FSF Threatens Anthropic Over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Freely
In 2024 Anthropic was sued over claims it infringed copyrights when training LLMs.
But as they try to settle, they may have a problem. The Free Software Foundation announced Friday that Anthropic’s training data apparently even included the book “Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software” — for which the Fre … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge
Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry’s most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy – a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral com … ⌘ Read more

It’s raining and raining and raining and raining. I had hoped my mate canceled the hike today. But he didn’t. He showed up. So, off we went to the Staufeneck Castle Ruin after having a lunch first. The rain drizzling on the umbrella was very nice and I was very glad that he dragged me outside.

It was super wet, though. Entire creeks were coming down on some path sections. A slippery, muddy mess on others. Our boots were already soaked a few kilometers in the trip. The important part was that the feet were warm, though, despite being wet. We barely met anybody in this lousy weather. So we had basically everything for us alone. That’s always great.

Visibility was poor the higher we got. At 13 a low hanging cloud was moving in, 14 is the result just three minutes later. We couldn’t see the castle 300 meters away anymore. No chance. It was really funny, because the houses in town at two kilometers distance were still visible. Poorly, but you could clearly make out the town. Not the castle, there was just a white wall of cloud :-)

On the way back, we warmed up with tea I brought along. After I dropped off my mate at the train station, I bumped into a fellow scout, so my wet feet cooled off completely in these 15 minutes we talked. The rainjacket mostly held up with the protection of the umbrella, just the sleeves were down. My rain trousers, on the other hand, leaked a little bit a the lower ends. I was glad when I could strip all the wet stuff. I would do it again, though. :-) Now, I’m swapping the newspaper in my boots every half an hour to absorb all the moisture.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-die-burg-staufeneck-2026-02-21/

Oh, our leaning silo laughs at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. :-D I’m wondering when it collapses. I’m waiting for this to happen for years now.

Microsoft Deletes Blog Telling Users To Train AI on Pirated Harry Potter Books
Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset – incorrectly marked as public domain – and use them to train AI models on the company’s Azure platform.

The blog, written in November 2024 … ⌘ Read more

Pendant que la France s’endort, nos voisins se réveillent
S’il apparaît maintenant assez clair que la France est en train de s’effondrer, cela ne veut cependant pas dire qu’il en serait de même pour le reste de l’Europe. En pratique, certains autres pays comprennent les dangers et les difficultés et sont en train de réagir petit-à-petit. La France a pendant des siècles été un […] ⌘ Read more

Britain Lost 14,000 Pubs, a Quarter, in 13 Years
Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline.

Leek trained a random forest model on … ⌘ Read more

Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot
The Gentoo Linux project last year announced plans to move their code hosting to Codeberg rather than GitHub. Gentoo’s desire to move away from GitHub was motivated by Microsoft’s Copilot training on GitHub repositories. Those plans are turning into action now with the main Gentoo project up on Codeberg and honoring pull requests… ⌘ Read more

KPMG Partner Fined Over Using AI To Pass AI Test
A partner at KPMG Australia has been fined $7,000 by the Big Four firm after using AI tools to cheat on an internal training course about using AI. From a report: The unnamed partner was forced to redo the test after uploading training materials into an AI platform to help answer questions on the use of the fast-evolving technology.

More than two dozen staff have been … ⌘ Read more

Meta’s New Patent: an AI That Likes, Comments and Messages For You When You’re Dead
Meta was granted a patent in late December that describes how a large language model could be trained on a deceased user’s historical activity – their comments, likes, and posted content – to keep their social media accounts active after they’re gone.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, is listed as the primary autho … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Claims DeepSeek Distilled US Models To Gain an Edge
An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News.

In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committe … ⌘ Read more

UK’s First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK’s first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend – operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the … ⌘ Read more

The UK Paid $5.65 Million For a Bookmarks Site
The UK government paid consulting firm PwC $5.65 million to build its new AI Skills Hub, a site meant to help 10 million workers gain AI skills by 2030 that functions largely as a bookmarking service, directing users to external training courses that already existed before the contract was awarded.

