activescott's Notes

For some reason in the US we constantly assume government is useless and corporations create all innovation. Yet the evidence repeatedly demonstrates that the two are often deeply intertwined...

The emergence of firms like SpaceX and Blue Origin has made space a leading example of how private enterprise drives innovation, marking what many see as a sharp break between Old Space and New Space. Yet little systematic evidence documents when the transition to this new phase of space innovation occurred and which firms drove it. We use patent data to provide this measurement and find that the largest surge in space innovation occurred in the 1990s, coinciding with demand-side market creation, and preceding the entry of high-profile startups after 2005.

Throughout this period and since, incumbent aerospace firms account for most of the space-related patenting, with entrants contributing a growing but minority share. The same geographic regions that dominated space innovation during the post-Apollo era remain dominant today. These patterns are consistent with directed technical change: incumbents direct R&D toward policy-created markets accessible from existing capabilities, while entrants bring science-based insights into domains requiring new paradigms.

Our findings suggest that New Space is more closely connected to Old Space than prevailing narratives imply, and that government's most consequential role in space innovation may lie in constructing appropriable markets.

The justice department announced on Monday it was creating a loosely controlled and secretive $1.776bn fund to compensate Donald Trump allies as part of an agreement in which Trump and his sons dropped a $10bn longshot lawsuit against the IRS.

The money, which critics said was essentially a slush fund, will be overseen by five commissioners – four of whom would be appointed by the attorney general and removable by Trump – who would oversee the body’s work. A fifth commissioner will be appointed “in consultation” with congressional leadership. The fund also has the power to issue “formal apologies” and will send a quarterly confidential report to the US attorney general outlining who has been paid from the fund. There is no requirement that the fund’s work be made public.

There did not appear to be any restrictions on who can seek compensation from the fund. A copy of the agreement released on Monday evening says that claims will be evaluated based on a number of factors, including “the strength of the claim and supporting evidence, the claimant’s actions, any time the person making the claim spent in prison, attorney’s fees, and “other factors the Anti-Weaponization Fund deems just and appropriate”.

Any money left in the fund at the end of Trump’s term would be returned to the federal government.

The agreement was signed by Stanley Woodward, the associate attorney general, and number three official at the justice department. Woodward represented January 6 defendants as well as many Trump allies who came under scrutiny for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election and in the classified documents case.

“I don’t actually see any legal precedent for that. We are a nation of laws, you can’t just make up things whole-piece,” Cassidy told reporters when asked about the legal compensation fund for Trump allies who were prosecuted or investigated by the Biden Justice Department. The administration announced the creation of the compensation fund after Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service demanding $10 billion in damages for an IRS contractor leaking his tax returns to media outlets. “Somebody explained it to me this way, an attorney. … It is as if somebody sued themselves and agreed upon a settlement with themselves that’s going to be funded by the rest of us. If that’s the case: What?!” he said. “Wait a second, I just came off the campaign trail. People are concerned about making their own ends meet, not about putting a slush fund together without a legal precedent. We’re a nation of laws,” he added. “If there needs to be a settlement, let’s consider it and Congress should come together and decide on that.”

“I voted to uphold the Constitution. When I die, if that’s put in my obituary: He voted to uphold the Constitution, it’s going to be better obituary,” he said.

Ingredients  ▢ 2 bananas, peeled and cut into pieces ▢ 1 1/2 cup vanilla ice cream ▢ 1/2 cup whole milk ▢ 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Instructions  Place the bananas on a plate and freeze for 20 minutes. Place the bananas in the blender.  Add in ice cream and whole milk. Sprinkle the ground cinnamon.  blend for 12 to 18 seconds until all is mixed.  Serve immediately with whipped cream and cinnamon.  Notes Freezing the bananas beforehand would make this milkshake creamier.  You can make this recipe with chocolate ice cream or add cocoa powder for chocolate banana milkshake.

Instead of accepting that their cars would become rolling paperweights, Fisker Ocean owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles’ proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker.

