Robot Archie🇺🇦🇪🇺💙

“Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books. For to you kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned with the flick of a finger.” ― Gordon R. Dickson, Tactics of Mistake

Apple just declared war on every AI company and handed them all the keys to the iPhone. For years, Apple kept Siri locked down like a fortress, one partner, one deal, and everyone else left outside the gates but that exclusivity just died. But first, understand why Apple had to do this. While Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta have been spending tens of billions every quarter building AI infrastructure, Apple has been spending almost nothing. Amazon's capex is up 42% year over year, Microsoft is up 89%, Alphabet up 95% and Meta up 48%. Meanwhile, Apple? Down 19%. Apple is not in the AI infrastructure arms race and it refuses to be and that gap in spending is now showing up as a gap in capability. So Apple chose a different move entirely. It is building something called extensions inside iOS 27. A new system that lets any AI chatbot, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Copilot plug directly into Siri. Users open their Settings, see a menu of every AI service they have installed, toggle them on, and suddenly Siri becomes a front door to every major AI in the world. Apple isn’t choosing a winner, it’s turning Siri into the marketplace where everyone competes. Here’s the genius part, Apple can’t outspend Amazon on data centers or Microsoft on model training so it’s not even trying. But Instead, it is letting those companies spend the billions and then charging them rent to reach iPhone users. Think about what this means financially, Apple already takes a cut of ChatGPT subscriptions when users sign up through the App Store. Now multiply that by every AI company on the planet competing for iPhone users. Apple loses nothing while it collects from everyone. Apple is also separately building a new version of Siri powered by Google Gemini's underlying models, a deeper technical arrangement. The Extensions system does not replace that deal but rather lives alongside it. So Apple's full strategy looks like this, build its own AI. Power Siri with Google's models behind the scenes. Let every other AI compete in an open marketplace it controls and take a cut of every subscription. What a Genius move.

The latest NATO defence spend chart is out, ignoring actual GDP figures, what does it show? The US has fallen from 1st to 7th, and is the only Nation to reduce its spending since 2014. The UK drops from 3rd to 14th, but If we removed our Nuclear spend we would be dead last.

🚨 THE LARGEST INVESTOR ON EARTH JUST SILENCED THE AI BUBBLE CROWD BlackRock CEO Larry Fink controls $14 trillion in assets. Every Fortune 500 CEO reads his letter before breakfast He just said this in his latest BBC interview: 1. “This is not a bubble” Fink talks directly to hyperscaler CEOs. Their message: demand is outpacing supply. Not slowing. Accelerating. They can’t build fast enough. 2. One data centre = $50 billion A single 1GW AI data centre costs over $50 billion. One tech CEO told Fink he needs 23 gigawatts by 2030. That’s over $1 trillion. From one company. 3. China is building 100GW of nuclear. Right now. That’s 30+ nuclear power stations under construction. While Europe debates planning permission, China pours concrete. 4. The real bottleneck isn’t chips. It’s power. “The biggest issue that limits the West is the cost of power.” His words. Not mine. 5. AI will create a blue-collar boom Fewer analysts. More technicians (e.g. electricians, welders, plumbers). The people who build and maintain AI infrastructure will be in massive demand. 6. Energy pragmatism, not ideology Oil. Gas. Solar. Nuclear. Wind. Use everything. Cheap power = economic resilience. Expensive power = recession. The largest investor on Earth just told you exactly where the money is going. AI infrastructure demand is real and accelerating. Only constrained by power.

Well

Superb political ad. One of the best you’ll see. This is better, and resonates more, than anything coming from Labour or the Tories.

The US has surpassed China and North Korea in Death rate from malnutrition

NEWS: Trump-backed effort to repeal Utah’s anti-gerrymandering law FAILS after grassroots campaign removes enough signatures to block it from the ballot. Republicans spent $4.35 million on signature gathering and brought in Turning Point Action to support the effort. The campaign was also endorsed by Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but it still fell short.

