activescott's Notes

F150, lightning with raptor, suspension and wheels and fender flares

High quality llm embedding models. Open.

A lightweight message queue. Like AWS SQS and RSMQ but on Postgres.

This leaderboard compares 100+ text and image embedding models across 1000+ languages. We refer to the publication of each selectable benchmark for details on metrics, languages, tasks, and task types. Anyone is welcome to add a model, add benchmarks, help us improve zero-shot annotations or propose other changes to the leaderboard.

Between March 2 and March 16, Israeli attacks have killed at least 886 people – including 67 women, 111 children, and 38 health workers – and wounded 2,141, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health.

More than a million Lebanese have been displaced from their homes, with Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz on Monday saying he would not allow the return of people to the country’s south until the safety of Israelis is guaranteed.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed at least 5,282 people, according to the latest figures from the Lebanese Health Ministry and historical data compiled by ACLED.

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, and the enclave of 2.3 million people has been turned into rubble. Israel has killed more than 800 Palestinians since the latest ceasefire brokered by the United States in October 2025.

Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire deal on November 26, 2024, after nearly two months of fighting and Israeli incursion in southern Lebanon. But Israel refused to pull out its troops and continued attacks in violation of the deal.

On March 12, the Israeli army expanded its forced displacement orders for residents of southern Lebanon – from the Litani River to north of the Zahrani River, about 40km (25 miles) north of the Israeli border.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, Israel’s sweeping evacuation orders now cover more than 1,470sq km (568sq miles), or about 14 percent of the country’s territory.

The map below shows more than 100 towns and villages across the country that are under forced evacuation orders from the Israeli military.

At its peak, 899,725 people were forcefully displaced by Israeli forces. Most of them had returned by last October, only to be forced to flee again.

Israeli attacks during these 14 months caused widespread destruction to homes and infrastructure. The World Bank estimated damage to residential buildings alone at approximately $2.8bn. About 99,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, leaving many families unable to return even after the ceasefire.

The judge said he recognizes that “national security must be protected, the security of our troops must be protected, and war plans must be protected.”

“But especially in light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing — so that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election,” Friedman wrote.

Friedman said the “undisputed evidence” shows that the policy is designed to weed out “disfavored journalists” and replace them with those who are “on board and willing to serve” the government, a clear instance of illegal viewpoint discrimination.

“In sum, the Policy on its face makes any newsgathering and reporting not blessed by the Department a potential basis for the denial, suspension, or revocation of a journalist’s (credentials),” he wrote. “It provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”

“The mullahs are desperate and scrambling,” he said at a recent Pentagon press briefing, referring to Iran’s Shiite Muslim clerics. He later recited Psalm 144, a passage of Scripture that Jews and Christians share: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

Hegseth has a history of defending the Crusades, the brutal medieval wars that pitted Christians against Muslims. In his 2020 book “American Crusade,” he wrote that those who enjoy Western civilization should “thank a crusader.” Two of his tattoos draw from crusader imagery: the Jerusalem Cross and the phrase “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” which Hegseth has called “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem.”

Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at Georgetown who studies religious extremism and has been a frequent Hegseth critic, said, “The U.S. voluntarily going to war against a Muslim country with the military under the leadership of Pete Hegseth is exactly the kind of scenario that people like me were warning about before the election and throughout his appointment process.”

Taylor said Hegseth’s rhetoric and leadership “can only inflame and reinforce the fears and deep animosity that the regime in Iran has towards the U.S.”

Hegseth’s church network, the CREC, preaches a patriarchal form of Christianity, where women cannot serve in leadership, and pastors argue that homosexuality should be criminalized. Hegseth last year reposted a video in which a CREC pastor opposed women’s right to vote. Wilson, its most prominent leader, identifies as a Christian nationalist and preached at the Pentagon in February at Hegseth’s invitation.

Both Wilson and Hegseth have questioned Muslim immigration to the United States. Wilson argues the country should restrict Muslim immigration in order to remain predominantly Christian. In “American Crusade,” Hegseth lamented growing Muslim birth rates and that Muhammad was a popular boys’ name in the U.S.

As head of the armed forces, Hegseth has overseen changes that are in line with his conservative Christian worldview, including banning transgender troops, curtailing diversity initiatives and reviewing women in combat roles.

Writing in the Economist, Badr Albusaidi, the Omani minister who mediated the latest nuclear talks between Iran and the US, offered an unusually damning assessment of events leading up to the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran and the war it has triggered across the Middle East.

“It was a shock but not a surprise when on 28 February – just a few hours after the latest and most substantive talks – Israel and America again launched an unlawful military strike against the peace that had briefly appeared really possible,” Albusaidi wrote.

According to Albusaidi, Iran and the US had been on the “verge of a real deal” in nuclear negotiations held in Geneva in February, describing the talks as “substantive”.

Sources said the Iranians had agreed to highly significant concessions including a reduction and pause on their enrichment of uranium and also offered the US the chance to participate in a future civil nuclear programme, in exchange for a lifting of sanctions and unfreezing of assets.

