scratch that Mitch

Floundering

[liam cunningham @liamcunningham1]

The Irish Minister of justice Jim O Callaghan is blocking students from Gaza studying in Ireland for the following reasons
There are gaps in their education
They can’t provide bank statements
They can’t prove they’ll return to Gaza.
Still silent?

[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.

[Alex Taylor @AlexTaylorNews]

My goodness. Never seen anything quite like this just now on French news @le20hfrancetele

A quarter of a million people forced to leave their homes. Firemen exhausted in the unequal fight. Huge area around Bordeaux engulfed in flames

Please give it a watch
My Eng subtitles

[Leyla Hamed @leylahamed]

At his latest summer camp, Pep Guardiola welcomed 28 Palestinian children, giving them a space to play, smile and simply be children.

His legacy goes far beyond football. Nobody comes close.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Whenever the apt analogy is drawn between South African Apartheid and Israeli Apartheid, cynics and doubters ask: If so, where is the Palestinian Nelson Mandela?

The answer is: Languishing in prison, tortured and menaced around the clock by prison guards for 24 endless years. His name? Marwan Barghouti.

The man who can unite Palestinians. A shining bright hope for both Palestinians and Israelis who want an end to genocide, to apartheid, to ethnic cleansing, to violence. That’s why Marwan Barghouti keeps languishing in a dismal, inhuman Israeli prison.

Will you join me in joining TEAM FREE MARWAN?

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

This morning, a young Palestinian girl collapsed in tears as she said goodbye to her father, Mahmoud Tarroush, after becoming the sole surviving member of her family.

A year ago, an Israeli strike on their home in Gaza killed her mother and siblings, leaving only her and her father alive. Her father was targeted on his motorcycle on Monday and later died, leaving her alone.

(Information and photograph by journalist Musab Al-Shareef)

[Boyan Slat @BoyanSlat]

Still wild that this is how much trash is not in the ocean right now because of The Ocean Cleanup and that this number will look tiny in a year or two

[Stan's Account @tristandross]

born out of our perennial indignity at having to endure the uk's rental market, channel 4 let us make a film about the housing crisis, which is now available to stream on their platform (fka 4OD) and youtube!
https://t.co/LrWeBa5AxS

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

Palestinians race to evacuate homes & businesses in Anza, near Jenin, after the israelis give them just an hour before the village is demolished

[Meral Hussein-Ece @meralhece]

One of thousands.

[Craic Of The Ash @CraicOfTheAsh]

MidWest Radio meltdown during the last minutes of the Mayo match. Volume DOWN 🤣

[Abdullah Omar🇵🇸 @Abdullah_Om3r03]

With shocking cruelty... Watch what this Israeli settler did to this dog.

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

Take a moment to take in the scene around his bookstore. Now gone forever. It’s breathtaking. Israel extinguishes every spark of life it finds.

This is their MO. This is what they do.

[Tehran Tadhg @TadhgHickey]

My friend @MohammadHuraini had his car set alight & his family almost burned alive in their home in a pogrom in the West Bank. But please do explain to him why it's problematic to describe the lawless f**** who terrorise his village almost daily as Jewish supremacists

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

There is no ceasefire. There has never been a ceasefire.

[Peter Stefanovic @PeterStefanovi2]

Many have asked why I have been so silent these past weeks. I'm heartbroken to say my beautiful, darling wife passed away on Thursday. She had held my heart in her hand from the first moment I saw her and we shared 36 wonderful years together. She had bravely battled cancer with courage and fortitude for many years yet still never lost the ability to light up a room with her beautiful smile, her wonderful sense of humour and her laughter. Not once did she give up the hope for life. I truely believe there is more to this existence than we know and that one day we shall be reunited by our love for each other, a love that was so honest and so real and so true. Until then I shall hold her tightly in my heart. When my daughter and I returned home from the hospital a red rose had appeared in our garden. It was right outside our door and had appeared from nowhere in a clump of dry weeds. Red roses were my wife’s favorite flower. She wore 3 in her hair at our wedding and carried a bouquet of red roses. I had asked her to send me a sign before she passed to say she was ok. It must have been sent by her.

You will stay forever in my heart until we are together again my darling ❤️

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Fine and fearless report from the West Bank by the great @christinalamb- with a deeply moving ending: "My son was on my wife’s lap when the IDF shot him dead’"
https://t.co/eBnokaRmLU

[Andrey X @the_andrey_x]

After the massacre in Tel yesterday, 🇮🇱 settlers launched a wave of pogroms on nearby villages

Today the Israeli army joined the attacks and tear gassed the people of the neighbouring village of Surra

They also tear gassed the journalists and the ambulances

📍 West Bank 🇵🇸

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

After Jewish terrorist "settlers" murdered Farouq Ramadan in cold blood, on camera.

The Israel Army is now filming themselves blowing up his families home so Israeli citizens can cheer and laugh.

And silence from "the West".

A truly demonic entity

[Ahmad Chamseddine @Achamsedine]

Cet automne, pour la première fois depuis 250 ans, ma famille ne récoltera pas d'olives au Liban.

Nos 600 oliviers ont été arrachés du sol par l'armée israélienne, racines comprises, et emportés. Les plus vieux avaient 500 ans !

Cette terre, mon grand-père la tenait de son arrière-grand-père. En deux siècles et demi, ma famille a acheté de la terre. Elle n'en a jamais vendu un mètre, pas un seul jour. Chez nous, on ne construit pas sur la terre. On y plante. Ces arbres ont survécu à plusieurs guerres. Ils ont survécu à tout.

Regardez les deux photos. À gauche, notre terre le 25 juin, la veille de la signature de l'accord entre le Liban et Israël. À droite, la même terre le 20 juillet.

Il ne reste rien. Et c’est justement ça, la preuve. Un incendie laisse des troncs noirs debout. Une frappe laisse des cratères. Ici, pas un tronc calciné, pas une souche, pas un débris. Une terre nue, raclée, griffée par les chenilles des engins. Déterrer un olivier de 500 ans sans le tuer demande des pelleteuses, un savoir-faire, des camions et une destination. Ce n’est pas un dégât de guerre. C’est une opération, sur une terre où il n’y avait ni armes, ni combattants, ni présence militaire. Ma famille n'a jamais été liée de près ou de loin au Hezbollah, et elle ne le sera jamais. Il n'y avait que des arbres, et des gens qui les taillent depuis huit générations.

D'après les témoignages qui nous parviennent, ces arbres auraient été emportés de l'autre côté de la frontière, vers Israël.

L'accord signé entre le Liban et Israël, censé préparer la paix, protège les biens des civils. Je demande simplement qu'il soit appliqué : que le sort des arbres déterrés soit établi, que ceux qui sont encore vivants soient rendus. Si nos arbres sont vivants quelque part, ils peuvent revenir. Je ne cherche pas une vengeance. Je cherche une adresse !

J'ai hésité à écrire ces lignes, pour ne pas provoquer des réactions d'un côté comme de l'autre. Mais je refuse de faire le deuil de ces oliviers. Dans ces arbres vit l'âme de mon grand-père, ancien général de la police libanaise, un homme qui a toujours cru dans la paix, dans les humains et dans la lumière. Il taillait ces arbres à mains nues. Il répétait : “on ne vend pas la terre, on la transmet”
Je lui dois de ne pas me taire.