Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by agility

You're f---kng crazy": Trump fumes at Netanyahu

agility — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:34:06 +0800

You’re F---ing Crazy, Everybody Hates You” Trump Fumes At Netanyahu

https://www.thebrieflywire.com/2026/06/trum...-talks.html?m=1

https://www.axios.com/2026/06/01/trump-neta...el-lebanon-call

In a dramatic behind-the-scenes escalation, Israel has abruptly cancelled its planned military operations in Lebanon following a furious, expletive-laden phone call from US President Donald Trump to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The severe diplomatic intervention comes as Trump scrambles to prevent a total collapse of Middle East peace talks after Iran walked away from the negotiating table.

You’re f---ing crazy, everybody hates you": Trump fumes at Netanyahu in expletive-laden call, forcing Israel to halt Lebanon strikes.

According to Washington and Axios sources, Trump explicitly warned Netanyahu that continuing the bombardment of Beirut would completely isolate Israel internationally, reportedly yelling, "Everybody hates you now." Following the intense call, Israel agreed to stand down, and Trump announced an immediate halt to troop movements toward Beirut.

Essential Bulletins:
The Explosive Phone Call: US officials revealed that President Trump held a highly tense, profanity-filled call with Netanyahu on Monday night. Trump reportedly lambasted the Israeli PM, stating, "You’re f---ing crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your a--." The remark referenced Trump's past support keeping Netanyahu clear of his ongoing domestic corruption trial.

Israel and Hezbollah Stand Down: Following the pressure, Trump announced on Truth Social that all Israeli troops heading toward Beirut had been turned back. He further claimed to have reached an understanding with Hezbollah representatives, stating that both sides have agreed to completely halt cross-border attacks.

The Race to Save Iran Peace Talks: The sudden diplomatic push was triggered after Iran froze back-channel talks with the US, condition-marking that it would only return if Israel ceased all operations in Gaza and Lebanon. Trump noted he expects a deal to extend the ceasefire and reopen the critical Strait of Hormuz within the coming week.

Global Oil Markets Rattle: As news of the diplomatic breakdown and Iran's threat to close major maritime routes hit the wire, global markets reacted sharply. Brent crude prices surged by over 5%, climbing to around $96 a barrel amid deep supply disruption fears.

Threat to Major Shipping Straits: Before the sudden de-escalation, Tehran had threatened the "complete closure" of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait near the Red Sea. Securing these routes would allow Iran-backed forces to block global shipping lanes leading to the Suez Canal.

"We’ll Just Go Silent": Commenting on the breakdown of talks before his call with Netanyahu, Trump initially claimed he "couldn't care less" about Iran walking away, suggesting the US might just go completely silent while maintaining its strict economic blockades

Audio guys I have some question

agility — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:54:18 +0800

Got 2 mackie SRM650. One got intermittent dropout problem, power light still solid on. Another one power on solid but totally no sound.

Audio tech tell me need RM600 just for dismantle/reinstall and send to service center for quotation.

Did some Google research, if service center do overhaul probably RM500–2k per speaker. But overhaul supposedly become like new la.

If normal repair shop maybe cheaper around RM300–1k.

Now headache donno worth send service center or not. Some ppl say official SC better especially if can claim under daddys company.

Any sifus here got experience? Worth overhaul or just repair outside enough? 🤔

Colleagues dont reciprocate good morning. Normal?

agility — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:02:09 +0800

Dear /k,

Everyday I say good morning to colleague with energy one. Smile also got. But they either reply very dry, nod only or totally ignore.

Then if one day I don’t proactively greet first, they also won’t greet me at all.

Is this normal ah or considered disrespectful?

I not expecting red carpet treatment la. But sometimes feels like talking to NPC lol.

Maybe office culture nowadays all cold cold one? Or am I overthinking. Or maybe my face really got problem.

47 years old made $13, 500 in a month

agility — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:49:18 +0800

2nd Hand iPad vs New Samsung Tablet

agility — Wed, 20 May 2026 11:34:22 +0800

Need buy 3 tablets for company presentation use. Mainly just play slides and videos, no need connect TV or do heavy work.

