Nicholas Pearce

Journalist. Rerum cognoscere causas.

[Jason Kint @jason_kint]

woah. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft.
Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1

[NIK @ns123abc]

BREAKING: Anthropic threat intelligence team published a report on everyone misusing Claude

"We believe we have a responsibility to disclose misuse of our services"

It’s insane, everybody should read it:

[yev @YevKopiika]

every slavic tale be like

[Nicholas Pearce @nickpearce_3]

Will Self’s hour-long diatribe included, this was an intensely enjoyable event that did justice to the sheer fun and pleasure of reading Amis.

[My Martin Amis @mymartinamis]

🔊Thank you to everyone who joined us for the spectacularly successful📚After Amis📚live day event at @BirkbeckUoL and @21Soho yesterday.

We cannot end today without also thanking the following writers and podcast fans, who kindly gave their voices to our closing tribute for the evening. 👇

⭐@AmandaPCraig
⭐@alysdenby
⭐@Leon_C_C
⭐@GMonaghan1998
⭐@SimonParkin
⭐@nickpearce_3
⭐@RossBarkan
⭐@BarneysRubble0
⭐@judecook_
⭐@RobDoyle1
⭐@SSamols
⭐@dpatrikarakos
⭐@postpost_its

[My Martin Amis @mymartinamis]

🔊Thank you to everyone who joined us for the spectacularly successful📚After Amis📚live day event at @BirkbeckUoL and @21Soho yesterday.

We cannot end today without also thanking the following writers and podcast fans, who kindly gave their voices to our closing tribute for the evening. 👇

⭐@AmandaPCraig
⭐@alysdenby
⭐@Leon_C_C
⭐@GMonaghan1998
⭐@SimonParkin
⭐@nickpearce_3
⭐@RossBarkan
⭐@BarneysRubble0
⭐@judecook_
⭐@RobDoyle1
⭐@SSamols
⭐@dpatrikarakos
⭐@postpost_its

[Teresa M. Bejan @tmbejan]

Absolutely brilliant from @second_sailing

“As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem — tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.”

Or as Plato’s Socrates puts it in Republic: “Nothing taught by force stays in the soul.”

To Save Higher Ed, Professors Need to Get a Little Weird https://t.co/y9JBxwghTD

[Novaya Gazeta Europe @novayagazeta_en]

📹 | 94-year-old Russian babushka bums cigarette off her ambulance nurse

A video has gone viral in Russia over the weekend in which a 94-year-old Moscow babushka, lying on an ambulance gurney, bums a cigarette from a nurse and lights it. It later turned out that it was not a state ambulance but a private one, which the Moscow Department of Health cited as the reason they were unable to assess the incident.

The Department of Health’s press service told independent media outlet Podyom that their employees had not been involved in the viral incident and the ambulance is not associated with the department.

[Hans Gutbrod @HansGutbrod]

if you follow me on other channels you have seen my obituary on Temur Ugulava, founder of Rooms Kazbegi & Tbilisi, Stamba and Fabrika.

The tributes flowing, including on X by @fadyasly @geomel_ge, highlighted the transformative role.

How to even capture the impact? 1/

[Christo Grozev @christogrozev]

Two days ago I reported to @Meta that a pro-Kremlin Bulgarian politician published, on Facebook, an unlawfully obtained court record exposing my full home address in Vienna, effectively encouraging pro-Putin vigilantes to come at it.
Zero response and the illegal post is still on, in clear violation of EU privacy rules.
@Facebook is a platform for evil.

[Aidan McLaughlin @aidnmclaughlin]

Martin Amis on Argentina’s 1986 World Cup

[Adam Crafton @AdamCrafton_]

Incredibly classless

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

The true import of what Starmer did behind the scenes after Trump’s return to power to support Ukraine, rally Europe behind Kyiv and diplomatically beat off Putin when it comes to Washington remains a story not fully told. Much of it quite rightly confidential and classified. But in due course, how pivotal this moment was and what he achieved as a diplomat will come to be seen as one of the most complex and against the odds successes of British diplomacy. Together Starmer and Macron have stabilised what was almost a very bad situation — the task now falls to Burnham to sustain this and react with similar subtlety at the next twist.

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

A huge new class action lawsuit has been filed by big publishers and authors against Google over AI training.

It opens: "Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of 'Don’t be evil' and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history."

It alleges that Google:

- took millions of books / articles provided to them for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar, and secretly used them to train LLMs
- had internal discussions where they flagged that using books publishers had provided them for other purposes was "highly problematic for Google" and could lead to "$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines"
- also trained on works from pirate sites & from behind paywalls
- used all this to build an AI system that competes with the works Google copied

[Andrew Orlowski @AndrewOrlowski]

This has struck a chord, and no wonder. Almost everyone who has to use it regards LinkedIn with horror.

Online here: https://t.co/wrHL760a94

[Sharon Goldman @sharongoldman]

"gave" WIRED the exclusive. 🙄 This is why tech journalism is ridiculous. The company believes it is doing the publication a great favor, and therefore the pub is obligated to write the story the company wants. Meanwhile, WIRED gets dozens of such "exclusive" offers every week.

[Christo Grozev @christogrozev]

BREAKING:
Shooting for the Stars: secret military documents we obtained show China fully involved with supporting Russian war in Ukraine and plans against the West, even offered a contingency plan to shoot down @elonmusk's Starlink. https://t.co/uFfZtB7jde

[IPN @ipnEng]

Mariam Kvrivishvili: Under the new model for the development of the Anaklia Deep-Sea Port, the state will need to mobilize an additional approximately $200 million beyond the originally planned amount
https://t.co/SMx6vYkmyS

[OC Media @OCMediaorg]

Georgia has said that China officially exited the Anaklia Deep Sea Port, in favour of direct state development and ‘partnership with several countries’, Economy Minister Mariam Kvrivishvili said. The move was expected by many experts and critics, as rumours of China’s exit had been circulating for months.

https://t.co/WFUsAjamct

[PUBLIKA @Publika_ge]

1/ According to AlgorithmWatch, Georgia's Ministry of Internal Affairs has been purchasing the Russian-made Polyface facial recognition system from Moscow-based Papillon AO since 2013.
📷Giorgi Beridze/AlgorithmWatch