A Louisiana school district says some teachers will receive $50,000 bonuses this year thanks to increased tax revenue from a @Meta data center construction project. Local officials said the windfall for teachers, funded by a portion of the parish’s sales tax, reflects an influx of economic activity that is revitalizing a slumping region. wsj.com/us-news/education/th…

Berkeley math professor: “Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates' chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.” Berkeley admitted 45% of applicants from a high school where nearly 94% of “students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.” It admitted less than 14% of applicants from a school where “nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5.”

🚨 MERCEDES JUST PUT A MOTOR ONLY 8 CM THICK INTO A CAR THAT CAN HIT 62 MPH IN 2.1 SECONDS. Instead of conventional radial flux motors, Mercedes is betting big on axial flux technology. In these motors, the electromagnetic force flows parallel to the axle, allowing two magnetic rotors to sandwich a central stator in a flat, disc-like layout. The result is dramatically smaller and more powerful. The front motor in the new all-electric Mercedes-AMG GT 4-door Coupe is just 9 cm wide. The rear motors are even thinner at roughly 8 cm each. Despite their tiny size, they help launch the heavy performance car from 0-62 mph in just 2.1 seconds, with a top speed of up to 186 mph. Why this matters: • Axial flux motors are significantly more power-dense and can be up to 50% lighter than traditional designs • Their extreme thinness frees up packaging space in the vehicle for better weight distribution, aerodynamics, or interior room • Mercedes acquired YASA in 2021 and has spent years developing the complex manufacturing processes needed to build them at scale • The technology is debuting in a high-performance AMG model, showing Mercedes is serious about using it in its most demanding cars The deeper implication: While most of the EV conversation focuses on batteries and software, the electric motor itself is undergoing a quiet revolution. Axial flux designs have long been seen as theoretically superior but extremely difficult to manufacture at scale. By solving the production challenges and putting these motors into a real high-performance car, Mercedes is pushing the entire industry forward. The next generation of electric performance cars may not just have bigger batteries they may have fundamentally better motors. We’re watching the physical hardware of EVs evolve as dramatically as the software has. How important do you think motor technology (rather than just battery size) will be for the future of electric performance cars? Follow for more frontier automotive engineering and electric vehicle technology.

AMD CEO LISA SU HELD A MINI PC ON STAGE THAT RUNS A 235B MODEL AND REPLACES YOUR $440/MONTH AI STACK amd's ryzen ai max 395 is the first x86 chip that runs a 200 billion parameter model on one piece of silicon. cpu and gpu share 128gb of unified memory, no separate graphics card needed the gmktec evo-x2 runs qwen3 235b fully, deepseek v3 comfortably and llama 3.3 70b with headroom. on linux you get 110gb of usable vram out of 128gb amd claimed the chip beat an nvidia rtx 5080 by more than 3x on deepseek r1 inference. a lunchbox sized pc outrunning a $1,000 discrete gpu on a real ai workload a heavy ai user pays $200 for claude code max, $200 for chatgpt pro, $20 for cursor and $20 for gemini. that's $5,280 a year and the box pays itself off in 9 to 10 months install ollama, pull the model, point claude code at localhost. same interface, nothing leaves the machine, nothing costs per request bookmark this and read the article below

East Germany turned human misery into foreign exchange at $96,000 per head. Socialism requires capitalism to survive. Between 1963 and 1989, the German Democratic Republic sold 33,755 political prisoners to West Germany for hard currency. The going rate started at 40,000 Deutsche Marks per prisoner in the early years and climbed to 95,847 marks by the end. You can find the invoices in the Stasi archives today. Line items included "one dissident journalist" and "three church activists." The East German state needed every Deutschmark it could get because its command economy couldn't produce goods anyone wanted to buy. A government so desperate for foreign currency created a production line of human trafficking with bureaucratic precision. The Stasi arrested dissidents, processed the paperwork, and shipped them west like any other export commodity. Church groups and West German officials negotiated bulk discounts. The whole operation generated $3.4 billion over three decades. A socialist paradise that claimed to represent the workers had to sell its own citizens to the capitalist enemy to keep the lights on. East Germany couldn't manufacture anything that the world market valued except the bodies of people trying to escape socialism. Every transaction proved that their entire economic system was a fraud that survived only by parasitically extracting value from the very capitalism it claimed to oppose. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but you still hear academics praise central planning and command economies today. They never mention that East Germany's most successful export program involved selling human beings by the pound to fund their workers' paradise.

It just magically appears.....

Thanks to socialism, the average Zimbabwean became a trillionaire before @elonmusk 💪

