These companies have too much money not to pay for the works themselves and scan them. AI training is obviously fair use — provided you had fair use of the material to begin with.

I’d Operation Iraqi Freedom had a killer SaaS layer from Palantir and the latest drones from Ukraine and some UATX grads leading the way and a DoD venture fund to buy innovation we’d have won in 6 weeks. Checkmate, historians of the war.

There’s nothing cooler than holding a flying squirrel. Just cool little dudes.

i REFUSE to be kept in ANY loop. they haven’t made a loop strong enough. you can try, but know that thousands have failed even after CIRCLING BACK

I think this may top Enigma

it is insane to describe a local government official as neoliberal

This man is a genius.

Bsky only has two modes: Yub Nub or Alderaan 2 seconds after the order

Condimentracide.

Here is the first thing you have to understand about the NYC mayoral election: you don’t have to think about it if you don’t live there and don’t really have to think about it if you do either.

Cuomo is going to leave NYC after he loses by virtue of the fact that he doesn’t live there, for 1.

Bill Ackman is a billionaire, if you ever wanted proof that returns are not distributed meritocratically.

Is this a thing?

Steal his look:

[Protoss voice] We must construct additional podcasts

An important military context is found in the declining need for skilled weavers in the late 18th/early 19th c. Many of these unemployed artisans turned to the British Army for work, adding a class of smart, skilled tradesmen to the ranks during a critical period of British military history.

Francis Cabot Lowell kinda famously did steal loom designs from the British

Ah yes, the loom. From the beloved time of labor, the industrial revolution. The Dutch especially craved loom work...

Be that as it may, I can't believe Microsoft didn't name their AI "Clippy".

AI isn’t a paperclip optimizer; rather, tech companies are an AI optimizer, turning everything into AI instead of paperclips.

The tech billionaires aren’t in control if you’re even moderately savvy about using this shit. Even really good top shelf stuff like Notebook LM is gonna get commoditized to hell and back by competitors in the nearish future, because the actual product components are fairly interchangeable.

This is an *amazing* level of derangement about generative AI. We are headed for weird anti-AI purity movements where ppl turn on personal computing entirely and start LARPing as Dune mentats, because they think the magic fascism math is hiding in every transformer, search algorithm, and BART.

Just wait until you dig into the Japanese rationale for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the implications in East and Southeast Asia. The IJA helped the PLA win…look at the postwar colonial history in Indonesia…

This is an incredibly tenacious myth about the Iraq War, pushed relentlessly by the Jacobin-y left. But there's no evidence for it. No evidence that policy-makers had oil as even a secondary or tertiary motive for invading. And it would make zero sense to do this, as Saddam was perfectly/

the real horror of foreign policy is realizing that the people involved actually do believe in things after all

In a 1989 interview Kasparov rebutted the idea that a chess playing machine could beat him and he *explicitly* compared the magnitude of this to a machine interviewing him or writing a novel

No, 3 hops was not standard signals intelligence procedure, targeting didn’t work like that, never. Stop it. You’re trivializing a major change in American military affairs.

This isn't at all true.

right. it is obvious that an LLM is an interesting type of thing. whether it is "intelligent" is hardly a coherent question, considering that there was historically exactly one thing (us) which could plausibly be considered "intelligent." where we draw the line now is an open question.

I'm leaning toward recommending we make these two honorary Marines for displaying a mixture of low impulse control and camaraderie that can't be said to have homoerotic undertones because they're more like overtones.

the head of the Heritage Foundation:

Ich wenn meine Chefin wieder "wie müssen KI einsetzen, damit wir KI einsetzen" 😶

The best bit in a while

I’ve joked before that Rationalism is to Silicon Valley as Scientology is to Hollywood. And that’s… not a joke, actually. The rationalist community is very influential and more than a little cult like. Eliezer Yudkowsky is the L. Ron Hubbard of rationalism. This book is his Battlefield Earth

HYPOTHESIS: repeat exposure to the LessWrong discussion boards is functionally indistinguishable from mercury poisoning.

Wanna know why Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel all LOVED Eliezer Yudkowsky, right up until they ignored him? It’s because he was USEFUL to their efforts to attract funding and talent to their new companies. If you think futurism is about accuracy, then you’re the sucker at the table.

Poster: In my tweet I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech CTO: At long last I have defined the Torment Nexus from the classic tweet Tech CTOs keep creating more Torment Nexus

One of the real 3-Card Montes being used in the AI bubble is this idea that there is some "AGI" breakthrough that's around the corner. But 90% right is about the limit and the idea that AGI already happened with ChatGPT 3.5 would pierce this bubble immediately.

I hate that I can tell how interesting this article is just by the bald "quantum" used incorrectly. A nice little shorthand is to replace "quantum" with "magic" and if the speaker/author's point doesn't change, they have no idea what they are talking about.

the funniest post from around the deepseek r1 release

America built a star under the bleachers of a football field and a British twink built a computer to break once though impossible to break German encryption methods

The degree to which student evaluations impact tenure is wild to me.

We built a portable sun. Two of them, actually. We also built thinking machines and shells that had radar in them.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

Sharks absolutely get cancer, and people claiming otherwise are pseudoscientific grifters preying on the desperate. Even if sharks did not get cancer, eating shark would not cure your cancer any more than eating LeBron James would make you better at basketball.

Josh Barro's new podcast should, ostensibly, be something that I would like -- I would argue that I'd have to be the target audience -- but I very much don't. It just comes across as whining.