Brian Trát

I like to read about modern Vietnamese history & the uses of historical memory 📚 always learning & reflecting

[GBC @GBC_Press]

🚨 BREAKING:

​The United Nations has officially declared Gaza a genocide zone, noting that Israel is deliberately targeting children and infants.

​It took a full three years to reach this conclusion.

[Marianne Williamson @marwilliamson]

This is not the kind of thing that is supposed to happen in America. And it is happening to thousands of people every day.

[The Anarchist Turtle 🏴Ⓐ🔆🏳️‍⚧️ @anarchoboognish]

forcing a toddler in broad daylight inside your unmarked car with no explanation is some predator level shit and I can't believe people who supposedly "care about children" don't care about this.

[Evan Luthra @EvanLuthra]

THIS IS F*CKING DISTURBING!!!🤯

A leaked Anthropic document just came out in court. Their own words:

"Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world."

Next line: "We don't want it to be known that we are working on this."

They planned to shred every book on the planet, in secret. And they almost got away with it.

It starts with theft. Anthropic stole 7 MILLION books from pirate sites to train Claude, because their CEO said paying authors was too much of a "slog."

Then the lawsuits hit and they needed a legal way to keep going. So they hired the ex-head of Google Books and sent him to publishers to ask for permission. Publishers said no.

That's when they found the loophole.

Buy millions of real, physical books. Cut the spines off with a hydraulic blade, scan the loose pages, and throw what's left in recycling.

One vendor offered to destroy 2 MILLION books in 6 months. That's 11,000 books a day.

Now the insane part.. destroying the books is what made it legal.

If you scan a book and keep it, that's a crime. If you scan it and shred it, that's fair use. A judge actually approved this, which means the shredder WAS the legal strategy.

They still paid $1.5 billion for the stolen books, the biggest copyright settlement in history. Works out to $3,000 per book.

And the scans are locked in Anthropic's private library forever. Nobody outside the company will ever see them. The authors got a shredded book and nothing else.

The part I can't stop thinking about is that a book on a shelf lasts 500 years without power, wifi, or a subscription, and the AI it was destroyed for gets thrown away in 18 months.

They killed something permanent to feed something disposable.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

George Lopez: “I don’t follow the Lakers anymore. Mark Walter owns detention centers, runs them for profit. Also owns the Dodgers. As soon as I found that out, I disassociated myself from the Dodgers and the Lakers. I lost two teams in one week”

[Jamarrius @YungxJayy]

It cannot be said enough how evil the United States is for what they’re doing to Cuba.

[Lance Cooper @lmauricecpr]

The United States has had more than one hundred and fifty years to label the Ku Klux Klan a terrorist organization and has never done so. The fact that the Black Panther Party was dismantled by the US government but the Klan still exists tells you a lot about this country.

[Jack Hopkins @thejackhopkins]

ICE grabbed a roofer in Missouri with no warrant. His wife self-deported so her kids wouldn’t lose both parents. Both found bound and shot in a cane field. Their 14-month-old was crying next to her mother’s body, dehydrated. Not a side effect. The point. Enough of this bullshit.

[The Serfs (youtube.com/theserftimes) @theserfstv]

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

[James🔻 @GoodVibePolitik]

Open threat to deploy a foreign military force into the United States to circumvent prosecution of a leader wanted for genocide no big deal

[Nick Cruse 🥋 @SocialistMMA]

This is the kind of stuff Americans think happens in Russia, China and Iran

[Shahanshah of the Internet Age @ChazakielDoremi]

Nobody seems to understand this but I cannot stress enough that a judge told Anthropic that training their AI models didn't constitute copyright violation as long as they 'transferred' the text instead of 'copying' it, legally necessitating the destruction of the books

[Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini @DrKarimWafa]

They say books won’t change the world. Tell that to every colonizer who burned them. To every enslaved person who was punished for reading. Literacy is resistance. Literacy is liberation. The library is a battlefield.

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Terrifying thread.

Due to a legal ruling which lets AI companies off the hook for copyright infringement as long as they destroy the original book, they're buying up millions of rare books, scanning them as AI training data, and then destroying them.

[Chetuya Chinagolum @Chetuyachinago]

This is precisely the tragic reality that W.E.B. Du Bois painfully discovered during the final stages of his intellectual life. The Black individuals who somehow manage to accumulate personal wealth, corporate power, and elite social status do not . . 1/n

[199621147 @lyemcfly]

Remember when everybody was laughing at Spirit airlines for closing down. Haha funny right.

[Starr⁷ 🪭is lost in the lights @hobabobahobi]

Can we also plant trees

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Anthropic are literally effectively burning books and want to be the exclusive source of truth in the future.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Children do not simply “become pregnant.” They are raped.

Reports that girls as young as 13 are being held in immigration custody while pregnant.

We must demand transparency about what happened to them, where they are now, and whether they are receiving proper medical care.

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

Imagine the amount of propaganda it took to convince millions of people that healthcare, food assistance, social programs, clean water, clean air, good wages, housing, equal rights, diversity and a healthy planet for all people was somehow a threat to America and to Christianity.