Author: Vidya Saras

Could Nigel Farage really be the next UK Prime Minister? It’s a question that, a mere five years ago, would have sounded rather like asking if we’d ever see Piers Morgan run the Ministry of Manners. And yet here we are, with Farage’s Reform UK party reportedly garnering a surge in new members—apparently outrunning the Conservatives in the membership stakes, and boasting a younger, more dynamic support base by a margin of at least 15 years. The Tory old guard, presumably, is drinking yet another cup of lukewarm tea in some draughty community hall, while the new kids on the…

I have just finished reading Debt: The First 5000 Years by anthropologist David Graeber. The book takes a look at the history of money, debt, and how they relate to societal structures from a lens that departs heavily from the conventional wisdom of economic thinking. Conventional wisdom paints a picture of people inefficiently bartering goods and services directly for each other, and money naturally arising as a result of the problems inherent in this. Graeber eviscerates this narrative looking at anthropological history. Primitive communities simply shared their resources freely with each other, living in a communal lifestyle, with bartering rarely…

Bitwise, a leading digital asset management firm, has lodged a new registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), dated December 26, 2024, seeking approval for the “Bitwise Bitcoin Standard ETF.” The filing describes a fund that aims to invest in publicly traded companies that hold significant amounts of BTC on their balance sheets or derive a substantial part of their revenue from BTC-related activities. “The Adviser believes that investing in equities of companies with substantial BTC-related business or assets can provide exposure to the performance of Bitcoin while mitigating challenges such as custody, regulatory constraints, and liquidity…

With The Merge now firmly behind us, protocol developers have been making progress across a (record?) number of areas over the past few months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle tries, history expiry, SSZ and more have all seen significant progress recently! In order to help move each of these threads forward, and to run through one more series of Shapella stress tests, client team members gathered in person for a week-long interop event in Austria: Edelweiss 🏔️ Unlike Amphora, which had a singular focus on The Merge, this event had two major tracks, focused on the Shapella and ProtoDanksharding network upgrades…

Popular idle RPG Immortal Rising 2 has started its Launchpool Season 2, giving players a chance to earn $IMT tokens through gameplay and daily activities.Running from December 20, 2024, to January 9, 2025, this event introduces new missions and mechanics designed to expand participation and rewards.With a total prize pool of 50 million $IMT—5% of the token’s total supply—players can compete across two distinct reward tracks by collecting soulbound tokens (SBTs) and ORBs. These rewards offer players an early opportunity to secure $IMT tokens before their official launch in Q1 2025. Source: Immortal Rising 2What’s new in Season 2?Launchpool Season…

Scams have entered almost every industry from online shopping to financial services. Cloud mining is no different. Scams have entered almost every industry from online shopping to financial services. Cloud mining is no different. People who want to earn cryptocurrency often get tricked by fake promises or unclear offers. So, finding both honest and open platforms becomes even more necessary to avoid getting tricked by false promises. Just like in other industries, transparency matters a lot in cloud mining. Users need to know exactly where their money is going, how it’s being used, and what they can expect in return.…

Many pieces of AI-generated content were used to express support for or fandom of certain candidates. For instance, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the BeeGees song “Stayin’ Alive” was shared millions of times on social media, including by Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican.“It’s all about social signaling. It’s all the reasons why people share this stuff. It’s not AI. You’re seeing the effects of a polarized electorate,” says Bruce Schneier, a public interest technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It’s not like we had perfect elections throughout our history and now…

Rather than protecting agents of death, Biden could have tried to change our culture into one that recognizes the humanity of the unborn.

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has made significant strides with the development of large-scale language models (LLMs). However, this progress has brought its own set of challenges. Training and inference require substantial computational resources, the availability of diverse, high-quality datasets is critical, and achieving balanced utilization in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures remains complex. These factors contribute to inefficiencies and increased costs, posing obstacles to scaling open-source models to match proprietary counterparts. Moreover, ensuring robustness and stability during training is an ongoing issue, as even minor instabilities can disrupt performance and necessitate costly interventions. DeepSeek-AI just gave a Christmas present…

Wenn Ihre erste Verteidigungslinie fällt, haben Cyberschurken leichtes Spiel.Leremy | shutterstock.com Security-Awareness-Schulungen sind für Unternehmen und Organisationen obligatorisch und sollten Teil jeder übergreifenden Cybersecurity-Strategie sein. Zumindest, wenn sämtliche Mitarbeiter möglichst gut über alle relevanten Sicherheitsrisiken aufgeklärt sein und bestmöglich zum Schutz unternehmenskritischer Assets beitragen sollen. Insofern zielen Security-Awareness-Trainings in erster Linie darauf ab, Cyberrisiken in Zusammenhang mit menschlichem Handeln zu reduzieren. Das Ziel besteht darin, den Mitarbeitern Wissen über Bedrohungen zu vermitteln, um diese zu verstehen, zu erkennen und zu vermeiden. Parallel gilt es jedoch sicherzustellen, dass die Angestellten ihren Aufgaben auch so effektiv wie möglich nachkommen können. In diesem…