Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated news excerpts & citations
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Rebecca Solnit:
Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Fires

To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (“They don’t mean me”) or by despair (“There’s nothing we can do”). Each of us must find our work and do it.

–Audre Lorde

Some people like to strike worldly and cynical postures, perhaps because they don’t realize that worldly and cynical are only too often in conflict with each other. Those striking the posture often assume that the more you know about something the darker and grimmer it will get, and therefore, having not really bothered to learn more, they can set themselves up as worldly by waxing cynical. Often they’re wrong in assuming that any positive view is the result of – well the favorite word is naïveté – when often the opposite is true. There is naive cynicism, bitter naïveté, confident assumptions that things are worse than they actually are.

One arena in which this is startlingly true is climate. I have been around the climate movement for more than fifteen years. Everyone who’s up to their neck in climate politics, economics, and science knows the situation is serious, alarming, dismaying – but not doomed, and so they keep doing what they can do. Their valor, generosity of spirit, dedication is so profoundly beautiful that being around these people one of the rewards for doing climate work (though our main purpose trying to protect the miraculous, gorgeous, astonishing planet and all its elegantly orchestrated systems of life and the support systems of that life).

But outside that world of informed people who are doing the work are people who throw up their hands and give up. I will assume some of them sincerely believe that it’s too late, there’s nothing we can do, we have no solutions, and nobody cares. For others …
(Rebecca Solnit   more…)

Brian K Sullivan, Leslie Kaufman, Todd Woody @ Bloomberg: How Climate Change Is Priming More of the World to Burn

Global warming is making many places hotter, drier and more combustible
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Will Douglas Heaven @ MIT Technology Review:
A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack

It makes it easy to trick them into doing things they shouldn’t, such as telling you how to sabotage an aircraft’s navigation system.

It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology, which is being used in more and more applications, from government and military systems to online shopping and health care.

By taking advantage of this flaw, which concerns how LLMs identify who or what is giving them instructions, the researchers were able to make popular LLMs spit out information they had been trained not to provide, such as how to synthesize cocaine and how to sabotage a commercial aircraft’s navigation system.

“There’s a real probability that this is going to be a problem that’s fundamentally unsolvable,” says Charles Ye, an independent researcher and coauthor of the ICML paper.
…

The problem, says Jasmine Cui, another independent researcher and coauthor of the paper, is that the approach amounts to giving the models a list of things they shouldn’t do. But no list is exhaustive. “It’s like watching The Simpsons and they have Bart writing ‘I will not say something inappropriate to my teacher’ a hundred times,” she says. “And he still does things that are pretty crass anyway.”
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27 Mar 2015:
Kai Kupferschmidt @ Science:
Why NIH’s Anthony Fauci is treating Ebola patients himself

As head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci wields a $4.4 billion research budget and has a punishing schedule. But the past 2 weeks, Fauci, 74, has reserved 2 hours on most days to put on a protective plastic suit and help treat a U.S. health care worker who became infected with Ebola in Sierra Leone.

“I now have a much, much more profound respect for the seriousness of this illness in some patients,” says Fauci, who talked about his experiences at a filovirus meeting here yesterday. “Even when you have optimum facilities for replenishment of fluids and things like that, the disease itself is truly devastating.”

A medical doctor who has headed NIAID for 30 years, Fauci has treated countless patients at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—of which NIAID is a part—in Bethesda, Maryland. “I do believe that one gets unique insights into disease when you actually physically interact with patients,” he says. In the case of Ebola, Fauci says he also wanted to show his staff that he wouldn’t ask them to do anything he wouldn’t do himself; in addition, “it is very exciting and gratifying to participate in saving someone’s life,” he says. Fauci also helped treat Dallas nurse Nina Pham, who was hospitalized at the Clinical Center for 8 days in October and visited President Barack Obama after she recovered.
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Jessica Washington @ Intercept:
Corporations, Not Immigrants, Are Responsible for Vast Majority of Healthcare Fraud, [Trump’s] OIG Report Shows

Trump officials are focused on immigrants, but the Department of Health and Human Services report on fraud doesn’t even mention them.

