Gondwana

 Austria drops all tarrifs with India

Shruthi introduced me to the concept of neti, basically, “not that.” It could be a slogan for India’s third way—unlike America, unlike China, not this, not that. I’m rooting for them. Unlike Europe’s third way, which seems to be to regulate, India’s third way wants to build in public. Halfway through the trip, we had a wonderful conversation with Pramod Varma, the architect of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). It would be no exaggeration to say that UPI, which processes nearly half of the world’s real-time digital payments, has done more for financial inclusion than any technology in history. Most of us, from the West, pressed him late into the night on why the private sector couldn’t do what UPI did. Maybe there are just idiosyncratic things about India, and maybe the private sector could’ve done it. But the fact is UPI is a huge success, which, because I didn’t learn how to replicate it, I can only credit to the architect’s boundless optimism.

Agent running in the field

 It’s a trend that more or less says, newer AI can somewhat reliably do harder and more useful tasks, as measured by how long it would take humans to do the tasks. As of this writing, the best AI can, roughly half the time, do tasks that take humans over four hours; that number was nine minutes just two years ago. Extrapolating the trend, AI will soon do tasks that take humans weeks. People use the trend to justify why the world might change very soon, very suddenly.

treated the prompt more like ‘what surprised me in 2025 that probably shouldn't have’ and wrote about F1 going to Apple, and the rapid rise of prediction markets.”

As for one of the recurring themes, Robert Cruickshank says, “I find it very telling how many people quoted here are surprised at institutional enabling of Trump’s Nazi authoritarianism. They lulled people into a false sense of security last year claiming the guardrails would hold. And these people generally have done little to maintain the guardrails!”

The little quince

 Shevek switched off the latest full-spectrum quantum computer with a smile.  " Some problems are too non-trivial and NP hard for giant data-centers and supercomputers.  I've put them all in the little quince "

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925405-700-quantum-computer-works-best-switched-off/

Abstract:

Counterfactual quantum communication (CQC) is an intriguing paradigm originating from quantum mechanics, enabling spatially separated parties to achieve communication tasks without the need to transmit any physical particles across the channel. Conventional quantum communication typically relies on particle transmission or utilizes entanglement-assisted protocols with local operations and classical communication, such as quantum teleportation and superdense coding, to transfer information. As the research area of quantum communication is being rapidly developed, significant progress has been made in the development of CQC. In this paper, we present a comprehensive tutorial on CQC for transmitting both classical and quantum information, noting that no physical particles are found in the channel during successful information transmission. We begin by studying the origin of CQC, followed by a detailed examination of counterfactual protocols for classical and quantum information transmission. This paper highlights the applications of CQC and outlines future research directions

Last days of the USSA

 MERELY WE ROLL ALONG

Freedom Through Technology.

Cypherpunks, high-tech libertarians, and various others mistakenly think technology will eliminate the need for government (if not outright eliminate government.

Assassination Politics

Convicted tax evader Jim Bell proposes a system of anonymous ecash awards for the murder of "aggressors", such as IRS agents. See also Crypto-Convict Won't Recant. What he misses is that his system, if tolerated, would merely force government to operate secretly rather than openly.

THIS SYSTEM -  APSTER - COULD MERELY FORCE THE USA UNDERGROUND

MERELY!

Cypherpunks collapse governments.

Subject: Everyone a remailer: Everyone a Mint: Everyone an assassin

https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=100872510706876&w=2

Strong-crypto, digital money, anonymous networks, pseudonyms, zero- knowledge proofs, reputations, information-markets, netwar, collapse-of-governments.

EVERYONE AN ASSASSIN RUNS ON PREDICTION MARKETS - THE LAST SHOE TO DROP

STRAP ON YOUR RATS

Dumbfuck dictators against APster

 Could murder them all in their beds

https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/trump-very-angry-after-putin-accuses-ukraine-of-attack-on-presidential-home-20251230-p5nqmc.html

THIS ASSASSINATION POLITICS AGRESSSION WILL NOT STAND MAN

VERSO Books for State Terrorism

 https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/slavo-zizek-presents-trotsky-terrorism-and-communism/

The title of this book is misleading for new readers – the “terrorism” it refers to is not the individual terrorism or terror attacks of small groups that the word conjures up today (though the prolific Trotsky wrote elsewhere about the problems of individual terrorism). It refers to state terror

Vladimir Lenin described state capitalism as a necessary, temporary, transitional phase for the backward Russian economy to develop a solid industrial foundation before achieving true socialism

Interview with Karl Marx, Chicago Tribune, January 5 1879: "Well, then, to carry out the principles of socialism do its believers advocate assassination and bloodshed?" "No great movement," Karl answered, "has ever been inaugurated Without Bloodshed."

Risk anticipation for winners

 Since chance favors the prepared mind

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/07/save-the-pentagon-futures-market.html

Risk anticipation for losers is called " Red Teaming " and is hierarchical and central.

. Let’s admit there’s something ghoulish about betting on an assassination attempt. But let’s also admit that U.S. government analysts ask themselves every day the exact same questions that PAM traders would have been asking: How stable is the government of Jordan? How likely is it the House of Saud will fall? Will Mahmoud Abbas still be head of the P.A. in 2004? How many more casualties will the United States take in Iraq? If it isn’t immoral for the U.S. government to be asking these questions, it’s hard to see how it’s immoral for people outside the U.S. government to ask them. Especially since the point of having traders ask the questions was to gather information to prevent catastrophes from happening.

Perhaps what’s immoral, though, is that PAM would allow people to make money from predicting catastrophe. But CIA analysts don’t volunteer their services. We pay them to predict catastrophes. Is that morally wrong? We also pay informants—like the guy who turned in Odai and Qusai—for valuable information. Again, are we wrong to do so?