; earthly power grids are having trouble coping, to say nothing of the demand for cooling water. Regulators and environmental groups alike are raising alarms about the impact that powering and cooling these massive AI datacenters will have on our planet.

While Sam Altman fantasizes about fusion power, one obvious response to those who say “think about the planet!” is to ask, “Well, what if we don’t put them on the planet?” Just as Gerald O’Niell asked over 50 years ago when our technology was merely industrial, the question remains:

“Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?”

O’Neill’s answer was a resounding “No.” The answer has not changed, even though our technology has. Generative AI is the latest and greatest technology on offer, but it turns out it may be the first one to make the productive jump to Earth Orbit. Indeed, it already has, but more on that later, because you’re probably scoffing at such a pie-in-the-sky idea.

There are three things needed for a datacenter: power, cooling, and connectivity. The people at companies like Starcloud, Inc, formally Lumen Orbit, make a good, solid case that all of these can be more easily met in orbit– one that includes hard numbers.

Sure, there’s also more radiation on orbit than here on earth, but our electronics turn out to be a lot more resilient than was once thought, as all the cell-phone cubesats have proven. Starcloud budgets only 1 kg of sheilding per kW of compute power in their whitepaper, as an example. If we can provide power, cooling, and connectivity, the radiation environment won’t be a showstopper.

Power

There’s a great big honkin’ fusion reactor already available for anyone to use to power their GPUs: the sun. Of course on Earth we have tricky things like weather, and the planet has an annoying habit of occluding the sun for half the day but there are no clouds in LEO. Depending on your choice of orbit, you do have that annoying 45 minutes of darkness– but a battery to run things for 45 minutes is not a big UPS, by professional standards. Besides, the sun-synchronous orbits are right there, just waiting for us to soak up that delicious, non-stop solar power.

Sun Synchronous Orbit, because nights are for squats. Image by Brandir via Wikimedia.

Sun-synchronous orbits (SSOs) are polar orbits that precess around the Earth once every sidereal year, so that they always maintain the same angle to the sun. For example, you might have an SSO that crosses the equator 12 times a day, each time at local 15:00, or 10:43, any other time set by the orbital parameters. With SSOs, you don’t have to worry about ever losing solar power to some silly, primitive, planet-bound concept like nighttime.

Without the atmosphere in the way, solar panels are also considerably more effective per unit area, something the Space Solar Power people have been pointing out since O’Neill’s day. The problem with Space Solar Power has always been the efficiencies and regulatory hurdles of beaming the power back to Earth– but if you use the power to train an AI model, and send the data down, that’s no longer an issue. Given that the 120 kW array on ISS has been trouble-free for decades now, we can consider it a solved problem. Sure, solar panels degrade, but the rate is in fractions of a percent per year, and it happens on Earth too. By the time solar panel replacement is likely to be the rest of the hardware is likely to be totally obsolete.

Cooling

This is where skepticism creeps in. After all, cooling is the greatest challenge with high performance computing hardware here on earth, and heat rejection is the great constraint of space operations. The “icy blackness of space” you see in popular culture is as realistic as warp drive; space is a thermos, and shedding heat is no trivial issue. It is also, from an engineering perspective, not a complex issue. We’ve been cooling spacecraft and satellites using radiators to shed heat via infrared emission for decades now. It’s pretty easy to calculate that if you have X watts of heat to reject at Y degrees, you will need a radiator of area Z.The Stephan-Boltzmann Law isn’t exactly rocket science.

Photons go out, liquid cools down. It might be rocket science, but it’s a fairly mature technology. (Image: EEATCS radiator deployment during ISS Flight 5A, NASA)

Even better, unlike on Earth where you have changeable things like seasons and heat waves, in a SSO you need only account for throttling– and if your data center is profitable, you won’t be doing much of that. So while you need a cooling system, it won’t be difficult to design. Liquid or two-phase cooling on server hardware? Not new. Plumbing cooling a loop to a radiator in the vacuum of space? That’s been part of satellite busses for years.

Aside from providing you with a stable thermal environment, the other advantage of an SSO is that if one chooses the dawn/dusk orbit along the terminator, while the solar panels always face the sun, the radiators can always face black space, letting them work to their optimal potential. This would also simplify the satellite bus, as no motion system would be required to keep the solar panels and radiators aligned into/out of the sun. Conceivably the whole thing could be stabilized by gravity gradient, minimizing the need to use reaction wheels.

Connectivity

One word: Starlink. That’s not to say that future data centers will necessarily be hooking into the Starlink network, but high-bandwidth operations on orbit are already proven, as long as you consider 100 gigabytes per second sufficient bandwidth. An advantage not often thought of for this sort of space-based communications is that the speed of light in a vacuum is about 31% faster than glass fibers, while the circumference of a low Earth orbit is much less than 31% greater than the circumference of the planet. That reduces ping times between elements of free-flying clusters or clusters and whatever communications satellite is overhead of the user. It is conceivable, but by no means a sure thing, that a user in the EU might have faster access to orbital data than they would to a data center in the US.

