2024-12-25T19:10:04Z Read in app Angle down iconAn icon in the shape of an angle pointing down. Elon Musk has racked up some wins and some losses since becoming a major MAGA power player. AP Photo/Matt Rourke This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.Have an account? Elon Musk went all-in to get Trump elected. Now, he's trying to shake up Washington.He's racked up some wins so far. But some of the limits of his influence are coming into view.Here's a running list of Musk's wins and losses since Trump was reelected.Since pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into helping President-elect Donald Trump win the 2024 election, Elon Musk has emerged as a major Washington power player.Musk has the ear of the incoming president, is set to co-lead a "Department of Government Efficiency" initiative with Vivek Ramaswamy, and has already demonstrated an ability to influence the course of major legislation.He hasn't won every single time, though. Musk's brash style has clashed at times with how Washington typically works, and he's encountered some losses here and there.Here's a running list of where Musk has won as he's sought to influence Washington and where he's lost. Loss: Trying to get Rick Scott elected as Senate GOP leaderSen. Rick Scott won just 13 votes after Musk loudly backed his candidacy to be the next Senate Majority Leader. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images The week after Trump's reelection, Musk made his first major foray into the politics of Washington, enthusiastically backing Sen. Rick Scott of Florida to become the next Senate GOP leader.Over the course of a dayslong online pressure campaign led by several MAGA-world voices, Musk referred to one of Scott's competitors, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, as the "top choice of Democrats." Senators privately grumbled that they were being bullied by outside figures.It didn't work.Scott received just 13 votes, and Thune a close ally of outgoing Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell won the prize instead.One key factor in Scott's loss may have been the fact that the vote was conducted via secret ballot, insulating senators from public backlash. Win, for now: Lawmakers' rapturous embrace of DOGESen. Joni Ernst is one of dozens of Republicans who've enthusiastically embraced DOGE. Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images Perhaps the biggest win for Musk on Capitol has been lawmakers' outpouring of support for DOGE.When Musk and Ramaswamy visited Capitol Hill in December, they were greeted like celebrities, with Republicans eyeing the government-efficiency initiative as an opportunity to enact all sorts of spending cuts they've long sought.Some Democrats are even interested in getting involved, particularly when it comes to defense cuts.What remains to be seen, however, is what DOGE ends up becoming in practice and whether Musk and Ramaswamy are able to implement the trillions of dollars in spending cuts they've floated. Win: Trump appoints a key ally to chair the FCCTrump named Brendan Carr as the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images. Musk is likely to benefit significantly from Trump naming Brendan Carr to chair the Federal Communications Commission.It's not just that Carr might be generally favorable toward Musk. He's also emerged as a public cheerleader of the billionaire businessman, including posting a photo with him earlier this year on X.Carr has publicly gone to bat for Musk before, including sending a letter to Brazilian regulators excoriating them for enacting a "cascading set of apparently unlawful and partisan political actions" after the country briefly banned X.Musk may also benefit financially. The FCC oversees the country's broadband systems, and Musk's Starlink could see a windfall under the incoming Trump administration.When the FCC denied government subsidies to Starlink and another broadband provider in 2022, Carr blasted the decision. Loss: Trying to get a kids' online safety bill passed at the last minuteSens. Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal, the lead cosponsors of the Kids Online Safety Act. Drew Angerer/Getty Images In December, Musk threw his support behind the Kids Online Safety Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that would force social media sites to alter their design to protect users under the age of 17.Versions of the bill have been around since 2022, and online safety has become a bipartisan concern on Capitol Hill in recent years.While the bill passed the Senate in June, it's been stalled in the House, where some Republicans have raised freedom-of-speech concerns. Musk and X helped negotiated a revised version of the bill in a bid to gain more support.That effort was shot down by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who told reporters that the bill wouldn't be moving before the end of the year. Win, sort of: Tanking a government funding billHouse Speaker Mike Johnson scrapped a short-term government funding bill after a pressure campaign led by Musk. Allison Robbert / AFP via Getty Images Musk's highest-profile flexing of his muscles on Capitol Hill happened in mid-December, when he led an online pressure campaign that resulted in the tanking of a short-term government funding bill.The billionaire businessman and other conservatives cast the legislation as an example of just the kind of wasteful spending they're hoping to eliminate via DOGE.In doing so, he got out ahead of Trump, who didn't weigh in on the legislation until well after it became clear that it wouldn't advance. That led Democrats to mockingly refer to Musk as the real leader of the GOP, a notion that Trump's team sought to tamp down.While Musk succeeded in killing the initial bill, lawmakers didn't end up shutting down the government, as he suggested they should.And Congress eventually passed a spending bill that, while significantly shorter than the initial bill Musk opposed, did many of the same things.At one point, Musk publicly wondered if it was a "Republican bill or a Democrat bill." Close iconTwo crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification.

