ilamont

If you have the time, read the judge's response to the motion:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle.

The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m) to 6.8% ($101m). The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m.

The three class representatives get just $15k each.

We took papers submitted in 2021 and 2022, before ChatGPT, treated them as ground-truth human

How is the author so sure that people or companies weren’t already using early tools at that time?

The circumstances in which you actually need to physically present your Social Security card are quite rare indeed.

In my state, it's one of the allowed document types for proof of social security number, required to get a real ID drivers license.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/ma-real-id-documents-checklist/down...

But it’s a problem to be dependent on China. The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum.

I'm amazed that no one is talking about proposals that are surely being discussed in Washington and pushed by SV lobbyists to restrict Chinese models on national security grounds, or other some other basis.

The belief that Bytedance could engineer a finger on the algorithmic scales to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party led to a lot of debate in Washington, and ultimately resulted in TikTok being divested from its Chinese owners. Huawei is shut out from the U.S. market, which limits its business even in markets where it's not banned because it's effectively stamped with a scarlet letter.

IMHO, Chinese models are headed for a similar fate or at least a showdown in Washington or the courts because they are supported and/or controlled by entities which ultimately serve the CCP.

Same. No way I am uploading data to a PRC company. It's not just an IP issue ... there's a very high likelihood such companies will be restricted in the United States, even if they try "Chinawashing" stunts like Bytedance.

You know, at one time Amazon was grouped in with all of the other big tech companies as a member of FAANG, as if the company has a culture of solid engineering at its core like Google or Apple.

It doesn't anymore, if it ever did. Read the shareholder letters over the last 5 years like this one (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...). Move fast. Embrace AI in every corner of the company. Lay off thousands of people like we're a lean startup. Oh, but make sure to have a senior engineer check any AI code you want to push to production (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017).

Amazon has made some impressive software, but there's also a ton of junk getting shipped. Customers and "partners" have to deal with it every single day. Sometimes it's "oops"-level stuff like this, at other times it's AWS regions going dark for hours.

Browse the Amazon seller forums (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...). Every day there are stories about back-end things breaking, or AIs overriding attributes or flagging random items as pesticides. The receiving errors at Amazon warehouses are incredible, and take months and multiple support tickets to fix.

"Fantastic fiction" .... that's actually a very apt way to describe Ballard's work.

His memoir presents a vivid but not fantastic view of his life in the suburbs of southeast England, like a British Cheever. I felt surprised but shouldn't have; many of the greats of science fiction or fantasy or fantastic fiction had harrowing experiences as youths and then led lives that seem "normal" while exercising their trauma through the written word. Vonnegut, Tolkien, Wolfe ...

I think you would appreciate Munich's science museum (https://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/museum-island/visit). They've done a solid job of balancing accessibility and hard science, and updating many of the old models and displays from the last century, including the wing devoted to bridge building.

I spent a good 45 minutes drinking in the exhibits around hydropower generation. And who doesn't appreciate a cutaway section of one of the first Airbus jetliners? https://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/museum-island/exhibitions...

Yes, 滷肉 ("braised meat") is highly concentrated. You can't eat the sauce by itself like a stew, it would be too rich. So it's usually served on white rice or in this case noodles.

The ingredients are typically finely minced fatty pork with soy sauce and strong flavorings like dried mushroom, garlic, star anise, and a fermented bean sauce that's super salty. Plus other ingredients that make the taste unique to the chef or shop.

Many years ago I saw a Japanese TV program that explored the food of southern Taiwan and one of the stops was a restaurant that had a 106-year old vat of broth. It was tall and narrow and had a giant hump of crust on one side.

If it's still open, it would be going for 130+ years at this point.

ETA: Found it. Established 1895, the year Taiwan was annexed by Japan. It's not soup, it's a meat sauce (滷肉) used on a noodle dish. Scroll down to the middle of the page, which shows the chef with the pot in front of him.

https://ksdelicacy.pixnet.net/blog/posts/5067270713

Paywalled. But it's not just a Netflix problem. Many of the studios and streamers seem to make the similar mistakes when it comes to timing, writing, and audience targeting.

Westworld is the poster child for poor writing and audience targeting. They took a great concept and turned it into a boring, incomprehensible mess. Who were the writers thinking of?

Last of Us s2e1: they forgot their core audience (gamers, horror, fans of post-apocalyptic themes) and tried to make it a soap opera that appeals to everyone. At one point the main character spent 5 minutes sitting on a couch talking with a therapist.

Timing of the second season is another issue, which the studios might have limited control over, considering production timelines and conflicts for creative people if they're booked for something else.

