I'm skeptical. The same claims were made about vaping before disposables were even a thing and it always turned out they were abusing the device somehow, deliberately overheating it or dry hitting. I'm sure there are a ton of random chemicals in disposables just doubtful that heavy metals are a problem. Avoid them cause they're wasteful.

The very first paragraph of the final report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a PDF that took 3 years and presumably millions of dollars to create

Americans are already familiar with how the Chinese government conducts economic warfare with crucial technologies such as semiconductors: corner the supply chain, then choke it to weaken the United States. But this is not the last time Beijing will run this play, and it is not even the most dangerous version of it.

Imagine a not-so-distant future where researchers in Shanghai develop a breakthrough drug that can eliminate malignant cells, effectively ending cancer as we know it. But when tensions over Taiwan reach a breaking point, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the strategic apparatus of the Chinese government, hoards the treatment under the guise of national security, cutting off supply to the United States. After years of access, this lifesaving drug is immediately in shortage, requiring doctors to ration it while American biotechnology companies scramble to reconstitute production in the United States. The streets and social media overflow with people demanding that the United States abandon Taiwan. The Administration faces an agonizing choice between geopolitical priorities and public health.

This scenario is fiction. But something like it could soon become reality as biotechnology takes center stage in the unfolding strategic competition between the United States and People’s Republic of China (China).

This is pure speculation but I'm 90% sure that the NVidia drop had nothing to do with Deepseek R1 and was actually insider trading on the "news" that Trump was considering a tariff on Taiwanese chips.

First, R1 was released on the 20th, 5 days before the stock dropped. It wasn't at all a secret, basically it was the talk of the town that whole week and their capabilities claims were shown to be solid very early on by many many people running independent benchmarks. But the market didn't react.

Second, the big AI companies want all the compute they can get, they aren't satisfied with training 10 or 100 or 1000 times more quickly, this is why they're talking about trillion dollar data centers with nuclear reactors. Also of note, R1 was trained on Nvidia TPUs with the same amount of vram as the H100s. You couldn't cheaply train such a model on any other brand of hardware, demand for Nvidia products isn't going anywhere.

Third, if anything it's the AI software companies that would take a big drop, they're the ones who are supposedly spooked and scrambling to replicate R1 internally. The major software only players took only a small hit but recovered quickly, that would be Microsoft and Meta. Google is also a hardware company, they're trying to move some of their chip fabs to TMSC but their TPUs are made by Samsung. They took a small hit and have not yet recovered. AMD is a hardware company, they have fabs all over including sourcing from TMSC, same story. Intel, a similar company, no change whatsoever, they don't use TMSC at all. Nvidia took the big one, and they get ALL of their chips from... TMSC. All the action happened about simultaneously in after hours weekend trading.

Fourth, when the tariff news dropped the market seemed to be unaffected almost as if it had already been priced in over weekend trading.

I just fucking can't with this shit, if the election takes place without her clarifying her position on Gaza and she doesn't catch some major mainstream criticism for it, I will have lost all hope

We're not gonna make it are we? People I mean

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/crime/2024/05/10/professor-richard-heyman-ut-austin-pro-palestine-protest-arrested-fired-interfering-police/73639778007/

The charging document notes that Heyman broke the trooper's "state-issued bike bell," which costs $62.

And through the grapevine I've heard at least one student received notification from campus police that they are banned from campus with no mention of exceptions for educational reasons. It seems they are planning to suspend or expel at least some students.

A poisonous cloud is hanging over Berlin...

what a shitty metaphor

...after a chemical factory blaze

oh

Okay I'm posting this in news even though I don't have a link, but my source is super solid...

In the first round of arrests at UT Austin the Travis county DA cited "copy pasted" probable cause affidavits as reason for dropping the charges. This time around the campus police took their time with the paperwork, which is why we haven't heard yet whether the charges are going forward. They were instructed to "personalize" all the PC stuff and ... they're still copy pasted, at least some of them are. With the thousands of hours of video and all the effort they could muster they still couldn't do it, as far as is known the only difference from last time is that they're trickling in gradually rather than all being filed at once.

It really seems like, by attacking Iran, they've extracted significant concessions and bribes from the US, additional ones, since the US is constantly bribing and conceding to them for no apparent reason. Gotta hand it to them, it's not a tactic that would have occured to most people.

Voters using issues they've become aware of within the last year to make decisions at the polls is un-american, it's not fair!

The judge from Uganda is now the ICJ vice president?