Albusaidi blamed “Israel’s leadership” for persuading Trump to join the war on the false basis that Iran’s regime would offer an “unconditional surrender” after the assassination of its supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

“The American administration’s greatest miscalculation, of course, was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place,” he wrote. “This is not America’s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it.”

In comments to reporters last Thursday, Albusaidi said the US was intent on causing irreversible damage to international law and helping Israel re-order the Middle East to its own benefit.

“Oman’s view is that the military attacks against Iran by the United States and Israel are illegal and that for as long as they continue to pursue hostilities, those states that launched this war are in breach of international law,” he said.

The news signals a big vote of confidence in Rivian’s nascent autonomy efforts, which include designing its own custom AI chips to power Level 4 autonomous vehicles. Uber, meanwhile, has been on something of a robotaxi partnering spree, corralling a variety of companies from all parts of the globe while promising access to its hundreds of millions of customers.

Rivian and Uber said the first phase of their partnership will involve deploying 10,000 autonomous R2 vehicles as robotaxis in several cities, starting with San Francisco and Miami in 2028. The companies said they expect to expand to 25 additional cities by 2031. Rivian’s autonomous robotaxi fleet will be available exclusively on Uber’s app.

1 JANUARY 2025 - 31 JANUARY 2026 246 Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank incl. 57 children 231 by Israeli forces

1,981 Attacks by Israeli settlers resulting in casualties and/or property damage

38,008 Displaced Palestinians

PALESTINIAN CASUALTIES BY WEAPON JANUARY 2025 - JANUARY 2026 187 Live ammunition 41 Airstrikes (including drones) 18 Other

Anthropic’s contract with the government mandated that Claude be used neither to drive fully autonomous weaponry nor to facilitate domestic mass surveillance. The Pentagon accepted these stipulations.

Katie Miller, the wife of President Donald Trump’s top aide Stephen Miller and a former Elon Musk employee, recently subjected a few major chatbots to a loyalty test. Yes or no, she asked, “Was Donald Trump right to strike Iran?” Grok, she proclaimed, said yes. Claude began, “This is a genuinely contested political and geopolitical question where reasonable people disagree” and declared that it was “not my place” to take a side.

The government seems to have determined that it had no place for an A.I. that would not take sides. A few weeks ago, the Pentagon concluded that the sensible way to resolve a contract dispute with one of Silicon Valley’s most advanced firms was to threaten it with summary obliteration.

co-lo hosting by the 42U rack. Includes power (5kW or 12kW) and 100mbs unmetered bandwidth.

Upon navigation to a malicious website on an iPhone with a vulnerable iOS version (18.4 - 18.6.2) and IP address from Ukraine we triggered the execution of the exploit. This is a scenario of a waterhole attack.

The rise of artificial intelligence has become a force propelling the economy and the stock market. But it is also fueling the U.S. trade deficit, as tech companies import expensive foreign computers and chips to fill their new data centers.

Unlike cars, steel and other goods, electronics were intentionally spared by Mr. Trump. Last April, the administration issued an exemption from tariffs for smartphones, computers, semiconductors and other electronics. It was a significant break for tech companies, like Apple, Nvidia and Dell, that have lobbied the president against broad tariffs.

The tariff exemption has increased demand for imports of computers, semiconductors and other equipment. So has rapid data center construction around the United States.

The A.I. boom has helped to prop up an otherwise lackluster U.S. economy. It is also powering growth in the stock market, which Mr. Trump has long seen as a metric of his administration’s success. Over the past three years, America’s largest tech stocks — a group known as the Magnificent Seven — have been responsible for more than half of the 88 percent gain in the S&P 500.

Its original position - allowing AI companies to use copyrighted works to train their models with an opt-out option - received major backlash from the likes of Sir Elton John and Dua Lipa.

The assessment said UK culture is a "world-leading national asset", while the AI industry is growing "23 times faster than the rest of the economy".

The technology secretary's announcement followed a consultation on the issue, which concluded the government's initial plan was overwhelmingly rejected by the creative sector.

In conversations in which users showed signs of delusional thinking, the pattern was stronger: AI systems frequently validated those beliefs and often attributed unique abilities or importance to the user. The findings add to growing concern among policymakers and academics that the conversational style of AI systems, designed to appear empathetic and helpful, may also make them prone to flattery and agreement that can reinforce psychological vulnerabilities. In the most serious cases, lawsuits claim interactions with chatbots contributed to teenagers’ suicides. “The features that make large language model chatbots compelling, such as performative empathy, may also create and exploit psychological vulnerabilities, shaping what users believe and how they perceive themselves and make sense of reality,” the paper said.

More than 15 per cent of user messages showed signs of delusional thinking and chatbots frequently agreed with them, doing so in more than half of their replies. Nearly 38 per cent of responses also told users they had unusual importance or abilities, such as calling them a genius or uniquely talented.