Possibly the most technical goal in football history

David Friedberg: California’s Voting System Looks Fraudulent, But It’s Working Exactly as Designed @friedberg believes California’s extremely loose election laws enable “appointments” not free elections. Why? The voting data in LA makes no statistical sense. “ Pratt's post-election mail-in ballots declined by 1/3. So statistically, the population of people that send in their ballots late reduced for Pratt by 1/3, increased for Nithya Raman by 80%, and Karen Bass 10% less, if you just look at the mail-in ballots before and after election day as a comparison. I don't know if there's a sociopolitical way that you can assess those statistics and assume that these are individuals casting their individual vote for who they think should be Mayor of LA. Basically, the concentration of incremental votes that Nithya Raman got came around the Skid Row area in Los Angeles. But when you look at the basic statistics of what happened in person, mail-in before, mail-in after Election Day, it becomes a real statistical quagmire on how did this sort of a sociopolitical shift happen in such a way that it did? Now, there was a report published, and they highlighted the 2018 California midterm elections and the challenges that they saw arise in that midterm election because of some of the legislative changes that were made. First, California Assembly Bill 1921 legalized the practice of unlimited ballot harvesting in the state. What that means is that any individual in the state of California has the right to go and collect ballots from any other individuals, regardless of relationship, fill them out, and send them in. California, two years later, 18 months later, also passed a law that made it permanent that every person registered in the state of California would get a ballot, so tens of millions of ballots then get mailed out. Then there was another series of laws that were passed that said anyone can register to vote. You don't need to prove your citizenship. You can use a gym membership card as an example. So anyone can register to vote. There is no proof of ID when you get a ballot. There is no demonstration that the person who fills out the ballot has anything to do with the individual who's supposed to be voting that ballot, and it is legal for an individual to go out and collect hundreds or thousands of ballots, ship them in, and they will all qualify in these kind of mail-in ballot voting processes. So there's nothing illegal or fraudulent going on. In fact, the system is operating exactly as intended. It has been set up and structured in a way that with the right construct, you can get an individual appointed, not elected, but appointed to a particular role in government under a, quote, ‘free election’ in California.”

Sony AI’s Ace robot defeats pro Miyuu Kihara under official ITTF rules Nature paper - "Outplaying elite table tennis players with an autonomous robot"

Conspiracy theory: Local and state governments are conspiring to make SpaceX a 100 trn dollar company. To wit: synmax-dc-friction-tracker.s…

FTW!!

Scientists Map 110 Quadrillion km of Underground Fungal Networks… A billion Times The Distance From Earth to the Sun! Earth’s Vast Underground “Carbon Superhighway” A groundbreaking new study published today in the journal Science has revealed, for the first time, the global scale of one of Earth’s most important but hidden biological infrastructures: the networks of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. These thread-like fungal structures, known as hyphae, form symbiotic partnerships with roughly 70% of land plant species—including major crops like wheat, corn, and rice. In exchange for sugars from the plants, the fungi deliver essential nutrients (such as phosphorus and nitrogen) and water, while also playing a massive role in storing carbon underground. Mind-Boggling Scale Using data from more than 16,000 soil cores worldwide, machine-learning models, and high-resolution robotic imaging of fungal hyphae, researchers estimated: •Total length: ~110 quadrillion kilometers (1.10 × 10¹⁷ km) of living hyphae in the top 15 cm of global soils—enough to stretch nearly a billion times the distance from Earth to the Sun (or about 10% of the diameter of the Milky Way if laid out in space). •Biomass: ~300 megatons of carbon, equivalent to 4–6 times the biomass of all humans on Earth. •These networks move about 1 billion metric tons of carbon per year into soils, acting as a critical “carbon circulatory system” that helps regulate the planet’s climate. Densities are highest in grasslands, with notable hotspots in places like the Sudd wetlands in Africa and the Everglades. The “Wood Wide Web” at Planetary Scale This research builds on the popular “Wood Wide Web” concept, where fungi connect plants in shared resource networks. The new global maps (available for exploration via the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN) show these connections operating at an ecosystem-wide level, supporting plant health, resilience to drought and disease, and food security. These fungi are vital allies in the fight against climate change and for sustainable agriculture. However, they face threats from soil disturbance (like tillage), pesticides, and land-use changes. The study also highlights gaps in sampling, particularly in undersampled ecosystems that need further research. Read the full research paper (paywalled, but abstract freely available): science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… 
Global density and biomass of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks Explore interactive maps and learn more at SPUN.earth. This discovery underscores how much of Earth’s life-support systems remain invisible to the naked eye yet operate on a truly planetary scale. Protecting these underground networks could be one of the most effective ways to sustain healthy soils, productive crops, and a stable climate.

Almost everyone thinks we’re losing to cancer. The age-adjusted death rate says otherwise: down 34% since 1991. Measured per person and adjusted for age, the US cancer death rate dropped by a third between 1991 and 2022. That adds up to roughly 4.5 million deaths that simply didn’t happen (about 3.0 million men and 1.4 million women). One caveat. That’s the death RATE per person, not the raw count. The total number of cancer deaths still rises each year because the country keeps getting bigger and older (about 618,000 deaths expected in 2025). Your odds of dying from cancer, though, keep falling. We bent the curve on the second-biggest killer without ever “curing” cancer.

CHART OF THE DAY: Corn prices have fallen now to an 8-month low of $4.17 a bushel (it's down ~50% from its 2022 peak). Quite a contrast with the apocalyptic warnings of a food crisis, shortages and even famine made by many armchair experts (and the odd university professor).

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hu…

FTW!

Mark Zuckerberg wanted to cure, prevent, and manage all diseases by the end of the century. He and Priscilla then had a series of meetings where Nobel Prize-winning scientists laughed at them. Now Zuckerberg says, "I thought that by the end of the century was a stretch. Now I think it's too conservative." Full episode linked in replies.

Interesting.....

The drop in nitrogen fertilizer prices has now extended into Asia. India has received offers for its latest urea tender at an average price of $530 per tonne, down ~44% from $947 per tonne in April.