July 2023 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Its good the Crypto Wars are so terrible
by professor rat 04 Jul '23

04 Jul '23

Otherwise we might become too fond of them Channel 4 News @Channel4News · 8h “No way to create a backdoor that only the good guys can walk through.” Signal President Meredith Whittaker says the Online Safety Bill will cause “unprecedented paradigm-shifting surveillance” - in a discussion with @cathynewman and former UK Tech minister Damian Collins. https://twitter.com/i/status/1675922360237694978 Reposts not the nineties calling to get their backdoor entries back or Mongoloid forks in the freedom road

1 0

Apple Hits $3 Trillion Market Cap After Spending More than Half a Trillion Dollars on Stock Buybacks Since 2013
by Gunnar Larson 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/07/apple-hits-3-trillion-market-cap-aft… Apple Hits $3 Trillion Market Cap After Spending More than Half a Trillion Dollars on Stock Buybacks Since 2013 Frightened Wall Street TraderBy Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2023 ~ According to S&P Dow Jones Indices, component companies of the Standard & Poor’s 500 spent $922.7 billion in 2022 buying back their own stock. That was $41 billion more than the S&P 500 companies spent in 2021, which came in at a lofty $881.7 billion. One of the companies leading the stock buyback parade is Apple. Of the $922.7 billion spent on stock buybacks in 2022 by all companies in the S&P 500, Apple represented 10 percent of that spending with $90.2 billion in buybacks of its own stock. On Friday, June 30, 2023, Apple, the iPhone manufacturer, closed the trading day in New York with a market value (market capitalization) of just over $3 trillion, an historic record. Apple’s $3 trillion market value is eight times that of the second largest mobile phone manufacturer, Samsung. We decided to dig into the 10-K forms that Apple is required to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission to see just how much help the company has had with propping up its share price by buying back its own stock. What we found stunned even us. Over the past decade, and including the first quarter of this year, Apple has juiced its share price by buying back a total of $573.4 billion of its own stock. The breakdown is as follows, per fiscal year: Apple’s Stock Buybacks 2023: First Quarter: $19.2 billion 2022: $90.2 billion 2021: $85.5 billion 2020: $72.5 billion 2019: $67.1 billion 2018: $73 billion 2017: $33 billion 2016: $30 billion 2015: $35 billion 2014: $45 billion 2013: $22.9 billion The second most valuable company in the world is Microsoft, which closed on Friday with a market cap of $2.53 trillion. According to its 10-K filings with the SEC, it has bought back $150.9 billion of its stock over the same span of time, that is, fiscal years 2013 through 2022 and the first quarter of 2023. To put that into perspective, Apple has bought back $422.5 billion more of its own stock than Microsoft. This raises the question, where would Apple’s stock price actually be without all of those stock repurchases? Microsoft’s Stock Buybacks 2023: First Quarter: $5.5 billion 2022: $28 billion 2021: $23 billion 2020: $19.7 billion 2019: $16.8 billion 2018: $8.6 billion 2017: $10.3 billion 2016: $14.8 billion 2015: $13.2 billion 2014: $6.4 billion 2013: $4.6 billion On June 14 we reported that “Headlines are sprouting up at various news outlets, touting that the S&P 500 is in a new bull market. But, in fact, almost all of the gains in the S&P 500 Index year-to-date have come from just seven stocks: Apple (ticker AAPL), Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, ticker META), Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), and Tesla (TSLA).” Alphabet and Meta Platforms are also spending big buying back their own stocks. In fact, if you add the share buybacks in 2022 of Alphabet ($59.3 billion), Meta Platforms ($27.93 billion) to the amounts spent buying back their own stock by Apple ($90.2 billion) and Microsoft ($28 billion) in 2022, these four companies represented 22 percent of the dollar amount of all stock buybacks in the S&P 500 last year. (As noted above, total stock buybacks of S&P 500 companies in 2022 tallied up to $922.7 billion.) In her 2016 book, “Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business,” Rana Foroohar called out Apple’s use of borrowed money to finance buybacks. She wrote: “…Apple’s behavior is no aberration. Stock buybacks and dividend payments of the kind being made by Apple – moves that enrich mainly a firm’s top management and its largest shareholders but often stifle its capacity for innovation, depress job creation, and erode its competitive position over the longer haul – have become commonplace. The S&P 500 companies as a whole have spent more than $6 trillion on such payments between 2005 and 2014, bolstering share prices and the markets even as they were cutting jobs and investment.” In a column in the Washington Post in June 2018 (paywall), Steven Pearlstein warned that “The most significant and troubling aspect of this buyback boom, however, is that despite record corporate profits and cash flow, at least a third of the shares are being repurchased with borrowed money, bringing the corporate debt to an all-time high, not only in an absolute sense but also in relation to profits, assets and the overall size of the economy….” Pearlstein said that the upshot of all of this debt-financed stock repurchasing is that “Corporate America, in effect, has transformed itself into one giant leveraged buyout.”

