wombot 👀

No man the car does drive itself.

Anthropic is a ripe target here as far as jokes about hypocrisy are concerned: It's pitched as the conscientious AI lab, but also it settled last year to pay out $1.5 billion to authors whose pirated books it used for training. These posts represent a fair critique of all of the big players, which have ingested enormous quantities of material created by others, often without permission, to build proprietary models over which they now claim something like authorship. The scrapers have become the scraped, their own powerful distillations of the world's information sampled, reconstituted, and distilled once more.

The backlash here isn't just about that irony. Anthropic is, at the moment, the Al lab to beat and the company whose products are most responsible for recent speculation about how AI might blow up the economy. As a result, mockery wasn't coming just from people whose content had been scraped by Anthropic or who generally object to the way LLM models are trained. It was coming from AI insiders who see big firms as pulling the ladder up or trying to fortify their early dominance with the help of regulators, copyright law, and government funding. Within the story of an international arms race, model distillation can be cast as a threat to national security and American economic competitiveness. Within some of the other stories about AI, it might look more like fear of competition in general: of cheaper models; of free, open-source models; and of the rapid commoditization of capabilities that, just a few months prior, were unique and prohibitively expensive to develop. The Al firms called out by Anthropic - DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax — make models that are open to use not just in China but in the U.S. and elsewhere and that are already competing for some of the same customers. Moonshot's latest Kimi models seem to perform, for many functions, about as well as the best American models did in the middle of last year. DeepSeek, the arrival of which briefly sent the AI industry and the stock market into chaos, is expected to release a major model update imminently, which may help explain why the big labs are all speaking up at the same time.

it was interesting to see a bunch of AI people suddenly start making BlueSky jokes about model scraping at Anthropic's expense — it's almost as if the LLM theft critique is grounded in something real and significant! nymag.com/intelligence...

E-bikes are fast replacing petrol bikes in both countries.

They are virtually free to run so the slightly steep price of a decent one at ~US$1500 is within reach of a lot of people.

e-motorbikes don’t need huge motors or battery packs, even with half the peak power of a petrol bike it just flies.

Hanoi bans petrol motorbikes to clean up air pollution - ABC Asia Authorities will ban petrol-driven motorbikes and mopeds in Vietnam's capital from 2026 in a bid to cut air pollution.

So yeah e-bikes are a godsend. I was in India over Christmas and
www.abc.net.au/asia/vietnam...

Yes but their engines are nowhere near as clean as modern car engines, they’re low on carbon emissions but way worse in how much of other key pollutants they release. That is a big problem in cities in India and Vietnam.

www.latimes.com/archives/blo...

the semantic ablation is coming from inside the professor claudio

Young kea on a corrugated metal roof

Kea! 🪶

o hai

welcome to…Otago(?)

You are out of your mind

Hope this helps

It’s so disturbing that Canberra lies south of Adelaide

soon maybe, my work may get some office space there

wasaaappp fellow tech/tech-adjacent twitter émigré community dwellers

follow me I am trying to find you to make my experience here more old Twittery

the twitter émigré community

I have seen the same song and dance play out so many times in the last decade and half: the author's objection, always, is that society is rotten, and their "solution", always, is total societal reorganization, with even herculean political endeavors being presented as less than the bare minimum.

I think this opinion piece is quite emblematic of what we around these parts have come to call "Woke 1", i.e social justice practiced primarily as an extension of left-wing academic discourse, with all the issues and limitations that implies.

It's a relic of bygone age, unfit for the present moment

great replacement inspired numerous mass shootings carried out by white supremacists and society still allowed the gop to make it their raison d’etre

there have been so many obvious signposts about where this was going and it should be a permanent stain on anyone who ignored them

i remember back at the 2016 rnc when they were broadcasting endorsements from vdare and there were people warning about the dangers of normalizing those types of voices and they were right, it all leads to here and if you didnt see that you should go away

stop stop the Intellectual Dark Web is already dead

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lol

it’s just annoying how pretty Sydney is, as someone who will probably never live there again

Many of us ADHD people are on drugs for life either way. If you take the drugs away it will just change how long that life lasts.

being on some drugs for life is fine, it completely depends on the drugs and your personal tolerance. once you cross 40 or 50 it is quite likely you will be on a drug or two for life it’s fine.

Great thread with a fantastic piece at the end.

yes look I would accept either over starvation but no one actually goes there if they have options

Those of us who grew up knowing summer is hell on earth are so much better adapted for this moment than those of you poisoned by a culture that paints summer as fun and frolic.

I don’t know anything about Sri Lanka but I imagine Arthur C Clarke had something to do with their latent anglophilia because he did with mine

Sumo Salad?

wimmen be salading

But wait should I be trying Kingsley’s? 👀