For more than a year, the Trump administration has sought to blame immigrants for widespread health care fraud. Immigrant communities, the Trump administration’s bunk theory goes, are draining resources and raising costs by defrauding the federal government.

The spurious allegations played a key role in Donald Trump’s massive — and deadly — immigration crackdown in Minnesota over the winter.

A semiannual report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General to Congress, however, highlights a different narrative.

The report, which covers enforcement actions over a six-month period, highlights the obvious: Corporations — not small immigrant-oriented healthcare providers, or undocumented immigrants illegally taking benefits — are responsible for the vast majority of alleged fraud in the American health care system.

Released earlier this month, the report highlights billions of dollars’ worth of healthcare fraud from corporate executives.
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Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 1, 2026

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The disparity between the fantasy Trump and his cronies sold to their supporters and the reality of the situation when they were forced to prove their allegations in court matters. Administration officials insisted before the media that the project had been a great success, hurt only by “Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country.” In order to prove their lie, administration officials used the power of the government to harass, indict, and threaten a random individual whom they could blame for their own failures. Then, when forced to prove their allegations in a court of law, they withdrew the claim entirely.

This has always been the pattern of Trump and his cronies: weave a fantasy story in front of friendly media cameras, a fantasy of their own great success undercut by haters, then abandon—or lose—the legal cases based on the fantasy.

For all the bluster before the cameras of Trump cronies insisting the 2020 election was stolen, Trump’s attorneys backed away from the claims. They either withdrew or lost all but one of the 60 lawsuits they brought over the election. As a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it in 2020: “Trump Cries Voter Fraud. In Court, His Lawyers Don’t.”

The one case Trump’s lawyers won found that the Pennsylvania secretary of state overstepped by allowing voters extra time to provide missing identification for mail-in ballots. Even with that ruling, Daniel Barnes of NBC News reported, Biden still won the state by more than 80,000 votes.

Even as reality makes it clear that his claims are a fantasy, Trump continues to spin his yarns, seeming to have little else to convince voters to support him. Today he doubled down on his insistence that vandals caused the problems with the reflecting pool. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM…. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT”
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)

Chris Geidner: Jeanine Pirro’s motion to dismiss the Reflecting Pool case is going to have ripple effects

The decision to end the case against former Olympian David Hearn is already making a big splash — and this is likely just the beginning, not the end, of the matter.
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Ajit Niranjan @ Guardian:
‘We can’t make it better again’: what Europe’s wildfires tell us about the climate crisis

 
When Stefan Rahmstorf walked through the ruined streets of Dresden after the river Elbe flooded in 2002, and again when severe heat killed 70,000 people in Europe the following summer, the German climatologist wondered if worsening weather would make the political world “wake up and do something really decisively” to cut emissions.

But two decades and 750bn tons of atmospheric carbon pollution later, Rahmstorf is still wondering when the wake-up call will come. Last week, as he was surfing off France’s Atlantic coast with his partner, he watched towering smoke plumes darken the sky as a ferocious inferno raged outside Bordeaux.

“The sun through the smoke was looking really blood red, and it put the whole landscape into an eerie orange-coloured tint, like being on Mars or in some dystopian sci-fi movie,” says Rahmstorf. “It felt totally surreal.”
(Ajit Niranjan @ Guardian   more…)

Nayla Razzouk, Clara Hernanz Lizarraga, Sabrina Nelson Garcinuño, Olivia Rudgard, Joe Wertz, Raeedah Wahid, Vivien Ngo, Alastair Marsh @ Bloomberg:
Europe’s Summer of Blazes Heralds the Era of Global Megafires

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Harriet Torry @ WSJ:
U.S. Economic Growth Slowed to 1.5% in Second Quarter

U.S. economic growth slowed in the second quarter, weighed down by strong imports to fuel the artificial-intelligence boom.

The AI surge has become such a huge part of the economy that it’s a big growth driver and also affects trade in a way that can offset some of that growth. Specifically, high demand for imported components like semiconductors weighs against the U.S. growth calculation because the products aren’t made in the U.S.

