Powderhorn

What the fucking fuck?

We all know that AI is expensive, but a new set of algorithms developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Intel Labs, and d-Matrix could significantly reduce the cost of serving up your favorite large language model (LLM) with just a few lines of code.

Presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning this week and detailed in this paper, the algorithms offer a new spin on speculative decoding that they say can boost token generation rates by as much as 2.8x while also eliminating the need for specialized draft models.

Speculative decoding, if you're not familiar, isn't a new concept. It works by using a small "draft" model ("drafter" for short) to predict the outputs of larger, slower, but higher quality "target" models.

If the draft model can successfully predict, say, the next four tokens in the sequence, that's four tokens the bigger model doesn't have to generate, and so we get a speed-up. If it's wrong, the larger model discards the draft tokens and generates new ones itself. That last bit is important as it means the entire process is lossless — there's no trade-off in quality required to get that speed-up.

I believe that the time has come for a new Social Media Bill of Digital Rights. Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental protections for our digital communities from corporate control and surveillance capitalism.

So what could such a Social Media Bill of Rights include?

• The right to privacy & security: The ability to communicate and organize without fear of surveillance or exploitation.
• The right to own and control your identity: People and their communities must own their digital identities, connections and data. And, as the owner of an account, you can exercise the right to be forgotten.
• The right to choose and understand algorithms (transparency): Choosing the algorithms that shape your interactions: no more black box systems optimizing for engagement at the expense of community well-being. The right to community self-governance: Crucially, communities of users need the right to self govern, setting their own rules for behavior which are contextually relevant to their community. (Note: this does not preclude developer governance.)
• The right to full portability – the right to exit: The freedom to port your community in its entirety, to another app without losing your connections and content.

ActivityPub is of course mentioned.

For the first time ever, Linux has clawed its way past the five per cent desktop market share barrier in the United States so maybe 2025 is finally the much predicted year of Linux on the desktop.

StatCounter’s latest figures for June 2025 show Linux holding 5.03 per cent of the US desktop market. That might sound modest, but it is a massive milestone for the open-source faithful who have been banging on for decades that Linux would one day break through. Even more satisfying, Linux has now overtaken the “Unknown” category in the stats, a small but symbolic victory that shows the growth is no longer being ignored or misattributed.

It took a grinding eight years for Linux to crawl from one to two per cent by April 2021. Another 2.2 years were needed to hit three per cent in June 2023. From there it snowballed, taking only 0.7 years to cross four per cent in February 2024 and just four months later Linux is through five per cent.

Analysts say AI workloads, the backlash against surveillance-heavy proprietary platforms, and the never-ending trainwrecks of Apple have made Linux a more attractive option for ordinary users. Microsoft’s increasingly locked-down Windows 11, with its forced online accounts and hardware restrictions, has not helped either.

I guess Apple and MS are finally finding out.

I sincerely hope -- tempered by reality, of course -- that this is not a preview of what's to come here.

In early June, a career journalist in El Salvador received a call from a government source. Their name was on a list of more than a dozen individuals the administration of President Nayib Bukele planned to have arrested. “I left the country the next morning,” they tell Rolling Stone. “I didn’t know that at the same time, others were getting the same warning — colleagues and other people in civil society.”

“As an investigative journalist, I asked myself many questions and had many doubts [about leaving],” they say, “but in a country that has no guarantees, no rule of law, and no fair trials, I couldn’t just wait and see.”

The reporter — who had covered the corruption, abuses, and public deceptions orchestrated by the Bukele administration — is part of a growing exodus of journalists, activists, human rights advocates, and nonprofit organizations fleeing El Salvador. The mass exile is taking place in the backdrop of an alliance between Bukele and President Donald Trump’s administration, and the rapid devolution of U.S. support for humanitarian rights and grassroots organizations operating around the globe.

“They wanted us all to run,” says Noah Bullock, director of the Central American human rights organization Cristosal. “They created conditions where there were really no better options. Hundreds of people left the country in the last month.”

