Ms. M is *tired* @msmtchnk

thinking of this heartbreaking essay written by a mathematician last week, before this most recent news dropped

Noam Brown @polynoamial

a day ago

An internal version of Astra, @OpenAI’s next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science. We believe it will be a major step for scientific reasoning. openai.com/index/ten-adva…

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btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.” it was called project panama. here's exactly what happened: 1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.” 2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy. it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.” 3: that piracy created a massive legal risk. so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.” 4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs. those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers. 5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months. 6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them. a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling. 7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data. the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.

Hedgie @HedgieMarkets

7 days ago

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're

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Every time I talk to someone about China I inevitably end up having to slip in something like "well yeah they're responsible for the welfare of a fifth of humanity" and it always makes people pause for a moment.

Amina 💌 @fawnn404

5 days ago

i think peoples politics would become very different if they stopped seeing the global south as a collection of humanitarian crises and started seeing it as the majority of humanity

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Since getting married, I’ve endeavored to buy more physical books. Between myself, my wife and her parents downstairs, we have between two and three thousand books. They fill every nook & corner of our home. A home library is the single best investment you can make.

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The Heritage Foundation, which laid the groundwork for Project 2025 & influences much of the current administration’s policies, recently released a report calling for the dismantling of Title IX in an effort to increase opportunities for male athletes & suppress female athletics

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Ladies, imagine someone doing your cooking, cleaning, running errands & endless invisible domestic labor. Imagine how much TIME that would free up for your career and hobbies. For the average male, that IS their reality. Then they turn around and claim women "contribute nothing."

"the Republican Party is ideologically committed to impregnating as many teenage girls as possible" is an objectively true statement that is taboo to admit in mainstream politics

Brianna Turner @_Breezy_Briii

a week ago

The report opposes the inclusion of women/ girls in high intensity sports and instead recommends they stick to moderate intensity sports to maintain optimal fertility levels. This method also seeks to increase opportunities for male athletes and sees them as victims of Title IX

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have yall seen the way they take water?? is this not so incredibly infuriating?? what the fuck is this dystopian ass world we are living in actually

Interesting AF @interesting_aIl

7 days ago

Activist Erin Brockovich is forming a nationwide effort to hold data centers accountable for environmental damage She has already received over 8,000 complaints about data centers from nearly every state

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He assaults a woman and all the men just stood by until she beat his ass back nobody can convince me men are our “protectors”

@

57 years ago

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this will be used against student protesters before it will be used to protect students from school shooters

philip lewis @Phil_Lewis_

5 days ago

Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters The plastic, non-lethal aircraft, which can smash windows and ram attackers will be at the ready at certain schools in Colorado, Florida and Georgia washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/07…

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If they're turning engineers into activists they have been doing unfathomable evil behind the scenes

T. Bernadetti @MrsRoyKeaneo

6 days ago

WATCH THIS! Engineers storm the stage in protest against Amazon's use of AI in the ongoing 🇵🇸 genocide "When Amazon employees say something against project Nimbus you fire them!" Watch how his face drops! He's there to promote AI yet goes into screensaver mode when confronted

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@TifaTheMonk Wait what did I miss?!

Capitalism be like: “People aren’t going into debt when they’re sick and that makes me mad😡😡”

Pubity @pubity

a month ago

The U.S. is investigating Germany for making medication and healthcare a little too affordable for their citizens. They're pressuring Germany to raise prices and invest more in "innovative pharmaceutical research" to keep international drug prices from going down.

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This is how you push through universally unpopular legislation. You start with attacks on groups most people don't care about (sex workers), under the guise of something many support (protecting kids). Then you keep increasing the heat until the frog sits in boiling water.

PCMag @PCMag

2 months ago

Age verification started with porn and social media. Now, governments are passing laws requiring operating systems to collect your age before you can use your computer at all. pcmag.com/explainers/you…

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We don't know whether it was smartphones/social-media or edtech that was the bigger contributor to the decline in education outcomes that began in the 2010s. But new revelations show the tricks Meta, Snap, and Tiktok used to lure students during the school day. Still more reasons to be technoskeptical nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/…

Phone-free schools and the recent parent-led EdTech pushback sweeping the nation show that families have agency in challenging the idea more tech is always better for kids. I love to see @rweingarten and teachers joining in support. AFT is well-positioned to make real demands of Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and they should use that leverage. nytimes.com/2026/05/27/tec…

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_

2 months ago

SAM ALTMAN: “WE SEE A FUTURE WHERE INTELLIGENCE IS A UTILITY, LIKE ELECTRICITY OR WATER, AND PEOPLE BUY IT FROM US ON A METER.”

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"Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies." Yes, more or less this

Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem

2 months ago

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it

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The mechanism is specific and worth reading carefully. Able-bodied adults without dependents must now document 80 hours per month of work, training, or volunteering to maintain SNAP. Job searching - actively looking for work - does not count. Miss the threshold over any three-month period: ineligible for three years. The exemption that previously protected former foster youth from this time limit has been eliminated. A population already more likely to face housing instability, academic disruption, and unemployment now runs the same clock as everyone else. The average SNAP benefit is $6 per day. That is what this policy fight costs at the individual level. The bill that built this requirement cut $187 billion from SNAP in the same legislation that extended tax cuts for corporations and wealthier Americans. That contrast is in the record.

The New Republic @newrepublic

2 months ago

SNAP Cuts Threaten to Cut Young Adults Off at the Knees trib.al/kS5GVjz

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Indeed, unprecedented apology. The Catholic Church was the LARGEST single owner of enslaved people in the Americas. Made its wealth from slavery. John Paul II rehearsed a rambling apology when he visited Gorée Island back in the 1990s. #slaveryarchive

The Associated Press @AP

2 months ago

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery and for failing to condemn it for centuries. apnews.com/article/pope-a…

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