As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to provide a sort of state of the union on the years movie monstersa quick analysis of whats still regarded to be scary. However, upon reflection, what was envisioned as 21st century bestiary began to look less like a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual and more like the aisles of my local Walmart. As the old world dies and the new world struggles to be born, it seems the monsters of 2024 may represent the same fears, but have taken on a more mundane hue. As Im not sure what to do with this information, submitted for your approval is io9s 2024 monster revue. The Familiar A Quiet Place: Day One Paramount In a year that saw the re-election of a former president to office, an ongoing war in the Middle East, escalating nuclear brinksmanship, and the return of bird flu, 2024 carried with it a grimy sense of repetition. The feeling were going to double down on exactly what we tried earlier, only more so, with a full trilogy of material in a mind so its bound to pay off like never before, right? Its no coincidence, then, that the year that was saw new variations of A Quiet Place, Alien, The Omen, Rosemarys Baby, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, Godzilla, Hellboy, Salems Lot, The Crow, The Strangerseven Witchboard, the likes of which we havent heard from since a direct-to-video sequel in 1995. Currently, it seems like theres no end in sight for the return of recognizable IP of yesteryear, with new Saw, Conjuring, Insidious, Fear Street, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Final Destination movies scheduled for release next year. Not to mention 28 Years Later, another nostalgia piece boasting a trailer on track to become the most-watched horror trailer of all time.As we enter 2025, this devil you know attitude will extend to Universal once again doubling down on its stable of classic monsters, trading the companys previous attempt at a shared cinematic universe for bespoke takes on Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy from no less than the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Leigh Whannell, and Lee Cronin, respectively. Nosferatu Focus Features Today even sees the release of a new Nosferatu, replete with a marketing campaign hopeful to make its cozy gothic trappings into a new Christmas tradition. Its interesting then that movie audiences have largely rejected vampireswith an emphasis on this vampire, in particularthe last few years with films like Abigail, Renfield, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter failing to make much of an impact on either the culture or box office.The hallmarks of Dracula and/or Nosferatufeeding on the blood of others, self-isolating, yet maintaining tremendous wealth and influence over othersthese are good things wholly endorsed by the culture. The kids call it being sigma. What feels particularly new about this ongoing trend of sticking with what we know, though, is the sudden reverence weve developed toward the humble slasher genreformally regarded to be horrors bottom-of the-barrel. Though yesterdays cultural detritus becoming tomorrows critical darlings is nothing new (recent Best Picture winners have included stories about a fish-man falling in love with a human woman; a universe where people evolved pork products in place of phalanges; and a socially minded take on the ABC Movie of the Week, Bad Ronald), nothing thats achieved this level of cultural significance has been so laser-focused on gore effects. The two-and-half-hour Terrifier movies have more in common with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis than Dario Argento. In a Violent Nature, which reimagined a film like Friday the 13th or Madman from the perspective of its undead killer, added an experimental flourish to the genres classically simple narrative, emphasizing the thin wall differentiating films like these from the French New Wave really are the occasional splats of blood. Jesse Korman/Dark Age Cinema Though the envelope-pushing Terrifier franchise may seem like a litmus test for human empathy, it should be noted people legitimately like Art the Clown and his unrated Harpo Marx-meets-Freddy Krueger routine. Anything too subversive wouldnt be able to find this audience. Its for this reason Im legitimately intrigued by a movie that did not come out this year: Macon Blairs remake of The Toxic Avenger. Something about a politically motivated judge, jury, and executioner of big business assets was deemed too radioactive to release. I wonder why Media I Saw the TV Glow A24 Convergent with the continued popularity of the slasher film has been the taboo-shredding approach of having them star childrens characters who have recently slipped into the public domain. In the last year, new slashers have been announced starring Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Bambi, Popeye, Steamboat Willie, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid, and the Mad Hatter. Something about transposing characters meant to draw as much revenue as possible into the realm of bloodthirsty killers feels correct in a way thats both timely and inevitablenot to mention punk rock. Once a IP falls into the hands of the people, is not the only moral thing to do to turn into a monster? Especially if all roads have lead to 2024, the consensus must be Mickey and company sold us a bill of goods the first time around.One need only lightly dust YouTube these days for an endless array of video essays on dark Pokmon theories or an unusually frightening PlayStation 2 game starring Piglet. In these circles, a lost Cartoon Network bumper or unproduced episode of SpongeBob Squarepants is spoken of in the same hushed reverence as unexploded nuclear ordinance. When everything is available online, something that isntno matter how innocuoussuddenly becomes suspicious and arcane. If we used to tell children scary stories so they wouldnt venture into the woods alone, lost media hunters must at least be deterring each other from sharing their credit card info with seedy collectors on the dark net. Recent films like I Saw the TV Glow understand the sort of fanatical devotion investing too much of yourself in childrens media can bringthe kind people used to describe as Lovecraftian, but is now referred to by terms like Disney Adult. To a generation where Cthulhu has been available as a plush doll their entire life, the Great Old Ones may just as well have been Garfield and friends, all along. Smile 2 is another film from the last year to understand this, following on the heels of films like The Ring and It Follows, where curses are spread as transmissible memes that move like virusesand even our celebrities arent immune.Smile 2 Paramount Pictures As of 2024, cosmic horror is strictly earthbound and though the beliefs of its media savvy cultists may seem silly to you, you dont need to believe in the destructive powers of their particular fandom as long as they do. Technology Subservience XYZ Films The last year has also seen a number of movies monster-ifying AI and bleeding-edge technologymovies like Subservience and Afraid, in which machines meant to improve our quality of life are personally invited into the home, vampire-like, only to reveal some unsavory appetites of their own. However, as terrified as we are of robots taking our jobs, weve paradoxically also collectively lost faith in the concept of technological progress. Weve had movies about homicidal robot nannies, toys, smart homes, and personal assistants, but weve yet to reach that singularity in which this burgeoning technology does anything scarier than being better at the thing youve outrageously defined yourself to be.As our government continues to admit our airspace is and has always been occupied by physics-defying aircraft beyond human comprehension, Im reminded of Jordan Peeles 2022 feature Nope, which suggested UFOs are secretly some sort of insatiably hungry, atmospheric beast our zoologists have yet to recognize or catalog. Somehow, its easier to believe. Which brings us to Life Itself/Old People Apartment 7A Paramount Pictures Much like AI replacing us in the workforce, one of the more curious trends of the last year have been a string of monster movies focusing onin one form or anotherdoppelgngers. Whether a heretofore unknown biological entity as in Cuckoo, a demonic presence as in Never Let Go and Daddys Head, or a voluntarily engineered proxy of oneself as in The Substance, the anxiety at the heart of these stories resides not in becoming a monster, personally, but in being superseded by oneand potentially missing out on the cool things a monster gets to do. Nightbitch, a recent film in which Amy Adams transforms into a dog as an expression of her repressed rage, is posed as a net positive. The idea of losing control has tremendous appeal lately. Just like Demi Moores fear of irrelevancy in The Substance, the real fear is being left behind. Speaking of, if 2024 could be defined by a single persistent boogeyman, the title would unanimously have to be given to old people. Films like Heretic, Apartment 7A, and Alien: Romulus, have featured the elderly (if not the outrightly late, as in the specter of poor Ian Holm in Romulus) tormenting the young for a plethora of reasons, varying from financial gain to merely proving theyre still relevant from the comfort of their own booby-trapped homes.People often fail to see a distinction between mummies and zombies, but the difference between them is noteworthy. Mummies are distinct from zombies in that a zombie is something clinically dead, but somehow still behaves as if its alive. A mummy is something that by all means should be dead, yet somehow biologically is still alivejust as how the Khariss heart continues to beat by virtue of the tana leaves in Universals The Mummys Hand, The Mummys Tomb, The Mummys Ghost, and The Mummys Curse. With the release of Nosferatu today, in Count Orlok we have a familiar, elderly, copyright-infringing ghoul from the dawn of film who simply refuses to go away. The right man for the time, indeed. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

