All posts tagged: Restraints

A President Without Restraints – The Atlantic

A President Without Restraints – The Atlantic

Published by José Betancourt

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This morning, as his 8 p.m Eastern deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz and make other concessions looms, President Trump threatened to wipe the country out entirely. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump declared on Truth Social. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” The president did express hope that “different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail,” which would prevent such an attack. Bizarrely, he ended with a benediction for the same people he had just threatened to slaughter: “God Bless the Great People of Iran!” Though Trump rarely speaks clearly, this threat would appear to meet the definition of genocide under the 1948 United Nations convention: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The …

ByteDance’s AI Ambitions Are Being Hampered by Compute Restraints and Copyright Concerns

ByteDance’s AI Ambitions Are Being Hampered by Compute Restraints and Copyright Concerns

Published by skeptic

Move over Sora 2, there’s a hot new AI video model in town. In early February, ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.0, a major upgrade to its flagship video model, which had previously remained fairly obscure. Its powerful capabilities immediately shocked the AI ecosystem in China, even among audiences who had once been skeptical of AI-generated video and viewed the technology mainly as a way to produce slop. Feng Ji, the founder of Game Science, the studio that developed China’s global hit video game Black Myth: Wukong, wrote online that he was “deeply shocked” by the model’s abilities and believed Seedance 2.0 would pose significant challenges to China’s current copyright regulations and content moderation systems. Pan Tianhong, who leads a Chinese professional video production studio with over 15 million followers on social media, posted a video in which he said Seedance 2.0 is significantly better than any video-making models that came before it. “It thinks like a director,” Pan said. However, most people can’t get their hands on the model at this moment because access remains fairly …

Germany plans to give spies vast new powers in rollback of postwar restraints – POLITICO

Germany plans to give spies vast new powers in rollback of postwar restraints – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

“We want to continue working closely with the Americans,” Marc Henrichmann, the chairman of a special committee in Germany’s Bundestag that oversees the country’s intelligence services, told POLITICO. “But if a [U.S.] president, whoever that may be, decides in the future to go it alone without the Europeans … then we must be able to stand on our own two feet.” German leaders believe the need is especially urgent in their country, where the foreign intelligence service, or BND, is far more legally constrained than intelligence agencies elsewhere. Those restraints stem from intentional protections put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy apparatus. But those restraints have had the side effect of making Germany particularly dependent on the U.S. for intelligence gathering, and this is now seen as a potential danger. “The intelligence business is one where the question always arises: What do you offer me, what do I offer you?” Henrichmann said. “And of course, if Germany is only a taker, the risk is …

Analysis-A Year Into His Return, Trump Wields Executive Power With Few Restraints

Analysis-A Year Into His Return, Trump Wields Executive Power With Few Restraints

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Tuesday will mark his first year back in the White House after a ‌shock-and-awe policy ​blitz that has expanded presidential power and reshaped America’s relations with the ‌world. As he enters his second year, he appears increasingly unconstrained, pursuing policies that have deepened divisions in the country. In recent weeks, Trump ordered a more aggressive federal crackdown on ​illegal immigration in Minnesota that led to the shooting death of an unarmed woman motorist by a federal agent, oversaw an audacious military raid on Venezuela to capture President Nicolas Maduro, revived his controversial plan to take over Greenland, threatened to bomb Iran, and shrugged off concerns over a ‍criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “I don’t care,” Trump told ​Reuters in an Oval Office interview last week when asked about the potential economic fallout from the probe into Powell. Speaking to The New York Times on January 7, Trump said the only check on him as commander-in-chief to launch military strikes abroad was “my own morality.” …