The term, borrowed from competitive gaming, refers to a health threshold where a character is vulnerable to an instant, unblockable finishing move. In the context of American life, Chinese observers use it to describe a terrifyingly low “margin for error.” This is the point where a single stroke of bad luck—a $3,000 ambulance ride or a sudden layoff—triggers a terminal collapse into homelessness.

This shift in perception is driven by radical transparency. For the first time, the “American Dream” is being filtered through the lens of real people rather than Hollywood studios. Through international students and overseas Chinese on TikTok and Weibo, the “unfiltered” America has been revealed.

Instead of the manicured suburbs of Desperate Housewives, Chinese netizens see the sprawling tent cities of the West Coast. They witness the “Great Reckoning” on Xiaohongshu, where American users share medical bills that look like mortgage statements.

Trump is curious as to why Iran has not yet "capitulated" and agreed to curb its nuclear programme, as Washington builds up its military capability in the Middle East, Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff said.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated,’ because he understands he has plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious as to why they haven’t... I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they haven’t capitulated,” Witkoff said in an interview on Fox News on Saturday.

“Why, under this pressure, with the amount of seapower and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’? And yet it’s sort of hard to get them to that place.”

Trump has ordered a huge buildup of forces in the Middle East and preparations for a potential multi-week air attack on Iran. Iran has threatened to strike U.S. bases if it is attacked.

The world’s largest-ever AI summit took place in India this week, with hundreds of thousands of people, including world leaders and CEOs of AI companies, descending upon New Delhi for six days.

It was the fourth in a series of summits that were initially designed as a place for governments to coordinate global action in the face of threats from advanced AI.

India’s technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at least 70 signatories were expected to commit to what has been dubbed the "Delhi Declaration" on AI at the summit. Few details were available about that declaration, except that it pledged that “AI's promise is best realised only when its benefits are shared by humanity,” according to a European Union press release. Vaishnaw said the final draft would be released on Saturday, along with a full list of signatories.

China, the world’s second largest AI power and India’s strategic adversary, was all but absent from the summit, which fell on the same week as Chinese New Year.

And the White House made it clear in Delhi that the U.S. would reject any attempt to regulate AI at the global level. “We totally reject global governance of AI,” White House official Michael Kratsios said on Friday.

Official “frontier AI commitments” released during the summit made no overt mention of previous summits’ attempts to coordinate government action on addressing AI risks. Instead, a set of voluntary commitments announced by the Indian government emphasized the importance of sharing data on real-world AI usage and building mechanisms to improve AI in under-represented languages.

“Full global consensus on how to govern AI is a far cry from reality,” says Isabella Wilkinson, a research fellow at the British foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House. “The core issue is how to incentivize countries and companies to get around the same table … despite fragmented geopolitics, intense competition, and the drive for ever-more powerful and -profitable AI. None of this is particularly conducive to global cooperation.”

Inspired by a recent question someone else posted.

Note: Tourists do not count since they are merely visiting, not staying.

The Votkinsk factory, that produces ballistic missiles, is more than 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) from Ukraine.

Ukrainian forces struck a major industrial site deep inside Russia's Udmurt region, the Ukrainian General Staff said on Saturday.

The attack was confirmed by local officials. "One of the republics facilities was attacked by drones" launched by Ukraine, regional head Alexander Brechalov said in a Telegram post.

The Ukrainian military said it used domestically produced Flamingo missiles to hit the plant, located about 1,400 kilometers (800 miles) from Ukraine.

A video showed rows of marchers at Tehran's Sharif University of Technology condemning Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a "murderous leader."

Students held protests at several Iranian universities at the start of a new semester on Saturday, some clashing with pro-government groups, according to local news agencies and posts on social media.

The protests coincided with ceremonies traditionally held after 40 days to mourn those killed by security forces during last month's anti-government demonstrations, which saw thousands lose their lives in the worst domestic unrest since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution.

A video purportedly showed rows of marchers at Tehran's Sharif University of Technology condemning Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a "murderous leader", and calling for Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's toppled shah, to be a new monarch.

Defence minister rebuffs US president’s claim that Arctic islanders are ‘not being taken care of’

Greenland does not need medical assistance from other countries, Denmark has said, after Donald Trump said he was sending a hospital ship to the autonomous Danish territory that he wants to acquire.

“The Greenlandic population receives the healthcare it needs. They receive it either in Greenland, or, if they require specialised treatment, they receive it in Denmark. So it’s not as if there’s a need for a special healthcare initiative in Greenland,” the country’s defence minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, told the Danish broadcaster DR on Sunday.

In Greenland, as in Denmark, access to healthcare is free. There are five regional hospitals across the vast Arctic island, with the Nuuk hospital serving patients from all over the territory.

• appearance
• probably some kind of fungus maybe a black mould
• vibes based engineering
• aggressive and yearns for violence
• british accent

Despite building an increasingly screen-focused world, billionaire tech leaders are keeping their own children away from the tech they helped create.

As far back as 2010, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter his kids had never used an iPad and that, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

Since then, the trend of Silicon Valley billionaires keeping their families away from technology has become even more pronounced, thanks in part to the rise of social media and short-form video.

At the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival, early Facebook investor and billionaire Peter Thiel joined Chen among the ranks of tech leaders who are setting strict limits on screens. Thiel said he only lets his two young children use screens for an hour-and-a-half per week, a revelation that prompted audible gasps from the audience.

Other tech CEOs, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have also spoken about limiting their children’s access to devices. Gates has said he did not give his children smartphones until age 14 and banned phones at the dinner table entirely. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, in 2018, said he limits his child to the same 1.5 hours per week of screen time as Thiel. And finally, Musk, who bought the social media company X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, said it “might’ve been a mistake” to not set any rules on social media for his children.

Yet, as the trials against social media companies continue and country after country moves toward legislating what Silicon Valley’s billionaires have quietly practiced for years, the private behavior of the world’s most powerful tech figures stands in contrast to what they’re promoting and building

Afghanistan's Taliban rulers said they are preparing "an appropriate and calculated response" to Pakistani air strikes that killed at least 18 people in Nangarhar and Paktika provinces.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51252387

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51251702

Archived

Australia, the United States, Japan and the Philippines should establish a formal NATO-style defence alliance to counter China’s growing military power in Asia, according to a former top adviser to Joe Biden.

Ely Ratner, who served as Biden’s assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, also urged the Albanese government to significantly increase military spending to ensure that AUKUS does not cannibalise the defence budget and drain resources for other important investments.

[...]

He said he was concerned by Donald Trump’s lack of focus on competition with China and that he feared the US president could make damaging concessions to Beijing when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping this year.

“The threat is mounting from China. China’s ambitions have not moderated. It is building a military to be able to dominate the Indo-Pacific, and it has ambitions for which only combat-credible deterrence will prevent conflict in the Indo-Pacific,” Ratner said in an interview.

[...]

And this motherfucker thinks China is not socialist. 😂