SB 44 Residential Building / CO Ideias e Projectos de Arquitectura Lda.Save this picture! Loureno Teixeira de AbreuApartmentsLisboa, PortugalArchitects: CO Ideias e Projectos de ArquitecturaAreaArea of this architecture projectArea:795 mYearCompletion year of this architecture project Year: 2023 PhotographsPhotographs:Loureno Teixeira de Abreu Lead Architect: Joo Bucho More SpecsLess SpecsSave this picture!Text description provided by the architects. Building SB 44, located in the So Bento neighborhood, in Lisbon, Portugal, is the result of the renovation of a "Gaioleiro" city building from the end of the 19th century. Its construction is characterized by thick perimeter walls, in mortared stone, with wooden floors, Lioz stone window frames, ceramic tile roof and a facade covered in traditional tiles.Save this picture!The building consists of two volumes. At the front, the main residential volume, with 5 floors, and at the back, a two-story warehouse that served the commerce that existed on the ground floor.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The intention of preserving the identity and chronology of the building dictated that the facades were maintained and preserved, innovating in the interior. Small apartments were created, meeting the demand at the time. Traditional materials were used, such as pine flooring, color patterned cement tiles, Lioz stone. Atriums and corridors stood out for their contrast, with a bolder design, favoring concrete, metal and integrated lighting.Save this picture!The connection between the two volumes is materialized with a wooden pergola, and a minimalist garden, with tree bark and a birch tree in the center.Save this picture!Project gallerySee allShow lessProject locationAddress:R. de So Bento 44, Lisboa, PortugalLocation to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.About this officePublished on December 25, 2024Cite: "SB 44 Residential Building / CO Ideias e Projectos de Arquitectura Lda." 25 Dec 2024. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1023771/sb-44-residential-building-oco-ideias-e-projectos-de-arquitectura-lda&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save!ArchDaily?You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

