https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/reassignment-wont-fix-the-largest-ever-social-security-staffing-cut

More than 110 million people across Europe suffer high levels of health-damaging noise pollution, according to a report. The resulting physiological stress and sleep disturbance leads to 66,000 early deaths a year and many cases of heart disease, diabetes and depression.

The report is based on data reported by EEA countries on transport noise, which is the most widespread and significant type of noise pollution.

Noise pollution harms health of millions across Europe, report finds

About 110 million people suffer stress and sleep disturbance that lead to tens of thousands of early deaths

^{Damian Carrington (The Guardian)}

Looked for an app on mobilism. And a comment said something suspicious.

App name: Seven

Uploader: Balatan

About an year ago I searched on reddit about, If mobilism is safe or not. And lot of people said that it's safe. And some people even mentioned above mentioned uploader Balatan to be trustworthy.

I don't know how much true is that comment.

I am not an expert in digital forensics. So, I just leave it to your eyes.

Photographer @balsoft@lemmy.ml

Moon rising during sunset. Taken from Gombori mountain. Nikon D700, 85mm, cropped.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has until the end of June to develop new guidance for federal agencies. Federal agencies will use this guidance to create new policies that align with the Trump administration’s dubious definitions of scientific integrity and “gold standard science.”

The goals of scientific integrity policies are to (1) protect the scientific process from inappropriate (like political or corporate) influence, (2) make federal research and evidence accessible without compromising people’s personal data, (3) allow federal scientists to communicate their research without interference, and (4) to use the best available science in decision and policy making.

I mean, I think we all know what the choice will be, right?

OSTP Has a Choice to Make: Science or Politics?

Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists sent a letter to the Director of OSTP, Michael Kratsios, outlining our concerns about this EO and recommending what should be included in the new guidance President Trump requested in the recent EO.

^{The Equation}

Automation, public data repositories, standardized metadata forms, and interoperable data-sharing platforms are some of the major pushes being made in guidance for Federal agencies looking to apply the Trump administration’s “gold standard science” objectives, according to guidance issued today by the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP).

OSTP Director Michael Kratsios delivered the memo to Federal agencies on June 23 and said the guidance will assist agencies in applying an executive order from President Donald Trump on “Restoring Gold Standard Science” by ensuring “that science is no longer manipulated or misused to justify political ends.”

That memo included methods of approaching science-related initiatives – namely those related to national security and energy innovation, according to the document – that would foster cross disciplinary collaboration and withstand scrutiny.

“In an age of rapid technological progress and heightened public scrutiny, federally-funded and federally-performed science, and its use in Federal decision-making, must be beyond reproach,” reads the document.

To support this goal, OSTP said that agencies should encourage depositing raw data and code in publicly accessible repositories to facilitate reproducibility. Other data-related pushes include requiring grant applications to include data sharing plans, and standardizing metadata formats and data-sharing platforms across agencies.

When introducing the concept of gold standard science in May, Kratsios zeroed in on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles in scientific fields, claiming that inclusive efforts pushed by DEI pose an “existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community.”

Kratsios said that the “first step to restoring trust in America’s scientific establishment, and rebuilding a strong foundation for breakthrough discoveries, is a return to Gold Standard Science.”

OSTP Unveils Agency Data, AI Guidelines for ‘Gold Standard Science’

Automation, public data repositories, standardized metadata forms, and interoperable data-sharing platforms are some of the major pushes being made in guidance for Federal agencies looking to apply the Trump administration’s “gold standard science” o…

^MeriTalk

cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/42192609

• Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mk.2, Olympus 30mm Macro
• F/8 30.0mm 1/100s ISO-1000 15 frames

I'm still figuring out how to best do this, but I'm amazed at the pictures I can get! This is the JPEG straight from the camera, so no editing other than the stacking and tweaks the camera does. I almost exclusively use natural light, but I'm probably going to need to grab something for this type of thing.

Lots of fun, and if my neighbors didn't think I was crazy before, I'm sure they do now! 😂

cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/42192701

cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/42192609

• Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mk.2, Olympus 30mm Macro
• F/8 30.0mm 1/100s ISO-1000 15 frames

I'm still figuring out how to best do this, but I'm amazed at the pictures I can get! This is the JPEG straight from the camera, so no editing other than the stacking and tweaks the camera does. I almost exclusively use natural light, but I'm probably going to need to grab something for this type of thing.

Lots of fun, and if my neighbors didn't think I was crazy before, I'm sure they do now! 😂

A Republican proposal to penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence can move forward without requiring approval from 60 senators, the Senate parliamentarian decided on Saturday. But the moratorium on state AI laws did not have unanimous Republican support and has reportedly been watered down in an effort to push it toward passage.

In early June, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) proposed enforcing a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by making states ineligible for broadband funding if they try to impose any limits on development of artificial intelligence. While the House previously approved a version of the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill" with an outright 10-year ban on state AI regulation, Cruz took a different approach because of the Senate rule that limits inclusion of "extraneous matter" in budget reconciliation legislation.

Under the Senate's Byrd rule, a senator can object to a potentially extraneous budget provision. A motion to waive the Byrd rule requires a vote of 60 percent of the Senate.

