activescott's Notes

Lenders, including JPMorgan and MUFG, have spent more than six months distributing $38bn of construction debt tied to a data centre project leased to Oracle in Texas and Wisconsin, people familiar with the matter said.

Some banks sought to sell the loans at a discount to non-bank lenders to offload the Oracle-linked debt, the people said.

Banks have in recent weeks sounded out investors about structures including a variant of a significant risk transfer, or SRT. SRTs have been commonly used by European banks to reduce their capital requirements by offloading the risk of losses on part of a loan portfolio to investors such as private credit funds and insurers in exchange for a return. North American banks have begun using the instruments more in recent years. Rather than a classic SRT that may be tied to dozens of loans, banks are exploring slicing and dicing large and concentrated data centre loans to shift the riskiest portions off their books, for example.

Companies have already started expanding to new debt markets beyond bank lending by issuing private credit, asset-backed securities, commercial mortgage-backed securities and privately placed bonds. “There’s a nervousness . . . [Banks] are having to find more counterparties in order to achieve for what’s in the market and in the pipeline,” said Carlos Mendez, co-founder at Crayhill Capital.

The best bike lock overall is the Litelok X1 that brings cutting-edge technology at a friendlier price point.

For the ultimate in bicycle security, choose the Litelok X3, the toughest lock we tested, which took nearly 8 minutes to defeat. However, it's quite pricey.

The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against other major currencies, logged its steepest six-month drop in more than 50 years in the first half of 2025. Though the decline hasn’t deepened, the dollar index is still about 10% lower than the start of Trump’s term.

A strong dollar makes imports cheaper and can help keep inflation in check. A weak one can increase prices on foreign goods but boost American exports.

Trump has suggested a strong dollar puts the U.S. at a disadvantage and that a weak dollar helps American industry. And as with most things with Trump, he’s been blunter in his messaging.

“You make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar,” he said last year, one of a number of public statements showing his preference for seeing the dollar decline.

Trump isn’t alone in seeing benefits of a weaker buck.

In recent months, corporate earnings calls have been peppered with talk of how a weaker dollar has helped companies from Philip Morris to Coca-Cola, with executives pulling out C-suite phrases like “favorable currency impact” to note how the dip brought tailwinds outside the U.S. that added to bottom lines.

Currency values are constantly moving and, while the dollar’s recent fall is notable, it has reached lower levels at points in the presidencies of each of Trump’s predecessors, back through the creation of the Dollar Index in 1973, when Richard Nixon was at the helm.

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says while “a lot of policies that Trump is doing are something of a cancer for the dollar,” he believes that it was destined to fall no matter who was in charge.

“The dollar had been on a 15-year bull run,” he said. “I would argue the dollar is still wildly overvalued, and over the next maybe five or six years, it might fall 15%.”

What does that mean for American consumers? Rogoff says commodity prices are likely to rise, particularly with the impact of the Iran war on fuel prices.

“They’re just going to go up,” he says, “no matter what the dollar’s at.”

Lebanon’s National News Agency reports Israeli attacks have killed more than 30 people in a single day, in further violations of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire signed by Israel and Lebanon last month. Two children were among those killed in the attacks on southern Lebanon. They came as a Hezbollah drone injured 12 Israeli soldiers in northern Israel. On Thursday, Israel issued new forced evacuation orders for villages north of a strip of occupied territory along the border that Israel is calling a “Yellow Line.” More than 1 million people have been displaced from their homes by Israel’s attacks, about one-fifth of Lebanon’s population.

The Saver's Credit can be used by low- and moderate-income individuals and families to reduce their tax bills.

The Saver's Credit is applied directly to your tax bill to reduce the amount of federal income tax you owe. For instance, if your tax bill is $1,000 and your credit is $400, you'd only owe $600. If your tax bill is $1,000 and your credit is $1,000, it's a wash. You'd owe nothing.

To qualify, you must be 18 or older, not a full-time student, and not claimed as a dependent on someone else's tax return. Then you have to meet the AGI requirements. AGI is your gross income minus adjustments such as deductible retirement contributions, self-employment taxes, educator expenses, and student loan interest.

