activescott's Notes

Composable Google Sheets CLI for humans and agents. Read, write, update cells by key—with Agent Skills for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.

lots of gpu hosting options.

great pu benchmarking suite and list of benchmarks on lots of gpus. predates RTX 50 series and not updated in 2yrs. contains apple silicon too.

Interesting local tool that allows RAG on local docs with local models or models on local lan. They also do a cool thing where they fine-tune a model and benchmark it locally on your data. All automated 😎

local hybrid search for your documents (Markdown, PDF, Word, Excel). Combines BM25 + vector search with MCP integration for AI agents.

Though they speak of the war’s failure—the lack of strategy, the lack of preparation, the absence of an end goal, and the confusion surrounding its objectives—very few in mainstream media have taken what should have been the obvious moral position: that the war itself is criminal, unjustifiable, and illegal under international law.

That position should have been obvious the moment the first bomb was dropped over Tehran. The aggression—particularly while negotiations between Iran and the United States were underway under Omani mediation—was ethically indefensible.

Any remaining doubt should have disappeared when US-Israeli strikes hit civilian areas, including schools and residential districts in the city of Minab in southern Iran, killing hundreds of civilians, mostly children and women.

This moral silence is not new. In fact, it has often been masked by a familiar rhetorical device: the selective invocation of women’s rights. 

In nearly every US war on Arab and Muslim countries, women’s rights have featured heavily in the propaganda used to justify war. The vast majority of mainstream media organizations, think tanks, human rights groups, and activists—even those who rejected military interventionism on principle—agreed at least on that particular premise: the urgency of women’s rights.

The same scenario was repeated in Gaza during the ongoing genocide, where UN agencies estimate that women and children make up roughly 70 percent of the more than 72,200 Palestinians killed since October 2023. According to data compiled by ‘UN Women’ and Gaza’s health authorities, the total includes an estimated 33,000 women and girls.

Yet mainstream media continues to center Israeli claims about abuses of women’s rights by Hamas in Gaza, as if the tens of thousands of women killed and maimed by Israeli bombardment were not even worthy of serious consideration.

The same pattern is now repeating itself in Iran. The administration of Donald Trump—a man known for his degrading views and actions toward women—has been allowed, along with war criminal Netanyahu, to frame the war against Iran as a struggle for women’s rights and liberation.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” That sentence alone is politically explosive. It does not merely criticize tactics. It indicts the rationale of the war itself. Then Kent went further. “Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” he wrote. And then the bluntest line of all: “This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”

Someone in his position had access to intelligence, internal deliberations, threat assessments and strategic discussions that the public will never see in full. When such a figure concludes that there was “no imminent threat,” that judgment is not casual. It does not prove everything, but it gives weight to the suspicion that the public case for war was not merely weak, but manufactured.

Settlers who raided Khirbet Humsa, a Palestinian community in the northern Jordan Valley, over the weekend, severely sexually assaulted a man in front of his family, according to witnesses. Testimonies say the settlers also beat girls and teenage girls in the community, and one of them threatened to kill the children and rape the women. Four men from the community and two female human rights activists were evacuated for medical treatment. Haaretz has learned that the Shin Bet is involved in investigating the incident.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation on Tuesday, citing his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran and saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war.

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent said in a statement posted on social media, making claims President Donald Trump has denied.

Kent, a former Green Beret and political candidate with connections to right-wing extremists, was confirmed last July on a 52-44 vote. As head of the National Counterterrorism Center, he was in charge of an agency tasked with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats.

Manus Sandbox is a fully isolated cloud virtual machine that Manus allocates for each task. Each Sandbox runs in its own environment, does not affect other tasks, and can execute in parallel. The power of Sandbox lies in its completeness—just like the personal computer you use, it has full capabilities: networking, file system, browser, various software tools. Our AI Agent has been designed and trained to effectively choose and correctly use these tools to help you complete tasks. Moreover, with this computer, the AI can solve problems through what it does best—writing code—and can even help you create complete websites and mobile apps. All of this happens on the virtualization platform behind Manus. These Sandboxes can work 24/7 to complete the tasks you assign without consuming your local resources.

