Getty Images CEO Craig Peters says Getty is spending "millions and millions" on its Stability AI lawsuit in the UK and the US, accusing it of copying 12M images (Ryan Browne/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/getty-ceo-
Source: India orders ISPs and app stores to block 25 streaming services, like Ullu and ALTT with millions of downloads, for allegedly promoting obscene content (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/25/india-bans-streami…
‘A timebomb’: could a French mine full of waste poison the drinking water of millions? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/23/french-mine-stocamine-waste-drinking-water-chemicals-alsace-aquifer-aoe
Single-photon sources created by nature millions of years ago
D. G. Pasternak, A. M. Romshin, R. A. Khmelnitsky, G. Yu. Kriulina, A. A. Zhivopistsev, O. S. Kudryavtsev, A. V. Gritsienko, A. M. Satanin, I. I. Vlasov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20405
https://san.com/cc/millions-of-cars-at-risk-from-flipper-zero-key-fob-hack-experts-warn/
Millions of cars at risk from Flipper Zero key fob hack, experts warn
Extraordinarily Expensive Costs Force Getty to Pick Its AI Legal Battles (Ars Technica, 28 May 2025)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/extraordinarily-expensive-costs-force-getty-to-pick-its-ai-legal-battles/…
In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading
The #BigTech boom in #ArtificialIntelligence usage has also boomed the prices of #ElectricBills for millions, whether they had anything to do with it or not ..
Source: India orders ISPs and app stores to block 25 streaming services, like Ullu and ALTT with millions of downloads, for allegedly promoting obscene content (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/25/india-bans-streami…
Scientists find millions of tons of nanoplastics in the North Atlantic Ocean https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/07/scientists-find-millions-of-tons-of-nanoplastics-in-the-north-atlantic-ocean/
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