Of course, the final qualification is that you make a contribution to a retirement account. It's important to note that rollover contributions do not qualify for the credit, and eligible contributions may be reduced by recent retirement account distributions. Contributions to a wide range of retirement accounts qualify for this credit, including:

Traditional IRA
Roth IRA
Traditional 401(k)
Roth 401(k)
403(b)
457 plan
SARSEP
SEP IRA
SIMPLE IRA
Thrift Savings Plan
ABLE account

What is the Saver's Match, and how is it different from the Saver's Credit?

Beginning in tax year 2027, the Saver's Credit for retirement contributions will be replaced by the Saver's Match. While both incentives are designed to encourage lower‑ and moderate‑income workers to save for retirement, they work in different ways.

The Saver's Credit is a nonrefundable tax credit that reduces the amount of federal income tax you owe. By contrast, the Saver's Match provides a government matching contribution—worth up to 50% of the first $2,000 ($4,000 per person for joint filers) you contribute each year—that is deposited directly into an eligible retirement account.

For most organizations, autoMode.environment is the only field you need to set. It tells the classifier which repos, buckets, and domains are trusted: the classifier uses it to decide what “external” means, so any destination not listed is a potential exfiltration target. The default environment list trusts the working repo and its configured remotes. To add your own entries alongside that default, include the literal string "$defaults" in the array. The default entries are spliced in at that position, so your custom entries can go before or after them.

If it wasn't for the tariffs, would Colossus be solar-powered? It would be much easier to make it solar powered, yeah. The tariffs are nuts, several hundred percent. Don't you know some people? The president has... we don't agree on everything and this administration is not the biggest fan of solar. We also need the land, the permits, and everything. So if you try to move very fast, I do think scaling solar on Earth is a good way to go, but you do need some amount of time to find the land, get the permits, get the solar, pair that with the batteries.

I just repeatedly tackle the limiting factor. Whatever the limiting factor is on speed, I'm going to tackle that. If capital is the limiting factor,
20:52 20 minutes, 52 seconds then I'll solve for capital. If it's not the limiting factor, I'll solve for something else.

If it wasn't for the tariffs, would Colossus be solar-powered? It would be much easier to make it solar powered, yeah. The tariffs are nuts, several hundred percent. Don't you know some people? The president has... we don't agree on everything and this administration is not the biggest fan of solar.

Dwarkesh is pretty annoying. How many times does he say to Jensen "is that true" or some variant of calling him a liar. he can push back without insinuating he's a liar and Jensen definitely does not come off as a liar here. Maybe biased, but not liar.

If we scare this country into thinking that AI is somehow a nuclear bomb, so that everybody hates AI and everybody's afraid of AI, I don't know how you're helping the United States. You're doing it a disservice. If we scare everybody out of doing software engineering jobs because it's going to kill every software engineering job—and we don't have any software engineers as a result of that—we're doing a disservice to the United States. If we scare everybody out of radiology so nobody wants to be a radiologist because computer vision is completely free and no AI is going to do a worse job than a radiologist, we misunderstand the difference between a job and a task. The job of a radiologist is patient care. The task is to read a scan. If we misunderstand that so profoundly and we scare everybody out of going to radiology school, we're not going to have enough radiologists and good enough healthcare. So I'm making the case that when you make a premise that is so extreme, everything goes from zero or infinity, we end up scaring people in a way that's just not true. – Jensen Huang

Venezuela is another possible contender, said market watchers. With output recovering faster than expected and a potentially more U.S.-friendly political environment emerging, Caracas could seek greater flexibility.

“Venezuela could be next off the rank in wake of leadership change there to a more U.S. friendly position,” said Saul Kavonic, energy analyst at MST Marquee.

Kpler’s Smith also said that Venezuela was a potential candidate because it has been ramping up production and exports at a quicker pace than expected. Venezuela’s oil exports rose above a million barrels per day in March for the first time since September.

x402 is an open, neutral standard for internet-native payments. It absolves the Internet's original sin by natively making payments possible between clients and servers, creating win-win economies that empower agentic payments at scale. x402 exists to build a more free and fair internet.

Weird. But by all means buy.