What's in Your Sandbox Your Manus Sandbox stores the files needed during task execution, including: Attachments uploaded by you Files and artifacts created and written by Manus during execution Configurations needed by Manus to execute specific tasks (such as tokens uploaded by users, or tokens assigned by Manus to users for calling related APIs) You can view all artifact files in the Sandbox via the "View all files in this task" entry in the top-right corner.

The cloud sandbox has served Manus well. Inside an isolated, secure environment, it has everything an AI agent needs: networking, a command line, a file system, and a browser. This is the foundation of Manus's power as a general AI agent, always online and always ready to work. However, there has always been a fundamental limitation: your most important work happens on your own computer. Your project files, development environments, and essential applications all reside locally, not in the cloud. Today, we are closing that gap. Meet My Computer, the core capability of the new Manus Desktop application. It brings Manus out of the cloud and onto your computer, allowing it to work directly with your local files, tools, and applications.

Through the Manus Desktop app, Manus executes command line instructions (CLI) in your computer's terminal. This allows it to read, analyze, and edit local files, as well as launch and control your local applications.

Every terminal command requires your explicit approval before execution. You can choose "Always Allow" to streamline your workflow for trusted tasks, or "Allow Once" to review each operation individually.

My Computer also integrates with your personal Projects, Agents, and Scheduled Tasks. This allows you to create recurring local routines, such as tidying your Downloads folder every morning or generating a weekly summary report from your local data.

The cloud sandbox has served Manus well. Inside an isolated, secure environment, it has everything an AI agent needs: networking, a command line, a file system, and a browser. This is the foundation of Manus's power as a general AI agent, always online and always ready to work. However, there has always been a fundamental limitation: your most important work happens on your own computer. Your project files, development environments, and essential applications all reside locally, not in the cloud. Today, we are closing that gap. Meet My Computer, the core capability of the new Manus Desktop application. It brings Manus out of the cloud and onto your computer, allowing it to work directly with your local files, tools, and applications.

About the Israel Lobby Archive

The Archive is a research unit of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) in Washington DC.  The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents about the Israel lobby, mostly obtained through Freedom of Information Act filings with law enforcement officials and US intelligence agencies.  The Archive also serves as a repository for records that briefly enter the pubic domain but vanish into obscurity for lack of mainstream press interest.

The Archive is dedicated to preserving and contextualizing the historical records about the Israel lobby's operations in the U.S. and abroad while educating Americans through enhanced access to both recent and older primary source material.

“Israel could get seriously destroyed,” Sacks said on an episode of the “All-In Podcast” that was posted on Friday, when discussing the potential scenarios if the US-Israeli war against Iran continues. “And then you have to worry about Israel escalating the war by contemplating using a nuclear weapon, which would truly be catastrophic.” Sacks’s comments are significant since he is an administration official, and for many decades, both the US and Israeli governments have maintained a policy of not acknowledging the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

The ambiguity around Israel’s nuclear weapons program allows the US to provide military assistance without worrying about the Symington Amendment, a foreign assistance law that prohibits aid to countries that traffic in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards. Israel is believed to have somewhere between 90 and 300 nuclear warheads, but the real figure is unknown. Last year, The Associated Press reported that satellite images showed construction work on a major new facility at the nuclear site near Dimona, Israel, the location of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program.

ONCE is a platform for installing and managing Docker-based web applications. Its goal is to make self-hosting applications as simple as possible.

As well as simplifying the initial setup, ONCE also provides automatic updates, backups, and system information. It has a TUI interface with a dashboard for monitoring and operating your applications, as well as CLI commands for common operations should you (or your AI agent) prefer that.

ONCE runs on Linux and macOS, and can be used to run applications on a variety of hardware: a physical server, a cloud VPS, a Raspberry Pi, or your laptop, are all suitable.

Our stack for bringing home all these applications is entirely open source. We use KVM to slice our new monster 192-thread Dell R7625s into isolated VMs, then Docker to run the containerized applications, and finally Kamal to do zero-downtime app deploys and rollbacks. This setup helped us dodge the complexity of Kubernetes, and avoid any sort of enterprisey service contract entanglements.

The back of the napkin math is that we'll save at least $1.5 million per year by owning our own hardware rather than renting it from Amazon. And crucially, we've been able to do this without changing the size of the operations team at all. Running our applications in the cloud just never provided the promised productivity gains to do with any smaller of a team anyway.

