Executives from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir Join U.S. Army
June 24th, 2025Via: Business Insider:
Four top tech execs from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir have just joined the US Army — no obstacle courses, shouted orders, or grueling marches required.
The Army Reserve has commissioned these senior tech leaders to serve as midlevel officers, skipping tradition to pursue transformation. The newcomers won’t attend any current version of the military’s most basic and ingrained rite of passage— boot camp.
Instead, they’ll be ushered in through express training that Army leaders are still hashing out, Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for the chief of staff of the Army, said in a phone interview with Business Insider.
“They’ll do marksmanship training, physical training, they’ll learn the Army rank structure and history, and uniforms,” Butler explained. He said that “you could think of it as a pilot” of the boot-camp-lite plans, adding that the new soldiers were a part of the Army’s larger effort to rapidly modernize.
The execs — Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly the chief research officer for OpenAI — are joining the Army as lieutenant colonels as part of an effort to turbocharge tech innovation and adoption, according to an Army press statement.
The service’s decision to allow the four to skip “direct commissioning” boot camp, a shortened version of regular officer boot camp, is unusual, though not without historical precedence, Butler said.
“The Army has allowed the direct commission of civilians since 1861 to bring experts with critically needed skills into the force,” he wrote in an email to BI.
Trump on Israel-Iran Situation: “They Don’t Know What the Fuck They’re Doing”
June 24th, 2025Does it seem like a miracle that the actions of all these imbeciles have not yet resulted in a mushroom cloud?
President Trump on Israel and Iran: "We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing." pic.twitter.com/xrztmebALZ
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 24, 2025
Norwegian Tourist Barred from Entering the U.S. After ICE Found Meme Showing JD Vance with a Bald Head on His Phone
June 24th, 2025You might be a terrorist if… pic.twitter.com/mwbwOqEDok
— cryptogon (@cryptogon) June 24, 2025
Via: Daily Mail:
A Norwegian tourist claims he was harassed and refused entry to the US after immigration officers found a meme of JD Vance on his phone.
Mads Mikkelsen, 21, arrived at New Jersey’s Newark Airport on June 11, excited about his holiday.
But, his plans were thrown into disarray when he was reportedly pulled aside by border control and put in a cell.
The tourist was then subjected to what he described to Norwegian outlet Nordlys as an ‘abuse, of power and harassment’.
‘They asked questions about drug trafficking, terrorist plots and right-wing extremism totally without reason,’ he told the outlet.
Mr Mikkelsen, claimed the officers then threatened him with a $5,000 fine or five years in prison if he refused to give the password to his mobile phone.
The guards reportedly found a meme on the device’s camera roll showing US vice president JD Vance with a bald, egg-shaped head.
Musk Wants Grok AI to “Rewrite the Entire Corpus of Human Knowledge”
June 23rd, 2025Tell us another one, Elon.
Via: Coin Telegraph:
Elon Musk says his artificial intelligence company xAI will retrain its AI model, Grok, on a new knowledge base free of “garbage” and “uncorrected data” — by first using it to rewrite history.
In an X post on Saturday, Musk said the upcoming Grok 3.5 model will have “advanced reasoning” and wanted it to be used “to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.”
He said the model would then retrain on the new knowledge set, claiming there was “far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.”
Computer Engineering Grads Face Double The Unemployment Rate Of Art History Majors
June 23rd, 2025Via: ZeroHedge:
Computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate of art history majors, according to the most recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The stats show art history majors have a 3 percent unemployment rate while computer engineering grads have a 7.5 percent unemployment rate. Computer science grads are in a similar boat, with a 6.1 percent rate.
The trend appears notable among STEM majors.
Graphic design is at 7.2 percent, chemistry at 6.1 percent and fine arts at 7.1 percent. Physics and sociology — which represent both sides of the spectrum — came in with similar numbers, with 7.8 percent and 6.7, respectively.
The highest on the list is anthropology at 9.4 percent. The lowest is nutritional sciences at .4 percent.
IRAN PARLIAMENT: STRAIT OF HORMUZ SHOULD BE CLOSED
June 22nd, 2025Update: U-Turning Oil Supertankers Cross Hormuz After Avoiding It
Via: Bloomberg:
Two supertankers, each capable of hauling about 2 million barrels of crude, headed through the Hormuz shipping strait at the mouth of the Persian gulf, having performed U-turns in the past 24 hours.
