Germany’s Federal Statistical Office released figures on Friday showing that China is back on top as the country’s most important market with €251bn (£219bn) in trade in 2025, up 2.2% on 2024 when the US was the country’s leading export destination.

Pakistan has carried out multiple overnight air strikes on Afghanistan, which the Taliban has said killed at least 18 people, including women and children.

Islamabad said the attacks targeted seven alleged militant camps and hideouts near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and that they had been launched after recent suicide bombings in Pakistan.

Afghanistan condemned the attacks, saying they targeted multiple civilian homes and a religious school.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51251424

The Albanese government has created a new unit in Treasury to inject intelligence insights into economic decision-making for the first time.

The new branch is working with intelligence agencies and international partners to identify and communicate trends, threats and opportunities for economic security.

[...]

Archived

[...]

“Geopolitical tensions and conflicts around the world are a major driver of global economic uncertainty,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the Australian Financial Review.

“Economic security and national security are now almost indistinguishable.”

The idea of a “distinct economic security function” – including staff seconded from security agencies – was first raised in the Independent Intelligence Review that was made public last year. The review identified economic security as an emerging area of policy at a time of rising national security challenges.

[...]

“Our pitch to international investors is not that we are immune from uncertainty but that we are well-placed to manage it and grasp the opportunities that flow from it,” he said, pointing to Australia’s well-regulated financial system, deep capital markets, and long track record as a reliable home for capital.

However, a recent report by the United States Studies Centre urged both government and business to urgently step up contingency plans to better navigate heightened risks from global crises.

[...]

Australian businesses had been “sluggish” to prepare for geopolitical threats across the supply chain because of the complexity and costs involved, said the report.

Companies “should consider ‘war gaming’ different disruption scenarios to help them anticipate and plan for geopolitical pressure and supply chain disruptions”, it warned.

[...]

It also said Australia was well-positioned to play a key role in targeted areas like critical minerals and supporting AI expansion through energy production and as a hub for data centres.

“Part of the solution is for government to think broadly about how Australia can plug holes in the global supply chain,” said Channer.

[...]

Public broadcaster ABC said some Chinese riders with food delivery service HungryPanda in Australia were in a dispute over their pay and conditions.

They discussed protest plans in a group chat on Chinese messaging app WeChat, the ABC said.

Some riders reportedly said police in China then called them directly or warned them through their families not to get involved in protests.

HungryPanda, an Asian food delivery firm founded by a Chinese international student in Britain in 2017, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

"The Australian Government does not tolerate surveillance, harassment, or threats towards any Australian citizens or individuals lawfully in Australia," said a spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs.

Australia's counter foreign interference taskforce was "aware" of the ABC report on HungryPanda riders, the spokesperson said, declining, however, to comment on individual cases.

[...]

In its annual threat assessment last year, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation said "multiple foreign regimes" attempt to monitor, harass and intimidate Australians and Australian residents.

This month, Australia's federal police charged two Chinese nationals with foreign interference, accusing them of spying on a Buddhist group at the behest of police in China.

[...]

When Nigel Farage told a journalist this week she should “write some silly story … and we won’t bother to read it”, it provoked an instant – and divided – reaction. For some it was a “masterclass” in dealing with mainstream media, but for others it was “rude, dismissive, misogynistic, arrogant”.

Behind the scenes, Farage’s treatment of the Financial Times’s Anna Gross – which was met with mirth and applause among Reform diehards in the room – provoked disquiet and anger among lobby journalists across the political spectrum.

As the Reform UK leader was leaving the event, a Guardian political reporter suggested he had been rude and had upset the journalist. “Good,” Farage responded.

It is not the first time Farage has been accused of patronising a female journalist. When the former BBC Radio 4 Today presenter Mishal Husain asked him about the potential consequences of shooting down Russian planes last October, Farage responded: “Listen love, you’re trying ever so hard.” A month later he accused the Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey of playing a “silly little game” when she asked who his chancellor would be.

Amid a busy news cycle, his most recent condescension could have been easily forgotten. But in a week where Farage hired a hardline anti-abortion theologian as his head of policy and promised to repeal the Equality Act on his party’s first day in government, it has sparked the question: does Reform UK, and its leader in particular, have a women problem?

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.

[...]

The Albanese government has created a new unit in Treasury to inject intelligence insights into economic decision-making for the first time.

The new branch is working with intelligence agencies and international partners to identify and communicate trends, threats and opportunities for economic security.

[...]

Archived

[...]

“Geopolitical tensions and conflicts around the world are a major driver of global economic uncertainty,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the Australian Financial Review.

“Economic security and national security are now almost indistinguishable.”

The idea of a “distinct economic security function” – including staff seconded from security agencies – was first raised in the Independent Intelligence Review that was made public last year. The review identified economic security as an emerging area of policy at a time of rising national security challenges.

[...]

“Our pitch to international investors is not that we are immune from uncertainty but that we are well-placed to manage it and grasp the opportunities that flow from it,” he said, pointing to Australia’s well-regulated financial system, deep capital markets, and long track record as a reliable home for capital.

However, a recent report by the United States Studies Centre urged both government and business to urgently step up contingency plans to better navigate heightened risks from global crises.

[...]

Australian businesses had been “sluggish” to prepare for geopolitical threats across the supply chain because of the complexity and costs involved, said the report.

Companies “should consider ‘war gaming’ different disruption scenarios to help them anticipate and plan for geopolitical pressure and supply chain disruptions”, it warned.

[...]

It also said Australia was well-positioned to play a key role in targeted areas like critical minerals and supporting AI expansion through energy production and as a hub for data centres.

“Part of the solution is for government to think broadly about how Australia can plug holes in the global supply chain,” said Channer.