Pokmon Scarlet and Violet being open-world games have a wide variety of treasures and every day items to find. From Nuggets to Star Pieces, these are the best items to sell ASAP in Pokmon Scarlet and Violet.

Jujutsu Kaisens final volume is officially out and with it, fans got a new epilogue chapter which only added to the already established ending of the series. It is safe to say that JJKs epilogue chapter was incredibly exciting as fans saw attention being turned to the likes of Panda, Nobara, Sukuna, Uraume, and last but not least, the protagonist of the story, Yuji Itadori. For the fans who were expecting a glimpse of Yuji in combat after the war, this wasn't such a good chapter.

With rumors surrounding the Nintendo Switch 2 seeming to reach a fever pitch, it's likely fans can expect to see an announcement of Nintendo's next console in the near future. While the details surrounding the Nintendo Switch 2 are still largely grounded in unconfirmed leaks and rumors, it seems likely that the console will retain much of the current Switch's designincluding the iconic Joy-Con controllers. If this is the case, Nintendo can take the Switch 2's Joy-Cons to even greater heights by doubling down on an existing feature that has become one of the console's most well-received.

Nvidias GB200 NVL4 boosts mid-range computing with cutting-edge architecture, PCIe connectivity, and energy efficiency for next-generation data center needs.

Something about levitating gadgets intrigues many people, no matter their age. Perhaps because the anti-gravity property of such accessories is perfect for your desk, office cabin, or living room shelf. Be it a speaker, desk lamp, planter or mug if its levitating, it sure is alluring. Now, add to that list a Cybertruck, if you are a fan of the all-electric pickup truck.Tesla has unveiled the Levitating Cybertruck for fans who like the unconventional futuristic looks of the pickup truck which has mixed reviews from automotive pundits out there. As a neutral audience you either love it or hate it. Either way, it has made all the news in the last year. No wonder the levitating replica of the Cybertruck sold out within minutes of its release on the official Tesla shop.Designer: TeslaThe 1:24 scale model of the element-proof truck comes minus any wheels and levitates over a magnetic levitation base. All the cool levitation magic is done using an electromagnetic field just at the right intensity to make it possible to hover the object in mid-air. This levitating Cybertruck looks super cool and something right out of a sci-fi den. Of course, geeks will love its silver-coated form just like the real one, and the fact that it has functional headlights illuminated by 14 LED lights and lifelike taillights.On your desk, the accessory measuring 8.98 inches in length, 3.28 inches in width, and 2.36 inches in height can be a fidget toy as you can give a slight spin to set it in motion. To set it up, all you have to do is, place the base on a nonmetallic flat surface, position the Cybertruck over the base until you feel the magnetic resistance, and place it around the center. Once the truck is balanced you can see the mid-air hovering magic.The limited edition collectible is priced at $250 and were hoping it comes back again in stock so that you can grab one for your work setup. Tesla however has not hinted when this steeply priced desk accessory will stock up again, if itll ever!The post Gravity defying Tesla Cybertruck is a limited edition levitating gadget for your workstation first appeared on Yanko Design.