“Back then, the river was embarrassing. It was a conveyor belt of trash,” said Miller as he handed me a photograph showing a tributary choked with broken appliances, tires, plastic kiddie pools and even a rusted blue car.

Chief among the junk: tires. Each year, the United States discards nearly 300m tires. While most are reused or recycled, millions slip through the cracks.

When Miller paddled past a tree where a tire had speared itself “like an olive on a toothpick”, he realized that tire would be there forever, unless someone did something.

So, he did. That fall, Miller gathered hundreds of tires then recruited friends to corral them downstream. Lacking boats, he devised a way to fill old tires with empty milk jugs to make them buoyant.

There’s a new record holder for the most accurate clock in the world. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have improved their atomic clock based on a trapped aluminum ion. Part of the latest wave of optical atomic clocks, it can perform timekeeping with 19 decimal places of accuracy.

Optical clocks are typically evaluated on two levels — accuracy (how close a clock comes to measuring the ideal “true” time, also known as systematic uncertainty) and stability (how efficiently a clock can measure time, related to statistical uncertainty). This new record in accuracy comes out of 20 years of continuous improvement of the aluminum ion clock. Beyond its world-best accuracy, 41% greater than the previous record, this new clock is also 2.6 times more stable than any other ion clock. Reaching these levels has meant carefully improving every aspect of the clock, from the laser to the trap and the vacuum chamber.

The team published its results in Physical Review Letters.

“It’s exciting to work on the most accurate clock ever,” said Mason Marshall, NIST researcher and first author on the paper. “At NIST we get to carry out these long-term plans in precision measurement that can push the field of physics and our understanding of the world around us.”

Indulge me in a rant. If we're going to redefine the second because of advancements in measuring sensitivity, doesn't this become a good time to reconsider the SI structure?

Bad approximations of distances in the 18th century brought us the metric system. With the sort of precision we now have, not to mention the need for nongeocentric units as space increasing becomes a field of research, why are we using a flawed system based on guesses from a few guys in France during The Enlightenment?

I've no issue with shorthand like AUs or light-years for large distances, but it feels we should have the basic tenets of the universe as the basis. Like, the light-nanosecond for distance on the human scale (it's about 11.8 inches or 29.98cm) and then reconfigure the system from first principles.

I'm not saying we should throw out measuring systems each time they get more precise, but a lot of cruft is grandfathered in to what we currently use. We can't just go for further precision and then shrug and say "well, nothing we can do about it."

Ten years ago, medical marijuana was only legal in about half of U.S. states, and recreational use was outlawed in most of the country. Today, although marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, most states have legalized some use of the drug, setting off a green rush that, according to the data platform Statista, is predicted to bring in nearly $47 billion in revenue this year.

But in the absence of regulations or guidance from the federal government, states are struggling to oversee the flood of new businesses and products. Although experts told Undark that illicit marijuana remains the bigger safety hazard, across the country, independent tests have documented rampant problems with the legal products on dispensary shelves, including overstated THC levels as well as amounts of pesticides, mold, and heavy metals that exceed state limits.

Whistleblower reports and interviews with industry insiders show how some producers seek out lenient testing labs to examine their product. Some labs, in turn, may see a boost in business if they inflate THC values and greenlight contaminated products — a pattern corroborated by Undark’s own analysis of testing data obtained through state open records laws.

More potent products sell better, said Mike Graves, a one-time major Oklahoma grower who has tangled with Parker and Hrabina. In an interview with Undark, Graves acknowledged shopping around for favorable labs: “I’d roll a joint,” he said, and would “send it out to three different companies.” He would then use whichever company returned the highest THC level to provide the required testing certification for his products.

The industry’s problem, Graves said, is lax oversight of bad labs.

Believe it or not, this is a very short excerpt. Ever since I discovered Delta 8 years ago, I won't buy anything without a CoA, but back then it was all online, and Redditors would regularly post about differing results when they sent samples off for testing.

