Carl

Tryna make it

[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.

[27. @dimvji]

you just have to get really good at continuing

[Mechanical Knowledge @mechanical_4u]

Before modern indexed shifting became standard, some bicycles used fully mechanical automatic derailleur systems that changed gears without any rider input. Designs like the Suntour Auto Shift relied on centrifugal force generated by rear wheel rotation to control when and how the drivetrain shifted.

As speed increased, internal rotating weights inside the mechanism moved outward, activating linkages that adjusted cable tension. This movement guided the derailleur across the cassette, allowing the bike to shift into higher gears automatically, then return to lower gears as speed dropped.

Although innovative, these systems were sensitive to setup and riding conditions, which limited their long term adoption. Advances in indexed shifters and rider demand for precise manual control eventually replaced automatic mechanical solutions, turning designs like this into a rare but fascinating chapter in cycling engineering history.

Video Credit: rbcbikes

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize.

Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness.

Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding.

He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history.

The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future.

A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite.

That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.

[DuplexCyclone @DuplexCyclone]

@BossDuffi @frontierindica He’s not your buddy, guy!

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

In medical school, we are taught a golden rule: "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." It is a reminder to look for the common explanation before the exotic one. But after decades in cardiology, I’ve learned that if a patient is still suffering after the "horses" have been ruled out, a doctor must have the courage—and the curiosity—to go hunting for the zebra.

Sarah was a thirty-four-year-old marathon runner and a devoted mother who came to me after six months of being told she was "fine." She had been bounced from one specialist to another, each one pointing to her normal EKG and standard blood tests as proof that her crushing fatigue and racing heart were simply the result of "new mom stress." By the time she reached my office, she didn't just look tired; she looked invisible, as if the medical system had stopped seeing the woman and only saw the data.

Instead of re-reading the normal test results that had already failed her, I asked Sarah to walk me through her life. We talked about her training and her family, eventually landing on a backpacking trip she took to the Mendoza province of rural Argentina. She described staying in a charming, rustic cottage made of sun-dried mud bricks. She mentioned waking up one morning with a strangely swollen, purple eyelid that she assumed was a simple spider bite.

As she spoke, a memory surfaced from a biography I had read years ago about Charles Darwin. Most people know Darwin for his theories on evolution, but medical historians have long puzzled over the mysterious, debilitating illness that plagued him for decades after he returned from his voyage on the HMS Beagle. Darwin had written in his journals about being bitten by the "great black bug of the Pampas" while sleeping in mud-walled huts in South America. He spent the rest of his life suffering from heart palpitations and exhaustion that the Victorian doctors of his time could never explain.

I realized then that Sarah wasn't suffering from stress; she was likely hosting the same "silent killer" that may have haunted Darwin: Chagas Disease.

The "Kissing Bug" lives in the cracks of those mud-brick walls. It bites its victims—often near the eyes or mouth—while they sleep, passing a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi into the blood. The danger of Chagas is that the initial symptoms disappear quickly, but the parasite can hide in the body for years, slowly weaving itself into the muscle and electrical "wiring" of the heart.

To confirm this, I moved beyond the standard tests. I ordered a specialized "Strain Rate" ultrasound, which doesn't just look at whether the heart is pumping, but at how the individual muscle fibers are stretching. We saw that while her heart looked strong to the naked eye, the fibers were "stuttering," a sign of early parasite-induced scarring. A specific blood test for the parasite's antibodies confirmed the diagnosis.

Treatment required a difficult, sixty-day course of anti-parasitic medication to stop the infection, paired with a protective heart regimen to keep her electrical system stable while the inflammation settled. Because we caught it before her heart was physically damaged or enlarged, the recovery was a success.

Months later, Sarah returned to my office, her vibrant energy restored. She brought me a leather-bound copy of The Voyage of the Beagle with a note tucked inside. She wrote that while other doctors had looked at her charts, I had looked at her. This case remains a vital reminder for my memoir: in a world of high-tech scans and AI, the most sophisticated diagnostic tool we possess is still the human story. When we truly listen, we don't just find the disease—we find the patient.

Good morning.

[0.005 Seconds (3/694) @seconds_0]

user: s

windows search: alright i can do this

u: sp

ws: ok im narrowing this down

u: spo

ws: ok weve got spider solitaire (sponsored game hes never opened) and spotify (opened daily for 5 years)

u: spot

ws: GOT IT
ws: BEST MATCH: SPIDER SOLITARE
ws: im so good at this

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

He pulls over for a second, spots a small body of water, grabs a rod from the passenger seat, casts once and instantly hooks a fish. Unreal. https://t.co/1GaFfcNwFP

[SXR123 (Dave) @SXR123]

I don't say this lightly but Steam is quite literally the only company I am okay with having this monopoly.

There are so many ways they could use steam to generate more money. I see every opportunity for them to exploit their userbase and they choose not to.

