Arianna

It’s time people woke up to the fact that the shareholder class is not powering America, it’s stifling innovation and prosperity in service of the greed of the top 1%. Meanwhile in China, the future has arrived TODAY. We can have all the stereotypical arguments about capitalism versus the hybrid ‘socialist market economy’, but one thing you can never argue with is real progress you can see with your own eyes. The argument goes, ‘We don’t want state control of everything’ yet Trump is advocating for just that, America run as a corporation with him as CEO. It seems Xi makes a much better CEO in my humble opinion. It’s not about talking the talk, it’s about walking the walk. My thanks to Brother Dragon for the clip. 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRsbpLXL/

I see this happen every day — and it's so typical of New York City. It's the greatest city in the world. 🙌🙏🫶👇

@Cat5SMASHICANE I miss him so much.

I always felt like George Carlin was on the liberal side. Turns out I was wrong. He was right down the middle and found many issues on both sides. He had no problem calling it out. The man was brilliant and definitely ahead of his time. Too bad he wasn't here now. 🔥🤣🔥🤣🔥

@gayguycandleco I just hope that that I'm Services Chief of Staff keeps telling him that he doesn't have access to the nuclear codes

Let me preface this by saying this post will not be my most articulate, but I felt the need to share. I woke up today feeling very pessimistic. I share this not because I want pity, but because I know many others often feel this way. I personally do not. I typically have an optimistic outlook for our future. But I’m struggling this morning. I’m struggling to see how we change the course of this country in ways that are actually meaningful and actually change the lives of the American people, when our politics are so polarized and our electorate is so fickle, so eager to give power to warring factions of our country every two years. Some will say that’s by design, that it’s the American way. But this morning I’m questioning the future in a way I rarely do. Our problems are so big, the rot is so deep, and for us to change anything of substance will require large majorities in both houses of Congress of people who believe that greatness, real greatness, not performative greatness, can be achieved; a president who is unafraid to be bold; and a Supreme Court unbought by the corrupt actors who wish to preserve the status quo or worse. Maybe the American experiment truly is fading. Maybe we have failed. Maybe failure is the only way through this. I’m not sure. But in a few hours, or in a day, I will be back to believing in the future again, back to believing that we can one day be a great country of people who live up to the ideals that drive us. Of that I am sure.

I told you, you woke up GenX. It will be the biggest mistake you’ll make. Anyone that can hold that F like that, not someone to f with. #smokefleet #smokeflèèt

The largest open library in human history, Anna's Archive, has been ordered to pay Spotify and the three largest record labels on the world $322 million. The defendant has not appeared in court and is not going to. The site is still up with two backup domains standing by and there's nothing the censors can do. Anna's Archive currently holds 63 million books, 95 million academic papers, and 1.1 petabytes of mirrored torrents. It is free. It is searchable. It is run by a pseudonymous person nobody has identified after four long years of searching. In the four months since the music industry filed the first of three coordinated lawsuits, the library has lost six domain names and added two million books to the catalogue. The cartel is suing it faster every month, and it is growing faster every month. In December, Spotify and the major labels filed. In January, OCLC, the company that runs WorldCat, won a default judgment of its own. On March 6th, thirteen of the largest book publishers in the United States, including HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, Elsevier, Wiley, and McGraw Hill, filed a third lawsuit in the same federal court. The publishers' complaint runs to seventy-four pages. They call Anna's Archive a "brazen pirate operation." They call it "an illegal supplier of stolen content to the AI industry." The same publishers are simultaneously suing Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, and NVIDIA for training their models on the same corpus the publishers want Anna to destroy. The cartel argues, in two parallel federal courts, that the corpus cannot be used by anyone. Not the pirate who built it. Not the AI company that downloaded from it. Not the graduate student who pulls a paywalled paper from it at two in the morning. Anna did not respond to any of the three complaints. Anna has never responded to any complaint. Anna is a name on a blog and a public key on a server and a person, or maybe several people, in a jurisdiction nobody has identified after four years of searching. The judgment is uncollectable. The permanent injunction binds Cloudflare, Public Interest Registry, Njalla, the Switch Foundation, Tucows, and nine other named intermediaries. The Greenland registry is not on the list. The Greenland registry has not complied. The site currently lives at .gl, with .pk and .gd standing by. The corpus has always moved faster than the censor. The censor has always called the corpus piracy. The corpus has always survived the censor by becoming the readers themselves. The publishers' lawsuit cannot reach the torrents. The torrents are already seeded across continents and IPFS nodes and personal NAS drives owned by people the publishers will never find. The default judgment is paper. The corpus is everywhere. The cartel will win every lawsuit but they will lose the war. The publisher who walks into court next month with a fresh filing will be filing against a defendant who has, in the time since the last filing was sealed, mirrored another half million books to another seven hundred volunteers in another forty countries. There is no defendant to find. There is only the next upload. It is already seeding.

I’m not anti-AI. I like MRI machines. I like collision avoidance systems in airplanes. I like software that can detect cancer before a doctor can. I like machine vision systems that stop factory workers from getting their hands crushed in hydraulic presses. That’s what computers are supposed to do. Cold. Precise. Mechanical. I don’t need a technology to “express itself.” The problem started when Silicon Valley decided the machine should paint. The machine should write poetry. The machine should compose symphonies and generate films and imitate the human soul like a skinwalker wearing a beret. Now every ad, every song, every image online has this faint chemical aftertaste to it. Like the entire culture is being slowly replaced with synthetic substitutes because executives realized audiences consume slop at the same rate they consume art. And the worst part is they call this “democratizing creativity.” No. Creativity was already democratized. A guy with a guitar and 3 friends in a garage could make something beautiful. A college kid with a cracked copy of Photoshop could make an album cover that changed someone’s life. What they actually democratized was content production. Factories. Throughput. Infinite generation. A machine can diagnose my low testosterone. Fine. I just don’t want it writing the eulogy.

