j e double hockey sticks

[Colin McLaughlin @colinthecrabb]

Get outta here Odysseus. We're eating the sun-god's cattle and you don't want none of this shit

[Acyn @Acyn]

A notepad in front of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent reads "To Do Buy Japanese Yen $5-10 bil" as he participates in a cabinet meeting at Camp David.

The note, photographed at 11:33 EDT, came after Reuters earlier reported the Treasury had put banks on alert for a possible U.S. intervention in the market for Japan's currency.

📸REUTERS/Daniel Heuer

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

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.

[Burner @BurnerDontask]

Winning is not an option (?)

[𝓷𝔁𝔂𝓲𝓮 @glooomiii]

bro let’s do our secret hand shake *kisses you on the lips*

[Covie @covie_93]

They moved on from lindsey graham's death so quickly you'd think he died in a school shooting.

[alex @rslashchips]

The kids are rebuilding icanhascheezburger from the irradiated steel around them

[Old Man Rattle @oldrattle_]

my favorite part about arby’s is how they let you pay with your body

[OS2NOX @OS2NOX]

Zohran Mamdani: legally we cannot enforce netanyahu's warrant and are left with no options to stop his visit

Mayor Sliwa in Timeline B:

[j e double hockey sticks @Jeronimo0oo0]

@beetlemoses Love this for you

[Nugs @Nugjokes]

It’s called broad daylight because women light up the world

[Cairo Smith @cairoasmith]

Forlorn BBC reporter doing his segment at the furry con: "It's said there are no atheists in foxholes, John, but there are, sadly, foxes in atheist holes."

[dandelion georgism 🔰🏗 @DandyGeorgism]

1995: oh cool you can buy books online now

2026: the company that owns Whole Foods and Lord of the Rings is experiencing setbacks with its space program

[gunnar @GunnzMetzger]

if i kill myself right now i won't have to figure something out for dinner

[retard girl @freewavebitch]

Being schizophrenic but the only voices you hear are migos adlibs

[Richard Newby @RichardLNewby3]

Replace every single data center with true IMAX theaters.

[🖤 Buy Physical Media 🖤 @VHSDVDBLURAY4K]

Why they got the Chik-Fila-A Workers looking like harkonnen soldiers From Dune 😭💀

[S2 Underground @s2_underground]

First of all no, we're not doing this. I do not answer DMs from a company that is trying to do damage control AFTER they have ruined the trust of Americans. I do not have "good faith" debates with people who want to enslave me in a fishbowl that they can monitor at all times.

Guess what guys: We don't actually have to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, or engage in "good faith" debates with bad actors. I don't have to justify my concerns about Flock to anyone. But since this condescension pissed me off, I will respond publicly, since Flock seems to want to keep our voices in the shadows and out of the public eye.

Note the argument:

"You see, King George specifically authorized quartering troops among you, I don't know what you're complaining about it's ALL LEGAL".

Well, golly gee guys, I guess it's all right then, they made it legal.

That's exactly the problem. Notice how nobody has a problem with standard security cameras. Public security cameras are not the problem...directly pumping the feed of every square inch of the country into a centralized federal database is one HELL of a problem and we must do everything within our rights as Americans to push back against efforts like this, if we are to have a future as a nation.

Flock, much like Palantir, took the decently good idea of improving security, and implemented it in the most cartoonishly evil way possible at nearly every single step. They are working directly for all levels of government....not the citizenry. They use subterfuge, legal technicalities, and every single trick in the book to put up hundreds of cameras every single day. They constantly mislead the public about what databases their sensors feed into, and who they sell the metadata to.

They have so little oversight that it's laughable, and ALL oversight involves the classic case of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing". Flock has been caught lying MANY times, and misleading the public regarding what their cameras actually do. Newsflash...they don't just read license plates.

They are also concealing which agencies purchase their data specifically so as to avoid getting warrants, and in doing so they have turned the ENTIRE COUNTRY into an open air prison....where THEY get to provide the intelligence data to those who enforce the laws as selectively as they please.

And their defense for doing so? "Aww look at the cute puppy we rescued" or "We arrested one guy using our camera network, we're so AWESOME".

You don't get to arrest one genuine criminal, and use that as justification to set up and entire Minority Report-esque surveillance system to surveil the entire country. You don't get to betray trust, and then be sad that people don't trust you. You don't get to cozy up to the boot of tyranny so much that you become the boot yourself, and then pretend to be just "one of the guys".

We will not fall for this gaslighting, no matter how hard they try.

For some reason, many people think that private companies can't be tyrants, which could not be further from the truth. At a certain point, a private company can be so heavily embedded within government, that they might as well BE the government. Except they are worse, because we don't even have the tiniest way to hold them accountable except for taking the billion-dollar company to court.

That's my problem with Flock, Palantir, and pretty much every single other defense contractor in existence. I will NOT accept every single facet of my life being monitored, just in case a criminal commits a crime somewhere near me. I will NOT live in "ze pod", no matter which politician is in power, and I will not accept a future where people like this will dictate to me what my country should be.

[Daniel Bordman @DanielBordmanOG]

Every word of this sentence is a work of art

[Solar Flare @solarflare001]

Was at a rave high as fuck on mushrooms and when the fog machines came on my Jewish friend clutched his Star of David necklace and said “Omg it’s the chambers” and that really fucked with my trip