They have exceptional customer service, steam charts are public (something MANY companies would rather not be public to hide embarrassment), ludicrous deals for games several times a year, banning in-game ads, making it a requirement for developers to say whether or not they used AI, the mod support and steam workshop. The list goes on.

Any gaming CEO would kill to have Steam and would promptly kill it within 5 years to appease share holders.

Don't even get me started on the Gabecube (the new steam console).

Steam single-handedly is holding PC gaming up and I never want anything to happen to it.

Other companies can eat shit and learn to actually respect their customers like Valve and Steam do—but they won't, because that means not squeezing every dime possible out of your userbase.

[u m a m i @u_m_a_m_i]

When I first released this, I didn’t imagine it would end up being one of my most popular animations. Perception is filtered through bias - what we see in others is incomplete and we substitute whats missing with pieces of ourselves.

[Тsфdiиg @tsoding]

You used to be able to just create a Native GUI App in 10 seconds. No Electron, no Game Engines, no Web frameworks. Just a lean fast .EXE produced in seconds. Works on any Windows machine WITHOUT Internet connection. Software Development is actually going backwards.

[Carl @cjstainless]

Spotify cooked with their wrapped this year. Very tasteful, and way more insightful than usual

[Carl @cjstainless]

no way I spotted the mcqueen I saw here a couple days ago

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Let me explain exactly why VLC is free despite 6B downloads, because no one seems to get it.

VLC doesn’t make money because making money would destroy the only thing that made it reach 6 billion downloads in the first place.

The player grew through a specific distribution loop: tech-savvy users install it once, it works perfectly on every weird video file they throw at it, and they recommend it to everyone forever. IT departments deploy it across entire companies. A Reddit comment from 2009 still drives downloads in 2025 because the answer never changed.

That recommendation engine dies the second ads appear. Not slowly. Immediately.

The users who drive VLC’s distribution are the exact people who understand what ads mean. Your incentives just switched from “make the best player” to “maximize impressions.” They see it, stop recommending it, and your growth engine shuts off.

Run the actual numbers. VLC gets maybe 50 million active users daily across 6 billion total downloads. Typical video player ad rates run $1-3 CPM. Even if you served ads on every playback session, you’re looking at maybe $50-150 million annually at absolute peak optimistic assumptions.

Sounds like a lot until you realize what Kempf actually traded it for.

VLC reaching 6 billion people made Kempf the person who built the infrastructure everyone depends on. He runs a video consulting business. He built dav1d, an AV1 codec that powers modern streaming. Being “the guy who kept VLC free” opens every door in video technology. Clients pay him to solve problems because he proved he optimizes for quality over quick monetization.

“Former ad-supported media player executive” gets you exactly zero of that leverage.

The people celebrating Kempf’s ethics are missing the calculation. He didn’t sacrifice millions for principles. He rejected $150M in highly uncertain ad revenue to build permanent positioning worth multiples of that in everything else he touches.

VLC free generates more value for Kempf than VLC monetized ever could. The trade was never even close.

[Dr. Clayton Forrester @DrClaytonForre1]

The Romans built the Pantheon out of concrete in 126 A.D. and it still looks like new. Modern concrete is inferior.

[VishalSid | CW: Jojos @VishalSid_1]

INDIAN BROS WE ARE SOO BACK
THIS LOOKS WAY TOO GOOD😭😭🔥

WE WILL BE SEATED🗣️🔥🔥
#BahubaliTheEternalWar

[Guilherme Nunes @guilhernunes_]

The cat tries to use telepathy to cheat on the test, but the duck didnt study either.

[X Freeze @XFreeze]

Quantum computers work best in extremely cold and stable environments

Moon’s permanently shadowed craters have:
- Temperatures can drop below -200°C, which helps quantum bits (qubits) work without losing information

- Constant darkness means less energy fluctuations and more stability

- There’s almost no air, water, or electromagnetic noise, so quantum states stay stable longer

[Arun Bothra 🇮🇳 @arunbothra]

A few years ago, city bus service in Odisha had fare slabs like ₹5, 7, 10, 13, 15… up to ₹25 or ₹30.

Conductors often struggled with change, leading to delays, arguments, and irritated passengers and staff.

As managing director of the company, I discussed the problem with @PrashanthBachu, a brilliant urban mobility expert. He suggested: “Simplify it. Make it ₹5–10–15–20…”

Our team was very hesitant. As a govt company, we couldn’t raise fares. This meant we could only reduce fares to simplify the slabs — ₹7 → ₹5, ₹13 → ₹10, a clear revenue drop !

Prashanth said it wouldn’t. This sounded illogical but his reasoning was brilliant:

• Faster ticketing reduces freeloaders, those who get off before the conductor reaches them.
• Happier passengers and staff mean smoother service.
• Globally, fares are in easy multiples.

We took the risk and implemented it.

Result? Everything improved. We had fewer complaints and happier staff. And the biggest surprise: Revenue went up by 3%.

Sometimes, simplifying is smarter than increasing.

@CRUT_BBSR