The firm joins a growing list of publicly-traded companies betting on ETH. These companies, coupled with DeFi treasuries, have accumulated a total of $9.5 billion worth of the cryptocurrency, equivalent to around 2% of its total supply, data from StrategicEtherReserve shows.

talkie is an inference library for the talkie 13B language model family developed by Alec Radford, Nick Levine, and David Duvenaud.

talkie-1930-13b-base is a 13b language model trained on pre-1931 English-language text.

talkie-1930-13b-it has been instruction-tuned using a novel instruction-following dataset built from pre-1931 reference works including etiquette manuals, letter-writing manuals, encyclopedias, and poetry collections. It has also undergone reinforcement learning using online DPO to improve instruction-following capabilities.

We also provide a 'modern' base model, talkie-web-13b-base, with the same architecture and training FLOPs as talkie-1930, but trained on FineWeb, to allow for controlled comparisons between modern and vintage models. Note that we need to be careful about the claims we make contrasting the behavior and capabilities of the models, because temporal coverage is not the only difference in the pretraining corpora. For example, the distribution of subject matters differs significantly.

The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year. If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department

under new guidance issued by the Trump administration, immigrants can now be denied a green card for expressing political opinions, such as participating in pro-Palestinian campus protests, posting criticism of Israel on social media and desecrating the American flag, according to internal Department of Homeland Security training materials reviewed by The New York Times.

The administration includes criticism of Israel as a potentially disqualifying factor, with the training materials citing as an example of questionable speech a social media post that declares, “Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine” and shows the Israeli flag crossed out.

Oil demand is expected to contract by 80 kb/d this year, as the Iran war upends our global outlook. This is 730 kb/d less than in last month’s Report and a forecast 1.5 mb/d 2Q26 decline would be the sharpest since Covid-19 slashed fuel consumption. Initially, the deepest cuts in oil use have come in the Middle East and Asia Pacific, mainly for naphtha, LPG and jet fuel. However, demand destruction will spread as scarcity and higher prices persist.

Global oil supply plummeted by 10.1 mb/d to 97 mb/d in March, with continued attacks on energy infrastructure in the Middle East and ongoing restrictions to tanker movements through the Strait of Hormuz leading to the largest disruption in history. OPEC+ production fell 9.4 mb/d m-o-m to 42.4 mb/d while non-OPEC+ supply declined 770 kb/d m-o-m to 54.7 mb/d, as lower Qatari output offset gains in Brazil and the United States.

Global observed oil inventories fell by 85 mb in March, with stocks outside of the Middle East Gulf drawn down by a significant 205 mb (-6.6 mb/d) as flows through the Strait of Hormuz were choked off. At the same time, with limited outlets after the effective closure of the Strait, floating storage of crude and oil products in the Middle East rose by 100 mb and onshore crude stocks in the region were up by 20 mb. China added 40 mb of crude to tanks.

However, at the time of writing, it remains unclear whether the ceasefire will turn into a lasting peace and a return to regular shipping flows through the Strait of Hormuz. With oil-importing nations scrambling to source replacement barrels from an increasingly shrinking pool of supply, physical crude oil prices surged to record levels near $150/bbl, far above the prices in futures markets, with the physical-futures disconnect becoming increasingly acute. Even steeper gains have been seen for refined products, with middle distillate prices in Singapore reaching all-time highs above $290/bbl.

Resuming flows through the Strait of Hormuz remains the single most important variable in easing the pressure on energy supplies, prices and the global economy.

In early April, shipments through the Strait remained severely restricted, with loadings of crude, natural gas liquids and refined products averaging around 3.8 mb/d, compared with more than 20 mb/d in February ahead of the crisis. Exports through alternative routes – most notably from the west coast of Saudi Arabia and Fujairah on the east coast of the UAE, as well as the ITP pipeline that runs from Iraq to Ceyhan in Türkiye – had increased to 7.2 mb/d from less than 4 mb/d before the war. The overall loss in oil exports exceeds 13 mb/d, with associated production curtailment and damage to energy infrastructure in the region resulting in cumulative supply losses of more than 360 mb in March and 440 mb projected for April.

Overall, global oil demand is estimated to contract by 800 kb/d year-on-year in March and by 2.3 mb/d in April. Global oil demand is now projected to decline by 80 kb/d on average in 2026, compared to growth of 730 kb/d expected in last month’s Report.