Ben Affleck talks about building InterPositive, the AI video startup he sold to Netflix for ~$590m. Says when he first saw AI text-to-video, he told Matt Damon: “Dude, we have to do as many movies in the next few years as we can. We’re finished.” He later felt the AI video models didn’t fully understand filmmaking (they had raw video knowledge but didn’t convey “cinematic language”). Affleck raised money and his team (16 employees total) spent 8 months with various cameras and equipment shooting footage as inputs to train a new model (letting other filmmakers build a model for each film based on daily footage, which presumably makes it easier to do post-production edits): “[We built our own] data set that would serve as late-stage training for open models to do discrete tasks…It was geared toward actual specific tasks that would generate value, as opposed to, ‘Oh, this is novel. That’s kind of cool. Look what it can do.’ It was more, ‘it needs to hit these criteria’… We built the workflow. [It] is designed to train from a filmmaker while they’re making their movie. Rather than exposing what you’re doing to everybody to learn from, they retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning they’re creating. They train their own discrete model using the same technique we did, just on top of that additional layer we had created.“

A federal district judge just declared that Flock camera systems violate the Fourth Amendment! Applying Chatrie, the court concludes that extensive camera networks engage in unlawful "indiscriminate mass surveillance." A major ruling. storage.courtlistener.com/re…

"I will throw you in prison. I want Chinese style communism to happen inside of the democratic party right now. I want to do cultural revolution shit." Hamas Piker just flat out admits he wants to imprison and kill democrats in a literal communist revolution. These are animals.

“Pro Palestine” is a deeply antisemitic ideology. All Arab states have been ethnically cleansed of Jews. The Palestinian movement wants to complete this mission, i.e. a Middle East without Jews. In other words, “Pro-Palestine” has nothing to do with human rights or peace, or with the well-being of the "Palestinian" population. “Pro-Palestine” means supporting the ethnic cleansing (and extermination) of the most native population of the Middle East: the Jews.

RT @TheChelby: Reminder that Megyn Kelly waited a full decade before reporting Roger Ailes raped her.

Today is the anniversary of two separate battles that both resulted to two Medals of Honor being awarded SFC Randy Shugart and MSG Gary Gordon (both posthumous) for Operation Gothic Serpent in 1993 SSG Clint Romesha and SPC Ty Carter for the defense of COP Keating in 2009

A Jordanian cleric sat on a podcast on September 24, and asked the question his whole tradition can’t seem to answer. Sheikh Yousuf Al-Zareeni wanted to know why, for more than a hundred years, Muslims have not won a war, and how six million Jews keep beating 350 million Arabs, or a billion and a half Muslims if he widens the count. His explanation wasn’t armies, or states, or the fact that a country which builds is harder to erase than a militia which films. It was that half the Jewish women are cheap, that the Jews have invoked the wrath of Allah, and that America and the Jews are now Satan, Britain having held the post in the last century. So this whole “America and Israel are Satan” line isn’t limited to just the Islamic regime of Iran. It’s an Islamic ideological line. That’s the whole method. Numbers were supposed to be destiny. When the numbers failed, the failure had to be a plot, because a doctrine that promises victory can’t survive a century of the other result. So the UN is obeyed by everyone except the Jews. Sieges and wars against other Muslims were fine, because someone else ordered them. Singers and actors die of cancer, and some of them were Jewish, or Armenian, or Christian, which he offers as if a disease were an argument. MEMRI translated it. He said it in public, to his own side, with a book open on the desk. This isn’t some fringe clip from 2004. It’s a scholar, last month, still doing the arithmetic of contempt and still landing on Satan when the arithmetic embarrasses him. The West keeps calling this a land dispute. He isn’t talking about a border. He’s talking about a people who were supposed to lose, and didn’t.

RT @ed_fin: “VLCC rates have reached unprecedented levels and are now at $1.3 million per day (43 times the January number). This is equiva…

On this day—October 3, 1944 The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem wrote to Heinrich Himmler and asked for an Arab-Muslim army to fight the Jews beside the Reich. He had already know the Holocaust architect well. In his memoirs, the Mufti called Himmler his “close friend,” and described taking tea with the Reichsführer-SS. On one such occasion, Himmler signed a photo of the two of them together: “To his eminence the Grand Mufti, a memento.” Germany was losing. The Red Army was already in Poland. Meanwhile, the Nazis kept the gas chambers running. The Mufti had been in Berlin since 1941, on the German payroll, broadcasting for the Nazis in Arabic, and pleading with European leaders to send Jewish children to Poland where they could be murdered rather than allowing them passage to British Mandate Palestine. The Mufti had already helped recruit the 13th SS Mountain Division, Handschar. Now he wrote to Himmler asking for an Arab-Islamic army in Germany where volunteers would be merged with the units already in existence. All, of course, to be trained and armed by the Reich. He wrote that the effect in the Arab and Islamic countries would be “the most favorable.” That same month, the SS dropped a five-man German-Arab commando into the Jordan Valley with weapons, explosives, and German-Arabic dictionaries. The British caught them. Under interrogation, they said the Mufti had briefed each of them, compared Islam with National Socialism, and told them the fight in Mandate Palestine would help Germany. On November 2, the German Foreign Office issued a statement. Al-Husseini complained to Ribbentrop that it was not enough. They had cut the word “Muslim.” The Nazis were happy to use Muslim volunteers, but would not endorse the Mufti’s army. He flew out of Germany on May 7, 1945, the day of the surrender. Yugoslavia listed him as a war criminal for the SS recruitment, but he was never tried. The Arab Higher Committee took him back as its leader just in time to work to continue the Holocaust by annihilating the Jews of Mandate Palestine who were getting ready to declare their state. He lost there too.

There is an FDA-approved peptide that can make the body build new bone. In one study, it raised lower spine bone density by 11.2% and cut new spinal fractures by 86%. Now, some people online are claiming it could help adults grow taller. Here's the full story: (1/14)

Fun Friday night project: real-ish looking video rendering of an O’Neill cylinder🧵

Stunning futuristic cityscape by French sci-fi artist Philippe “Manchu” Bouchet.

We are now entering into an era where any product can be created exactly to a consumer's preferences & needs. I vibe-fabricated a dog door with a wifi-controlled lock, perfectly to the specifications & design of my house. I know nothing about metal fabrication or electrical engineering. It's now getting manufactured and delivered in 2 weeks -- for almost the same cost if I bought a mass-produced item off-the-shelf.

RSI Watch: Clip from Machine God. Hinton et al. paper below.

Inside a Benedictine abbey church on the river Danube, not far from Regensburg, Bavaria, the 18th-century Asam brothers created another Baroque masterpiece. At the high altar, St. George rides out of the light to face the dragon. Looking up, the ceiling is painted as if it opened into heaven. And there, over the rim, a small sculpture of Cosmas Damian Asam leans down and looks at you. His younger brother carved it. On the side wall, a ship painting: Columbus’s second arrival in America in 1493, with twelve Benedictine monks aboard the Santa Maria. The ship stands for the Church here. Baroque splendor at its finest ✨

Eric Schmitt: "Did you or did you not slap Chris Rock on stage at the Academy Awards on March 07, 2022?" Jack Smith: "That was Will Smith."

Incredible product testimonial (from 2001) nytimes.com/2001/11/23/autom…

Here’s a joke for you: What does a Taiwanese soldier do when the Chinese invades? Surrender What does an AMBITIOUS Taiwanese soldier do when the Chinese invades? Shoot the nearest American “trainer” and then surrender.