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?? Major General Kowsari, member of the National Security Commission of the Parliament: The Parliament has reached the conclusion that the Strait of Hormuz should be closed, but the final decision in this regard lies with the Supreme National Security Council. pic.twitter.com/sWd0rsOBsA
— Press TV Breaking (@PTVBreaking1) June 22, 2025
Via: New York Post:
Iran’s parliament has voted to close the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping channel through which around 20% of the world’s daily oil flows.
The move, which could block $1 billion in oil shipments per day, is likely to send oil prices soaring.
It will come into effect pending a final decision by Iran’s Supreme Council.
Army Colonel Removed From U.S. Joint Chiefs Staff Over Israel Criticism
June 21st, 2025Via: ZeroHedge:
A United States Army colonel has been removed from his position on the Pentagon staff supporting the Joint Chiefs after his Israel-critical social media posts were publicized by Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). Until this week, Army Col Nathan McCormack led the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Levant and Egypt branch. That team is part of the Joint Staff J5, which proposes strategies, plans, and policy recommendations to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
…
Here are the published comments that led to McCormack’s removal:
May 2025: “Netanyahu and his judeosupremacist cronies are determined to prolong the conflict for their own goals: either to remain in power or to annex the land.”
June 2024: “The more Israel’s death cult escalates toward Hezbollah, the more we will see show-of-force attacks like this and 13 April.”
June 2024: “The U.S. has not been an honest broker. We have overwhelmingly enabled Israel’s bad behavior.”
May 2024: Amid talk of pushing Gaza residents into other countries, McCormack wrote, “[Israel] wants to expel them and cleanse ‘Eretz Israel’ of ethnic Palestinians.”
April 2024: “I’ve lately been considering whether we might be Israel’s proxy and not realized it yet. Our worst ‘ally.’ We get literally nothing out of the ‘partnership’ other than the enmity of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.”
Oct 2023: “I agree that Israel has an absolute right to respond militarily, and that civilians may legally be caught in the crossfire, but you are ignoring the requirement of proportionality. Israel’s responses always (always—not hyperbole) disproportionately target Palestinian civilians.”
U.S. HAS ATTACKED IRAN’S NUCLEAR FACILITIES
June 21st, 2025Update: Hannity: B-2 Stealth Bombers and Tomahawk Missiles Were Used in Attack
Via: Fox:
Sean Hannity said on Saturday night that President Donald Trump gave him details on the U.S. strikes in Iran. According to the “Hannity” host, the U.S. used six bunker buster bombs —each of which weighs 15 tons — in its strikes on Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility. The bombs were dropped from American B-2 stealth bombers.
Fordow had two entrances and one ventilation shaft, which likely served as the entrance points for the Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs).
Additionally, 30 Tomahawk missiles launched from U.S. submarines were used in the attacks on the Nanatz and Isfahan facilities. There is speculation that the missiles were shot from Ohio Class Submarine, but there has been no confirmation.
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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2025
Via: The War Zone:
The U.S. has directly entered the war against Iran, striking three nuclear facilities, President Donald Trump announced via social media. The attack came on the ninth day of the Israel-Iran war in which Israeli forces have been attacking Iranian nuclear weapons facilities among other targets, including ballistic missile launchers, air defense systems, military leaders and nuclear scientists. You can catch up with our coverage of this fight here.
“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan,” Trump stated on Truth Social. “All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Britain: “NHS Plans to DNA Test All Babies to Assess Disease Risk”
June 21st, 2025I don’t even know where to start…
Via: BBC:
Every newborn baby in England will have their DNA mapped to assess their risk of hundreds of diseases, under NHS plans for the next 10 years.
The scheme, first reported by the Daily Telegraph, is part of a government drive towards predicting and preventing illness, which will also see £650m invested in DNA research for all patients by 2030.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said gene technology would enable the health service to “leapfrog disease, so we’re in front of it rather than reacting to it”.
It comes after a study analysing the genetic code of up to 100,000 babies was announced in October.
The government’s 10-year plan for the NHS, which is set to be revealed over the coming few weeks, is aimed at easing pressure on services.
The Department for Health and Social Care said that genomics – the study of genes – and AI would be used to “revolutionise prevention” and provide faster diagnoses and an “early warning signal for disease”.
ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills
June 21st, 2025Via: Time:
The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.