[...]

If you want to donate: https://republik.social/@republik_magazin/116096708108187775

Hezbollah said on Saturday that the group “no longer has any option” but to defend itself after the deadliest Israeli strikes in weeks hit eastern Lebanon on Friday.

The strikes killed at least 10 people, including a Hezbollah military official, in the Bekaa Valley region, in another violation of the ceasefire signed in November 2024. Twenty-four people, including three children, were wounded.

In a speech broadcast on Hezbollah’s television channel Al-Manar, the deputy chairman of Hezbollah’s political council, Mahmoud Qamati, described the attacks as “a new massacre and a new aggression.”

Just to start off, know that I have zero experience with this. I'm only looking into doing this because I'm absolutely sick and tired of centralised services (in this case Discord) turning to shit, and want to start a Discord-like/alternative federation between my friends.

Prosody seems to be the easiest to set up, and has all the available capabilities for a server that allows Discord-like functionality (text, group voicecall, streaming). Movim is the client that makes use of all that.

But I don't have a clue how to set up a Prosody server with Podman. I've never done this before. I started by downloading the Prosody image through Podman, then tried running it, which prompted the creation of a container. Kept everything at the defaults and tried running it, but it didn't work.

What do I do from here?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51248621

Archived

• In 2024, over 60 Russian agents were deployed to spread disinformation across three continents. At least 17 of them are former members of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s network.
• The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service now oversees their activities and provides financing through two front companies. This investigation reveals the identities of two Foreign Intelligence Service agents in charge of operations.
• The network, internally known as the “Company,” has established five offices abroad, including in Bolivia in 2024.
• With the help of “counter-agents” recruited in the field, the network also carries out intelligence missions.

[...]

Since Yevgeny Prigozhin died in August 2023, his sprawling network of propaganda agents has come under the control of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. A data leak has allowed Forbidden Stories to identify more than 60 of its agents tasked with expanding Moscow’s disinformation efforts across three continents.

[...]

A study conducted by researchers at CCC, which is based at the MIT Media Lab, found that state-of-the-art AI chatbots — including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, and Meta’s Llama 3 — sometimes provide less-accurate and less-truthful responses to users who have lower English proficiency, less formal education, or who originate from outside the United States. The models also refuse to answer questions at higher rates for these users, and in some cases, respond with condescending or patronizing language.

I can't stand citizen saboteurs. Why is no one doing anything against that?

We will forever love and treasure our comrade and friend, Michael Parenti. I want to salute our comrades who went and spent time with him from GenZedong. I don't know if any of them are here, but the fact that I was partially part of a group of folks from Reddit that got to go and visit Michael, will always be a source of inspiration and commitment for me. We all have our fronts, my friends. We all have our roles.

This paper is honestly one of the most creative takes on LLM reasoning I’ve seen in a while. The team at ByteDance basically argues that we should view Long Chain-of-Thought as a macromolecular structure with internal forces that hold the logic together. They found that when we try to teach a model to reason by simply distilling keywords from a teacher, it fails because it’s like trying to build a protein by looking at a photo of it rather than understanding the atomic bonds.

Their Molecular Structure of Thought hypothesis breaks reasoning down into three specific bond types that behave similarly to their chemical counterparts. Deep reasoning acts like covalent bonds, forming the rigid primary backbone where each logical step must strictly justify the next. Self-reflection functions like hydrogen bonds, creating folding patterns where the model looks back 100 steps to audit an earlier premise, which keeps it from hallucinating. Finally, you have self-exploration acting like van der Waals forces, these are low-commitment bridges that let the model probe different ideas without getting stuck in a rigid path too early.

They found that most synthetic reasoning data is actually trash because it lacks this distribution. They proved that models don't actually learn the keywords themselves, but the characteristic reasoning behaviors those keywords represent. In one experiment, they replaced keywords like wait with arbitrary synonyms or removed them entirely, and the models still learned the reasoning structure just fine. It turns out that building these stable thought molecules is what creates the basis for Long CoT, as opposed to just mimicking a specific vibe or prompt format.

They built MOLE-SYN to address the problem. Instead of just copying teacher outputs, it uses a distribution transfer graph to walk through four behavioral states to synthesize traces that have the correct bond profile from the start. Their approach makes reinforcement learning much more stable because the model starts with a balanced skeleton instead of a bunch of fragmented logic. The paper challenges the whole more data is better mindset to argue that it's the geometry of the information flow that really matters.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43439862

Modern oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, Gates, and Zuckerberg are exactly like medieval lords. The top 1% controls all resources, and it is almost impossible to buy an apartment today. We own nothing and just pay rent or subscribe to their platforms. These billionaires have total power to fire thousands of workers anytime and buy politicians for their own interest. They say they work for humanity, but it is just fake marketing. For example, they are silent on wars in Palestine and Ukraine. Majority of ordinary people and developers are too naive. They believe these lies and fail to see the real system

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43439648

Emphasis mine. Note, this could be a random lunatic phoning this in to the FBI informant line, but the report was initially classified until 2043.

(S//NF) Jeffrey Epstein ("Epstein") had a compound in New Mexico where he lured and video recorded underage women. He also had a private island. Epstein was President Vladimir Putin's wealth manager and provided the same service for Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Epstein had some connection to [REDACTED] from MIT Media Lab but CHS was unsure of the details. Epstein had dirt on other people. The logs from his ig is were made public at some point. Epstein had a mansion on the Upper West Side**. Epstein made his money from charging his clients fees to hide their money offshore.** Epstein knew former President Bill Clinton, and was very close to current President Donald Trump. In the spring of 2015, President Trump had just been to Epstein's property for lunch.

Much more inside the source file

EFTA01683874

Source: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01683874.pdf