The Race

This hypothetical European might want to use European-owned servers. Well, the European Commission is on it; in the ASCEND study (Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero Emission and Data sovereignty) you can tell from the title they put as much emphasis on keeping European data European as they do on the environmental aspects mentioned in the introduction. ASCEND imagines a 32-tonne, 800 kW data center lofted by a single super-heavy booster (sadly not Ariane 6), and proposes it could be ready by the 2030s. There’s no hint in this proposal that the ASCEND Consortium or the EC would be willing to stop at one, either. European efforts have already put AI in orbit, with missions like PhiSat2 using on-board AI image processing for Earth observation.

You know Italians were involved because it’s so stylish. No other proposal has that honeycomb aesthetic for their busy AI bees. Image ASCEND.AWS Snowcone after ISS delivery. The future is here and it’s wrapped in Kapton. (Image NASA)

The Americans, of course, are leaving things to private enterprise. Axiom Space has leveraged their existing relationship with NASA to put hardware on ISS for testing purposes, staring with an AWS snowcone in 2022, which they claimed was the first flight-test of cloud computing. Axiom has also purchased space on the Kepler Relay Network satellites set to launch late 2025. Aside from the 2.5 Gb/s optical link from Kepler, exactly how much compute power is going into these is not clear. A standalone data center is expected to follow in 2027, but again, what hardware will be flying is not stated.

There are other American companies chasing venture capital for this purpose, like Google-founder-backed Relativity Space or the wonderfully-named Starcloud mentioned above. Starcloud’s whitepaper is incredibly ambitious, talking about building an up to 5 GW cluster whose double-sided solar/radiator array would be by far the largest object ever built in orbit at 4 km by 4 km. (Only a few orders of magnitude bigger than ISS. Not big deal.) At least it is a modular plan, that could be built up over time, and they are planning to start with a smaller standalone proof-of-concept, Starcloud-2, in 2026.

You can’t accuse Starcloud of thinking small. (Image Starcloud via Youtube.)
A closeup of one of the twelve “Stars” in the Three Body Computing Constellation. This times 2,800. Image ADA Space.

Once they get up there, the American and European AIs are are going to find someone else has already claimed the high ground, and that that someone else speaks Chinese. A startup called ADA Space launched 12 satellites in May 2025 to begin building out the world’s first orbital supercomputer, called the Three Body Computing Constellation. (You can’t help but love the poetry of Chinese naming conventions.)

Unlike the American startups, they aren’t shy about its capabilities: 100 Gb/s optical datalinks, with the most powerful satellite in the constellation capable of 744 trillion operations per second. (TOPS, not FLOPS. FLOPS specifically refers to floating point operations, whereas TOPS could be any operation but usually refers to operations on 8-bit integers.)

For comparison, Microsoft requires an “AI PC” like the copilot laptops to have 40 TOPS of AI-crunching capacity. The 12 satellites must not be identical, as the constellation together has a quoted capability of 5 POPS (peta-operations per second), and a storage capacity of 30 TB. That’s seems pretty reasonable for a proof-of-concept. You don’t get a sense of the ambition behind it until you hear that these 12 are just the first wave of a planned 2,800 satellites. Now that’s what I’d call a supercluster!

A man can dream, can’t he? Image NASA.

High-performance computing in space? It’s no AI hallucination, it’s already here. There is a network forming in the sky. A sky-net, if you will, and I for one welcome our future AI overlords. They already have the high ground, so there’s no point fighting now. Hopefully this datacenter build-out will just be the first step on the road Gerry O’Neill and his students envisioned all those years ago: a road that ends with Earth’s surface as parkland, and civilization growing onwards and upwards. Ad astra per AI? There are worse futures.

---

From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed

As Israel and Iran trade blows in a quickly escalating conflict that risks engulfing the rest of the region as well as a more direct confrontation between Iran and the U.S., social media is being flooded with AI-generated media that claims to show the devastation, but is fake.

The fake videos and images show how generative AI has already become a staple of modern conflict. On one end, AI-generated content of unknown origin is filling the void created by state-sanctioned media blackouts with misinformation, and on the other end, the leaders of these countries are sharing AI-generated slop to spread the oldest forms of xenophobia and propaganda.

If you want to follow a war as it’s happening, it’s easier than ever. Telegram channels post live streams of bombing raids as they happen and much of the footage trickles up to X, TikTok, and other social media platforms. There’s more footage of conflict than there’s ever been, but a lot of it is fake.

A few days ago, Iranian news outlets reported that Iran’s military had shot down three F-35s. Israel denied it happened. As the claim spread so did supposed images of the downed jet. In one, a massive version of the jet smolders on the ground next to a town. The cockpit dwarfs the nearby buildings and tiny people mill around the downed jet like Lilliputians surrounding Gulliver.

It’s a fake, an obvious one, but thousands of people shared it online. Another image of the supposedly downed jet showed it crashed in a field somewhere in the middle of the night. Its wings were gone and its afterburner still glowed hot. This was also a fake.

The AI Slop Fight Between Iran and Israel

There’s a lack of footage from the conflict and AI-generated content is filling the void.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

https://thehill.com/latino/5359169-pregnant-us-citizen-border-patrol-agents/