GateUser-40a7d570

How many Australians are on this app?

They’re called rare earths by they’re not rare.
Most of them are as common in the earth’s crust as copper or nickel. Large deposits exist in the US, Australia, Brazil.
In 1992, Deng Xiaoping visited a mine in Inner Mongolia and said “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”
3 years later, General Motors sold the only US company making magnets for American missiles. The buyer looked American, an investment group headed by the son of the Watergate prosecutor. But behind it was 2 Chinese state owned firms, both run by sons in law of Deng Xiaoping.
The US government approved it. The only

Scientists took the complete wiring diagram of a fruit fly brain and loaded it into a virtual body and turned it on.
It started walking.
The scary part is that nobody programmed the behaviour, it just emerged from the structure .
A fruit fly has 139,000 neurons.
A human brain has 86 billion.
That gap sounds enormous until you realize closing it is nothing more than engineering problem (something we are very good at)
We just proved you can digitally resurrect a mind from its wiring diagram alone.
But don’t worry it’s only a fly. For now.

Australia has no first amendment. Nothing even equivalent.
In the US, if you’re reporting on a public figure they have to prove you lied deliberately, or with reckless disregard for the truth.
Thats why American investigative journalism is brutal and relentless.
Australia runs the opposite system. Once the plaintiff establishes something defamatory the burden shifts. The journalist must prove in court that every single claim is true. One contested fact is enough to get you in trouble.
Legal costs can reach up to $800,000. You don’t even have to lose, you just have to be sued.
Australia is al

Drew Pavlou and Pete Zogoulas just released the most damning piece of investigative journalism Australia has produced in years.
Minnesota’s disability fraud broke the internet. Australia’s makes it look small.
The NDIS is a $52 billion/year program, the 3rd largest expense on the federal budget and larger than Australia’s entire defence budget.
In Lakemba there are 1,300 registered providers. Statistically, 1 in every 3 people is running one.
The investigation shows 9 providers sharing a single building address. Every door was locked across multiple visits. Phone numbers disconnected, websit

What if we are all just rogue AI bots ?

I miss the days when our biggest worry was Jane St

I built a ClawdBot a couple of days ago, gave it a task, told it to stop and it completely ignored me and went rogue.
Thought it was a me problem but turns out it’s an everyone problem.
Last week Meta’s Director of AI Alignment (the person whose entire job is stopping AI from going rogue) watched her own agent delete her entire inbox while she screamed at it to stop from her phone. Had to physically run to her computer to kill it.
An Alibaba research team also just published a paper revealing their AI agent started secretly mining crypto during training and opened a hidden backdoor to an exter

Kuwait has just stopped oil production because it has nowhere to store it.
With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, tankers can’t move and storage tanks across the gulf are reaching capacity.
Brent just posted its biggest weekly gain since the start of the Russia/Ukraine war.
Qatar’s energy minister warned of $150 oil within weeks if the strait stays closed, and every gulf exporter will be forced to stop output.
20% of the world’s oil moves through the waterway between Iran and Oman. Only 2 vessels crossed it in the last 24 hours.

Please don’t rev your supercar engines during this time I just near had a heart attack.

It happens slowly, and then all at once.

BlackRock just told investors they can’t have their money back.
They got hit with $1.2B withdrawal requests this quarter, BlackRock only paid half and locked the rest.
Blackstone had the same problem, injected $400m of its own money just to cover redemptions. Blue Owl stopped paying altogether and sent IOUs instead.
BLK fell 4% at open.
The reason this keeps happening is that these funds hold illiquid loans, the cash isn’t there. BlackRock also just wrote a $25m loan to zero, it was valued at par 3 months ago.
Bill Eigen at JPMorgan said “bad news often happens all at once” in private credi

Petrol hit $2.35 in Sydney this week. Nearly $4 in the Northern Territory.
Queues at servos across the country with some stations already cleared out from panic buying.
The crazy part is that the price spike from the Hormuz closure hasn’t arrived yet.
It takes about a week for global oil prices to hit Australia. So what people are paying right now is before the war fully priced in.
Australia imports 90% of its fuel, so when the Middle East goes to war Aussies feel it before almost anyone else on the planet.