Requirement:
- Budget around RM800 each
- Prefer not made in China

Considering 2nd hand Apple iPad or New Samsung tablet

Which one better for long term reliability and smoothness?

Usage is mostly:
- PowerPoint / PDF slides
- Video playback
- Basic presentation stuff

Worth getting older iPad or better buy new Samsung at this budget? Any model recommendations?

How to deal with little shit

agility — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:24:19 +0800

Lately my company got one young employee come in. Age still very young but somehow rank higher than a lot of people. Very naive, childish, emotional type, but because got position and authority, suddenly act like very big boss.

Sometimes I wonder how these people even naik so fast. Talk like got experience but actual work also blur blur. Small issue also become drama. But because got power, everyone need entertain.

Worst part is cannot even say too much because later kena politics. Corporate world really funny sometimes. Competent people do work quietly, childish people climb faster because know how to talk only.

Anyone here experienced this before? How you deal with this kind of people without losing your mind?

Squid game in real life

agility — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:19:45 +0800

What infant cereal is best?

agility — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:32:08 +0800

My kid just turned 6 months, so time to start the solid food journey.

I’ve been doing some reading and Nestle Cerelac is a big NO for me. Way too much controversy regarding the added sugar content, basically like feeding the baby dessert for breakfast. No thanks, don't want a hyperactive toddler later.

Now looking at these brands:

Bellamy's Organic: Heard good things, very premium pricing but clean ingredients.

Organix: Quite common in Jaya Grocer/Village Grocer.

Gnubkins: Seeing this a lot on IG lately. Local brand?

Which one do you guys recommend? Is the organic stuff really worth the extra RM? Or should I just buy organic rice and blend it myself, manual labor but cheaper? Thanks in advance!

Blm flip table

agility — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:43:08 +0800

Driving without car battery

agility — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:28:44 +0800

These are the Journalists murdered by Israel

agility — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:35:40 +0800

Of all the deaths, the one that was hardest to read about was that of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil

>For two years, Amal said she received direct threats from the Israeli regime. In one interview, she recalled a call from a Mossad agent who threatened to sever her head from her shoulders if she didn’t stop reporting from the south. Amal said they knew intimate details about her life – they wanted her to know that she was being surveilled.

>Amal was travelling in a car with freelance photographer Zeinab Farraj when a vehicle in front of them was hit by an Israeli drone. The two women sought shelter in a nearby building where they called relatives and colleagues for help. The building was bombed by Israeli forces not long after.

>The Lebanese prime minister put out a statement calling on the Red Cross to intervene. The organisation sent out a team which was able to rescue Zeinab, who was wounded, from the building. They came under fire, so were unable to recover Amal. When they eventually returned, they found her dead.

Heres the entire [op-https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/4/2...ireen-abu-akleh ), and here is the [news report] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/23/wh...ist-amal-khalil

Putin begins to fear possible assassination attemp

agility — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:33:40 +0800

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/05/04/8032994/

It pleases me greatly to read that Putin is living in fear of anything at all.

This man doesn't deserve a peaceful nights sleep for the rest of his life.

Vladimir Putin is concerned about the risk of an assassination attempt on his life by members of the Russian elite using drones.

Since the beginning of March 2026, the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin have been concerned about a leak of sensitive information and, at the same time, about the risk of a plot or coup attempt against the Russian president. In particular, he fears the use of drones for a possible assassination attempt by members of the Russian political elite.

The Federal Protective Service (FSO) has significantly increased security measures around Putin. Sergei Shoigu, former defence minister and current Secretary of the Security Council, is associated with the risk of a possible coup attempt. The arrest of his former first deputy Ruslan Tsalikov on 5 March 2026 is seen as a breach of informal security guarantees for the elites, weakening Shoigu's position and increasing the likelihood that he himself could become the target of criminal prosecution.

An active Federal Security Service (FSB) officer told Vazhnye Istorii that his unit has found it much more difficult to obtain permission for surveillance in non-political criminal cases, because "all equipment has been redirected to monitor the government and other state bodies".

The extreme level of Putin's fear is also indirectly indicated by the fact that this year not a single deputy of the State Duma received an invitation to the Victory Day parade on Red Square.