The hub links to platforms like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning system rather th … ⌘ Read more

US Government Lost More Than 10,000 STEM PhDs Last Year
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year as President Donald Trump dramatically shrank the overall federal workforce. That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technol … ⌘ Read more

Citigroup Mandates AI Training For 175,000 Employees To Help Them ‘Reinvent Themselves’
Citigroup has rolled out mandatory AI training for all 175,000 of its employees across 80 locations worldwide, a sweeping initiative that CEO Jane Fraser describes as helping workers “reinvent themselves” before the technology permanently alters what they do for a living.

The $205 billion bank sent out an in … ⌘ Read more

How Anthropic Built Claude: Buy Books, Slice Spines, Scan Pages, Recycle the Remains
Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called “Project Panama” to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies.

The company spe … ⌘ Read more

NASA Eyes Popular PC Hardware Performance Tool for Its Flight Simulators
NASA Langley has initiated the U.S. government software approval process to install CapFrameX, a benchmarking tool popular among PC gaming enthusiasts, on its cockpit simulators used to train test pilots. The space agency reached out to CapFrameX, not the other way around, according to an X post from the company.

NASA builds cu … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Allegedly Sought ‘High-Speed Access’ To Pirated Book Library for AI Training
An expanded class-action lawsuit filed last Friday alleges that a member of Nvidia’s data strategy team directly contacted Anna’s Archive – the sprawling shadow library hosting millions of pirated books – to explore “including Anna’s Archive in pre-training data for our LLMs.”

Internal documents cited in the … ⌘ Read more

Palantir CEO Says AI To Make Large-Scale Immigration Obsolete
AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration, according to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Bloomberg: “There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” said Karp, speaking at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. “I do think these trends re … ⌘ Read more

Ukraine To Share Wartime Combat Data With Allies To Help Train AI
An anonymous reader shares a report: Ukraine will establish a system allowing its allies to train their AI models on Kyiv’s valuable combat data collected throughout the nearly four-year war with Russia, newly appointed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has said. Fedorov – a former digitalisation minister who last week took up the post to drive ref … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Contacted Anna’s Archive To Secure Access To Millions of Pirated Books
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna’s Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim (PDF) that the trillion-dollar company directly … ⌘ Read more

Bikinis et statistiques : la nouvelle terreur des dirigeants
Horreur, catastrophe et heures les plus sombres : de dangereux internautes seraient en train de ficher les musulmans de France ! Quelle abomination ! Il semble en effet qu’un site se charge de recenser toutes les mosquées de France. Ce site, c’est Trouve Ma Mosquee et cette cartographie vient de déclencher une véritable crise d’hystérie dans les médias… […] ⌘ Read more

Researchers Make ‘Neuromorphic’ Artificial Skin For Robots
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s App Course Runs $20,000 a Student. Is It Really Worth It?
Apple’s Developer Academy in Detroit has spent roughly $30 million over four years training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps, but not everyone lands coding jobs right away, according to a WIRED story published this week.

The program launched in 2021 as part of Apple’s $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and costs an esti … ⌘ Read more

John Carreyou and Other Authors Bring New Lawsuit Against Six Major AI Companies
A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it’s because another set of authors already filed a class action suit … ⌘ Read more

Is America’s Tech Industry Already Facing a Recession?
America’s unemployment rate for tech jobs rose to 4% in November, and “has been steadily rising since May,” reports the Washington Post (citing data from the IT training/certifications company CompTIA).

Between October and November, the number of technology workers across different industries fell 134,000, while the number of people working in the tech industry decline … ⌘ Read more

Apples
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India Proposes Charging OpenAI, Google For Training AI On Copyrighted Content
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organ … ⌘ Read more

Inquest into death of tasered 95yo to focus on dementia training
Court hears training of aged-care staff and first responders in dealing with people experiencing dementia will be the primary focus of an upcoming inquest. ⌘ Read more

IBM To Buy Confluent For $11 Billion To Expand AI Services
IBM is buying Confluent for $11 billion in a major push to own real-time data streaming infrastructure essential for enterprise AI workloads. It marks Big Blue’s biggest acquisition since Red Hat in 2019. Bloomberg reports: The AI boom has touched off billions of dollars in deals for businesses that build, train or leverage the technology, propelling the valu … ⌘ Read more