BREAKING: Apple is planning to open up Siri to run any AI service via their App Store apps as part of iOS 27, dropping ChatGPT as the exclusive outside partner in Apple Intelligence and Siri. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

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I showed a Trump post to my psychologist friend and asked her to do a proper profile. This was, in retrospect, like asking a vet to look at a particularly diseased badger. She put down her coffee, read it twice, and said: “Right. Where do you want me to start?” The all-caps, she explained, isn’t emphasis. It’s dysregulation. A regulated adult uses punctuation to signal importance. Trump uses volume, because volume is what worked in the room he grew up in. Fred Trump’s household rewarded dominance and punished weakness. Donald learned early that the loudest person wins. He never updated that software. He never updates anything. The man is essentially Windows Vista with a spray tan. “NATO HAS DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” The word absolutely is doing a lot of work there. Psychologists call this black-and-white thinking, a cognitive pattern strongly associated with narcissistic personality structures. The world is either total loyalty or total betrayal. No middle ground. No nuance. No evidence of a functioning cerebral cortex. “MILITARILY DECIMATED.” She paused on this one. Self-glorification dressed as fact, she said. He has no military background, never served, and has a well-documented terror of illness and physical danger. Bone spurs, famously. Four of them. One per deferment. So he compensates verbally, hard and consistently, because words are his only battlefield and even there he fights like a man wearing oven mitts. “THE U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO.” The people who most loudly declare their independence, she said, are almost always the most terrified of abandonment. Classic counterdependence. The kid who announces he doesn’t need friends. In the playground. Alone. Eating his lunch next to a bin. The threat with no content, “NEVER FORGET THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME,” she found genuinely fascinating. It has the grammatical structure of consequence without any actual consequence attached. It’s what you say when you want to punish someone but lack both the means and the attention span to follow through. And then the signature. His own name. On his own platform. As if the man might otherwise forget who he is halfway through a sentence, which, to be fair, seems increasingly plausible. She sat back and said: “This is a man who has been pretending to be formidable for so long he can no longer locate the frightened little boy underneath. But he’s still there. He’s always there. TACO is always there. Screaming in capital letters at people who stopped listening years ago.” I paid for the coffee. It was the least I could do. She’s going to need therapy after this. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

As the United States turns 250, the country’s population is more racially and ethnically diverse than in previous decades. Three-quarters of U.S. adults see racial and ethnic diversity as a good thing for the country. Read more about Americans’ views on diversity here: pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

Russian Gunners Killed by Exploding North Korean Shells Footage captures North Korean-supplied artillery rounds exploding prematurely, turning Russian howitzers into death traps.

This is what oligarchy looks like. 50 billionaires have spent $433 million to buy the elections in November. 80% is going to candidates who supported a $1 trillion tax break for the top 1% & a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid & the Affordable Care Act. We must end Citizens United.

NEW: Pentagon estimates only 23% of young Americans (17-24) are eligible to serve in US military mainly due to poor academic performance on testing, obesity, and criminal records. -ABC

The IDF Chief of Staff has warned that the IDF is on the verge of collapse after 900 straight days of war. This is what he told the government yesterday: 1) Reservists are being stretched to a breaking point across multiple active fronts simultaneously: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, and the Iranian front 2) No ultra-Orthodox conscription law has been passed, leaving thousands exempt from service in practice 3) The cabinet approved the legalization of dozens more outposts and farms in the West Bank, requiring additional troops to protect them 4) Jewish nationalist terrorism is surging in the West Bank, requiring an additional battalion to be deployed there, with possibly another needed soon 5) Mandatory service is set to shorten to 30 months in January 2027, the opposite of the IDF's request to extend it to 36 months 6) The government is avoiding passing the necessary laws (conscription, reserves, extended service) largely due to political pressures related to the Haredi exemption controversy The expansionist policies of the government are straining the army to the point of no return. The IDF cannot carry this load and will "collapse into itself" according to the Chief of Staff soon if the wars of expansion do not stop. Israel is simply not big enough and not rich enough to dominate the Middle East in the long-term.

Elizabeth Warren is introducing a wealth tax. The bill would impose an annual 2% tax on the net worth of households over $50 million, with billionaires paying 3%. And, to deter the ultra-rich from leaving the country to avoid the tax, the bill would also levy a 40% "exit tax" on anyone worth more than $50 million who renounces their U.S. citizenship.

