Хай живе Вільна Україна

tsundoku - there was a word for it all along...

[Rima Med 🇺🇸🇱🇹🇺🇦 @rima_medUA]

While I was briefly back in the US, I was disheartened by how many would say "oh is that still going on?" when referring to the war in Ukraine.

It was incredibly frustrating for me especially as an active duty medic in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. At that point its just willful ignorance. Everyone has a cellphone, laptop, tablet, etc. Information is literally at your finger tips. But instead of informing oneself properly, the choice seems to be watching AI slop, mainstream media, and other short attention span apps.

The was is not over, it has not slowed down, we are still working and fighting for freedom in Ukraine, the frontline is still 1000 km long, civilians are still being killed by r*ssia every day. We can only go so far to inform you. The rest is up to you. Up to date sources, @KyivIndependent @KyivPost @saintjavelin @U24_gov_ua

Stay informed and inform others.

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

The record labels/Napster/iTunes lesson is that if you maximize rent seeking, you maximize the incentive to circumvent - but even then, if you offer a reasonable accommodation, society will accept it. Academic publishing has been a vile example of such rent seeking for decades…

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan got so angry at journal paywalls in 2011 that she built a pirate website holding 88 million scientific papers, and last month she turned the whole thing into an AI that lets you ask one question and get the actual research as the answer.

Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan, and the website is called Sci-Hub.

The AI she just launched is called Sci-Bot. It lives at https://t.co/6w0IBtOEYB and almost nobody outside academia knows it exists yet.

Here is the story, because it is one of the strangest things to happen in science publishing in the last 50 years.

Elbakyan was born in Almaty in 1988, the year the Soviet Union started to collapse. She taught herself programming at 12. She read Soviet science books that explained things her family used to call miracles. She got into computer security at university and graduated in 2009 with a degree she barely needed because by then she was already a serious hacker.

Alexandra moved to Moscow that fall. Then Germany. Then a research internship in the United States. She was working on brain-computer interfaces, the kind of research that requires you to read hundreds of papers a year just to keep up with the field.

And every single one of those papers was locked behind a journal paywall that cost between 30 and 50 dollars to read once.

She did the math. A graduate student in Kazakhstan could not afford to read science.

The first thing she did was learn how to get around the paywalls one paper at a time. She passed the trick around to other students. They asked her for papers constantly. She got tired of doing it manually.

So in September 2011, in three days, she wrote a script that automated the whole thing. A user pastes a DOI. The script logs in through a donated institutional credential. The paper comes back free. The website caches it.

The next person who asks for that paper gets it instantly because the previous request already saved a copy.

That was Sci-Hub. Three days of code. One graduate student. Done.

15 years later, the cache holds 88 million scientific papers. Almost every piece of scholarly literature published before 2020 is sitting on her servers. Researchers in 190 countries use it. Studies in Nature have shown that roughly half of all academic paper downloads worldwide now go through Sci-Hub, not the publishers who actually own the copyrights.

Elsevier sued her in 2015 and won a 15 million dollar judgment. She did not pay. The American Chemical Society sued her and won an injunction. She did not comply. Courts in India, France, Russia, and the UK have tried to block the domain. She just moves it. https://t.co/3sAWJzNe8I. https://t.co/tGIETesZ8i. https://t.co/H5WQ1f9lqR. The site has had over 20 domains and is still up.

Nature put her on its list of the 10 people who mattered most to science in 2016. The New York Times compared her to Edward Snowden. The Verge called her the pirate queen of science.

She has not been to the United States in over a decade because she would be arrested at the airport.

The Sci-Bot launch in April 2026 is the part that nobody is talking about.

She took the 88 million paper database and put a small language model on top of it. You ask a question in plain English. The model searches the entire shadow library, pulls the relevant papers, synthesizes an answer grounded in real citations, and links you to the full text of every source. Free. No login. No institutional credential. No paywall.

Three real scientists tested it for a Chemical and Engineering News article last month. They asked it medical and chemistry questions. The radiologist said the answer he got was usable. The chemist said the gaps in recent literature were obvious but the older science was solid. The publisher community is furious.

What she built is what the paid academic AI tools are trying to build. Except the paid ones are limited to what their parent publisher legally owns. Hers is limited to almost nothing.

Alexandra still lives somewhere in Russia. She does not give her address. She does not do video interviews. She gives talks over Skype with the camera off. She runs the largest illegal library in human history from a laptop and a donation page.

A graduate student who could not afford to read science built the system the entire scientific community now quietly depends on.

The publishers have spent a decade trying to shut her down.

She just shipped an AI that makes their entire business model outdated.

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

Add to this, I have security professionals saying it’s okay to follow instructions from a similar vendor to add _all of Amazon SES_ to an SPF record…

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Tonight, Congress will vote to lower the age to prosecute minors as adults from 16 down to 14 in DC.

Let me get this straight:

Congress wants to prosecute 14 yr. olds as adults, but they don’t want to prosecute adults who sexually abuse 14 year olds?

Release the Epstein files.

[DMARC_org @DMARC_org]

Our #DMARC stats hadn't been updated in a few years, but we've finally posted an update through CY2025. More info here: https://t.co/VDIKBLt6Yu

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

@nachippoo 「さようならニーナ」？何❓なぜ⁇

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

Like I said: view all political developments for the rest of the week in light of the fact that the Epstein Files are supposed to be released on Friday.

House Republicans just suddenly cancelled Congressional session Friday and are sending everyone home Thursday evening.

