activescott's Notes

While his higher profile targets have gotten all the attention, the Associated Press has a very good story you should read about Carr’s efforts to bully a Bay Area radio station (KCBS) after it accurately informed locals about the goonish behavior of masked ICE agents.

Carr opened a fake investigation into the network last February, claiming the station had violated ambiguous public interest standards. The fake inquiries were tethered to a right wing antisemitic propaganda campaign attempting to link George Soros to these stations despite Soros’ limited investment involvement being both irrelevant and three or four layers deep.

As our already struggling, highly consolidated, and under-funded media outlets tend to do, KCBS immediately folded under federal existential threat, just as Carr hoped:

“KCBS demoted a well-liked anchor and dialed back on political programming, people said. For months, reporters were dissuaded from pursuing political or controversial topics and instead encouraged to focus on human interest stories, according to the current and former staffers.”

When staffers did try to cover more political fare, they say the tone was heavily scrutinized and the content was watered down to a bland gruel to avoid upsetting Republicans:

“Doug Sovern, a veteran political journalist at the station, said he was sidelined after Carr announced his investigation.

“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said Sovern, who retired in April. He said his retirement was not related to the controversy.”

As Carr was distracted by his other extremist projects, like failing to censor Kimmel, some of the scrutiny eased and the station regained the confidence to at least report on things like the No Kings protest. But the bullying appears to have had its intended effect. At one point, a KCBS reporter says he was denied the opportunity to interview Katie Porter because management felt it would upset Donald Trump:

The updated vaccines have not been specifically tested for safety in people, just as flu vaccines are not tested in people every year with a strain change. The safety of the shots, however, has been well established in the original trials and through surveillance of billions of highly similar doses.

The main serious safety risk of each of the vaccines is inflammation of the heart muscle or its surrounding tissue, known as myocarditis and pericarditis, respectively. The conditions are rare, most commonly affecting young men after a second dose.

Studies have shown that for most people, myocarditis is much more likely following a COVID-19 infection than a COVID-19 vaccine. Infection-related myocarditis is also more severe and linked to worse outcomes.

U.K. health officials analyzed preliminary flu data and predicted that subclade K may spread more easily than other versions. The researchers estimated that the reproduction number of subclade K is 1.4, meaning that each infected person spreads the virus to 1.4 other people on average. Typically, the reproduction number of the flu is closer to 1.2.

While there will be more flu cases this year, so far, there is no evidence that this new flu version will cause more severe cases, hospitalizations or deaths. Health officials have already recorded many more cases this year than at the same time last year, about 4.5 million cases compared to 1.9 million in 2024. But of those nearly two million cases last year, 1.2% were hospitalized and 0.05% died from their infections. So far in 2025, the rate of hospitalization is 1.09% and the mortality rate is 0.04%.

The CDC has not yet commented on the effectiveness of this year’s flu vaccine in the U.S. But U.K. health officials previously estimated that their vaccine, which is different from the one used in the U.S., reduced hospitalizations by about 70-75% in kids and by about 30-40% in adults.

The recent firing of the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and new restrictions from leaders at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about who will be eligible to get COVID-19 vaccines have sparked confusion among the public and concern from health experts, who say it’s critical to protect as many people as possible from respiratory viruses like flu and COVID-19.

To answer some of your top questions about the 2025-2026 COVID-19 and flu vaccines, we consulted with infectious disease expert, Dr. Michelle Barron.

You can get both shots at the same time, and the exact timing doesn’t matter. So if you’re able to get the updated 2025-2026 COVID-19 and flu vaccines sometime in the next couple of months, Barron encourages as many people as possible to do so.

The panel originally had been scheduled to vote on the COVID-19 vaccine recommendations in June. But that month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the committee and installed new members of his choice. The CDC director, who had just been confirmed by the Senate, was fired in August, and other top officials resigned. Meanwhile, Kennedy has repeatedly made false or misleading claims about COVID-19 vaccines this year.