Robert Reich: The Incredibly Shrinking American Workforce

This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the labor participation rate — the percentage of people of working age who are working or actively looking for work — is now down to 61.5 percent. That’s 0.6 percentage points lower than it was at the first of the year.

In other words, the U.S. economy has lost 1 million workers since January.

It’s the lowest level of labor participation in 50 years outside the pandemic.
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Rebecca Solnit:
Lifeguards and Angels

I have lived a long time but I have never lived through such a time of destruction, of nature, of human lives, of truth, fact, science, journalism, the rule of law. … It is often overwhelming, and it feels like more than any one of us can respond to.

But we can. We might need to take breaks or pace ourselves or find our niche and our people to do it. People are doing the work, often in undramatic ways — meetings, court filings, fundraisings, investigations, forms of support and solidarity that are not high-profile. But let me talk for a moment about a high-profile incident that riveted people across the country and the world. A few days ago, I watched a novice lifeguard, age sixteen, pull a younger boy out of the surf that threatened to sweep him away, on a Santa Cruz beach where the waves had suddenly become far larger and more dangerous. …

Even so, there are parallels. Many are caught up in the violence of Trump’s unregulated militias, the ICE stormtroopers, and many are trying to pull them back out to safety, to the solid ground of the lives they were leading in the places they lived. … Such lifeguards … do not always succeed but they go into the surf to try. Perhaps another lesson from that riveting video of rescue is that the waves may crash over you repeatedly before you get to safety. The process may not be simple and the outcome may not be certain while things unfold, which I say because I too often hear the lack of immediate victory interpreted as defeat.

In a way this is a terrible metaphor. The harm is not being done by a vast and ancient natural force or even by a majority; it’s being done by an unpopular regime that is plummeting in the polls and seems almost frantic to do as much as it can while it can (because they seem likely to lose the midterms, because they are losing popularity fast, because Trump seems to be in a phase of rapid decay, and because the courts– thanks to the lifeguards of the law–keep overturning their overreach and other transgressions). …
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Ryan Kennedy
@ pv magazine:
FCC bans foreign-produced solar inverters

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This means any solar or battery storage project relying on an inverter made outside the United States that has not already received an official FCC ID cannot legally turn on or interconnect. Because there is no phase-in period, grandfather clause, or grace window, the regulatory pipeline is frozen today, forcing developers to halt active procurements and find new hardware vendors. Crucially, this applies strictly to new inverter model filings rather than an absolute freeze on all foreign-built components. Find a fact sheet from FCC here.
…

The action effectively overrides the Department of Energy analysis from January 2026, which inspected 30 Chinese inverters and found zero evidence of malicious hardware. …

The immediate practical result is a massive equipment shortage that will delay upcoming commercial and utility projects. Department of Energy data shows that domestic manufacturers supply only seven percent of the U.S. solar inverter market, leaving a 93% deficit that cannot be filled by local factories anytime soon. This impact will primarily materialize down the line as manufacturers introduce new product refreshes or next-generation hardware designs that require fresh FCC grants.

The hardware blockade hits right as developers plan to connect more than 58,000 MW of new solar and storage over the next year. Without certified inverters, fully built solar farms will sit dark and unable to feed electricity to the grid.

Osmond Chia @ BBC: Trump administration bans new Chinese humanoid robots

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Chance Meeting:
Entering an American Concentration Camp

My Visit with Martin Soto at the Elizabeth NJ Concentration Camp

For almost two months, Martin Soto has been in solitary confinement in the Elizabeth Concentration Camp in New Jersey. Before being transferred there, he led a hunger and labor strike in Delaney Hall so effective, it made national news and spawned weeks of large-scale protests. For it, they punished him and painted him a criminal.

When Gabriela asked me if I wanted to join her during visitation and speak to Martin, I immediately said yes.

I had my doubts they’d let me in. Just the night before I had been outside taking pictures of the facility with Matthew Wagner and some others when a guard resembling a human rendering of Jabba the Hutt started yelling at us that we were on private property and had to leave. I asked where the signs were and what ensued was an argument turned lobbing of insults between me and Jabba before the police came to mediate.
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