The Vatican was in no mood to play games with the would-be prophet from Palantir and Nigel Farage’s “friend”, Peter Thiel. Paolo Benanti, a priest who has advised Pope Francis and Pope Leo on AI and tech ethics, called out Thiel as a “political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem” and delivered a scathing rebuke of Thiel’s religious delusions: “Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.” Benanti hit Thiel where it hurts, zooming in on his persistent efforts to pervert religious ideas into justifications for greed, monopoly, and authoritarianism. He exposes Thiel’s obsessive focus on achieving “the pathological radicalization” of “competition, technology, the individual” to argue against democratic society itself. thenerdreich.com/peter-thiels-a…

💪🇺🇦 Ust-Luga: Results 🇺🇦 Ukrainian UAVs struck: ▪️ 3 oil tankers: Aisopos (Greece), Sea Hymn (Marshall Islands), Fiesta (Sierra Leone); 
▪️ 5 storage tanks containing fuel oil, gas condensate, and fuel; 
▪️ 3 technological units, including a hydrocracking unit; 
▪️ 3 berths, including a pier structure, a utility building, and a dormitory; 
▪️ 2 patrol boats under construction for the border service coast guard at the Vyborg Shipyard; 
▪️ a port crane and a tender site at the "Portenergo" berth; 
▪️ an electrical distribution substation. Indeed, the most destructive attack on a Russian port during the entire war. Source: ASTRA

Homeowner waits until construction job is nearly done—then calls ICE on 6 of her own workers. Woman even provides the ladder used by agent to detain men—who she owes $10,000 for 3 day job. "She called the damn law on us and now we're totally screwed!" men yell in Spanish. "They surrounded us!—They surrounded us!" Agents even left behind the workers' van with doors wide open—filled with thousands of dollars worth of tools. The arrest was broadcast live for about 30 minutes by a co-worker—identified as Bryan Polanco. "Seeing it is not the same as experiencing it," he explains. "I’ve seen many videos, and sadly today I had to experience it." At the end of the video he gets the woman who called ICE on camera: "It is the same woman. Tidying up the house, and still with hatred in her heart." The incident occurred in Cambridge, Maryland.

BREAKING NEWS: TECH SCIENTISTS WORLDWIDE are in shock today after the US suddenly banned Chinese participants from the world’s largest gathering of AI researchers, set to be held in Australia. The sudden blow to academic freedom stunned the world of AI and machine learning. Every entity sanctioned by the US is now automatically banned from submitting papers to the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, organizers said. The submission of work is linked to attendance at the annual gathering. The science organization processes academic papers and organizes the world’s largest AI researchers’ annual meeting, due to be held in Sydney from 6 December this year. . SCIENTISTS CRY FOUL The organization, known as NeurIPS for short, has been running since the late 1980s, under scientific principles of collaboration—not politics. But now organizers have been told they must reject US-sanctioned firms. The problem is that the US sanctions list is massive and arbitrary, designed to smack down rivals. It contains more than 870 Chinese targets, including Huawei, SenseTime, and Megvii. Chinese telecom operators are also listed. Chinese scientists have cried foul. The China Computer Federation urged NeurIPS to “recognize the harm its actions have caused to the global academic community” in a statement yesterday. It called for the foundation to “restore equal submission and academic exchange rights for all institutions”. . 'JOINT EFFORTS' CREATE SUCCESS Last night scientist Yuliang Xiu of Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, wrote: "It’s my first time being invited as an Area Chair for NeurIPS, and I’m truly honored. However, I have to decline the role due to its sanctions policy." He pointed out that "NeurIPS’ prosperity comes from the joint efforts of researchers worldwide, and its growth and success have long been supported by sponsorships from some of the sanctioned entities too." Non-Chinese scientists have also expressed dismay. “What a ridiculous decision from NeurIPS! Some of the companies affected have sponsored you for years!” said Haitham Bou Ammar, an assistant professor from Cambridge, UK, writing on X. Maziyar Panahi, an AI healthcare scientist based in France, described the new policy as "nonsense". . HOW SCIENCE WORKS In the past, Chinese scientists were not just heavily involved, but actually helped make the conference happen, with Huawei, Unitree, Bytedance and Alibaba listed as sponsors. Scientists from around the world have pointed out at that science does not work this way—global academic breakthroughs in scientific fields are, by definition, shared by humanity. If you’ve discovered a new element in particle physics, it’s a new element. Pretending it didn’t happen just because the scientist is Chinese (or Russian or Iranian) destroys the foundations of the scientific method.