This year, the recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is narrower. Although the vaccines are broadly recommended for adults 19 and older, they are no longer recommended for healthy pregnant people or for healthy children 6 months through 17 years old.

Kennedy announced the changes in a video in May, citing safety risks for young people and pregnant people as justification.

But his claims have been widely disputed by experts in vaccines, pediatrics, and women’s health. An analysis by FactCheck.org found that the secretary “misrepresented scientific research to make unfounded claims about vaccine safety for pregnant people and children.”

GeoFS is a flight simulator with a global environment generated from satellite images and digital geographic data. You can run it for free in your web browser without anything to install, subscribe to worldwide HD aerial images (suitable for VFR flight) or install the available mobile Apps.

NVTOP stands for Neat Videocard TOP, a (h)top like task monitor for GPUs and accelerators. It can handle multiple GPUs and print information about them in a htop-familiar way.

Currently supported vendors are AMD (Linux amdgpu driver), Apple (limited M1 & M2 support), Huawei (Ascend), Intel (Linux i915/Xe drivers), NVIDIA (Linux proprietary divers), Qualcomm Adreno (Linux MSM driver), Broadcom VideoCore (Linux v3d driver).

Apple’s release notes detail that RDMA integrates with the Thunderbolt framework to enable zero-copy data transfers, meaning data moves directly from one device’s memory to another’s without intermediate buffering. This eliminates bottlenecks associated with TCP/IP protocols, which Thunderbolt previously emulated. Insiders note that while Thunderbolt 5 offers peak speeds, real-world performance depends on factors like cable quality and device compatibility—only M4 and later chips fully support this enhanced mode.

Diving deeper into the technical specifics, Apple’s developer documentation explains that RDMA over Thunderbolt is exposed through new APIs in the macOS networking stack. Developers can initialize clusters using Swift or Objective-C calls that negotiate memory mappings directly over the Thunderbolt bus. This is a departure from traditional Ethernet-based RDMA, which relies on Infiniband or RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), adapting instead to Thunderbolt’s point-to-point topology.

For those building apps, the update introduces protocols for fault-tolerant clustering. If a device drops out—say, due to a disconnected cable—the system can redistribute workloads dynamically, minimizing disruptions. Testing scenarios outlined in the notes suggest latency as low as microseconds for small transfers, rivaling dedicated high-performance computing setups.

Security is paramount in such a powerful feature. Apple’s notes emphasize built-in encryption for RDMA transfers, preventing unauthorized memory access. A separate 9to5Mac report on the update’s patches reveals fixes for kernel vulnerabilities that could have been exploited in clustered environments, ensuring that the feature doesn’t become a vector for attacks.

Looking at adoption, early sentiment on X suggests enthusiasm among AI researchers. One thread discussed collaborative model training, where multiple users contribute compute power via clustered Macs, democratizing access to high-end AI tools. This could disrupt markets dominated by cloud providers, offering cost savings for startups avoiding subscription fees.

RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models.

exo connects all your devices into an AI cluster. Not only does exo enable running models larger than would fit on a single device, but with day-0 support for RDMA over Thunderbolt, makes models run faster as you add more devices.

The Kirkland Cannery Building, also once called King County Food Processing Plant and State Cannery Number 4, is a historic building in Kirkland, Washington. It is an 11,000 ft2 cannery, built in 1936 by President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA), and was sold to the City of Kirkland in 1941 for $44.79.[1][2] It was operated as a cooperative to benefit the poor during the Great Depression, along with three other WPA plants at Kent, Wapato, and Wenatchee.[3] Citizens could bring in crops, fish, and chicken, to be canned at no charge in exchange for donating one third of the product to "state institutions".[4] During World War II, it "was largely as an aid to the general food conservation program and the war effort rather than as an economic aid to the communities served".

Yesterday The President announced reducing regulatory burden on nuclear energy companies. Today the President’s company announces they are merging with a nuclear energy company.

The firm behind President Donald Trump's Truth Social platform is merging with a Google-backed energy company in a deal valued at more than $6bn (£4.4bn).

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