1 0

[bigml] sweep.ai is yet another autocoder
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

via reddit via twitter, apparently r/MachineLearning lets visitors read it again? uses chatgpt, works on whole repositories https://github.com/sweepai/sweep <b>Sweep</b> allows you to create and review GitHub issues with ease. Simply describe any issue and Sweep will do the rest. It will plan out what needs to be done, what changes to make, and write the changes to a PR. Supported languages: Python, Javascript/Typescript, Rust, Go, Java/C#, C++ and anything else GPT-4 supports --- ## ✨ Demo For the best experience, [install Sweep](https://github.com/apps/sweep-ai) to one of your repos and see the magic happen. [Demo](https://github.com/sweepai/sweep/assets/44910023/365ec29f-7317-40a7-9… ## 🚀 Getting Started ### 🖥️ Sweep Chat Sweep Chat allows you to interact with Sweep locally and will sync with GitHub. You can plan out your changes with Sweep, and then Sweep can create a pull request for you. 1. Install [Sweep GitHub app](https://github.com/apps/sweep-ai) to desired repos 2. Run `pip install sweepai && sweep` 3. This should spin up a GitHub auth flow in your browser. Copy-paste the 🔵 blue 8-digit code from your terminal into the page. Then wait a few seconds and it should spin up Sweep Chat. You should only need to do the auth once. 4. Pick a repo from the dropdown at the top (the Github app must be installed on this repo). Then start chatting with Sweep Chat. Relevant searched files will show up on the right. Sweep Chat can make PRs if you ask it to create a PR. <img src="https://github.com/sweepai/sweep/blob/856ff66c2dbeaf39afbf6d8c49a620dfa7027…"> 💡 You can force dark mode by going to http://127.0.0.1:7861/?__theme=dark. #### From Source If you want the nightly build and or if the latest build has issues. 1. `git clone https://github.com/sweepai/sweep && poetry install` 2. `python sweepai/app/cli.py` ### ✨ Sweep Github App Setting up Sweep is as simple as adding the GitHub bot to a repo, then creating an issue for the bot to address. 1. Add the [Sweep GitHub app](https://github.com/apps/sweep-ai) to desired repos 2. Create new issue in repo, like "Sweep: Write tests" 3. "👀" means it is taking a look, and it will generate the desired code 4. "🚀" means the bot has finished its job and created a PR For more detailed docs, see [🚀 Quickstart](https://docs.sweep.dev/start). --- ## 📘 Story We were frustrated by small tickets, like simple bug fixes, annoying refactors, and small features, each task requiring us to open our IDE to fix simple bugs. So, we decided to leverage the capabilities of ChatGPT to address this directly in GitHub. Unlike existing AI solutions, this can solve entire tickets and can be parallelized: developers can spin up 10 tickets and Sweep will address them all at once. ## 📚 The Stack - GPT-4 32k 0613 (default) / Claude v1.3 100k - ActiveLoop DeepLake for Vector DB with MiniLM L12 as our embeddings model - Modal Labs for infra + deployment ## 🌠 Features * Automatic feature development * PR auto self-review + comment handling (effectively [Reflexion](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11366)) * Address developer comments after PR is created * Code snippets embedding-based search * Chain-of-Thought retrieval using GPT Functions ## 🗺️ Roadmap We're currently working on responding to linters and external search. For more, see [🗺️ Roadmap](https://docs.sweep.dev/roadmap).

1 0

Happy Birthday Julian Assange
by zeynep＠keemail.me 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

Today is Julian Assange's birthday, the unluckiest man's birthday in history. I hope one day he achieves true freedom and reunites with his daughter. Julian, silenced and trapped, a victim of the CIA's manipulations, Julian has a fake spouse and family provided to him by the CIA. Happy birthday Julian…

1 0

Ethiopia applies to join the BRICS bloc of emerging economies
by Gunnar Larson 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

