Trump Announces Sweeping Reciprocal Tariffs on Trading Partners
April 2nd, 2025I wonder if Ross Perot is smiling from the great beyond…
Remember that?
Because Ross Perot’s prescient warnings were not heeded decades ago, this is what a Made in USA car looks like now:
President Pfizer Warpspeed Trump Gaza #1 is awful in some ways… and good in other ways. Bringing sanity to trade imbalances won’t be easy, but the U.S. is finished otherwise. I have no idea if it’s too late for the U.S. to change course. I suspect that it is, but I’ve been wrong before.
Via: Sky:
Politico Claims: “Trump Tells Inner Circle That Musk Will Leave Soon”
April 2nd, 2025
Update: Musk – “Fake News”
Yeah, fake news https://t.co/nPhTpZj3Fc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2025
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Via: Politico:
President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man.
The president remains pleased with Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency initiative, but both men have decided in recent days that it will soon be time for Musk to return to his businesses and take on a supporting role, according to three Trump insiders who were granted anonymity to describe the evolving relationship.
Musk’s looming retreat comes as some Trump administration insiders and many outside allies have become frustrated with his unpredictability and increasingly view the billionaire as a political liability…
AI-Based Model Streams Intelligible Speech from Thoughts
April 2nd, 2025Via: Berkeley Engineering:
Marking a breakthrough in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco has unlocked a way to restore naturalistic speech for people with severe paralysis.
This work solves the long-standing challenge of latency in speech neuroprostheses, the time lag between when a subject attempts to speak and when sound is produced. Using recent advances in artificial intelligence-based modeling, the researchers developed a streaming method that synthesizes brain signals into audible speech in near-real time.
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“Our streaming approach brings the same rapid speech decoding capacity of devices like Alexa and Siri to neuroprostheses,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli, Robert E. and Beverly A. Brooks Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and co-principal investigator of the study. “Using a similar type of algorithm, we found that we could decode neural data and, for the first time, enable near-synchronous voice streaming. The result is more naturalistic, fluent speech synthesis.”
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According to study co-lead author Cheol Jun Cho, who is also a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer sciences, the neuroprosthesis works by sampling neural data from the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls speech production, then uses AI to decode brain function into speech.
“We are essentially intercepting signals where the thought is translated into articulation and in the middle of that motor control,” he said. “So what we’re decoding is after a thought has happened, after we’ve decided what to say, after we’ve decided what words to use and how to move our vocal-tract muscles.”
To collect the data needed to train their algorithm, the researchers first had Ann, their subject, look at a prompt on the screen — like the phrase: “Hey, how are you?” — and then silently attempt to speak that sentence.
“This gave us a mapping between the chunked windows of neural activity that she generates and the target sentence that she’s trying to say, without her needing to vocalize at any point,” said Littlejohn.
Because Ann does not have any residual vocalization, the researchers did not have target audio, or output, to which they could map the neural data, the input. They solved this challenge by using AI to fill in the missing details.
“We used a pretrained text-to-speech model to generate audio and simulate a target,” said Cho. “And we also used Ann’s pre-injury voice, so when we decode the output, it sounds more like her.”
Arkansas Gov. Huckabee Sanders Signs Bill Approving Purchase of Ivermectin Without Prescription
April 2nd, 2025Via: The Gateway Pundit:
On Tuesday, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill approving the sale of Ivermectin over the counter without a prescription.
Arkansas Senate Bill 189 authorizes Ivermectin for human use to be sold without prescription or consultation with a healthcare professional.
Arkansas is the second state to make the drug available without a prescription, joining Tennessee.
Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test
April 2nd, 2025I thought this train left the station a couple of years ago. Maybe not.
Via: arXiv:
We evaluated 4 systems (ELIZA, GPT-4o, LLaMa-3.1-405B, and GPT-4.5) in two randomised, controlled, and pre-registered Turing tests on independent populations. Participants had 5 minute conversations simultaneously with another human participant and one of these systems before judging which conversational partner they thought was human. When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant. LLaMa-3.1, with the same prompt, was judged to be the human 56% of the time — not significantly more or less often than the humans they were being compared to — while baseline models (ELIZA and GPT-4o) achieved win rates significantly below chance (23% and 21% respectively). The results constitute the first empirical evidence that any artificial system passes a standard three-party Turing test. The results have implications for debates about what kind of intelligence is exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs), and the social and economic impacts these systems are likely to have.
Is It Any Sort of Useful Signal That Someone with an Estimated Net Worth Between $60 and $80 Million Fled California Because of High Taxes, High Prices, High Crime and Government Mismanagement?
April 2nd, 2025Has the situation in California crossed some sort of red line, where even seriously wealthy people can’t stand it anymore?
With this Producer Michael video below, you might be thinking, “Who cares? It’s one guy.”
But here’s the thing: It’s not just one guy.
