Tootfinder

Google the price of oil, and you’ll most likely find two widely quoted prices for the commodity, one in the United States, the other in Europe.
These prices, which are constantly changing on electronic markets, suggest that although the war with Iran has made energy a lot more expensive, things are not nearly as bad as they were four years ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine.
But if you needed an actual tanker full of oil — and quickly — it would cost you dearly.
On Tuesday, …

Iran War Drives Deeper Oil Shock Than Prices Reveal
The war with Iran is preventing huge amounts of oil from flowing out of the Persian Gulf, but the prices that many people track don’t fully capture the scale of the disruption.

So to follow up on this, I've caught it in action. Models, when quantized a bit, just do a bit more poorly with short contexts. Even going from f32 (as trained) to bf16 (as usually run) to q8 tends to do okay for "normal" context windows. And q4 you start feeling like "this model is a little stupid and gets stuck sometimes” (it is! It's just that it's still mostly careening about in the space of "plausible" most of the time. Not good guesswork, but still in the zone). With long contexts, the probability of parameters collapsing to zero are higher, so the more context the more likelihood you are to see brokenness.
And then at Q2 (2 bits per parameter) or Q1, the model falls apart completely. Parameters collapse to zero easily. You start seeing "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” sorts of behavior, with intense and unscrutinized repetition, followed by a hard stop when it just stops working.
And quantization is a parameter that a model vendor can turn relatively easily. (they have to regenerate the model from the base with more quantization, but it's a data transformation on the order of running a terabyte through a straightforward and fast process, not like training).
If you have 1000 customers and enough equipment to handle the requests of 700, going from bf16 to q8 is a no-brainer. Suddenly you can handle the load and have a little spare capacity. They get worse results, probably pay the same per token (or they're on a subscription that hides the cost anyway so you are even freer to make trade-offs. There's a reason that subscription products are kinda poorly described.)
It's also possible for them to vary this across a day: use models during quieter periods? Maybe you get an instance running a bf16 quantization. If you use it during a high use period? You get a Q4 model.
Or intelligent routing is possible. No idea if anyone is doing this, but if they monitor what you send a bit, and you generally shoot for an expensive model for simple requests? They could totally substitute a highly quantized version of the model to answer the question.
There are •so many tricks• that can be pulled here. Some of them very reasonable to make, some of them treading into outright misleading or fraudulent, and it's weirdly hard to draw the line between them.

A classified Israeli military database ... indicated that of more than 53,000 deaths recorded in Gaza, named Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters accounted for roughly 17%. That suggests the rest, 83%, were civilians. These are not the statistics of a war fought with precision, this is a war where imprecision is the aim.
When reported verification times for AI-assisted targets are measured in seconds, ... the consequences are written in rows of small coffins.

Reach reports 2025 revenue down 3.7% YoY to £518.4M, adjusted operating profit up 2.4% YoY to £104.7M, and Google Discover traffic down 46% YoY in H2 (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_business/plunging-goo…

Plunging Google Discover traffic hits Reach digital revenue
Major cost cuts at Reach helped keep profits up in 2025 despite falling revenue across both digital and print.

One of my VR Lighthouses died last month. These things are gyroscopically spinning 24 hours a day for, what, a decade now? Nearly.
No wonder. Mostly the industry seems to be settling on using head-mounted cameras rather than sweeping infra-red beams and receptors on the head anyway.
It is true that lighthouses give accurate positioning, but means I can't easily take the headset next door, say. Or to a party.
So inside-out, as they call it, is fine for the headset now and mostly okay for the hand-controllers.
But it offers no solution at all for the foot-trackers and hip-tracker that I need for puppetting the characters in the #vr #slimeVR #trackers

of course... it's actually much worse than just policy dredged up from the days of Paul Martin and Stephen Harper… it's a gigantic step backward at the behest of fossil fuel interests in order to keep people burning fossil fuels.
EV mandates should be 'sold’ as an affordability measure! Because they are!
No, I don't mean grants, I mean everyday use. Real impacts on your pocket book. How much money would you save if you *never* went to a gas station. Just think about that for second.
Then we can do the math.
My 2019 Hyundai Kona Electric just passed 251152km (palindrome!) yesterday and gets around 6km/kWh on average.
I pay about $0.13/kWh at home to charge so that's $0.02/km. That is $5,023.04 in total energy expenses so far.
Our 2012 Toyota Prius C is at 270,000km and gets about 5.5L/100km or 0.055L/km. At (a discounted) $1.25/L that’s $0.04/km or $10,800 in total energy expenses so far.
Per kilometre the EV is half the cost to 'fuel' than one of the most fuel efficient gas cars out there.
In general, why would *anyone* choose something that costs double to run!?
And yet, the government doesn't sell this as ‘affordability’ it sells it as 'environmental responsibility'.
Let's be honest, they do that because they *know* the environmental message is *less* motivating than money.
Now I said at the beginning, "imagine" never going to the gas station. Obviously that doesn't mean you're fueling for free... but there is another overlooked aspect to this.
Fueling your car is a day to day thing. It's one of the biggest pulls on people's bank accounts precisely because it is such a frequent cost.
Now imagine if that 'bill' was just rolled into your home electricity bill. Which you could do other things to reduce cost overall?
EVs are not just an environmental game changer, they are a financial one for the average person.
That is why oil companies are throwing absolutely everything they have at government (and also fomenting fascism) to keep their good times going, at our expense.
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #EV #ClimateChange #ClimateAction #Driving #Affordability

Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization has reported that a projectile hit the grounds of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, following what it described as continued hostile actions by US and Israeli forces.
The incident, which took place on Tuesday night, caused “no financial or technical damage, and no casualties”, and “no part of the facility” was affected, it said.
The AEOI said the same nuclear power plant was hit on 17 March.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/24/iran-war-live-updates-trump-ursula-von-der-leyen-oil-prices-energy-crisis-israel-strikes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other