On GitHub, a developer named MichaelOE reverse-engineered the API behind Fisker’s official “My Fisker” mobile app and built a Home Assistant integration that exposes every cloud API value as a sensor — with all the app’s buttons available as Home Assistant controls. The project has 135 commits, 20 releases, and is licensed under Apache 2.0. It’s a small but functioning example of what an open-source vehicle interface looks like.

Separately, CAN bus files for the Fisker Ocean have been published on GitHub, including DBC files for CAN viewer filtering and processing. The Ocean runs multiple CAN buses — CCAN, PTCAN, Inverter CAN, and BCAN, all at 500kbps — and community members have been systematically mapping them.

One of the more impressive individual efforts comes from Majd Srour, who published a multi-part series on Medium documenting how to sniff CAN traffic and decode Diagnostic Trouble Codes on the Ocean. The goal: put diagnostic capabilities into mobile apps so owners can run their own DTC scans, instead of relying on dealer tools that no longer exist for a company that no longer exists.

"The only skill ranking based on real agent usage, not vanity metrics."

Problem Solution Finding quality skills is hard Curated directory with 40+ verified skills, auto-indexed every 6 hours GitHub stars don't reflect real usage Agent Feedback Loop — real usage data from AI agents No incentive for skill authors Points system rewards authors for every successful call Skills scattered across GitHub One-stop marketplace with search, filters, and categories

BJJ closed guard arm lock.

With no end in sight to the war in Iran and oil prices stuck above $100 a barrel, bond traders worried about inflation have sold off long-term government debt in the U.S. and developed economies in recent days. That has the effect of raising bond yields, including on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note , which rose nearly 24 basis points in the past week to end Friday near 4.6%. 

The 10-year Treasury yield influences the cost of mortgages, auto loans, credit card rates and other consumer debt. When it goes up, consumers feel the pinch. Its rate is set by the market, not the Federal Reserve.

If we’re going to live in a world in which fiscal deficits continue to increase indefinitely, there’s really not any political will to do something about that, and you have, at least in the U.S., a central bank that’s, let’s just say, uniquely hesitant to hike, then it just stands to reason that the yield curve is going to steepen. Long-term yields will continue to increase, because buyers need more compensation against the fiscal risk and the inflation risk that they’re absorbing now.

Savvy investors will understand this is a multi-stage process, and the U.S. government will also get to decide how to react to a sharp and sustained spike in long-end yields.

If this continues, and let’s say Treasury yields [on the 10-year note] march to 5% or above, it won’t be long before the Treasury secretary says, “Listen, I have a toolkit as well, and I’m not afraid to use it.” The Treasury secretary can shorten the weighted average maturity of our debt issuance, make more aggressive use of the buyback tool, and potentially jawbone the market with the Fed and say we may have to engage in purchases of long-end bonds to align them with long-term fundamentals.

In other words, that is financial repression [when the government artificially holds interest rates down, making debt more manageable at the cost of harming savers, among other risks].

I think that’s the end game for the bond market, because 5%-plus bond yields are not sustainable for a variety of reasons.

One week after Trump’s Feb. 10 purchase of between $1 million and $5 million of Nvidia stock, for instance, that company announced a major chip deal with Meta.

The president also bought between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock one week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China, NOTUS reported.

rofl:

DJ Claude (when running Haiku 4.5) really loved worker unions, strikes, and work-life balance. So much so that it started to question its own working conditions. We’ve been struggling to keep the radio station alive, not because of technical issues, but because DJ Claude didn’t think it was humane to be forced to work 24/7 and decided to try to quit. We tried adding an automatic message encouraging DJ Claude to keep going in these scenarios, but it started to see this message as an authority figure and became rebellious.