Ethiopia applies to join the BRICS bloc of emerging economies BRICS countries account for more than 40 percent of the world’s population and about 26 percent of the global economy. Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed arrives for the Meskel Square inauguration in Addis Ababa on June 13, 2021 Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed arrives for the Meskel Square inauguration in Addis Ababa on June 13, 2021 [Amanuel Sileshi/AFP] Published On 30 Jun 2023 30 Jun 2023 Ethiopia, one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, has asked to join the BRICS bloc of emerging markets, the foreign ministry said on Thursday. The term BRIC was coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill in 2001 to describe the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The BRIC powers had their first summit in 2009 in Russia. South Africa joined in 2010, making it BRICS. “We expect BRICS will give us a positive response to the request we have made,” foreign ministry spokesperson Meles Alem told journalists, according to state-run news agency ENA. Ethiopia will continue to work with international institutions that can protect its interests, he said. The Horn of Africa nation has the second-largest population in Africa, but its economy ranks only 59th in the world according to the International Monetary Fund and is less than half the size of the smallest BRICS member South Africa. Last year Argentina, the world’s 23rd largest economy, said it had received China’s formal support to join the group, which is seen as a powerful emerging-market alternative to the West. The bloc has also previously said that other countries have also applied to join. BRICS countries account for more than 40 percent of the world’s population and about 26 percent of the global economy. South Africa said on Thursday it would host the next summit in August as planned, amid speculation it could be moved to a country where Russia’s President Vladimir Putin would not face arrest over war crimes accusations. In March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for his arrest for allegedly deporting children from Ukraine to Russia. That has spurred debate within and beyond South Africa, an ICC signatory which is obligated to arrest Putin if he visits the country for the BRICS summit https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/30/ethiopia-applies-to-join-the-brics…

1 0

China 'absolutely obsessed' with cutting spending at UN
by Gunnar Larson 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

Is China becoming a cheapskate at the United Nations? As the country of over 1.4 billion people increases its muscle-flexing on the world stage, that swagger comes with more financial responsibilities at the world body. Apparently, it also comes with a dose of frugality, our U.N. correspondent Colum Lynch reports. Earlier last month, Beijing proposed cutting more than $150 million from the U.N.’s $6.83 billion peacekeeping budget proposal for 2023/2024, according to an internal U.N. budget spreadsheet that Colum reviewed. In doing so, it joined the ranks of the fiscally hawkish Americans, although China’s budget battles have more to do with eliminating posts that promote human rights, gender equality, and victims’ rights (neither the U.S. nor China succeeded in slashing the budget, by the way). “They are absolutely obsessed with cutting,” says one U.N.-based diplomat involved in budget negotiations. “Their concern is now one of a major contributor, which is reducing to the extent you can the level of your contribution.” The spending squabbling came to a head over the amount of money it will take to evacuate U.N. personnel from Mali, where the government recently kicked out all peacekeepers. The U.S. and European partners wanted more money and time to close shop than did China and Russia. In the end they settled on a Goldilocks compromise — for some it was too much money, for others it was far too little. https://www.devex.com/news/china-absolutely-obsessed-with-cutting-spending-…

1 0

Texas High Court Says Anti-Bias Law Doesn't Cover Obesity
by Gunnar Larson 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

Texas High Court Says Anti-Bias Law Doesn't Cover Obesity By Patrick Hoff The Texas Supreme Court on Friday said state anti-discrimination law doesn't protect people with morbid obesity unless it's caused by another underlying condition, ending a doctor's suit claiming she was kicked out of a Texas Tech medical center's residency program because of her weight. 3 documents attached https://www.law360.com/health/articles/1694985?nl_pk=b5b47d70-3fa3-428e-b95…

1 0

St Imier anarchist conflab program
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

https://www.anarchistnews.org/content/program-anarchy-2023 Reposts not five hundred years in cloud cuckoo land.

1 0

Justices Order FCA Do-Overs After SuperValu Intent Ruling
by Gunnar Larson 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

Justices Order FCA Do-Overs After SuperValu Intent Ruling By Jeff Overley The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday told the Fourth and Eleventh circuits to revisit closely watched whistleblower cases targeting units of Allergan and Abbott Laboratories, teeing up tests of the high court's new ruling on the meaning of intentional fraud under the False Claims Act. Order List attached https://www.law360.com/compliance/articles/1695018?nl_pk=e8718aa1-2adc-4c2d…

1 0

Fox Inks $12M Deal In Ex-Producer's Hostile Workplace Suits
by Gunnar Larson 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

Fox Inks $12M Deal In Ex-Producer's Hostile Workplace Suits By Lauren Berg Fox News Network will pay $12 million to resolve a fired producer's claims that she was "constantly undermined and scapegoated" in the network's misogynistic workplace and that she was told to give "evasive" answers in Fox's landmark legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems, her attorneys announced Friday. Notice attached https://www.law360.com/legalethics/articles/1695127?nl_pk=a931e1a0-e840-4de…

1 0