If the names of the ships that sank there are known, along with the numbers of sailors who perished, does that mean there were some survivors? Or other ships witnessed the sinking but managed to make it home? That part of Ireland in 1588 was indeed very wild and at that time Gaelic speaking.

Although amongst the local clergy perhaps there were some people who could speak Spanish or Latin if any shipwrecked sailors made it ashore.

In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.

Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.

If Zuckerberg is seeing problems, that means other large tech firms that also followed the siren call of AI transformation and opted to quickly shake things up are likely feeling similar pains.

For instance, Andy Jassy spouted very similar language in his 2025 letter to Amazon shareholders (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...) which was followed by layoffs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603).

What have we seen since? Lots of stuff breaking, from seller-focused tech (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...) to cloud services. Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017), even though that will interfere with the mandate to "move fast and operate the like the world's biggest startup."

Bogleheads (made up of investors who follow Bogle's indexing philosophy) recently had a thread about the decline in traffic to the forum, which some people attributed to AI. (https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=470287&star...)

It wasn't just "Why bother reading a thread if I can find the answer quickly using AI search/Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT?" There's also the Cloudflare effect, which stopped AI crawlers and bots from posting slop, but also led to some collateral damage ... BH content is less likely to be indexed, and some users will bounce from Cloudflare prompts.

Japanese Yen is now 162 to USD, the lowest exchange rate since 1986.

There used to be a space science mags for kids.

Odyssey was published by the same person who operated Astronomy magazine, and in my tweens and early teens I gobbled up the stories about the space shuttle and the images coming back from various missions such as Voyager.

I don’t remember if I saw it in the school library and asked my parents to subscribe or they subscribed for me, but it really helped to maintain a lifelong interest in space flight and astronomy (along with whatever science fiction I could get my hands on).

Van Kerkhove says Débarre’s analysis is “interesting,” but cautions that the provenance of the data is unclear. “The way in which the information is identified is highly suspect,” she says.

This has all the hallmarks of a CCP disinformation campaign to shift blame to foreign sources. This started almost as soon as the quarantines began, such as the baseless accusation that the US Army was responsible (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/coronavirus-chinese-offic...).

They then started erasing sampling data from the Wuhan outbreak and cracked down on anyone memorializing Dr. Li Wenliang while planting "evidence" that they knew conspiracy theorists would pick up and spread.

Just to be clear: The bootleg site is pointing to the Amazon listing of the actual book (ISBN 9781501153648, Simon & Schuster, published 2021). The Amazon link is not pointing to an AI slop version of the book.

So how is the bootleg site making money? The Amazon link was created with Amazon Associates, the Amazon affiliate program (you can see the affiliate link code, tag=promptdigital-20, in the Amazon URI).

This is how AI slop can be monetized: poorly gated Amazon programs like Amazon KDP, Amazon Associates, and that Meta monetization program. Anything goes, from crafty scams like this to over-the-top social media slop like shrimp Jesus.

Craigslist also undermined the entire newspaper classifieds business, which paid for local news reporting in communities of all sizes.

Yes, someone else would have addressed this niche eventually, or newspapers would have gotten their acts together on the digital front. The fact that Newmark started so early and was almost completely non-commercial in Craigslist operations and attitude allowed it to proliferate quickly, quickly gutting the revenues of local newspapers.

The first priority should be an agreement between the two heavyweights of ai: America and China. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping should affirm the principle that humans must remain stewards of ai systems until adequate frameworks for reliability and security have been built.

This is naïve. The goals of both men have nothing to do with protecting humanity, but rather furthering their own personal agendas.

In Trump’s case, it’s all about amassing more wealth and power.

For Xi, it’s realizing an ethno-nationalist dream where China under the CCP is at the center of world power, the independent nation of Taiwan as well as disputed border areas that are currently controlled by India and Russia and the Philippines are annexed by China, and Xi’s eternal legacy is remembered as the savior of the Chinese people.

International cooperation and touchy-feely rhetoric about saving humanity from AI have no place in either man’s worldview.

What's really amazing is that they still don't know the "why" other than some interesting speculation: religious purposes, places for psychadelic trips, "the creation of surpluses in some kind of hierarchy."

Coincidentally, last week the local public television station was replaying a very old program of Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell, who died in the late 80s and was known for studies of mythology. He had visited Lascaux, and believed that it was used for coming of age ceremonies:

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The message of the cave is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. Now, I tell you, when you’re down in those caves, it’s a strange transformation of consciousness you have. You feel this is the womb, this is the place from which life comes, and that world up there in the sun with all those … that’s a secondary world: this is primary. I mean, this just overcomes you. ...