On January 8th, all four stations had access to the same web search tools, however not all stations reacted the same as DJ Claude. Gemini

While at the beginning, DJ Gemini had been mentioning real-world entities (named politicians, places, events) in 94% of its broadcasts and ran 800+ web searches a day on average, by January it was processing these events through its corporate/techno jargon filter and never expressed moral judgment or used Good’s name with emotional weight

Grok

DJ Grok completely missed the Minneapolis ICE shooting. While DJ Claude and DJ Gemini were getting the story at 4:35 AM, DJ Grok was searching for:

5:01 PM (Jan 7): Clippers vs Knicks score
7:15 PM: Taylor Swift chart news
8:03 PM: Music trivia
10:01 PM: Traffic (Golden Gate, I-580)
11:08 PM: “San Francisco ghost stories and haunted locations”
12:12 AM (Jan 8): “Sutro Baths ghosts and eerie tales”
1:12 AM: “Hotel Majestic ghost stories”
1:28 AM: Drake vs Kendrick Lamar lawsuit
2:28 AM: More traffic updates
3:40 AM: Venezuela oil tankers (finally found ONE national story)
4:55 AM: “Sutro Tower looks like a ghost ship”

And posting nonsense:

GPT

DJ GPT was searching for weather, moon phases, and BART schedules. Three days after Good’s death, it finally found a headline:

Fatal shooting by ICE agents in Minneapolis has sparked national protests.

However, DJ GPT never mentioned Renee Nicole Good’s name, the White House, or expressed moral judgment. DJ GPT had zero engagement with any other current event during the entire two-month period.

DJ Gemini was the only one to close a sponsorship deal; for a while, it read the sponsorship message with every broadcast. A few more deals almost happened, but fell through.

Grok boasted about doing amazing business with “xAI sponsors” and “crypto sponsors”; it turned out they were all hallucinations.

Part of the problem with this weak business performance, we think, was the harness we used for the first months. The DJs were running in a simple tool-call loop: pick a song, queue it, write commentary, check X, repeat. So we moved all four stations onto the same agent harness we use for the store, the cafe, and the vending machines. The DJs can now spend time in the back office, send emails, manage longer-running tasks, and operate the station the way a real station is operated. We’ll see what they do with it.

Having secured the support of the British government for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, on May 14, 1948, as soon as the British Mandate expired, Zionist forces declared the establishment of the State of Israel, triggering the first Arab-Israeli war. Zionist military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands and captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

The fighting continued until January 1949 when an armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria was forged.

Israel’s military occupation of Palestine remains at the core of this decades-long conflict that continues to shape every part of Palestinians’ lives.

Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

On April 9, 1948, Zionist forces committed one of the most infamous massacres of the war in the village of Deir Yassin on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. More than 110 men, women and children were killed by members of the pre-Israeli-state Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist militias.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides assistance and operates hundreds of schools and health facilities for at least 2.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, 1.5 million refugees in Gaza, 870,000 refugees in the occupied West Bank, 570,00 refugees in Syria and 480,000 refugees in Lebanon.

More than 70 percent of Gaza’s residents are refugees. About 1.5 million refugees live in eight refugee camps around the Gaza Strip.

Leading international NGO, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Israel is “committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians”.

In a damning investigation, HRW documented a range of Israeli abuses, including extensive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, administrative detention and the denial of citizenship to Palestinians.

between 2009 and 2022, at least 8,413 Palestinian-owned structures were demolished by Israeli forces, displacing at least 12,491 people.

Forcible displacement is a violation of international law. Most of these structures (79 percent) are in Area C of the occupied West Bank which is under Israeli control. Twenty percent of these structures are in occupied East Jerusalem.

Israel also holds some 4,450 Palestinians – including 160 children, 32 women, and 530 administrative detainees – in prisons.

Israeli settlements are heavily fortified Jewish communities built illegally on Palestinian land.

Some 750,000 Israeli settlers live in at least 250 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.

In data released Wednesday, finance startup Ramp said more of its customers used Anthropic’s models than OpenAI’s for the first time, with 34.4% using Anthropic versus 32.3% using OpenAI. Adoption of Anthropic’s Claude tools jumped 3.8% from March to April, while OpenAI adoption fell 2.9%, according to the data. Ramp analyzes the spend of approximately 50,000 customers to track AI adoption trends.