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

Yes! Make #Zardoz part of your holiday celebrations as you contemplate the end of the static world behind us (2025) and the bright new world opening before us (2026)! Contemplate _that_ on third level…

[Richard Kadrey @Richard_Kadrey]

Christmas night: "But Santa, you've hardly touched your Zardoz cookies."

[Senator Mazie Hirono @maziehirono]

This year, when given the opportunity to lower costs for working Americans, Republicans have chosen to raise costs every single time.

From higher energy bills to higher health care premiums, Republicans are actively working against the American people and their pocketbooks.

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

@vnaylon Ah, when you put it that way, it seems pretty unlikely…

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

@SwiftOnSecurity Don’t know, I frequently got “you must be married and have a family you’re hiding” just driving a German sports wagon…

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

The entirely foreseeable outcome of outsourcing to leverage lowest wages and least protected workers? The model propagates, and will eventually arrive where it started. Not the first article, won’t be the last. #labor #china #indonesia https://t.co/j1rDj4hOq0

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

This year - turkey leg, marinated in a 1:5 soy sauce to water mix for a couple hours, then some of same left in Pyrex with carrots and celery shown; baked potato; and stir fried cauliflower, red Bell pepper, and green onions with garlic and hot red pepper.

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

Last year…

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

My #Thanksgiving dinner: roast turkey drumstick, with celery segments to maintain moisture; carrots from the pan below the turkey; mushrooms sautéed in butter and garlic; green beans in ginger and soy sauce, with a little Fresno pepper kick; and baked 🥔

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

Just noticed that #Classico Organic sauce comes in _graduated_ Atlas Mason jars. Pretty cool! Do they accept normal two-piece lids, too?

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

@mizunocaitlin Great outfit! Hooray for whimsy! We could all use a bit more of that…

[Хай живе Вільна Україна @_smj]

Did you catch that Judge Mehta handed down a “remedy” in the Google anti-trust case that pretty much just tells Google to carry on?

[Cory Doctorow NO LONGER ON TWIT TER @doctorow]

Well, *fuck*.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on https://t.co/iSBh8srvly, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://t.co/MW19KeIIL9

1/

[Gabrielius Landsbergis🇱🇹 @GLandsbergis]

The current geopolitical moment is often compared to Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938. But there is another point in history that could be used as an example equally well.

In 1944, Stalin, sensing victory approaching, demanded that part of Poland be recognised by the Allies as part of the Soviet Union. Instead of rejecting the demands, the Allies ultimately put pressure on the Poles to accept Stalin’s redrawn borders. Sounds familiar.

When Polish Prime Minister Mikołajczyk refused to accept the ultimatum, Churchill exploded: “You are no Government if you are incapable of taking any decision. You are callous people who want to wreck Europe and then to run away to your own troubles… What did you put into the common pool? You may withdraw your divisions if you like. You are absolutely incapable of facing facts. Never in my life have I seen such people.”

The British Prime Minister was basically calling the Poles selfish for demanding the preservation of the Polish state. But the Allies had no excuse for leaving Poland to the Soviet Union, betraying a country that had sacrificed so much for the freedom of Europe.

What President Trump is doing with Putin should come as no surprise. He never hid the fact that he intends to have a “deal” with Putin. He has shown little interest in what that would mean for Ukraine or for European security. The doing of the deal was always his sole interest. Putin was ready to oblige, but only if the deal was on his terms. Currently he wants part of Ukraine. But his ultimate goal has never changed: he will be going after Ukraine’s – and, when he sees a chance, Europe’s – jugular.

And here we are, reading Putin’s script in a Putin–Trump pact.

It is also easy to predict what Ukraine might do with this. President Zelensky’s position looks clear: he rejects the pact; there is no way Ukraine can accept a capitulation. Not while it is still able to fight and still has allies that can support that fight.

The unanswered question is what Europe is prepared to do now.

Is Europe going to follow President Zelensky’s example and continue to reject the Putin–Trump pact? I am sure there are those who already think that pressing Ukraine to give up is the best path forward. Some might even think Ukrainians are “callous” for making demands. From the point of view of a war-weary western decisionmaker, the Trump-Putin pact might seem tempting. It might achieve a ceasefire, no matter how temporary, they ponder. It makes the war somebody else’s problem, they say to themselves. And, they say, we need to do what we can to appease President Trump, especially if he were to threaten to abandon Europe.

To proponents of the messy redrawing of borders I say: we have been here before. One of the most shameful moments of the Second World War was the abandonment of allies – friends – who fought alongside the Brits and the Americans, leaving them for decades of debilitating Soviet rule, because it was “expedient”, or as they used to say, “there was nothing we could have done.”

That defeatist shrugging isn’t so convincing this time. We all know there are things we can do. We can help Ukraine. We can treat Ukraine as a true ally that has been fighting not just alongside us, but for us. There would be no hiding behind empty words. Whereas, endorsing the pact or pressuring Ukraine to accept it would bring generational shame.

Victors avoid judgement – that is why we seldom remember the words of Churchill to Mikołajczyk. But Europe is not a victor right now; it is on the path to be the next victim. So, if nothing else, self-preservation must kick in, convincing European countries that allowing the alteration of borders by force would be a suicidal move.

And in the end, the Trump-Putin pact’s power depends on others supporting it. The honourable thing to do would be not to support it. If Europe stands with Ukraine, the pact will last for just a short moment in Alaska.