@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-05-28 10:05:42
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-
@Dragofix@veganism.social2025-06-29 12:40:03
‘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
@wfryer@mastodon.cloud2025-05-28 22:49:25
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/…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-06-28 13:30:10
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
@tinoeberl@mastodon.online2025-06-26 18:20:55
#China hat mit über 1 Terawatt installierter #Photovoltaik-Leistung einen neuen Rekord erreicht.
Im Mai kamen fast 93 Gigawatt hinzu. Der rasante Ausbau wurde durch staatliche #Fördermaßnahmen
@timbray@cosocial.ca2025-05-27 16:16:27
Pretty amazing. And yet, the majority of Americans won’t see this story because the truth is paywalled but the bullshit is free. Which feels more and more to me like one of the world’s most important problems.
https://masto.ai/@Nonilex/114580574368958399
@muz4now@mastodon.world2025-06-26 18:27:10
@servelan@newsie.social2025-06-28 15:26:28
Millions of College Students Could Have Their Federal Aid Slashed Under Budget Proposals
https://www.investopedia.com/college-students-could-lose-grants-11752596
@qurlyjoe@mstdn.social2025-06-28 01:49:50
Why are people so stupid? What is it about our brains that makes us susceptible to the whole influencer schtick? They’re just the metastized manifestation of behaviors we’ve had probably in some fashion or another for 100s of 1000s of years. The game has always been, whoever talks to and persuades the most people wins. But now, a single voice can be heard (or read) by millions, within minutes. How can this be evolutionarily advantageous?
@servelan@newsie.social2025-06-29 04:13:33
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: "If the GOP reconciliation bill passes, ICE gets through FY2029: - $45 billion for detention, on top of the current annual budget of $3.4 billion - $14.4 billion for transportation and removal, on top of the current annual budget of $750 million - $8 billion for hiring/retention - Billions more." — Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2vtbmhmrwzbqcfv4we4uxzzt/post/3lsp64jee722u