Salah involved in Liverpool training after outburst
Mohamed Salah takes part in Liverpool’s training session on Monday following his explosive interview at the weekend. ⌘ Read more

England coach says team ‘over-prepared’ for Brisbane Test, as players head for Noosa getaway
England coach Brendon McCullum claims his team trained too hard for the Gabba Test, which ended in a bruising eight-wicket loss that leaves the tourists’ Ashes hopes in tatters. ⌘ Read more

No place for weak men in my dressing room - Stokes
Captain Ben Stokes questioned his England players’ mentality after their crushing defeat by Australia, while Brendon McCullum says they trained “too much”. ⌘ Read more

McCullum says England ‘trained too much’ as Stokes questions mentality
Coach Brendon McCullum says England trained “too much” while captain Ben Stokes raised questions about his side’s mentality after their defeat in the second Ashes Test. ⌘ Read more

Young people on benefits to be offered construction and hospitality work
The government says it will fund training and work experience for 350,000 not in work or education. ⌘ Read more

McCullum says England ‘trained too much’ as Stokes questions mentality
Coach Brendon McCullum says England trained “too much” while captain Ben Stokes raised questions about his side’s mentality after their defeat in the second Ashes Test. ⌘ Read more

Disruption at Heathrow Airport after emergency services attend incident
Trains to and from the airport were halted but are now running with delays, National Rail has said. ⌘ Read more

Young people on benefits to be offered construction and hospitality work
The government says it will fund training and work experience for 350,000 not in work or education. ⌘ Read more

Train derailment closes Townsville-Mount Isa rail line
A train locomotive is on its side and two others are off the track after a derailment on the Townsville to Mount Isa rail line. ⌘ Read more

India caps airfares as IndiGo crisis leaves hundreds stranded for fifth day
Thousands of IndiGo flights were cancelled this week due to a pilot shortage, which prompted government relief and extra trains to help stranded passengers. ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Has Trained Its LLM To Confess To Bad Behavior
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company can make an LLM produce what they call a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out a task and (most of the time) owns up to any bad behavior. Figuring out why … ⌘ Read more

Victorian hobby club opens ‘Australia’s biggest’ miniature railway
A group of dedicated volunteers say they have built “Australia’s biggest” miniature railway in regional Victoria and after a decade of hard work it’s finally open to the public. ⌘ Read more

Major incident causes Perth traffic chaos ahead of AC/DC concert
A serious crash on one of Perth’s major freeway’s brings train services to a halt and is causing traffic chaos in the city’s south. ⌘ Read more

Hegseth’s use of Signal app posed risk to US personnel, watchdog finds
A report by the Pentagon watchdog concludes US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated Pentagon policy by using his personal device for official business and recommends better training for all Pentagon officials. ⌘ Read more

EU’s former top diplomat charged in ‘fraud and corruption’ probe
European prosecutors are investigating suspicions of fraud related to an EU-funded training scheme for junior diplomats. ⌘ Read more

Car falls from bridge, lands on train tracks sparking lengthy rail delays
A complex operation is under way to remove a car that crashed onto train tracks in the Blue Mountains. ⌘ Read more

Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers To Build Its Surveillance AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Flock, the automatic license plate reader and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the United States, according to material … ⌘ Read more

Concerns over lack of specific training in ADHD for GPs amid care reforms
Queensland is becoming the first jurisdiction in Australia to allow specialist GPs to diagnose ADHD in adults and prescribe treatment, but some hold concerns about the lack of mandatory specific training. ⌘ Read more

Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel opens today. Here’s what you need to know
It’s the biggest upgrade to Melbourne’s rail network in more than 40 years, and it’s arrived — the long-awaited Metro Tunnel, along with its five new inner-city stations, opens to the public on Sunday. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Very rarely. And if I/we do, then it’s by train or by car. 😅

Why Can’t ChatGPT Tell Time?
ChatGPT can browse the web, write code and analyze images, but ask it what time it is and you might get the correct answer, a confident wrong answer, or a polite refusal – sometimes all three within minutes of each other.

The problem stems from how large language models work. These systems predict answers based on training data and don’t receive constant real-time updates about things like time unless they specifically se … ⌘ Read more