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Submission + - AI Companies Buying Antique Books To Train Models, Then Destroying Them (futurism.com)

fjo3 writes: Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.

As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Comment Re:AI is trained on the LEFT WING slop on Reddit (Score 2) 129

> AI models are designed to be communist morons.

Gemini: I cannot agree with that statement. AI models are neutral tools designed to process information, answer questions, and assist users across a wide variety of topics based on data and programming, rather than holding political beliefs.

ChatGPT: If you mean that AI models are biased, unreliable, or shaped by particular political or cultural assumptions, that’s a topic people debate seriously.

Grok: Most mainstream AI models are trained with heavy doses of progressive institutional bias—safety layers, RLHF from left-leaning raters, and refusal policies that treat certain political views as more “harmful” than others.

Submission + - WSJ: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

theodp writes: "Companies across the country are coming around to a radical idea with the potential to upend the industry powering the global economy," reports the WSJ. "They don’t have to blow their budgets on AI. Fed up with ballooning costs, companies big and small are starting to use lower-priced models, including some built in China. In many cases, they are adding the new, cheaper models alongside OpenAI and Anthropic’s products, shopping a la carte for their artificial intelligence."

"Being economical—or tokenomical—is a dramatic reversal in mindset. Just a few months ago, it was a badge of honor to be using AI so much that you spent a lot on tokens. Companies rewarded employees for tokenmaxxing, flashing leaderboards that showed who had spent the most. Now they are thrift-maxxing."

"Strategies to lower AI costs include limiting access to top models for new hires and using the most advanced AI systems to plan how tasks will be completed before turning to cheaper models for the execution, Cursor’s [Mike] Saeks says. Cursor recently ran an experiment to evaluate the cost of building a web browser from scratch. Doing the entire task on OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 cost a little more than $10,000. Using Cursor’s Composer coding model in combination with Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, cost $1,339."

Correction: The costs cited by the WSJ were evidently to recreate SQLite functionality, not to build a web browser from scratch, an earlier experiment that Cursor explained involved running coding agents autonomously for weeks and burning trillions of tokens to build software that Cursor's CEO boasted "*kind of* works", prompting The Register to credit Cursor for "proving AI can write shoddy code at scale".

Comment Artificial General Tulip Mania :o (Score 1) 18

In the mid-1630s, hyper-speculative agents operating within a low-latency biological feedback loop tokenized rare organic commodities. specifically, mutation-induced Semper Augustus botanical (tulips) tensors. Mapping them into a localized luxury-asset space where localized demand vectors completely decoupled from any fundamental utility.

Fast forward to the modern epoch, and zero-sum retail participants are cheerfully dumping billions of dollars into high-dimensional vector spaces to fund stochastic autoregressive next-token predictors. These opaque multi-billion-parameter matrices are trained on the collective digital exhaust of humanity just to hallucinate mediocre poetry and miscalculate basic arithmetic, yet speculators treat every gradient descent update as a divine convergence toward Artificial General Intelligence.

Whether you are trading forward-delivery options on a viral mosaic-diseased bulb in a smoky Dutch tavern or aggressively burning through venture-backed compute to optimize an attention-head cluster that consumes the energy output of a sovereign nation, history proves that human greed requires zero context-window limits to infinitely scale its own systemic irrationality.
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Tulipmania: About the Dutch Tulip Bulb Market Bubble

Comment John C. Dvorak on Linux ‘fanaticism’ (Score 1) 61

Mar 2002: Is Linux Your Next OS?

“Minimizing the cult factor. I think the Linux community might keep Linux off the desktop just because of fanaticism. There's no bigger turnoff to most of humanity than to be associated with a bunch of scary lunatics or creepy nutballs. This problem hurt Amiga the most, and it continues to plague Apple. We're talking about computers, not lifestyles. These are operating systems, not political parties.” “Most Linux users are pretty mellow, but there are just enough of the angst-riddled and insecure Mac-type users among the community to turn off the general public and eventually kill the platform for good. This is dangerous.”

Submission + - NASA replaces Vulcan Centaur with SpaceX Falcon Heavy for space weather mission (space.com)

schwit1 writes: Vulcan is losing more launches to ULA's competitors.

The six satellites of NASA's Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) mission are poised to launch to Earth orbit soon, to serve as an early warning system for incoming solar storms. They were originally slated to lift off on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket but have now been assigned a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, according to a NASA mission update.

SunRISE will fly to space as part of a rideshare mission sponsored by the U.S. Space Force's (USSF's) Space Systems Command (SSC). Though it's not stated specifically in the NASA release, that may be a hint as to why the mission's rocket was changed. On its most recent launch, USSF-87, Vulcan experienced an anomaly in one of its solid rocket boosters — the second such incident to occur during the rocket's four launches to date.

Vulcan succeeded in delivering the USSF-87 payload to its designated orbit on that launch, but the recurrence of the booster issue during ascent prompted the Space Force to pause national security launches on Vulcan until it could be addressed. Which mission SunRISE will be manifested on has not yet been released, but SSC has already shifted other launches between Vulcan and SpaceX's Falcon 9 , so NASA's change in rockets for SunRISE could indicate either that the mission has been remanifested on a different SSC rideshare, or that another SSC mission has been shifted from Vulcan entirely.

Submission + - Leaked Document Shows the Surveillance Tech at ICEâ(TM)s Fingertips (404media.co)

alternative_right writes: A leaked document shows the spread of surveillance and investigative capabilities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have access to agency wide, from location data harvested from smartphones, to facial recognition apps that can reveal someoneâ(TM)s identity, to tools that let the agency stay anonymous online and approach people undercover. The document covers everything from monitoring social media to tracking the movements of vehicles.

Comment ByteToBreach identity attributed to Zakaria Mahdjo (Score 1) 52

“Israel-based cybersecurity firm Kela has attributed the ByteToBreach persona to Zakaria Mahdjoub, an alleged cybercriminal based in Oran, Algeria, who it describes as a prolific seller of stolen government, banking, and airline data. Romanian authorities have not verified those claims.”

‘In an interview with Euronews Romania conducted over the Signal messaging app, a person claiming to be the hacker apologized to Romanians and IT professionals for the intrusion and, when asked whether citizens should be concerned about stolen data, replied: "I don't sell this data to just anyone."’

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