I can buy a book, scan it and put it on the internet and it wouldn’t be piracy?

Yes, but only if you’re a multi-billion AI company.

Their police dramas certainly do!

The title might be slightly hyperbolic, but still:

The quality of training data fed into the neural network directly impacts the resulting AI model’s capabilities. Models trained on well-edited books and articles tend to produce more coherent, accurate responses than those trained on lower-quality text like random YouTube comments.

Anthropic initially chose the quick and easy path. In the quest for high-quality training data, the court filing states, Anthropic first chose to amass digitized versions of pirated books to avoid what CEO Dario Amodei called “legal/practice/business slog”—the complex licensing negotiations with publishers. But by 2024, Anthropic had become “not so gung ho about” using pirated ebooks “for legal reasons” and needed a safer source.

Buying used physical books sidestepped licensing entirely while providing the high-quality, professionally edited text that AI models need, and destructive scanning was simply the fastest way to digitize millions of volumes. The company spent “many millions of dollars” on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals.

oof.

It’s a sign of the times that an obviously unwell person like him can continue having a political career.

Beyond the obvious, I wonder who replaced the staffers that apparently left in droves. Maybe somebody saw an opportunity to create another monster a lá RFK or even DJT.

And then this:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bestowed only Trump and Fetterman with mementos celebrating the exploding-pager strike targeting Hezbollah militants that resulted in 32 deaths and thousands more injured. Fetterman (…) accepted a silver beeper from Netanyahu

A silver beeper???

I mean sure, but I feel that’s basically all both Trump admins have been doing.

If that’s the best they have to offer…

I have tons of respect for these guys, imo they were the closest we ever got to worthy heirs of Monty Python. But over the years they did too much shitty stuff, too.

Same here, mine is 2006 and already quite computerized for my taste.

But recently I did a trip in a 2020s car and it was … disconcerting. First of all it was automatic which I’m not used to. Unable to get it in gear, the 9yo boy in the backseat said: look at the screen, it’s telling you what to do!. He was right. Even so the car would not let me back into a patch of high grass, kept blocking the wheels. Jarringly.

telemetry … cell connection

When did this start to be a standard feature anyhow, and how does adoption track across brands & timeline?

The comic is hyperbolic and not in a good way. “They wouldn’t like it” - yeah, if millions of Americans did the same. And it isn’t even necessary to go pre-digital or pre-internet to “cut out the middleman”.

I agree with you on most, but this:

which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?

is hyperbole on your part.

First of all, by-default internet connected cars haven’t been a thing until relatively recently (10 years max I guess). And then, gas guzzling does not necessarily correlate with age. Cars consuming less than, say, 5l/100km have existed since at least the 80s (1st hand experience, and the car was already 20 years old at that point).

We (mostly my brother and I) convinced our octogenarian parents to switch the whole family group to Signal, many years ago. It works nicely. What saddens me though, is that Signal will never replace WA for most people, it’s Just One More App for them.

The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who refused to leave their positions despite the president’s attempts to remove them.

As if all this wasn’t despicable enough already. They are really set on being Public Enemy #1. I hope justice will catch up with them long before they die of old age. Any kind of justice will do: poetic, divine, mob…

My favorite every morning moment: bow down and SLURP

Ach ja, Thema Thiel. Hallo zurück. Beide psychotisch mMn.

Verdammt, du magst GIFs aber ganz schön. Erstmal dein Unter abonniert.

So they just voted to - well, not quite dismantle democracy but at least open the doors wide for dismantling it.

Almost unanimously.

That’s so fucked up.

Slightly unrelated, but in my language Bestie means Beast. So, Peter Thiel’s beast

Devoid of all meaning except for being unmistakably racist. And not the mild, everyday kind either.

edit: there’s already two sibling comments with almost opposite interpretations. Fuck that shit, I don’t need to understand the finer (?) points to know that Yarvin & Thiel are horrible people who have way too much influence. And I bet half the time Yarvin doesn’t even understand it himself, he just needs to keep the controversy boiling.

Probably throwing back his long hair with a head movement, while challenging the prof with what he thinks is an unassailable argument. Mistaking the stunned silence that follows for a win.

🤢🤮

Now you, too, know about Curtis Yarvin. You thought Jordan Peterson was bad? Welcome to the club.

And people think I’m exaggerating or polarising when I call Peter Thiel a neoliberal fascist.

edit: it seems some people don’t understand that Neoliberalism and Fascism do, in fact, go together very well. And that the fascism we’re all facing now does not look the same as 90 years ago.

Yep. I was going to comment that LEGO is made out of amazingly hard plastic, but this one has clearly suffered the consequences.

So… Peter Thiel is an alien?