John Paul Bindel 👍🏼 @jbindel

Happy Independence Day! There’s a story from the end of the Revolutionary War I want to tell as we celebrate America’s 250th Birthday, and it’s one everyone in the world can learn from. George Washington, at that moment, after commanding the American forces to victory, was the most powerful man in the new country. Many people talked about making him King of America. Across the ocean, King George was sitting with an American painter, and asked what he thought Washington would do now that the war was ending. The painter said he believed he would go back to his farm. The King said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” As the war officially ended, Washington came to speak to Congress and said, “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater of Action.” He returned his commission they’d given him in 1775 - after more than 8 years of leading the Americans to victory without pay, and he was home at Mount Vernon for Christmas. Of course, he was elected as our first President a few years later, and after two terms, showed the same selflessness again when he willingly gave up his power and went back to Mount Vernon again. That’s true greatness. He had all the power in the world. But power, alone, does not make you great. Washington’s greatness came from being a true servant - to a cause much bigger than himself. His greatness was his complete lack of selfishness. The whole story of American Independence is a story of selflessness. It’s a story of people who set their self-interest aside and worked for each other. We’ve all heard the line about “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Apparently, Ben Franklin might have actually never said that. But that’s fine, because the same mentality is right there in the last line of the Declaration of Independence, published on this day 250 years ago: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” We mutually pledge to each other. No one was in this alone. No one was in it for themselves. This was a group of people with different backgrounds who were in it for each other. Today is a reminder: greatness comes from what we do for each other, never what we do for ourselves. That’s a lesson that applies no matter what country you call home. It’s a lesson that doesn’t require any law passed by a politician, because, let’s be honest, if you’re waiting for selfless politicians, I really hope you are not holding your breath. All of us have the power to be there for the people around us. For our families and friends. For our neighbors. For everyone. All of us can reach for greatness. It’s as simple as looking beyond yourself, seeing past the mirror, picking your eyes up from your phone, and pledging to be there for each other. Happy Fourth. May you all find your own version of greatness today by lifting each other up. Lift up your neighborhood. Lift up America. Lift up the World.

Hitler killed himself and Germany surrendered. Japan got nuked. Do they teach history in Ohio?

𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐡𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐩 @geshclip

a month ago

JD Vance: If you go back to WW2 or every major conflict in human history, they all ended with some kind of negotiation.

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@SlexAxton Makes perfect sense if you don't understand any of it.

mythos is both too dangerous for our enemies to gain access to and also the right choice for us to not use. got it.

Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth

a month ago

Three months ago, @DeptofWar kicked @AnthropicAI out of our building—forever. Every passing day proves why that was the right move. 🇺🇸

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I was showing my girlfriend's teenage kid this and Fabulous Secret Powers and said "you think your generation has the monopoly on brainrot" and she responded with "Why are these videos so long?"

Lost Internet @LostMemeArchive

a month ago

In 2003, a Flash animation of dancing badgers yelling “badger” became one of the internet’s biggest early brain infections.

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And now he’s actually following through on his tantrum with troop withdrawals in Germany, making the US weaker and Russia happy. Funny how that keeps happening.

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now. Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible. Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it. They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks. The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory. Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word. Then it got worse. The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else. It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors. One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked. Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted. Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher. That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites. Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights. This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

“Frog,” said Toad, “if I wash my dishes right now, then I will not have to wash them tomorrow, will I?” “No,” said Frog. “You will not have to.” Toad washed and dried his dishes. He put them in the cupboard.

Terrible. Promoting equality does not require diminishing excellence.

New York Post @nypost

10 months ago

Zohran Mamdani plans to phase out Gifted and Talented program in NYC elementary schools trib.al/yOv3dOo

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Duma-fication continues. And Montesquieu weeps.

Acyn @Acyn

6 months ago

Johnson: I have no intention of getting in the way of President Trump and his administration. He has used the tariff power that he has under Article II. He has not exceeded his authority. There is no reason for the Article I branch to intervene.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United Sates:

Remember, if you object to a 79-year-old American president threatening war against a longtime NATO ally, and explicitly saying it was because he wasn’t given a Nobel Peace Prize, there are Americans who will insist that your objection is a sign of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Chinese state media: Xi tells Trump return of Taiwan to China an important part of post-war international order This is the direct consequences of Trump telling Putin he can have part of Ukraine. Now every expansionist dictator thinks Trump will roll over.

Never let it be said that Trump cannot be loyal. He has demonstrated tremendous loyalty to exactly one person on Earth.

Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom

8 months ago

Trump went on a late night posting bender last night on the war in Ukraine. He criticized Biden, he criticized the U.S., he criticized Ukraine, he criticized Zelensky, he criticized our European allies. The only person he didn’t criticize is Putin. Only Putin. Shocker, huh?

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Dear Toad, I am glad that you are my best friend. Your best friend, Frog.

'We look brave,' said Frog. 'Yes, but are we?' asked Toad.

The turtle laughed. The lizards laughed. The snake laughed. The field mouse laughed, and Frog laughed.

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

There was only some wet mud and a lizard who was chasing his tail.

Here it is, folks: episode 2 of my new @novapbs micro-series, as an explainer of viral science videos. In today's installment, a dude on a boat seems to pause gravity... youtube.com/shorts/AQxs0d6…