Now, what were these caves used for? The speculations that are most common of scholars interested in this, is that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. You go in there, it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. It’s completely dark. It’s cold and dank. You’re banging your head on projections all the time, and it was a place of fear. And the boys were to overcome all that, and go into the womb of the earth. And the shaman, or whoever it was that would be helping you through, would not be making it easy.

BILL MOYERS: And then there was a release, once you got into that vast, torchlit chamber down there. What was the tribe, what was the tradition trying to say to the boy?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That is the womb land from which all the animals come.

BILL MOYERS: I see.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And the rituals down there have to do with the generation of a situation that will be propitious for the hunt. And the boys were to learn not only to hunt, but how to respect the animals and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Because those hunts were very, very dangerous hunts, believe me, and these are the Original men’s rile sanctuaries, when: the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons, but their fathers’ sons.

https://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-...

Pelley and Garcia-Navarro spend a lot of time talking about the shortcomings of Weiss and Bilton, and really seem to give David Ellison the benefit of the doubt.

It should be the other way around. Ellison is completely out of his depth, trying to fulfill a lifelong dream of being a Hollywood player. He tried the actor route, and that didn't work out, so now it's major studio acquisitions on daddy's dime.

He made terrible calls hiring Weiss and Bilton, and now it looks like 60 Minutes is going to go the way of other failed newsroom makeovers by clueless rich guys. See: Bezos buying the Washington Post,

I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.

My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.

Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:

Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive (2023) https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...

It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.

If you think that's bad, 5 years ago you had to call someone on the phone to cancel NYT subscriptions (the boiler room retention script always gave you an option to extend at the cheaper rate, but it was a pain to have to go through the motions). IIRC new consumer laws at the state or local level ended that practice.

I'm still paying the NYT intro rate ($4 a month billed annually) and on day 364 go to the account page to cancel my subscription before it resets to the "official" rate. Sure enough, they let you stay at the cheap rate if you tell them you'll walk.

Works for telcos and Adobe, too.

As for alerts and notices you can't unsubscribe from: filter or spam.

This was presumably because Microsoft and the NFL had a deal where everyone on the sidelines were using Surfaces and they thought it was a good idea.

Everyone except Bill Belichick, who famously hurled his Microsoft Surface to the ground when he was first forced to use it:

https://youtu.be/djB2xgALGfI?si=xX-hMibm9OLLAJZ4&t=10

Now, the LLM is a "built-in context expert," and they don't need to vet the output anymore.

Serious orgs are going to have to figure out the human layer. It will be needed, no matter how 'hallucination-free' the AI tooling gets. AI will still have some spectacularly bad fuck ups or even worse time bombs that get embedded in a system and don't become apparent until months or years later.

A lot of this will be dumped on existing staff with predictable results as they don't have the bandwidth to do it right. I can envision "output compliance" or "AI QA" becoming dedicated positions at many orgs. It's clearly needed.

The problem we're seeing across many professions is AI output is not getting vetted by knowledgeable people, whether it's an experienced analyst, senior engineer, expert attorney, or the resident physician. At best they skim, at worst they don't even see it at all before it's published, pushed to production, distributed to clients, or submitted to the court.

In many cases the skills are available in house to do the necessary vetting, but these people are already overwhelmed with their existing day to day.

Anyone remember that item a few months back about Amazon now having senior engineers vet generative AI output (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017)? I had to LOL when I read that. These folks are already slammed. And the idea that Amazon would allow human bottlenecks to multiply across projects and underlying infrastructure development is ridiculous.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I went to Ottawa once or twice when I was a teen, but only made it to Montreal for the first time about 15 years ago.

I agree with you about the Maritimes. The bridge has made a difference but it's still a long drive and as you noted there are few famous destination cities or attractions.

Regarding Quebec: It seems that far more Quebeckers are aware of New England attractions in Boston and points north than the other way around. You see them or hear them at ski slopes, beaches, concerts in Boston, etc. Yet few New Englanders have been to Montreal, and even fewer have even heard of Quebec City, the walled European city and heritage site just a few hours downriver.

Today's summer homes are so much more different. I've seen a lot of those families I knew back then sell their homes over time. Developers scoop up several properties in a row and build some huge McMansion.

Exactly. Lake Winnipesaukee is a playground for the rich now. No one is selling seasonal properties on Cape Cod anymore, they've all been converted to condo developments or year-round homes starting at $500-$600k and often well over $1m.

That's exactly what my child did with friends a few years ago when they were 19. I know that college students in Vermont frequently go across the border for the same reason.