Enshittification

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/vidya@piefed.social/p/2199306/xbox-ceo-asha-sharma-named-as-adviser-to-us-federal-reserve-on-jobs-and-productivity

Broad adoption of alternative assets is indeed the administration’s goal. One of the most consequential parts of a 401(k) plan is the default option, since most workers simply leave their money there. Usually, the default is a target date fund, which, based on the investor’s target date of retirement, gradually shifts its composition as that date approaches from mostly publicly traded stocks to mostly bonds, becoming more conservative and less risky as the person gets closer to needing the money. Target date funds haven’t changed much over the past two decades as they’ve soared in popularity. They offer all-in-one simplicity and, since they are often passive, low cost. Adding complex investments like private equity or hedge funds as a standard part of the mix would be a sea change. 

The proposed rule professes to be “neutral” as to what effect the new, lax standard will have on investments, but it confidently predicts that companies will include more alternative assets over time in 401(k)s. That, after all, is the point of the rule, to broaden access to “the potential growth and diversification opportunities associated with alternative asset investments,” as Trump’s executive order put it. After the rule is finalized, plans covering about 5 million participants will add new or modified target date funds that include alternative investments, according to the proposal, and the number will continue to grow every year.

cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/8880766

return of the rat dck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXOfALV8a68&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260702-frontiers-forces-ai-onto-academic-journal-editors - podcast

time: 4 min 58 sec

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/60740

“If you look, it’s the same company. They just make us want to think we have choices,” said Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action Fund. This “illusion of choice,” as Maxwell calls it, is a result of consolidation in the food and agriculture space. This consolidation adds to other economic challenges for smaller farmers, and […]

The post How Corporate Consolidation Has Impacted Small Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.

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"Role tags were a formatting trick that became the security architecture and the cognitive scaffolding of modern LLMs," the authors explain in a blog post. "We've shown that this architecture doesn't survive into the model's actual representations, and that such role confusion is linked to prompt injection."

This is little consolation, though. The real paradox is that much of the money with which private equity has run companies into the ground, laid off workers, and turned essential services into cash cows actually comes from pension funds and university endowments: that is, institutions of the welfare state originally intended to provide workers with a safety net. Not only has private equity made the life of many of them significantly worse; if and when it goes bust, it will be regular people who will ultimately bear the cost. Better to dismantle the system before that happens.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/48628116

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/47799327

Centrists don't understand that science is already destroyed in the US, the shockwave just takes time to propagate through the system.

Make no mistake, we have no future without science and we have just unplugged science.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by 20% to 30% or more even though its overall budget is down just 3%, Science has learned. NSF has not publicly explained the drastic cuts. But sources within and outside the agency, who did not want to be named, say they suspect the goal is to free up funds for a new $1.5 billion initiative, launched last month, meant to turn NSF-funded discoveries into new products and industries.

...

Program managers would normally rush to tell potential and current grantees about such dramatic changes. But the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut. “This information is highly confidential,” it reads. “Please do not communicate anything to PIs [principal investigators].”

Knowledgeable sources within and outside NSF have told Science about comparable cuts in many other units, including 60% for each of the three core research programs within the geosciences directorate. The agency’s biology directorate has been cut by $200 million from its FY 2025 level of roughly $800 million. And some directorates have been hit even harder. NSF is “dissolving” its smallest directorate, which funds social, behavioral, and economic sciences and has made only a handful of awards this fiscal year. The coming months could bring other cuts: For 2 years running, President Donald Trump has proposed slashing NSF’s $1 billion education directorate by nearly three-quarters.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/47799383

"If you have exact questions, you need to be able to provide exact answers," Krishnamurthy told us. "But I think inexact questions are what people are also going to expect. When you think about agentic workloads and operational databases, you want to be able to ask more flexible questions." An example might be a natural language query that takes into account context, such as previous interactions.

Krishnamurthy described "AI native infrastructure," including vector indexing, text indexing, and graph technology where "you combine structured and unstructured data, you have to be operating in terms of inexact results and data quality."

We can leave aside the usual laundry list of complaints about Stanford’s (and Silicon Valley’s) wealth, privilege and exclusivity, and their implications for hierarchies of race, class, and gender. We do not need Theo Baker to serve as our muckraker on these subjects since the truly dystopian possibilities lie elsewhere. The chilling subtext of Baker’s book is the impression it conveys of Stanford as a piece of advanced pronatalist technology designed to create the optimal laboratory conditions for selecting, grooming, and developing a remarkable class of quasi-adults. These actants can then be assigned to the most exclusive tech hubs (such as Xaira Therapeutics) to create the advanced biomedical tools to further enhance the life chances and cultural dominance of the very class from which they were initially picked. Is this meritocracy, or clonocracy?

It might be argued that Silicon Valley, like the army, the church, and the American Bar Association, is free to identify, recruit, and train new members as they please. What kind of a university is this, then? A metaphor comes to mind. Stanford is the harbinger of the university-as-giant-app, a networked series of buildings, professors, classrooms, donors, faculty, trustees, and back-office staff designed to turn out a small but predictable number of next-generation tech titans. Like other apps, it feels like a highly engineered tool geared to customer convenience, though only a carefully selected group of human beings is allowed to use the program—and the real operator is Silicon Valley itself, whose screen taps summon the Stanford within Stanford, fresh from the warehouse.