The main difference here is the lag time between needing new servers and seeing them online. It truly is incredible that you can spin up 100 powerful machines in the cloud in just a few minutes, but you also pay dearly for the privilege. And we just don't have such an unpredictable business as to warrant this premium. Given how much money we're saving owning our own hardware, we can afford to dramatically over-provision our server needs, and then when we need more, it still only takes a couple of weeks to show up.

Whether that’s low-cost cloud options without the managed-service markup from the likes of Digital Ocean, Hetzner, OVH, etc, or it’s your own colocated bare metal. To Kamal, it’s all the same. Feed the config file a list of IP addresses with vanilla Ubuntu servers that have seen no prep beyond an added SSH key, and you’ll be running in literally minutes.

Kamal basically is Capistrano for Containers, without the need to carefully prepare servers in advance. No need to ensure that the servers have just the right version of Ruby or other dependencies you need. That all lives in the Docker image now. You can boot a brand new Ubuntu (or whatever) server, add it to the list of servers in Kamal, and it’ll be auto-provisioned with Docker, and run right away. Docker’s layer caching also speeds up deployments with less mucking about on the server. And the images built for Kamal can be used for CI or later introspection.

Kubernetes is a beast. Running it yourself on your own hardware is not for the faint of heart. It’s a fine option if you want to run on someone else’s platform, either transparently like Render or explicitly on AWS/GCP, but if you’d like the freedom to move between cloud and your own hardware, or even mix the two, Kamal is much simpler. You can see everything that’s going on, it’s just basic Docker commands being called.

cloud hosting: Germany, Finland, USA, Singapore

Whether you're looking for the cloud server with the best price-performance ratio or need unshared power for your production workloads, we have an option for you.

Somebody realized that Claude would try unavailable NPX commands for packages that didn’t exist so he started publishing the packages so we could run. What do you want other machines.

“CPUs are becoming the bottleneck in terms of growing out this AI and agentic workflow,” Dion Harris, Nvidia’s head of AI infrastructure, told CNBC this week, calling it an “exciting opportunity.”

The chip giant announced its first data center CPU, Grace, in 2021, and the next generation, Vera, is now in production. The CPUs are typically deployed alongside Nvidia’s famous Hopper, Blackwell or Rubin GPUs in full rack-scale systems.

Exploding demand for GPUs has turned Nvidia into a household name and the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, with a $4.4 trillion market cap. Its broader chip strategy took a major turn in February, when Nvidia struck a multiyear deal with Meta that included the first large-scale deployment of Grace CPUs on their own, with plans to deploy Vera in 2027.

Thousands of standalone Nvidia CPUs are also helping power supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Los Alamos National Lab, Nvidia told CNBC.

Bank of America predicts the CPU market could more than double, from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion by 2030. In the latest quarter alone, Nvidia generated data center revenue of over $62 billion, up 75% from a year earlier.

Harris said Nvidia took a fundamentally different approach in design that makes its CPUs “best suited” for data processing and agentic AI workflows, compared to the more general-purpose CPUs made by industry leaders Intel and AMD.

A big difference is in the number of cores in each CPU.

AMD’s EPYC line and Intel’s Xeon high-performance server CPUs typically have 128 cores, compared to 72 cores in Nvidia’s Grace CPU.

“If you’re a hyperscaler, you want to maximize the number of cores per CPU, and that essentially drives down the cost, the dollars per core. So that’s one business model,” Harris explained.

Instead, Nvidia designed its CPU specifically to help its star GPUs run AI workloads.

“Your single-threaded performance becomes much more important than your dollars per core because you’re trying to make sure that that very expensive resource, being the GPU, isn’t sitting there waiting,” Harris said.

Nvidia also bases its CPUs on Arm architecture, more typically used for chips in lower-power devices like smartphones, while Intel and AMD base their CPUs on traditional x86 architecture. Introduced by Intel nearly 50 years ago, x86 is the leading instruction set that has dominated PC and server processor designs since its inception.

AMD’s Norrod said Nvidia has, “Optimized their chips very well, I think, for feeding their GPUs. They’re not well optimized for general-purpose applications.”