In this way, users were regulating the market for those who knew where to look -- and, in the end, pretty much three to four distillate producers got the overall stamp of approval. That's simply not feasible in a fractured physical retail flower market.

And boards or commissions previously used to handling just alcohol have an entirely new issue on their hands, as alcohol is rather widely known for being a good disinfectant. Under a previous administration, I'd have said marijuana should have fallen under USDA testing upon federal legalization, but should both randomly happen, the current patchwork system would likely be more reliable.

Speaking to a private gathering of conservative operatives and fossil fuel advocates in January, a top deputy to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gave “the inside story” about how his office bullied Wells Fargo, one of America’s biggest banks, into dropping out of a global initiative to reduce carbon emissions.

The official spoke in January at the exclusive Consumers’ Research Summit in Sea Island, Georgia. Rolling Stone has exclusively obtained audio and documents from the event.

Brent Webster, the First Assistant Attorney General of Texas, recalled how his office moved to cut off lucrative bond business to Wells Fargo. Webster then shared how he, in a private dinner at the governor’s mansion with Gov. Greg Abbott, Paxton, and the bank’s execs, told the bank Texas could “reinstate the bond market” if it left the Net Zero Banking Alliance.

When the Wells Fargo team got flustered, Webster said he threatened an antitrust lawsuit against them, telling the bank’s executives they were this close “to being sued right now.”

After the Texas attorney general launched an antitrust lawsuit against BlackRock and other large asset management firms, Webster said he called up his contact at Wells Fargo and warned, “you guys might be next.” It worked: “They left a week later,” he said. “They left the Net Zero Banking Alliance, and then all the banks followed.”

It's always fun to discover that no matter how bad things are as publicly presented, they're actually worse.

Plans have been revealed to grow fruit and vegetables using "cleaned" carbon dioxide in greenhouses above a landfill in what it is claimed will be a "world first".

The landfill in Wiltshire is run by Crapper & Sons Ltd, which is currently waiting to get planning permission for the project.

The company already captures methane coming off the waste to power its operations and send energy to the national grid, as well as producing CO2.

Having now started a community interest company called Sustain Wiltshire, it has said it wants to use the site to grow food for the local area all year round.

I'll believe that from German researchers when LLMs start shoehorning four nouns together instead of just delving.

A team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany published a non-peer-reviewed preprint copy of research they say detects that words that ChatGPT uses preferentially have started to appear more frequently in human speech since the bot was unleashed on the world in 2022.

So-called "GPT words" include comprehend, boast, swift, meticulous, and the most popular, delve. After analyzing 360,445 YouTube academic talks and 771,591 podcast episodes, the team concluded words like delve, swift, meticulous, and inquiry were just a few examples of terms that began appearing in more podcasts and videos across various topics.

I'd like to nominate "authenticity" as the vapid word of the year.

As always, "here's how" can be excised from a hed without any negative side effects.

In mid-2022, when BYD executive Lian Yubo was asked to compare Chinese manufacturing with Tesla’s technology, he remarked that Elon Musk was an example that all Chinese carmakers could learn from.

“Tesla is a very successful company no matter what. BYD respects Tesla and we admire Tesla,” he said in an interview on Chinese state media.

Yet just three years later, Tesla’s technological lead over its Chinese rivals has narrowed dramatically. It is fighting to stay ahead in the world’s largest car market, its sales are falling in many other countries and its efforts to develop fully self-driving vehicles are running into regulatory roadblocks.

Having once scoffed at the idea that BYD could ever be a competitor to Tesla, Musk returned from a visit to China last year with a sombre assessment for his senior management. “He had seen the BYD factories, the cost and their tech,” says one former Tesla executive, adding that Musk believed China was winning the electric vehicle race.

As Tesla’s sales decline following Musk’s forays into US politics and amid a lack of new models, BYD has overtaken it to become the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs. Its annual revenues surpassed $100 billion for the first time in 2024.