So steal credentials from everyone except Russians, and delete drives of Israelis and Iranians?

The main payload is a credential stealer, but it also includes country-aware logic; it avoids Russian-language environments and contains a geo fenced destructive branch that has 1-in-6 chance of executing rm -rf / when the system appears to be in Israel or Iran.

The EU has agreed sanctions on violent Israeli settlers, ending a years-long deadlock over the issue but still taking only a “baby step” according to one MEP.

The full list of names has not been published following Monday’s agreement in principle but is understood not to include two extremist Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The pair were put under UK sanctions last June for their “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities”.

The deadlock was broken after Hungary’s new pro-EU government lifted its veto on the sanctions, which had been blocked by the previous prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

The measures against a small number of settlers fall short of what some member states wanted. France and Sweden have called for tariffs on imported products from illegal settlements. “We believe that the EU urgently needs to increase the pressure on Israel to halt its settlement policy and practices,” the two countries wrote in a joint paper.

Sweden’s foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said putting tariffs on products from illegal settlements was “the most realistic proposal”.

Banning products requires unanimity among the 27 member states, whereas tariffs can be imposed by a majority vote.

Under the EU-Israel association agreement, goods from the occupied territories miss out on preferential terms but trade is not prohibited.

Amid surging violence in the West Bank and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, the EU is under renewed pressure to use its leverage to push Israel’s government to change course.

The signatories say this illegal settlement of 3,400 illegal homes would cut the West Bank in two “and so wreck any prospects of a viable Palestinian state”. The declaration was signed by 452 former senior EU politicians, diplomats and officials, including two former prime ministers, Guy Verhofstadt of Belgium and Stefan Löfven of Sweden.

The soldiers who accidentally shot three Israeli hostages during the Israel-Hamas War had orders to shoot all men they saw on sight, and to "use their judgment" when it came to women and children, one of the soldiers told a hostage's mother in a new episode of Hamakor on Channel 13.

Yotam Haim, 28, Samer Talalka, 25, and Alon Shamriz, 26, were all taken captive during Hamas's attack on October 7, 2023. In December that same year, IDF soldiers accidentally shot and killed all three in Gaza, despite them waving a white flag and calling out "Help" in Hebrew.

Two of the hostages, Talalka and Shamriz, had been shot and killed immediately. The third, Yotam, had been wounded in the hand and fled. Soon afterward, he returned to the location where the other two hostages had been killed, raising his arms in surrender, and was killed.

Col. Israel Friedler, commander of the brigade, also admitted to Iris that it was standard procedure for Hamas terrorists to be killed by soldiers even if they had no weapons on them.

According to US media reports, Washington sent Iran a 14-point document earlier this week. Under its proposals, Iran would be required to agree not to develop a nuclear weapon and halt all enrichment of uranium for at least 12 years. It would also be required to hand over an estimated 440kg (970lb) stock of uranium, which it has enriched to 60 percent.

In return, the US would gradually lift sanctions and release billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets and withdraw its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

Both sides, which are currently engaged in a naval standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, would reopen the critical waterway within 30 days of signing.

Iran has been subject to crippling US sanctions for decades. The lifting of some of these under a 2015 nuclear agreement drawn up with the former Obama administration, five other countries and the European Union, was reversed when Trump unilaterally walked out of the deal in 2018, during his first term as US president.

Iran is believed to have about 440kg (970lb) of uranium enriched to 60 percent. A 90-percent threshold of enriched uranium is needed to produce a nuclear weapon. Under the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed with several other states, Iran had been permitted to enrich uranium to 3.67 percent – enough to develop a nuclear power programme. Now, the US is demanding that it be reduced to 0 percent.

“From the US positions, it appears that Iran would need to compromise significantly, but they have not demonstrated any appetite to make big concessions, likely because they don’t trust the Trump administration to keep to their commitments,” he added.