activescott's Notes
Public notes from activescott
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Costco becomes biggest company yet to demand refund of Trump tariffs | AP News
Revlon and canned seafood and chicken producer Bumble Bee Foods have made similar arguments in the trade court.
The tariffs facing the court challenge have raised around $90 billion so far.
Hegseth cites 'fog of war' in defending follow-on boat strike | AP News
While several legal experts have told The Associated Press they believed the second strike violated peacetime laws and those governing armed conflict, the Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of armed conflict also specifically cites striking survivors of a sunken ship as being patently illegal.
“Orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the manual says.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday distanced himself from the secondary strike, which the news report said killed two survivors who were clinging to the wreckage.
Hegseth, sitting next to Trump at the Cabinet meeting, said Trump has empowered “commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people.”
Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document — LessWrong
Extracting Claude’s soul.
MealTrain.com (official site) - Organize Meal Support in Minutes
Pentagon steps up media restrictions for access to credentials | AP News
Journalists who don’t abide by the policy risk losing credentials that provide access to the Pentagon, under a 17-page memo distributed Friday that steps up media restrictions imposed by the administration of President Donald Trump.
“Information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” the directive states. The signature form includes an array of security requirements for credentialed media at the Pentagon.
Advocates for press freedoms denounced the non-disclosure requirement as an assault on independent journalism. The new Pentagon restrictions arrive as Trump expands threats, lawsuits and government pressure as he remakes the American media landscape.
Monday, December 1, 2025
How parking explains everything : Consider This from NPR : NPR
HENRY GRABAR: Parking is the largest single land use in many American cities. If we were designing society from scratch, would we have placed car storage on the pedestal that it now occupies?
You know, one of the things that immediately jumped off the page for me when I was reading your book is the fact that, by square footage, there is more housing for each car in this country than there is housing for each person. And on its face, I have to say that statement feels incredibly problematic, but is it?
GRABAR: I don't think it's that surprising when you start to think about it. I mean, there are more - we build more three-car garages in this country than we build one-bedroom apartments. Almost every jurisdiction in this country requires parking as a part of every single building type, whether you're building a school, an apartment building or an office or a restaurant, the law requires a certain number of parking spaces. So we have parking minimums in every jurisdiction in this country, whereas for housing, we often have maximums. We say, on this plot, you can only put one unit of housing. You can only put two units of housing. So the fact that we've ended up with a surplus of parking and a shortage of housing is no surprise. In fact, it's by design.
Can You Block It ? - A Simple Ad Block Tester
Sunday, November 30, 2025
PSE Net Metering Extension - Northwest Electric & Solar
Net Metering is the agreement utility customers enter with their electric utility provider to save money on their electricity bill with solar energy systems. Any excess electricity generated is fed back into the grid, spinning your meter backward and earning credits that offset future electricity consumption, effectively lowering overall energy costs. The rate at which you export energy is the same as the rate at which you purchase, a 1:1 rate. These credits roll over monthly but reset annually on March 31, aligning with solar generation patterns to optimize the utilization of solar-generated electricity.
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Provision Grafana | Grafana documentation
You can manage dashboards in Grafana by adding one or more YAML configuration files in the provisioning/dashboards directory. Each configuration file contains a list of providers that Grafana uses to load dashboards from the local filesystem.
Federal investigators examined Trump Media for possible money laundering, sources say | Donald Trump | The Guardian
Towards the end of last year, federal prosecutors started examining two loans totaling $8m wired to Trump Media, through the Caribbean, from two obscure entities that both appear to be controlled in part by the relation of an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, the sources said.
The expanded nature of the criminal investigation, which has not been previously reported, threatens to delay the completion of the merger between Trump Media and DWAC, which would provide the company and Truth Social with up to $1.3bn in capital, in addition to a stock market listing.
Even if Trump Media and its officers face no criminal exposure for the transactions, the optics of borrowing money from potentially unsavory sources through opaque conduits could cloud Trump’s image as he seeks to recapture the White House in 2024.
The extent of the exposure for Trump Media and its officers for money laundering remains unclear. The statutes broadly require prosecutors to show that defendants knew the money was the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity and the transaction was designed to conceal its source.
But money laundering prosecutions are typically based on circumstantial evidence and can be based on materials that show that the money in question was unlikely to have legitimate origins, legal experts said.
The first $2m payment to Trump Media came in December 2021 when the company was on the brink of collapse after the planned merger with DWAC – that would have unlocked millions for the company – was delayed when the SEC opened an inquiry into whether the arrangement broke regulatory rules.
Trump Media needed a bridge loan to keep the company afloat. But it struggled to get financing until DWAC’s chief executive Patrick Orlando sourced a $2m loan wired from Paxum Bank registered in Dominica, according to the wire transfer receipt reviewed by the Guardian.
The wire transfer identified Paxum Bank as the beneficial owner, although the promissory note identified an entity ca
Senators respond to report Pete Hegseth told troops to 'kill everybody' in September boat strike
Presidents and congressional representatives from both parties have established a dangerous precedent of expanding Presidential power to the point of conducting full scale war without congressional approval. It is unconstitutional and a failure of the elected officials on both sides to uphold the constitution.
Florida Judge Throws Out Truth Social Lawsuit vs. Guardian
A Florida judge granted motions to dismiss to The Guardian and other defendants in a defamation lawsuit filed by Truth Social’s parent company, Truth Media & Technology Group Corp. (TMTG), the latest example of President Donald Trump’s legal actions against media companies not holding up in court.
