Akis V

Documenting my unraveling...Maker Of Sounds/Basketball enthusiast/80's movies/Guitars @paleoaks

[MP10 @MusicPills10]

This is Emilio Piano (real name Emil Reinert), a French-German classical pianist who’s become famous on Instagram and TikTok for playing piano in public places — streets, shopping malls, airports — and letting random people request songs.
On June 16, 2026, he was playing outside the TAURON Arena in Kraków, Poland, right before The Offspring’s concert at the Lost Generation Festival.
A girl walked up and asked him to play her favorite song by The Offspring. He started playing… and suddenly the crowd went crazy. He had no idea why.
It turned out the band themselves were walking past on their way to the show. They heard him playing one of their songs (“The Kids Aren’t Alright”), stopped, and jumped in to sing and play along with him.
Completely spontaneous. One of those rare, magical moments that only happen in real life.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇸🇪🇵🇱 This absolute beast Bartłomiej Kubkowski just became the first person ever to swim across the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Poland.

160 km. 56 hours. No sleep.

Human limits just got pushed a little further. Respect.

Writer: Oliver

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔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 free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

This is an amazing quote from Lindsey Graham about when he realized how politics works. https://t.co/sh04ahQOFq

[Kekius Maximus @Kekius_Sage]

Listen to the haunting silence of an ecosystem gradually dying out over half a century.

This acoustic profile captures the progressive erasure of birdsong, serving as a stark and alarming warning of catastrophic biodiversity loss. Listen closely to realize exactly what we have lost.

[Ashwin Gopinath @ashwingop]

Claude Tag is a Trojan horse.  Not because Anthropic is doing anything evil. Because the incentives are obvious.

Day one, this looks like a great feature: tag Claude in Slack, let it follow the thread, remember context, connect to tools, break down tasks, chase work, and act like a teammate.

But that is exactly the problem. The moment your AI vendor becomes a shared coworker, it stops being just a model provider. It starts becoming the place where work is interpreted, remembered, routed, and eventually executed.

That is not model lock-in. That is context lock-in. You are now renting your company back from them.

Models can be swapped. Agents can be copied. But the memory of how your company actually works is much harder, maybe impossible, to move: the Slack scar tissue, the exception paths, the customer promises, the unfinished threads, the weird workflows, the implicit owners, the “we tried that in Q2 and it failed” knowledge.

Once that lives inside one vendor’s agent layer, you are not renting intelligence anymore. You are renting your company’s operating memory.

And the pricing model makes it even more dangerous. A human coworker has a salary. Claude has unbounded tokenized activity. The more work moves through it, the more the vendor captures not just IT spend, but labor spend.

This is the enterprise bargain people will regret: Convenience now, and rapid decent into dependency.

The right architecture is simple: rent the best intelligence from whoever is best this month. OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, open source, whatever. But own the context layer.

Your company memory should be inspectable, permissioned, portable, and model-neutral. It should not be buried inside the same vendor that sells you the intelligence and the workflow surface.

Claude Tag is useful. That is why it is dangerous. Rent the intelligence, but own the context. Or, regret later.

[Kydo @0xkydo]

🤯 Midjourney -- yes, the AI image company -- just shipped a brand new type of imaging machine. 🤯

- 100x faster than an MRI.
- 10x cheaper.

Full body scanned in 60 seconds instead of an hour in a tube. Ultrasound based, MRI-level resolution.

And it's real -- not a concept, a working machine. You step into a shallow pool of warm water, a ring of half a million sensors sends sound through your body from every angle, and ~60 seconds later you have a 3D map of your insides down to a fraction of a millimeter. No radiation, no tube, no lying still.

They're not even building it as a hospital machine -- they're building a spa. The scan is a side-effect of a place you'd want to hang out anyway.

Lastly, it is built by 9 people. NINE PEOPLE.

You can just do things.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

this didn't "happen", we caused it

first, children disappeared from daily life
most women turn 30 without ever holding a baby (they don't have siblings or cousins, and young babies have been removed from shared spaces), never changed a diaper or watched one up close.
you cant want what you've never seen

second, we killed the single income.
the average family needs both parents working just to get to the end of the month, so raising a family well went from hard to something practically impossible (2-3 months of maternity leave should be considered a crime against humanity).

then schools and media, the whole cathedral, all pushed towards the same direction in a systematic brainwashing effort: pushing every girl at the career, motherhood turned into that despicable thing you settle for when the better options run out, "a smaller life". nothing worth desiring, and if you do you must be ostracised

social media just finished the job.
presented childfree as freedom and ideal life, filmed the worst four seconds of a mothers day and called it a warning or "here's motherhood"

and underneath all of it, we removed people from history

no ancestors you owe anything, no descendants you're building for, just one atomic self detached from any sense of continuity. one life with no purpose other than its own selfish goals
especially for western people who have been taught that their ancestors are the most evil humans who ever existed
someone with no past and no future has no reason to see themselves as part of history, and everything they do revolves around their own pleasure
why would you carry something you were raised to be ashamed of?

so a quarter of women raised in captivity selecting for civilizational suicide becomes inevitable
the idea that this was a conscious choice is delusional.
we are the first species in history to get everything it ever wanted: safety, medicine, abundance, ninety good years, and the result is suicide.
everything else alive still manages to reproduce through famine and plagues. we got paradise and stopped

anyone shutting off their own survival drive with no threat in sight is definitionally suicidal and that's where we are now

[Fitz @FitzGSN_]

Had to put The Beast from Sicario over this

[Akis V @AkisV8]

@Polymarket 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?

[NBABase @TheNBABase]

San Antonio libraries have launched a "Read Like Wemby" campaign featuring Victor Wembanyama’s favorite fantasy and sci-fi books.

Since launching, nearly 160 books have been checked out or put on hold, and local kids are taking photos with life-sized Wemby cutouts.

(Via @MirinFader)

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[Akis V @AkisV8]

@itsMichaelJ Spin left hand off the glass by Timmy was just perfect.

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

So true☹️

📹 vetoshkin.evgeniy

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

“Wait so you’re telling me…”

[Akis V @AkisV8]

@unusual_whales 🤣

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.

My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.

This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.

Hedgie🤗