Alienation Is Emancipation
Iran threatens ‘complete and utter annihilation’ of OpenAI’s $30B Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi — regime posts video with satellite imagery of ChatGPT-maker’s premier 1GW data center. - Tom’s Hardware
“Since Kant, the role of philosophy has been to prevent reason going beyond the limits of what is given in experience; but from the same moment - that is, from the development of modern states and political management of society - the role of philosophy has also been to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality - which is rather a promising life expectancy.” - Michel Foucault, 1981a, “Omnes et Singulatim”, 225
Araghchi: Silence in the face of such blatant aggression will plunge the world into an unprecedented level of danger and chaos. Humanity has come too far as a species to allow a lawless bully to take us back to the law of the jungle. The Islamic Republic of Iran calls on the Security Council to convene an emergency session to unequivocally condemn the criminal act of aggression by the United States against Iran and to hold the administration in Washington accountable for its violations of the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter and the norms of international law.
India produces the most movies of any country, and stars such as Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan command cult-like followings. But shifting audience habits, including the rise of streaming, are squeezing production budgets, many industry players say. The number of moviegoers fell to 832 million in 2025 from 1.03 billion in 2019, according to consulting firm Ormax Media. While box-office sales hit a record $1.4 billion last year, revenue has been choppy since the pandemic and reliant on a handful of hits and pricier tickets. Studios in India are responding by deploying AI at a scale unseen elsewhere: creating full-fledged AI-generated films; using AI dubbing to release movies in numerous languages; and recutting endings of older titles to eke out additional sales. In the process, they are reshaping the economics of filmmaking, compressing production timelines, and pitting AI-driven efficiency against a recurring problem: Audiences have often reviewed AI content harshly, even when it sells. .."AI is slashing production costs to one-fifth of what they used to be for traditional filmmaking in genres such as mythology and fantasy,” said Rahul Regulapati, who heads Collective’s AI studio, known as Galleri5. And production time? "Down to a quarter,” he said…"In India, cinema isn’t about art. It’s purely business, so studios are going to use it to make mythologicals,” Kashyap said of AI. "Our audience is a sucker for it.” - Japan Times
If you could type a series of sentences into a computer and have it generate a videogame for you, would you? Well, you can—kind of. Tesana is one of a few companies promising that we can all make games simply by typing prompts into a generative AI system. In tandem with third-party AI services like Claude and asset generators, its proprietary game engine “translates descriptions of environments, mechanics, characters, and rules into structured game code.” - PCGamer
The tech billionaire and MAGA supporter Peter Thiel – who comes very close to an actual figure of the antichrist – is permanently attacking his opponents as figures of the antichrist….(W)e should not reduce Thiel to a figure in the Trumpian universe. The US global hegemony is now gradually dissolving, and Trump’s attempts to behave like a master of the world intervening anywhere he wants, from Venezuela to Iran, are in their very arbitrary and excessive form more and more a comedy – a dark comedy, but nonetheless a comedy. The US hegemony was not just a bad thing – for example, it did help to maintain peace in Europe in the Cold War years. Now this hegemony is not declining just because of the rise of other superpowers: Trump himself, with his chaotic policy, is accelerating this decline. However, even if the ongoing Iran war will turn out to be the end of the Trump reign as he practiced it in the last year, Thiel’s vision will remain relevant, inclusive of its basic paradox of fighting against the antichrist from a position which ultimately is that of the antichrist. Is this not the truth of nationalist‑populist Christians? Are they not the ultimate figure of the antichrist today?..I think that, in a deeper sense, Thiel is right against pure technocrats. Digital technocracy cannot survive alone; it needs some kind of spiritual foundation, and since our societies are predominantly Christian, the most obvious way is to present their antichristian stance as true Christianity – a nonsense, but a nonsense which obviously works. As a matter of fact, I much prefer to Thiel Ali Larijani, the recently “eliminated” grey eminence of the Iranian regime, who graduated in Artificial Intelligence and wrote three books on Immanuel Kant – since Larijani was a close confidant of Ali Khamenei, no wonder we find a book with a big portrait of Kant clearly visible on the cover behind the left shoulder of Khamenei. - Goads
The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people), according to a new Oxfam analysis published on April 2, 2026, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers. - Downtoearth
Poll finds 51% of Canadians want aid sent to Cuba even if it angers U.S.
“When you are willing, there is an immense amount of possibility.” - Zohran Mamdani
Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S.
What if the whole LLM thing is a false start? If the flaws are inherent systemic problems - if the compounding of hallucinations/errors can't be sorted out? If the capex build out is one of the biggest misallocations of capital ever? Then what? - Bloomberg
Trump’s respect for King Charles possibly quashed desire to annex Canada, says royal commentator. U.S. president was unaware Charles is Canada’s head of state, Robert Hardman writes in new book. - CBC
We’re into a new year, and once again, Statistics Canada data shows that corporate profits hit a record $677 billion in 2025. This new peak exceeds even the levels reached during the rampant profiteering and price gouging we saw during the pandemic. Much of this growth came from the financial sector, which recorded over $200 billion in annual profits for the first time. Although profits naturally rise over time with inflation, last year’s record can’t be explained by inflation alone. Instead, the corporate profit rate—the share of revenue left after covering operating costs—has been steadily climbing. In 2025, it reached 10.7 percent, the third highest in the past 30 years, after 2021 and 2022. Over the past two decades, the corporate profit rate has grown steadily. In the 2000s, it averaged around six percent, rising to roughly eight percent in the 2010s. Since 2021, however, it has jumped into double digits and hasn’t fallen below 10 percent. - Candian Dimension