arctic_bunny

The world is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of President Trump’s “emergency” tariffs, and Mr. Trump’s weekend tariff spree against European allies underscores again why his abuse of his authority needs to be reined in.

The episode puts in sharp relief how open-ended Mr. Trump’s claim of tariff emergency authority is. He can declare an emergency on his own, he can decide which countries and goods he can hit with the border taxes, and at what rate. This means he can use tariffs essentially whenever he wants for whatever reason he wants. Congress gave him no such expansive power under IEEPA or any other statute.

Tariff apologists will say the Greenland tariffs show the uses of border taxes for foreign policy, but the taxing power is Congress’s under the Constitution unless expressly delegated to the President.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-greenland-ieepa-supreme-court-2a4a6591

“On January 28, 1996, Ren Zhengfei held Huawei’s first “mass-resignation ceremony.” Each head of a regional sales office was told to prepare two reports: a work summary and a written resignation. “I will only sign one of the reports,” Ren said.

Huawei had started out in rural markets, and many of its early sales managers were provincial in their experience and network of contacts. As Ren sought to go national and international, he decided to make the entire sales staff resign and reapply for their jobs. “The mountain goat must outrun the lion to not be eaten,” he had told them ahead of the event. “All departments and sections must optimize and eat the lazy goats, the goats that do not learn or progress, and the goats with no sense of responsibility.”

They were following the strategy that Mao had used to win the Chinese Civil War of “encircling the cities with the countryside.”[9] They’d won over villages and towns in the beginning, building their strength to take on the big cities.

Ren told his followers that demotions built character and that the demoted would only be stronger when they worked their way up again.... “Even Deng Xiaoping could go down and up three times. Why can’t you go down and up three times?”

-- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”

К сожалению, мы достигли той черты, за которой не замечать существенного сходства политико-философских оснований идеологии MAGA и идеологии “Русского мира” более не представляется возможным. ... blah-blah-blah

https://t.me/v_pastukhov/1791

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-18/uk-s-right-wing-parties-criticize-trump-greenland-tariff-threat
*https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-17/trump-s-greenland-play-is-a-step-too-far-for-europe-s-far-right

-- Leaders from the right of the UK’s political spectrum delivered their sharpest criticism yet of US President Donald Trump, after he threatened tariffs on European allies unless a deal is reached for the US to buy Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark.

-- Alice Weidel, co-leader of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party — which German authorities classified as a far-right extremist movement and has developed close ties with the US administration — said Trump was acting no differently from Russia’s Vladimir Putin in breaching international law in Venezuela and threatening to do so in Greenland.

Mossing and others, both at OpenAI and at rival firms including Anthropic and Google DeepMind, are ... studying them [LLMs] as if they were doing biology or neuroscience on vast living creatures—city-size xenomorphs that have appeared in our midst.

Anthropic and others have developed tools to let them trace certain paths that activations follow, revealing mechanisms and pathways inside a model much as a brain scan can reveal patterns of activity inside a brain. Such an approach to studying the internal workings of a model is known as mechanistic interpretability. “This is very much a biological type of analysis,” says Batson. “It’s not like math or physics.”

Anthropic invented a way to make large language models easier to understand by building a special second model (using a type of neural network called a sparse autoencoder) that works in a more transparent way than normal LLMs. This second model is then trained to mimic the behavior of the model the researchers want to study.

Creating a model that behaves in predictable ways in specific scenarios requires making assumptions about what the inner state of that model might be in those scenarios. But that only works if large language models have something analogous to the mental coherence that most people do.

And that might not be the case.

...
Another possible solution ... Instead of relying on imperfect techniques for insight into what they’re doing, why not build an LLM that’s easier to understand in the first place?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/12/1129782/ai-large-language-models-biology-alien-autopsy/

В ночь на 9 января российские войска нанесли массированный удар по Киеву, после которого ситуация с теплом, светом и водоснабжением в городе резко ухудшилась. В тот же день мэр украинской столицы Виталий Кличко заявил, что без тепла осталась почти половина многоквартирных домов — около шести тысяч — и призвал тех киевлян, у кого есть такая возможность, уехать из города.

https://meduza.io/feature/2026/01/15/v-kieve-posle-rossiyskih-udarov-sotni-mnogoetazhek-ostayutsya-bez-tepla-i-sveta

Corporate America is entering the second year of Donald Trump’s second term with a new, hard-won understanding: The president’s personal interventions can shape business as profoundly as any economic force.

5. Perhaps above all, the author of The Art of the Deal sees every interaction as a transaction. Urban, of BGR, cites a Beltway adage: “The first rule of horse trading is to have a horse.”

In Trump’s Washington, those transactions often hinge on what a company can offer—or surrender—to stay in the administration’s good graces.