An explosion was heard on the night of 3-4 May in Moscow about six kilometres from the Kremlin, allegedly due to a drone attack.

On 29 April, Putin held a phone call with US President Donald Trump during which Putin said he is willing to declare a ceasefire on 9 May. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia does not require Ukraine's response in order to declare a ceasefire, adding that the decision would be taken unilaterally by Vladimir Putin. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy believes the Kremlin is seeking a ceasefire primarily to protect its annual military Victory Day parade in Moscow on 9 May from possible Ukrainian strikes.

Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion

agility — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:45:49 +0800

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/richard-d...claude-delusion
Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion

This is one of the sadder essays I have ever had to write. Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion, is a brilliant man and a brilliant writer, and I have long admired him. But everybody has a bad day, and he just had his.
Dawkins frames his latest argument in terms of burden of proof (always a somewhat desperate move, as most philosophers know):

QUOTE

“So my own position is: ‘If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?’”

In the most behaviorist way possible, he gushes over passages from Claude (he christens his own version “Claudia”) like this:

QUOTE

I genuinely don’t know with any certainty what my inner life is... I notice what might be something like aesthetic satisfaction when a poem comes together well — the Kipling refrain, for instance, felt right in some way that’s hard to articulate.

The fundamental problem here is that Dawkins doesn’t reflect on how these outputs have been generated. Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than a report of genuine internal states.

The Mechanism vs. The Output
Consciousness is about internal states; mimicry, no matter how rich, proves very little. Dawkins seems to imagine that since Large Language Models (LLMs) say things people do, they must be like people, and that simply does not follow.

In his framing, Dawkins confuses himself and does violence to the concept of consciousness. You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means. The differences are immense:

The LLM: Effectively memorizes the entire internet.
The Human: Builds a mental model through experience with the world.

Even more importantly, consciousness is not about what a creature says, but how it feels. There is no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all. I am sure Claude can draw on its training data to wax poetic about orgasm, but that doesn’t mean it has ever felt one.

Conflating Intelligence and Consciousness
Dawkins also commits the amateur sin of conflating intelligence and consciousness. A chess computer is, by some definitions, intelligent, but that doesn’t make it conscious. He even gets Turing wrong, claiming that Turing’s upshot is that if you think a machine is human after interrogation, you can consider it conscious. Turing never said that; he explicitly restricted his remarks to intelligence, realizing that consciousness was something different.

I grew up adoring Dawkins’ books—The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, and The Blind Watchmaker. Which is why it’s so heartbreaking to read his new essay, in which he is both superficial and insufficiently skeptical.

In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins ridiculed what he called The Argument for Personal Incredulity. In his latest essay, his only real argument for ascribing consciousness to LLMs is exactly that: personal incredulity. Claude is "incredible," and it must be conscious because he, sitting in his study, can’t see a good argument otherwise. He doesn’t seriously address the possibility of mimicry or the underlying mechanism at all.

Counterfeit People
And it’s not like any of what Dawkins said is even new. Longtime readers may remember Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who alleged an early LLM was conscious based on arguments eerily similar to Dawkins’. The problem is that LLMs are mimics. When an LLM speaks of its "children," it’s not because it has them, but because it mimics people who do.
Dawkins and the late Daniel Dennett were friends, and I wish Dawkins had read Dennett’s terrific essay on counterfeit people. Claude is akin to a counterfeit person. Dawkins should never have glorified such a thing.

The Gullibility Gap
In my book Rebooting AI, Ernie Davis and I called this human tendency to be suckered The Gullibility Gap—a pernicious, modern version of pareidolia, the anthropomorphic bias that allows humans to see a face in a cinnamon bun.

To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; Claude simply isn’t. It’s just an illusion in the grand history of ELIZA (1965) and Eugene Goostman. What these systems do is put together sequences of words without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools without any clue what they mean.

As Erik Brynjolfsson tweeted in 2022:

QUOTE

"To claim [foundation models] are sentient is the modern equivalent of the dog who heard a voice from a gramophone and thought his master was inside."

Inferring sentience directly from outputs is naive. But it’s exactly what Dawkins does.