As originally drafted, Cruz's backdoor ban on state AI laws would have made it impossible for states to receive money from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program if they try to regulate AI. He tied the provision into the budget bill by proposing an extra $500 million for the broadband-deployment grant program and expanding its purpose to also subsidize construction and deployment of infrastructure for artificial intelligence systems.

I covered a lot of BEAD distributions and state- and jurisdictional-level plans, and it's safe to say this is just another way to screw poor people. That's the whole fucking point of the program: Bringing broadband to those who don't yet have access.

It's not quite rural electrification, but it's the closest we've seen since then. Interestingly, rural voters, well, voted for this. And many are poor.

Bombing Iran ought to solve that, right?

Ted Cruz can’t get all Republicans to back his fight against state AI laws

Cruz plan moves ahead but was reportedly watered down amid Republican opposition.

^{Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)}

Memo says cybersecurity office deemed WhatsApp a high risk due to ‘lack of transparency in how it protects user data’

WhatsApp messaging app banned on all US House of Representatives devices

^{Guardian staff reporter (The Guardian)}

The Trump Administration moved Monday to join a legal fight to overturn a new Washington law requiring religious leaders to report child abuse or neglect even when it is disclosed in confession.

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/06/23/feds-seek-to-block-wa-law-requiring-clergy-to-report-child-abuse/

Part 2:Doom.

A decade or two ago, it was pretty common to discuss “foom & doom” scenarios, as advocated especially by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In a typical such scenario, a small team would build a system that would rocket (“foom”) from “unimpressive” to “Artificial Superintelligence” (ASI) within a very short time window (days, weeks, maybe months), involving very little compute (e.g. “brain in a box in a basement”), via recursive self-improvement. Absent some future technical breakthrough, the “Artificial Superintelligence” (ASI) would definitely be egregiously misaligned, without the slightest intrinsic interest in whether humans live or die. The Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) would be born into a world generally much like today’s, a world utterly unprepared for this new mega-mind. The extinction of humans (and every other species) would rapidly follow (“doom”). The Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) would then spend countless eons fulfilling its desires, desires which we humans would find to be bizarre and pointless.

Now, I don’t endorse every word of that foom & doom scenario above—for example, I don’t think “foom” requires recursive self-improvement. But I’m in much closer agreement with that scenario than the vast majority of AI safety & alignment researchers today, who tend to see the “foom & doom” scenario above as somewhere between “extraordinarily unlikely” and “already falsified”!

Those researchers are not asking each other “is it true?”, but rather “lol, can you believe that some people used to believe that?”. Oh well. Laugh all you want. It’s still what I believe.

Conversely, from my perspective as a foom & doomer, it’s the mainstream contemporary AI alignment discourse that feels increasingly foreign and strange. How, I ask myself, do so many seemingly reasonable people wind up with such wildly, bafflingly over-optimistic beliefs as “P(doom)≲50%”??

Anyway, my main goal in these two posts is to explore how I wind up in such a different place as most other alignment researchers do today, on the question of foom & doom. I don’t particularly expect to win skeptical readers over to my side, but would at least like to convey that foom & doom is a story that hangs together and deserves a modicum of consideration.

Part 2:Doom.

A decade or two ago, it was pretty common to discuss “foom & doom” scenarios, as advocated especially by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In a typical such scenario, a small team would build a system that would rocket (“foom”) from “unimpressive” to “Artificial Superintelligence” (ASI) within a very short time window (days, weeks, maybe months), involving very little compute (e.g. “brain in a box in a basement”), via recursive self-improvement. Absent some future technical breakthrough, the “Artificial Superintelligence” (ASI) would definitely be egregiously misaligned, without the slightest intrinsic interest in whether humans live or die. The Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) would be born into a world generally much like today’s, a world utterly unprepared for this new mega-mind. The extinction of humans (and every other species) would rapidly follow (“doom”). The Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) would then spend countless eons fulfilling its desires, desires which we humans would find to be bizarre and pointless.

Now, I don’t endorse every word of that foom & doom scenario above—for example, I don’t think “foom” requires recursive self-improvement. But I’m in much closer agreement with that scenario than the vast majority of AI safety & alignment researchers today, who tend to see the “foom & doom” scenario above as somewhere between “extraordinarily unlikely” and “already falsified”!

Those researchers are not asking each other “is it true?”, but rather “lol, can you believe that some people used to believe that?”. Oh well. Laugh all you want. It’s still what I believe.

Conversely, from my perspective as a foom & doomer, it’s the mainstream contemporary AI alignment discourse that feels increasingly foreign and strange. How, I ask myself, do so many seemingly reasonable people wind up with such wildly, bafflingly over-optimistic beliefs as “P(doom)≲50%”??

Anyway, my main goal in these two posts is to explore how I wind up in such a different place as most other alignment researchers do today, on the question of foom & doom. I don’t particularly expect to win skeptical readers over to my side, but would at least like to convey that foom & doom is a story that hangs together and deserves a modicum of consideration.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-robotaxi-videos-show-speeding-driving-into-wrong-lane