The Crushing Cost of U.S. Sanctions on Cuba
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/37811665
[from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the BellyOfTheBeast news/video collective]Cuba has released its annual report on the impact of U.S. sanctions on the island's economy. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the damages amount to $7.5 billion, the single biggest loss in a year since Cuba began issuing these reports.
Also:
* Farm near Havana pioneers #agroecology
* Cuba wins gold at the Tokyo Athletics World Championships
* Almost 1,000 same-sex marriages in Cuba last year
* Cuban reggaeton artist returns home after emigrating to #US
* Cuba extends tax exemptions on medicine and food imports
* Millions of Cubans struggle to get water
The Crushing Cost of U.S. Sanctions on Cuba
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/37811665
[from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the BellyOfTheBeast news/video collective]Cuba has released its annual report on the impact of U.S. sanctions on the island's economy. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the damages amount to $7.5 billion, the single biggest loss in a year since Cuba began issuing these reports.
Also:
* Farm near Havana pioneers #agroecology
* Cuba wins gold at the Tokyo Athletics World Championships
* Almost 1,000 same-sex marriages in Cuba last year
* Cuban reggaeton artist returns home after emigrating to #US
* Cuba extends tax exemptions on medicine and food imports
* Millions of Cubans struggle to get water
The Crushing Cost of U.S. Sanctions on Cuba
[from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the BellyOfTheBeast news/video collective]
Cuba has released its annual report on the impact of U.S. sanctions on the island's economy. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the damages amount to $7.5 billion, the single biggest loss in a year since Cuba began issuing these reports.
Also:
* Farm near Havana pioneers #agroecology
* Cuba wins gold at the Tokyo Athletics World Championships
* Almost 1,000 same-sex marriages in Cuba last year
* Cuban reggaeton artist returns home after emigrating to #US
* Cuba extends tax exemptions on medicine and food imports
* Millions of Cubans struggle to get water
ELI5: Is browsing on 4g/5g networks less secure than on your own wifi?
like this
About the same.
Mobile networks have their own security problems that wifi doesn't, but wifi has security problems that mobile networks don't.
Using a VPN does help secure your "last mile" connection but then you need to trust the VPN provider.
Windows privacy: AtlasOS vs Amelabs Privacy+?
- AtlasOS: atlasos.net/
- Amelabs Privacy+: docs.amelabs.net/privacy/_plus…
I use a Windows VM for apps not available on Linux and just want to cut out all the telemetry possible.
AtlasOS is installed as a Ameliorated Playbook and makes a ton of opinionated changes that aren’t privacy or necessarily performance related. Disabling the Windows 11 right click menus in favor of the legacy one, disabling window shadows, changing the wallpaper, etc. Privacy+ looks appealing, I wanna know if anyone has tried both and can tell me differences, like if one or the other improves privacy more.
Privacy+ Playbook
Completely transform your computer in minutes. Simply download a verified Playbook, or use your own, and run it in AME Wizard.Ameliorated Documentation
President Xi Jinping's remarks on the formulation of 15th Five-Year Plan
President Xi Jinping's remarks on the formulation of 15th Five-Year Plan
President Xi Jinping has made instructions on the formulation of China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) on different occasions.CGTN
copymyjalopy likes this.
How China fostered growth, innovation amid global uncertainties in the past five years
Explainer: How China fostered growth, innovation amid global uncertainties in the past five years
With the fourth plenary session of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee scheduled on Monday to review proposals for the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), it is an opportune moment to reflect on how the country has navigated its developm…CGTN
copymyjalopy likes this.
La tecnologia nel solarpunk è fatta dalle decisioni di una comunità che codifica i suoi strumenti.
Technology as crystallized community
"Ice Crystals" photo CC-BY spurekar For a few years now, I've been analyzing how technology is represented in fiction and popular culture.alxd - solarpunk hacker
Giacomo Tesio likes this.
CNN anchor apologizes for saying freed Israeli hostages were 'treated better' than Gazans
CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour apologized Monday after claiming that Israeli hostages freed from Hamas captivity were “treated better” than Gazans — remarks that provoked furious backlash from Israel supporters.
The longtime international correspondent retracted her statement on air just hours after Hamas released the final 20 living hostages under a cease-fire agreement brokered by the United States and Egypt.
Amanpour’s mea culpa came after she earlier told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins that the hostages “were probably being treated better than the average Gazan, because they are the pawns and the chips that Hamas had.”
“That was insensitive, and it was wrong,” Amanpour said during a broadcast on Monday.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour apologizes for saying freed Israeli hostages were 'treated better' than Gazans
“That was insensitive, and it was wrong,” Christiane Amanpour said during a broadcast on Monday.Ariel Zilber (New York Post)
CNN anchor apologizes for saying freed Israeli hostages were 'treated better' than Gazans
CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour apologized Monday after claiming that Israeli hostages freed from Hamas captivity were “treated better” than Gazans — remarks that provoked furious backlash from Israel supporters.
The longtime international correspondent retracted her statement on air just hours after Hamas released the final 20 living hostages under a cease-fire agreement brokered by the United States and Egypt.
Amanpour’s mea culpa came after she earlier told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins that the hostages “were probably being treated better than the average Gazan, because they are the pawns and the chips that Hamas had.”
“That was insensitive, and it was wrong,” Amanpour said during a broadcast on Monday.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour apologizes for saying freed Israeli hostages were 'treated better' than Gazans
“That was insensitive, and it was wrong,” Christiane Amanpour said during a broadcast on Monday.Ariel Zilber (New York Post)
copymyjalopy likes this.
DeepSeek releases DeepSeek OCR
LLMs totally choke on long context because of that O(n2) scaling nightmare. It's the core scaling problem for almost all modern LLMs because of their self-attention mechanism.
In simple terms, for every single token in the input, the attention mechanism has to look at and calculate a score against every other single token in that same input.
So, if you have a sequence with n tokens, the first token compares itself to all n tokens. The second token also compares itself to all n tokens... and so on. This means you end up doing n*n, or n^2, calculations.
This is a nightmare because the cost doesn't grow nicely. If you double your context length, you're not doing 2x the work; you're doing 2^2=4x the work. If you 10x the context, you're doing 10^2=100x the work. This explodes the amount of computation and, more importantly, the GPU memory needed to store all those scores. This is the fundamental bottleneck that stops you from just feeding a whole book into a model.
Well, DeepSeek came up with a novel solution to just stop feeding the model text tokens. Instead, you render the text as an image and feed the model the picture. It sounds wild, but the whole point is that a huge wall of text can be "optically compressed" into way, way fewer vision tokens.
To do this, they built a new thing called DeepEncoder. It’s a clever stack that uses a SAM-base for local perception, then a 16x convolutional compressor to just crush the token count, and then a CLIP model to get the global meaning. This whole pipeline means it can handle high-res images without the GPU just melting from memory activation.
And the results are pretty insane. At a 10x compression ratio, the model can look at the image and "decompress" the original text with about 97% precision. It still gets 60% accuracy even at a crazy 20x compression. As a bonus, this thing is now a SOTA OCR model. It beats other models like MinerU2.0 while using fewer than 800 tokens when the other guy needs almost 7,000. It can also parse charts into HTML, read chemical formulas, and understands like 100 languages.
The real kicker is what this means for the future. The authors are basically proposing this as an LLM forgetting mechanism. You could have a super long chat where the recent messages are crystal clear, but older messages get rendered into blurrier, lower-token images. It's a path to unlimited context by letting the model's memory fade, just like a human's.
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR · Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.huggingface.co
Rozaŭtuno
in reply to Skullgrid • • •