jwz

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models:

Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use -- but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. [...]

The company spent "many millions of dollars" on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals. [...]

Archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies.

Prior art in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.

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Libs of TikTok called GWAR's performance an act of "incitement."

A representative for GWAR told The New York Post, "Normalizing violence? [...] GWAR is to violence what the New York Post is to journalism. Ridiculous."

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Drew Sheneman:

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The structure built over the remains of Chernobyl's destroyed unit 4 suffered such extensive damage in a drone strike in February that it may not be possible to restore it:

The New Safe Confinement - the largest moveable land-based structure ever built - was constructed to cover a much larger area including the original shelter. [...] It has two layers of internal and external cladding around the main steel structure - about 12 metres apart - with both breached in the drone incident. The NSC was designed to allow for the eventual dismantling of the ageing makeshift shelter from 1986 and the management and containment of radioactive waste. It is also designed to withstand temperatures ranging from -43°C to +45°C, a class-three tornado, and an earthquake with a magnitude of 6 on the Richter scale but, as the meeting heard, it was not designed to withstand missile or drone strikes. [...]

These had all had to be put on hold and he outlined the scale of the damage - with the impact site seeing "pass-through damage to an area of 15 square metres"; damage to cladding from the fires that smouldered afterwards in an area of about 200 square metres; technological equipment - including the power supply system, ventilation and control systems - damaged by "drone fragments and blast wave"; the membrane, designed to help ensure the tightness of the shelter to protect the external environment, smouldered and more than 340 holes had to be cut in the shelter to allow firefighters to put out the fires. There was also damage to the steel structures of the arch and crane systems.

The IAEA's Martin Gajdos, Technical Coordinator of the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security, said that the damage meant the New Safe Confinement "is currently unable to to perform its confinement function".

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Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES, February 4, 1939:

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five "Aryan" actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich's Chamber of Culture on the grounds that "in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades." [...]

What amused the public most, however, and presumably roiled the National Socialist authorities most -- although Dr. Goebbels does not mention it -- is that they deftly, but unmistakably, caricatured some gestures, poses and physical characteristics of National Socialist leaders -- sometimes with bon mots that made the rounds of the country.

Dr. Goebbels says that the National Socialists proved during their struggle for power that they had a keen sense of humor that could kill opponents with ridicule. But as National Socialism proposes to remain in power 2,000 years it has neither the time nor the patience to apply that method to the "miserable literati."

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It's on its back, baking in the hot sun, but you're not helping, Leon. Why is that?

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This version introduced a number of new features:

• Plugins! This was the first time a web page could make sound, via RealAudio.

• Incremental display of progressive JPEGs on slow dialup connections (which I demoed a few years back.)

• Animated GIFs that were actually useful. Our support for GIF89a meant inter-frame timing, transparency, and the ability for animations to loop -- a Netscape extension present in every animGIF to this day: Application Block "NETSCAPE2.0"!

• HTML frames: the first time a page could have elements something like "position: fixed" and "overflow: auto".

• JavaScript! That wasn't my fault, but you still have my apologies. In our defense, if we hadn't done it, MICROS~1 would have done something far, far worse.

• And of course my baby, the first release of Netscape Mail and News.

Importantly, all of these features existed identically on Mac, Windows, and nine flavors of Unix, and were released simultaneously. This was basically unheard of at the time.

Terry and I got to push Netscape Mail out to something like 4 million users in those first few weeks, most of them new to the internet, so for a huge number of people it was their introduction to email. It didn't have some power-user features found in Eudora, but it was light years ahead of AOL.

Also it was almost certainly the first mail reader that allowed you to send HTML email. You had to compose them separately and then attach the files, but it worked. So HTML email is probably my fault. You're welcome.

It was also a USENET reader. You will not believe (or probably you will) the hate I got for this from people whose thought this was an abomination, because their ideas about user interface design told them that a mail reader and a USENET reader have nothing to do with each other and should have no UI components in common. It's not like they display lists of messages and allow you to reply to them. They certainly don't do that. That's just science.

