Ashfaak Saldulker

Night gardener

[Brian Tashman @briantashman]

Horrific statements from Hasan Piker today in the New York Times comparing Israeli actions to Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, and the Holocaust that’ll surely be covered by CNN and condemned by every Democratic leader

Oh wait they’re from Israeli generals and officials

[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.

[Nada Maucourant Atallah @MaucourantNada]

Following Netanyahu’s claim that Christian villages requested to be annexed by Israel, we spoke to three Lebanese officials from Christian-majority villages in the south.

All of them denied the claim.

“Whatever he says, we’ve never asked anyone for protection… We have the Lebanese state, and we will remain Lebanese.”
Our latest with @NadaOHomsi
https://t.co/XNAo4CvHu8

[Laila Al-Arian @LailaAlarian]

Israel is still killing civilians in Gaza. In what universe is this a “ceasefire”?

[Rory Petzer @RoryPetzer]

CHAMPIONS! I’M AT THE WORLD CUP IN MEXICO AND BAFANA BAFANA JUST SCORED A GOAL! MASEKO! 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆 #BafanaPride

[Bafana Bafana @BafanaBafana]

Bafana Bafana enter the history books as they progress to the next round of the FIFA World Cup for the first time ever thanks to a Thapelo Maseko goal in the 2nd half

#BafanaPride #BafanaBafana #FIFAWorldCup

[jeremy scahill @jeremyscahill]

⚡️ Exclusive: Internal Documents Show Trump’s “Board of Peace“ Moving to Crush Palestinian Self-Determination

🔺Gaza Proposals obtained by Drop Site show Trump’s board attempting to force a Palestinian surrender that Israel could not achieve in war.

https://t.co/Asck8RA5ft

[Ashfaak Saldulker @faak_yeah]

@s_m_marandi Why are they so proud to starve civilians?

[Ashfaak Saldulker @faak_yeah]

@gerrylum2 @comma_ai @tushparmar Address visible in photo

[Ashfaak Saldulker @faak_yeah]

@MarioNawfal There is no Cafe Americana at OR Tambo. Easily verifiable lie.

[Ashfaak Saldulker @faak_yeah]

@Alonso_GD But Trump says stockpiles are medium to upper medium so everything is definitely fine...

https://t.co/MThQfTkces

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

A child sits and reads a book inside the shattered shell of her home, surrounded by rubble and the hanging laundry.

[Ashfaak Saldulker @faak_yeah]

Keep boycotting. It works.

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

"But what’s actually taking a hit in Israel isn’t one economic sector or the other — it’s the Israeli brand, and it may not recover.
Ironically, the best representation of that brand are the Jaffa oranges, which have virtually disappeared from the international market — a brand that in and of itself is a representation of Israel’s settler colonial expropriation of Palestinian culture."
https://t.co/elE58t3fi1

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

Babies are freezing to death in Gaza. I’ll repeat that: Babies are freezing to death in Gaza. And the Western media just shrugs.

[Ashfaak Saldulker @faak_yeah]

@comma_ai are there any plans to allow shipping comma four to South Africa? I went and bought a car for comma and now realise there's no direct shipping option.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Abducting a doctor’s daughter to put pressure on him — much like executing men with their hands up — is the kind of thing most people in the West can only understand through the prism of movies that are trying very hard to make it obvious how bad the bad guys are

[Ashfaak Saldulker @faak_yeah]

@abierkhatib This is AI generated. You can see the Sora watermark

[Ashfaak Saldulker @faak_yeah]

@receipts_lol Is this in the West Bank?

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The new edition of JOHNSTONE is now available to order in print or download as a pay-what-you-want e-book version.

This month’s issue features a painting of Global Sumud Flotilla activist Greg Stoker calmly enjoying a smoke while the IDF was spraying the boats with skunk water in preparation to kidnap them.

My favorite thing about the Gaza flotilla activism we’ve been seeing is that it’s a glaring reminder that ordinary people really can just go up against the machine, and that the more there are the harder it is to stop them. It took Israel more than a day to abduct all the activists on the largest wave of boats because there were so many of them. A significantly greater number would probably have seen some ships land on the Gaza shore.

Everything about our society is geared toward stopping us from noticing this dynamic. Our education systems, our political systems, our media, our online information. Religions that have been around for thousands of years because the powerful endorsed and promulgated them are full of passages extolling the virtues of obedience, poverty, meekness, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. From the moment we are born our heads are filled with stories about why it’s good and right to consent to the status quo and why it would be wrong to take back what has been stolen from us by a predatory ruling class.

This is why we’re always inundated with messaging about the importance of civility and politeness any time people realize that they can simply confront corrupt officials in restaurants or at their homes to push for what they want. The managers of the oligarchic empire which rules over us are terrified that we will one day notice that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that there’s really nothing they could do to stop us if we decided to replace them with a system which benefits ordinary people instead of an elite few.

👇