I’ve known a few high net worth people and they usually have other high net worth people as friends. The friends will notice when one of their group flees for greener pastures (or, in this case, a desert hellscape that routinely sees temperatures over 110F).
The next thing you know, Producer Michael is talking about his move to some of his high net worth friends who are still in California… And a couple of million people on YouTube.
How many Producer Miachel-type people have to flee before the maniac kleptocrats who run California have an untenable budgetary problem on their hands?
Via: Producer Michael:
Related: Los Angeles Sales Tax Increased Again
Last Year: The Wealthiest Californians Are Leaving the State
Any Tesla Powerwall Installers/Technicians Out There?
April 2nd, 2025Update: Storm Watch Activated Anyway
Storm Watch activated and the Powerwall charged to 100%.
The Tesla app says, “A severe thunderstorm is forecast for your area. Powerwall has fully charged to provide backup protection.”
Hmm…
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Off topic. Apologies.
The Neurio power meter on my Powerwall 2 / Backup Energy Gateway 1 (gray metal enclosure) appears to have died. I have a case opened up with Tesla, but the ETA is weeks.
We’re about to be hit with a storm that will take the grid down for sure.
So…
Is anyone out there who can help me bootstrap that Neurio thing back up to get the Powerwall out of standby mode?
System info:
Powerwall 2
Gateway 1 with backup
Powerwall 2 LED: Solid green
Gateway emitting descending three tone diagnostic sound, “Failing tone”
Gateway status LED looks like fast blinking red, but I can’t get a good look behind the panel to see it clearly. A blue LED is also on (solid) somewhere in there. I’m viewing through the gateway reset port in the panel.
Tesla support said the Powerwall is in standby mode due to missing metering information / possible Neurio hardware failure.
Powerwall/EG is connected to Tesla via Ethernet. They are able to access it.
Service mode is on.
TEG wifi is NOT visible at all when viewing available wifi networks.
I’ve fully reset the system (reset EG, then shutdown all grid and solar power, wait five minutes) three times. Weirdly, this procedure brought it back to life after the first try. It failed again to the state above after a couple of days.
Note: Since Elon Musk is currently triggering woke lunatics, personal opinions of Musk, good/bad/otherwise, are off topic. I’m just trying to keep the lights on over here.
BioNTech RNA-Based COVID-19 Injections Contain Large Amounts Of Residual DNA Including An SV40 Promoter/Enhancer Sequence
April 1st, 2025Pfizer’s inclusion of an unnecessary SV40 promoter was so shocking that the peer reviewed paper actually intimated nefarious intent.
Something Dr Mikolaj Raszek had never seen before in published science.
‘These authors claim that Pfizer and BioNtech who are the producers of… pic.twitter.com/LTsiOf1iYu
— Kat A ? (@SaiKate108) April 1, 2025
Via: Science, Public Health Policy and the Law:
Our molecular analyses of the plasmid components confirmed data reported by McKernan and colleagues, namely the presence of a DNA sequence of the SV40 promoter/enhancer. This sequence was not declared in the plasmid map that BioNTech/Pfizer submitted in the approval procedure. This finding is very surprising and raises the legitimate question: Why did BioNTech/Pfizer apply this totally unnecessary but highly dangerous element in their plasmids and use it as a template for the production of modRNA? In our opinion, BioNTech/Pfizer must be held accountable for incorporating this highly dangerous element in their plasmids.
Secret Documents on Nazis Who Fled to Argentina After WWII Being Declassified
April 1st, 2025Via: Fox:
Argentina is set to declassify all government-held files relating to Nazi fugitives who fled and settled in Argentina after World War II, according to reports.
The documents will likely include Nazi-linked bank accounts and archival records detailing the use of Nazi “ratlines” which were monetary and logistic pathways Nazis used to escape justice and flee Argentina following the war.
…
It is estimated that up to 10,000 Nazis and other fascist war criminals escaped justice for Holocaust atrocities by fleeing to Argentina and other Latin American countries.
Notorious high-level Nazis, including Holocaust mastermind Adolph Eichmann and “angel of death” Josef Mengele, fled to the South American country, while rumors have swirled for years that former Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler also ended up there.
The pending release comes after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, requested their release last month in a letter to Argentinian President Javier Milei. Grassley is investigating Credit Suisse and its historic servicing of the Nazi-linked accounts and ratlines.
British Council Institutes Harsher Criminal Sentencing, But Only For White Men
April 1st, 2025Via: ZeroHedge:
The Sentencing Council of England And Wales, a non-departmental public body (faceless bureaucracy) which determines the guidelines for court punishments of convicted offenders, has recently made controversial changes and ignited a firestorm among the native British populace.
The council has announced that special exceptions in sentencing will be made for ethnic minority offenders (the majority of violent crime in Britain) and religious minority offenders, as well as female offenders. In other words, everyone except white males will enjoy reduced sentencing, creating a two tier justice system that targets white men for harsher treatment.