Anyway this also meant it was the first easy-to-use program that let you post HTML to USENET. Again, you're welcome. Oh and also MIME-encoded attachments rather than uuencode, and it would also display those attachments inline -- so again, for all the porn, you're welcome.

The wild popularity and success of Netscape Mail indirectly helped kill the company.

We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that my boss (now capo of noted criminal enterprise Andreessen-Horowitz-Whorfin-Lizardo, and a noted murder enthusiast and fascist in his own right, but I digress) saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "Since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to 'The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!"

To do this, Netscape bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. By which I mean: they had like 20 or more engineers and over several years had built a Windows-only mail reader that did did like 3/4ths of what Terry and I had built in 6 months, and had completely face-planted in the market. So Netscape bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. And like a chestburster, somehow Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape, as if Netscape had been acquired instead of the other way around.

Anyway, since they won the startup-acquisition lottery, they then they went off into the weeds with Second System Syndrome so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0" release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became "3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". Netscape "3.0" was the bugfix patch-release for 2.0, because it had been intended to be called "2.1" all along.

And "4.0" was the beginning of the long death spiral.

(I mean, the fact that Microsoft illegally used their monopoly in one market (operating systems) to destroy an existing market (web browsers) by driving the market price for browsers to zero, instantaneously eliminating something like 60% of Netscape's revenue, didn't help. We were stabbed in the front and the back at the same time.)

I would say that Netscape 3.2 is the canonical, best version of the original browser. But 2.0 was pretty fuckin' good.

And their tags shall blink until the end of days.

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Billionaire ketamine enthusiast unavailable for comment.

Pilot dies after plane carrying nearly 200kg of SpaceX-branded cocaine crashes in remote Brazil:

Authorities said the pilot was found dead outside the aircraft after it crashed in Coruripe, an area on Brazil's tropical coastline, according to G1 Globo.

Federal police said they had identified evidence of international drug trafficking, the outlet also reported.

Top notch police work there, guys!

The fire department was called at 1.48pm on Sunday and six officers were dispatched to the scene following concerns of an explosion, although there was no detonation, according to Em Tempo Noticias. Debris from the plane and drugs were scattered across the field.

Local media said between 180kg and 195kg of cocaine was found in the aircraft. More than 187 packets of cocaine were found with what appeared to be fake SpaceX packaging.

"Appeared to be". "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

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The White House wants to make it very clear that Nosferatu Van Goebbels does not play with porcelain dolls.

Stephen Miller Is Leading Donald Trump's Reign of Terror:

In the decades that followed, Miller did not grow -- except to become more hardened in his extremist views. When he worked as a communications aide in the office of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions during the Obama years, he was so widely disliked by his conservative colleagues on Capitol Hill that Republican staff in other offices would invent or spread malicious rumors about Miller, such as that he liked to play with porcelain dolls. (A White House official insists that any such characterization of his time on the Hill is "inaccurate and baseless gossip.")

The staffers at the time never dreamed that he'd ever amount to much more than a punch line or an obscure cautionary tale of what happens when you read too many far-right hate websites and dive into Washington's most feverish swamps.

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Meth! It's got what lungs crave!

The incinerator is usually used by animal control officers to dispose of euthanised animals, but local authorities said it can also be used by law enforcement to burn seized narcotics. [...]

Before evacuating themselves, many employees put on masks and helped get the animals out. Some staff were exposed to the smoke for more than an hour, and several began to feel sick. All 14 went to the emergency room, where they spent about three hours in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to combat the effects of smoke inhalation. [...]

The impacted animals were given veterinary care and placed in temporary housing, including four litters of kittens who are being closely monitored because they were closed in a room with the smoke, Ms Halverson told the BBC's US partner, CBS News.

A restoration team has also begun decontaminating the building, she said, but the process will take at least two weeks to a month.

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