Graph Neural Networks have emerged as a transformative force in many real-life applications, from corporate finance risk management to local traffic prediction. Thereby, there is no gainsaying that much research has been centered around GNNs for a long time. A significant limitation of the current study, however, is its data dependencywith a focus on supervised and semi-supervised paradigms, the investigations potential depends on the availability of ground truth, a requirement often unmet. Another reason for the sparsity of actual labels is the inherent nature of GNNs themselves. Since a graph is an abstraction of the real world, it is not as straightforward as video, image, or text, requiring expert knowledge and experience.With the prevailing challenges and increasing expenses to solve supervised graph paradigms, researchers have begun a pivot toward unsupervised contrastive learning. It works based on mutual information between different augmented graph views generated by perturbing its nodes, edges, and features. Although this approach is promising and eliminates the necessity of labels, it is not always possible to confirm if the labels and semantics remain unchanged post-augmentation, significantly undermining the graphs performance. To understand the detrimental effects of augmentation, lets take the example of a node. One could add or delete a node in the existing graph, which either adds noise or removes information, both detrimental. Therefore, existing static graph contrastive learning methods may not be optimal for dynamic graphs. This article discusses the latest research that claims to generalize contrastive learning to dynamic graphs.Researchers from Xian Jiaotong University, China, presented CLDG, an efficient unsupervised Contrastive Learning framework on the Dynamic Graph, which performs representation learning on discrete and continuous-time dynamic graphs. It solves the dilemma of selecting periods as contrastive pairs while applying contrastive learning to dynamic graphs. CLDG is a light and highly scalable algorithm, credit due to its simplicity. Users get lower time and space complexity and the opportunity to choose from a pool of encoders.The proposed framework consists of five major components:timespan view sampling layerbase encoderreadout functionprojection headcontrastive loss functionThe research team first generated multiple views from continuous dynamic graphs via a timespan view sampling method. Here, the view sampling layer extracts the temporally persistent signals. They then learned the feature representations of nodes and neighborhoods through a weight-shared encoder, a readout function, and a weight-shared projection head. The authors used statistical-based methods such as average, maximum, and summation for the readout function layer.An important insight to discuss at this point is temporal translation invariance. Under this, it is observed that regardless of the encoder used for training, the prediction labels of the same node tend to be similar in different time spans. The paper presented two separate local-level and global-level contrastive losses to maintain temporal translation invariance at both levels. In local-level temporal translation invariance, semantics were treated as positive pairs for one node across time spans, which pulled the same node representations closer and different nodes apart. Conversely, loss for global invariance pulled different nodes together and the same representation away. Following the above, the authors designed four different timespan view sampling strategies to explore the optimal view interval distance selection for contrastive pairs. These strategies differed in the physical and temporal overlap rate and thereby had different semantic contexts.The paper validated CLDG on seven real-world dynamic graph datasets and across twelve baselines. The proposed method outperformed eight unsupervised state-of-the-art baselines and was on par with the remaining four semi-supervised methods. Furthermore, compared to existing graph methods, CLDG reduced model parameters by an average of 2000 times and the training time by 130.Conclusion: CLDG is a practical, lightweight framework that generalizes contrastive learning to dynamic graphs. It uses additional temporal information and achieves state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised dynamic graph techniques while competing with semi-supervised methods.Check out the Paper and GitHub Page. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our60k+ ML SubReddit. Adeeba Alam Ansari+ postsAdeeba Alam Ansari is currently pursuing her Dual Degree at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, earning a B.Tech in Industrial Engineering and an M.Tech in Financial Engineering. With a keen interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, she is an avid reader and an inquisitive individual. Adeeba firmly believes in the power of technology to empower society and promote welfare through innovative solutions driven by empathy and a deep understanding of real-world challenges. [Download] Evaluation of Large Language Model Vulnerabilities Report (Promoted)

LatestMachine LearningQVQ-72B: The Ultimate Visual Reasoning AI You Can Run Locally 0 like December 25, 2024Share this postAuthor(s): Hasitha Pathum Originally published on Towards AI. This member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.Imagine having the power of a cutting-edge visual reasoning large language model (LLM) installed locally on your own machine. Its no longer just a dream the QVQ-72B, released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, is here to make it a reality! Developed by the brilliant Qwen team at Alibaba, QVQ-72B is not just another AI model; its a game-changer for anyone seeking high-performance multimodal reasoning without relying on cloud services.This article dives deep into what makes QVQ-72B unique, why its revolutionary, and how to set it up locally. Whether youre an AI enthusiast, a developer looking for advanced capabilities, or an organization prioritizing data privacy, this guide will equip you with everything you need to know about QVQ-72B.QVQ-72B is a state-of-the-art visual reasoning LLM with 72 billion parameters, specifically designed for tasks that require understanding and reasoning across both text and images. Unlike traditional language models, QVQ-72B integrates advanced visual processing capabilities, enabling it to interpret images, generate contextually relevant text, and solve complex multimodal problems.Key Features:Multimodal Mastery: Combines visual and textual reasoning seamlessly.Scalable Deployment: Fully operable on local hardware setups.Open Source: Released under Apache 2.0, ensuring flexibility Read the full blog for free on Medium.Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming asponsor. Published via Towards AITowards AI - Medium Share this post