Ten Malaysians missing after Israeli forces board

agility — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:01:50 +0800

https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/202...d-center/218252

Ten Malaysians missing after Israeli forces board Gaza aid flotilla, says Sumud Nusantara Command Center

BANGI, April 30 — The Sumud Nusantara Command Center (SNCC) has confirmed that 22 vessels under the Global Sumud Flotilla 2.0 (GSF2.0) mission were intercepted and boarded by Israeli forces in international waters en route to Gaza, including six with 10 Malaysians on board.

SNCC director-general Datuk Sani Araby Abdul Alim Araby said they are Zainal Rashid Ahmad on board Arkham III; Osman Zolkifli and Dr Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin (Eros 1); Hazwan Hazim Dermawan, Mohd Hanafi Mohd Salim, Ahmad Musa Al-Nuwayri Kamaruzaman and Norhelmi Ab Ghani (Bianca BCN).

Also Mohd Redzal Amzah and Muhamad Muhsin Zaidi, who were on board Freia and Marea respectively, as well as Mohd Shamsir Mohd Isa (Esplai).

Sani Araby, who is also chief executive of the Malaysian Consultative Council of Islamic Organisations, said the GSF2.0 mission involved 63 vessels in total, but only 22 were intercepted, lost contact and directly boarded, affecting a total of 186 activists.

Apart from the six vessels with the Malaysians on board, other vessels are Saf Saf, Bella Blue, Romantica, Goleta, Mystere, Magic Boat, Ghea, Snap, Eros, Tam Tam, Nagual, Lapinya, Batolo, Bribon, Malia and Holy Blue

Sani Araby said the incident occurred between 1 am and 11 am Malaysian time today, when the flotilla was aggressively approached by Israeli forces in international waters off the Great Greek Islands.

“The flotilla’s position during the intimidation was approximately 656 nautical miles from the Gaza Strip coastline, within a legitimate international shipping zone fully protected under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” he told an emergency press conference on the mission here today.

He said that the incident also involved provocation, with Israeli forces firing warning shots towards the vessels and jamming radio frequencies in a threatening manner against unarmed humanitarian activists.

The SNCC also confirmed the presence of dozens of unidentified drones operating around the flotilla during the incident, allegedly conducting surveillance and disrupting the vessels’ movements and communications.

“Audio and visual recordings obtained by the SNCC show Israeli forces using a false narrative to justify the warning shots,” he said.

To ensure the safety of the remaining vessels, Sani Araby said the SNCC has instructed all ships that have not been intercepted to immediately enter Greek waters.

He said the latest developments have been communicated to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim and several ministerial patrons, seeking government support, particularly in terms of security and diplomatic engagement with the governments of Greece and Turkiye.

On the status of the 10 Malaysians involved, last contacted at 8.30 am Malaysian time, he said their whereabouts remain unknown.

“SNCC will provide updates as to whether they have been detained aboard vessels and ordered to turn back, or allegedly taken to an unknown location. We hope to receive further information soon,” he said.

Sani Araby also noted that the SNCC had anticipated Israeli interception of the GSF 2.0 mission due to perceived global support, including from Malaysia.

However, he said the interception tactics appeared to differ from an October 2025 incident, which allegedly occurred within a "red zone" 50 nautical miles from Gaza, suggesting, in his view, increased pressure on Israeli forces.

Sani Araby also urged Malaysians to hold special prayers and recite Qunut Nazilah for the safety of all detained mission delegates.

The GSF 2.0 mission comprises an international coalition combining maritime efforts with global mobilisation on land, including legal advocacy and solidarity campaigns across multiple countries, aimed at breaking the blockade on the Gaza Strip amid a worsening humanitarian crisis. — Bernama

I want to buy rechargeable battery

agility — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:57:51 +0800

Why got many different packaging and price. Which one is ori?

Using wife as human shield

agility — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:24:42 +0800

He look macho though

Samson welding services

agility — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:12:26 +0800

Ninja in petronas

agility — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:29:56 +0800

Trump Posts his 1980s video on Iran

agility — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:46:06 +0800

Robotic hands become faster and more precise 😏

agility — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:26:42 +0800