More Than 4,000 Moth Species Flit Across Texas. One Scientist Photographed 550 in His Yard. Texas Monthly

Girl discovers dinosaur footprints on beach walk BBC

Demystifying Sovereign Wealth Funds JSTOR Daily

Climate

From growth fetish to post-growth Democracy Collaborative

Public EV Charging Sees Consistent Progress for Two Consecutive Quarters, J.D. Power Finds (press release) J.D. Power

Massive analysis of EV charging stations finds reliability issues galore Tech Brew. Commentary:

Catalogue for the Aftertime Via Negativa

Syndemics

What’s in your Covid Emergency Kit? Violet Blue

Why You Don’t Need to Panic About Mpox Jessica Wildfire, OK Doomer

Mpox And Mask Bans – A Recipe For Disaster Judy Stone, Forbes. See NC on mask bans here and here. Meanwhile:

Schools have made slow progress on record absenteeism, with millions of kids still skipping class AP

China?

China’s anti-corruption net has risk-averse officials afraid to innovate South China Morning Post

China’s countryside calls to city-dwellers: settle in, relax and revitalise rural regions South China Morning Post

The Koreas

Made in Korea: When a British boy band got the K-pop treatment BBC

Syraqistan

Israeli settlers rampage through Palestinian village (video) Al Jazeera

Biden says Gaza ceasefire in sight, warns against efforts to undermine deal Al Jazeera

US-led mediators present ‘bridging proposal’ to end Israel-Hamas war FT

Israeli negotiating team to travel to Cairo on Sunday to continue Gaza cease-fire talk Anadolu Agency

How Pro-Israel Groups Shape Global Media Coverage of Palestine Declassified UK

‘The Golan won’t accept any killing or regional war in our victims’ names’ 972 Magazine

Zero States for Two Peoples? Jewish Thinkers Are Pondering a Mass Return to Exile Haaretz

The Great Game

‘An island of freedom’: Inside the secret beauty salons of Afghanistan Al JazeeraT

Dear Old Blighty

‘Strike pain’ and ‘has Labour lost control of the unions?’ BBC

Never forget Labour’s ugly biases Funding the Future

New Not-So-Cold War

As Ukraine Invades Russia, Kyiv’s Troops Are in Trouble on the Eastern Front WSJ

Ukraine orders evacuation in east amid steady Russian gains FT

Ukraine war: as Russian troops close in, Kyiv urges civilians to evacuate Pokrovsk South China Morning Post

Ukraine on the Offensive Nataliya Gumenyuk, Foreign Affairs

The Kursk Offensive and the Risk of a Wider War The American Conservative

What Military History Tells Us About Ukraine’s Kursk Invasion RAND

Dmitry Trenin: This European region could be the next Ukraine RT

Biden Hints at Major Missile Upgrade For Ukraine’s New F-16 Fleet Military Watch

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry denies Russian allegations of planned “dirty bomb” strikes Ukrainska Pravda

US oil services group SLB expands in Russia as competitors withdraw FT

South of the Border

Ecuador slams vice president’s gender complaint against President Noboa as coup attempt BNE Intellinews

2024

Gov. Tim Walz shares his ‘white guy’ taco recipe with VP Kamala Harris FOX

Why Dem lawmakers are giving Harris a pass on policy proposals Politico

Election officials keep Green Party presidential candidate on Wisconsin ballot AP

Healthcare

Heartbreaking reality of fit patients in their 20s being hit with colon cancer is laid bare by oncologist who reveals his ‘critical’ discovery about the cause Daily Mail

Digital Watch

Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly Nature

Nvidia Sued for Scraping YouTube After 404 Media Investigation 404 Media

Hidden data could reveal if an AI model was trained on copyrighted material Imperial College. Copyright traps.

Mosaic Memory: Fuzzy Duplication in Copyright Traps for Large Language Models Igor Shilov, Matthieu Meeus, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Imperial College arXiv. From the Abstract: “Copyright traps have been proposed to be injected into the original content, improving content detectability in newly released LLMs.”

Defending AI Systems From Malicious Data Poisoning Attacks CMB Insurance Brokers

Will we run out of data? Limits of LLM scaling based on human-generated data arXiv. From the Abstract: “Our findings indicate that if current LLM development trends continue, models will be trained on datasets roughly equal in size to the available stock of public human text data between 2026 and 2032, or slightly earlier if models are overtrained.”

How to Tell If What You’re Reading Was Written By AI LifeHacker

California trims AI safety bill amid fears of tech exodus The Register

AI Gone Wrong: An Updated List of AI Errors, Mistakes and Failures Tech.co

These cool but creepy features of AI phones will erode trust in everything Business Standard

Zeitgeist Watch

Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Śāntideva on Virtue and Well-Being Philosophical Reviews

Buddhist Anarchism: Theory and Practice The Anarchist Library

Abstract representations emerge in human hippocampal neurons during inference Nature. From the Abstract: “Learning to perform inference by trial and error or through verbal instructions led to the formation of hippocampal representations with similar geometric properties. The observed relation between representational format and inference behaviour suggests that abstract and disentangled representational geometries are important for complex cognition.”

Photon entanglement could explain the rapid brain signals behind consciousness Phys.org. “A research group in China has shown that many entangled photons can be generated inside the myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers. It could explain the rapid communication between neurons, which so far has been thought to be below the speed of sound, too slow to explain how the neural synchronization occurs.”

Class Warfare

Minnesota Workers Strike Down Shady Provision That Restricts Their Freedom of Employment Workday Magazine

Mastercard planning to lower global workforce by 3% Anadolu Agency

‘Pig Butchering’ Online Scams Are Proliferating. Here’s Why They Work So Well. WSJ

Antidote du jour (Barry Aumiller):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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This entry was posted in Links on by Lambert Strether.

About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.