Tim
14.9K posts

Tim
@DRD_Tim
Geek, Producer of @Queer_Lodgings, Steward for Mythopoeic Conferences at @mythsoc, PhD Biochemist, Amateur Mixologist, Foodie, etc. Thoughts my own.

Microsoft says Copilot is for entertainment purposes only, not serious use — firm pushing AI hard to consumers tells users not to rely on it for important advice tomshardware.com/tech-industry/…


🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI and Google are about to have a massive legal problem. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have repeatedly sworn to courts that their models do not store exact copies of copyrighted books. They claim their "safety training" prevents regurgitation. Researchers just dropped a paper called "Alignment Whack-a-Mole" that proves otherwise. They didn't use complex jailbreaks or malicious prompts. They just took GPT-4o, Gemini, and DeepSeek, and fine-tuned them on a normal, benign task: expanding plot summaries into full text. The safety guardrails instantly collapsed. Without ever seeing the actual book text in the prompt, the models started spitting out exact, verbatim copies of copyrighted books. Up to 90% of entire novels, word-for-word. Continuous passages exceeding 460 words at a time. But here is the part that changes everything. They fine-tuned a model exclusively on Haruki Murakami novels. It didn't just learn Murakami. It unlocked the verbatim text of over 30 completely unrelated authors across different genres. The AI wasn't learning the text during fine-tuning. The text was already permanently trapped inside its weights from pre-training. The fine-tuning just turned off the filter. It gets worse. They tested models from three completely different tech giants. All three had memorized the exact same books, in the exact same spots. A 90% overlap. It's a fundamental, industry-wide vulnerability. For years, AI companies have argued in court that their models are just "learning patterns," not storing raw data. This paper provides the smoking gun.

Disgraced Texas megachurch pastor free after 6 months in jail for sexually abusing 12-year-old girl: 'I am deeply sorry' trib.al/DrrUE0U


Nick Cannon calls Democrats “the party of the KKK”: “People don’t know that the Democrats are the party of the KKK. People don’t know that the Republicans are the party that freed the slaves.”


Joni Mitchell on Prime Minister Carney: "This man is a blessing. You guys are so fortunate."


I use AI to do research (i.e., find things to read, explain parts of academic papers I find ambiguous or confusing), transcribe interviews, generate pushback on my column thesis, suggest trims when I'm over my word count, sharpen podcast interview questions, and perform a final fact check on columns and editorials. But mostly it's compressing the ancillary tasks to the main job: reading, thinking, and writing.

Unstoppable force vs immovable object

Netflix is raising prices in the U.S. for a second time in a year: • Under the higher pricing, Netflix’s Standard With Ads plan will now cost $8.99/month, up $1 from $7.99 previously • The Standard plan (no ads, viewing on up to two devices simultaneously) is rising by $2, from $17.99/month to $19.99/month. • The Premium plan (no ads, streaming on up to four devices at once, Ultra HD and HDR) is rising from $24.99/month to $26.99/month. variety.com/2026/tv/news/n…


First look at the live-action ‘HARRY POTTER’ series.