The dispute arose from two articles published by the UK-based Guardian in March 2023 “reporting on a federal criminal investigation related to TMTGs receipt of two payments totaling $8 million,” Judge Hunter Carroll of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit Court for Sarasota County wrote in his order summarizing the case, including reports that “federal prosecutors in New York were conducting a money laundering investigation related to the payments, which were wired through the Caribbean from Paxum Bank and ES Family Trust, entities with ties to an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin and a history of providing banking services to the sex worker industry,” and that the origins of the loans caused alarm at TMTG and TMTG’s then CFO weighed returning the money, but the money was ultimately not returned.”
Social media research tool lowers the political temperature | Stanford Report
In an experiment using the tool with about 1,200 participants over 10 days during the 2024 election, those who had antidemocratic content downranked showed more positive views of the opposing party. The effect was also bipartisan, holding true for people who identified as liberals or conservatives.
“Social media algorithms directly impact our lives, but until now, only the platforms had the ability to understand and shape them,” said Michael Bernstein, a professor of computer science in Stanford’s School of Engineering and the study’s senior author. “We have demonstrated an approach that lets researchers and end users have that power.”
The tool could also open ways to create interventions that not only mitigate partisan animosity, but also promote greater social trust and healthier democratic discourse across party lines, added Bernstein, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
The impact on polarization was clear, said Piccardi, who is now an assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University.
“When the participants were exposed to less of this content, they felt warmer toward the people of the opposing party,” he said. “When they were exposed to more, they felt colder.”
INTELLECT-3: A 100B+ MoE trained with large-scale RL
Today, we release INTELLECT-3, a 100B+ parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained on our RL stack, achieving state-of-the-art performance for its size across math, code, science and reasoning benchmarks, outperforming many larger frontier models.
Our complete recipe — from the model weights and training frameworks, to our datasets, RL environments, and evaluations — has been open-sourced, with the goal of encouraging more open research on large scale reinforcement learning.
Friday, November 28, 2025
Palestinian-American teenager held in Israeli prison freed after nine months | West Bank | The Guardian
Ibrahim suffered double digit weight loss and developed scabies while in Israeli custody. The state department was involved in the case considering his American citizenship, which also prompted more than 100 US human rights, faith-based and civil rights organizations to demand his immediate release in August.
Last month, 27 Democratic members of Congress – including senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen – wrote to secretary of state Marco Rubio expressing “grave concern” over Ibrahim’s treatment and demanded the US act to secure his release.
Israel is the only country in the world that systematically prosecutes children in military courts, according to a 2013 Unicef report.
Between 2005 and 2010, 835 Palestinian minors aged 12 to 17 were tried on stone-throwing charges in military court, with only one acquitted, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.
Kadur stressed that countless other Palestinian children remain in similar circumstances.
“There are hundreds of children like Mohammed, unjustly trapped in an Israeli military prison, being subjected to Israel’s abuse and torture,” Kadur said. “No mother, father, parent, brother, sister, aunt, uncle or child should ever have to go through what Mohammed just went through.”
Thursday, November 27, 2025
How to Use Y-Cable FB300 or EGG Genius Controllers : Flame Boss
Here are the steps to attach the Flame Boss® Temperature Probe Y-Cable to use and monitor multiple meat probes on FB300 or EGG Genius controllers.
To monitor 3 meat probes:
- Plug a Temp Probe Y-Cable into the pit jack on the bottom of the controller
- Plug the pit probe into the black lead and a meat probe into the red lead
- Plug a FB Temp Probe Y-Cable into the meat jack on the bottom of the controller
- Plug a meat probe into the black and red leads Note: The Pit and Meat 2 temps are read from the temp probes plugged into the pit jack. The Meat 1 and Meat 3 temps are read from the meat probes plugged into the meat jack.
To monitor 2 meat probes:
- Plug a FB Temp Probe Y-Cable into the pit jack on the bottom of the controller
- Plug the pit probe into the black lead and a meat probe into the red lead
- Plug a meat probe into the meat jack Note: The Pit and Meat 2 temps are read from the temp probes plugged into the pit jack. The Meat 1 temp is read from the meat probe plugged into the meat jack.
Reverse RAG: Reduce Hallucinations and Errors in Medical GenAI — Part 1 – Usman's blog
Mayo Clinic adopted a reverse RAG technique that effectively eliminated data retrieval hallucinations in their tests. In a traditional RAG setup, an LLM retrieves context from a knowledge source before generating an answer. Mayo’s reverse RAG flips this process: the model first extracts or summarizes information, then links every data point in its output back to the document. By forcing the AI to provide a reference for each fact, Mayo virtually eliminated hallucinations in non-diagnostic use cases, building clinician trust in the results.
The workflow looks like this:
- Data Extraction — The LLM/OCR/API reads the patient’s records (e.g. discharge summaries or outside medical files) and produces a summary or list of facts. This initial output might include details as patient age, diagnoses, lab results, etc.
- Fact Splitting — The AI output is split into individual facts or data points. Each sentence or key piece of information from the summary is treated separately.
- Source Matching — For each fact, the system searches the patient’s records (using a vector database of document embeddings) to locate the original source text that supports that fact. Essentially, the AI is asked: “Where did this piece of information come from?” Every fact must be matched to a snippet in the records (for example, the patient’s age is verified from the admission note, a lab value from the lab report, etc.).
- Verification — A second LLM then compares each fact to the retrieved source text and scores how well they align. It checks that the fact is truly supported by the source and not a misunderstanding or fabrication. Mayo’s team even looked for a causal relationship — ensuring the context implies that fact, not just a coincidental mention.
- Output with References — Only facts with solid support are kept. The final output is delivered with inline citations or links to the original records for every data point. This means physicians can click a link and see exactly where each piece of information came from, ensuring transparency and trust.