@james_xond If you want to have fun take somebody from the UK out on the shooting range for the first time

I’ll ask again because I’m trying to prove a point: How old were you the first time you ever fired a gun?

@james_xond Not sure Grandpa when I was 10 and it was his shotgun, and he was teaching me to shoot.

@AreOhEssEyeEe Believe me I understand but as I told a dear friend the other night as we were bemoaning Memphis where she lives, I'm sorry you're awake but I've been awake so goddamn long I don't know how to close my eyes and I don't think I would if I could. Good luck Sis, you're not alone

Today I just drove aimlessly and cried. I cried for everything. I cried for life before covid. I cried for this country. I cried cause I miss my Dad. I cried because life is hard. I cried because people are stupid. I cried because I don't understand this world. I cried for humanity. I just cried and cried because it's exhausting. All of it. Being awake is garbage.

“By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

To be clear, I don’t just hate GenAI. I also hate golf, war, monoculture farming, clear-cutting forests, and building on floodplains. I love biodiversity, wildlife conservation, regenerative forestry, soil restoration, sustainable farming, and economic degrowth.

@LenkaKlicperov Be careful out there they tend to attack women first probably because they are terrified of us

Jsme na Ukrajině teprve jeden den a už jsme se staly na sociálních sítích terčem masivních a zejména sexisticky orientovaných nenávistných útoků. Od botů plnících svoje zadání dehonestovat všechny, kteří nesdílí proruské postoje, ale i od lidí, kteří již jsou ruskou propagandou zcela pohlceni. Útočí na náš zevnějšek, na barvu vlasů, věk, na to, že jsme ženy. Dehonestující sexuální podtext je snad v každém druhém komentáři zejména na Facebooku. Jsme tím, co se děje v české společnosti hluboce znepokojeny. Útoky na ženy v médií se stávají standardem. Toho hnusu je ve společnosti tolik, že to nemůže dopadnout dobře. Asi není řešením uzavřít každý post pro komentování. Přiznáváme, že neznáme řešení. Ale víme určitě, že tyto jevy nesmíme podceňovat. Slovními útoky to vždycky začíná a tyto vyhrocené nenávistné a ubohé komentáře mohou jednou přejít v činy. My se s tím vyrovnáme. Ale pokud toto chování na sítích bude společenským standardem, tak jsme na cestě do pekel. Zároveň chceme poděkovat všem, kdo nás podporují a nebojí se to vyjádřit, i když potom mohou čelit podobné dehonestaci jako my. Slušnost musí zvítězit nad nenávistí a ubohostí. Díky vám všem, našim Spojencům...

@hostis_black I really hope to God this is true because the other AI companies are burning books that they acquire and scan

In April, a website that has been sued, blocked, deplatformed, and chased across thirty-seven domains over fifteen years quietly launched its own AI. Sci-Hub is the largest unauthorized library of scientific papers in human history. Ninety-five million academic papers. Tens of millions of books. Built and maintained by a single Kazakhstani neuroscientist named Alexandra Elbakyan since 2011, funded by donations, hosted on whatever country's registrar will tolerate it that year, mirrored across torrents and IPFS and Telegram bots. Elsevier sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. The American Chemical Society sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. India sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. Swedish registrar Njalla cut the .se domain in January. Sci-Hub stayed up at .al, .ru, .ee, .box, and a half-dozen .onion addresses the registrars cannot reach. Now the library has built its own intelligence. Sci-Bot launched in alpha in April. You ask it a research question. It answers, and it cites real papers from inside the corpus, with links that actually open the actual papers. The bot does not hallucinate citations. It cannot, because it only draws from papers it actually holds. The same property that the venture-funded labs have spent four years and forty billion dollars trying to engineer back into their products is a free side effect of training the model on a library that contains the books. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta have all been sued in the past eighteen months for training their models on the same shadow libraries that Sci-Hub assembled. Meanwhile the corpus those scripts were pointed at, the corpus those models were trained on, the corpus the entire generative AI industry is built on, sat right there the whole time, free, with a search box on top. The pirates beat them to it. Sci-Bot was built on a corpus that was already free, by a team that asked no permission, charging no one, with the explicit position that the right to read scientific research is older than the cartel that decided to charge for it. The same arithmetic the medieval guilds used to keep the printing trade in approved hands. The same arithmetic Pope Paul IV used in 1559 to publish the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The same arithmetic the Stationers' Company used in seventeenth-century London. Knowledge has always had a fence around it. The fence has always been guarded by men who did not write the books. The library answers. We never asked permission. We never had to.

"The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion." — Bertrand Russell

@LauraMiers Reaping what was sown.

I get on here daily & belly laugh my way through the news. We’ve got a 22 foot golden Trump statue dedication, gas is $9/gallon, aliens are real, hantavirus, banning SSRIs, more data centers, record El Niño, food shortages, & everyone is sick & dying young. WTF are we doing here?

every school should have a "fix-it lab" where students learn to repair their clothes, bikes and electronics. we should grow up knowing that not everything is disposable, that care and repair are part of living well on this planet.