Tootfinder

Hollywood is now coming to grips with Paramount's WBD deal, which many politicians and rank-and-file workers oppose, amid an uncertain time for the industry (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/l-a-c…

L.A. Comes to Grips With a Studio Merger Many Didn’t Want
Politicians and rank-and-file workers who feared a Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal now hope concessions will soften impact

Last year, we covered how Anthropic was buying physical books,
scanning them,
and destroying them to feed their Claude chatbot.
Judge William Alsup ruled this fair use.
In particular, he said mulching the books was perfectly fine because making them digital was
“exceedingly transformative”: [Order on Fair Use, 2025, PDF]
The print original was destroyed.
One replaced the other.
And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, s…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…

Bug of the day: a deadlock between dlopen(3)'s lock and OPENSSL_init_crypto()'s lock when two threads load a new library and initialize #OpenSSL.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.c

When you think big tech/ai heads won't make you more angry, you learn they go after rare books, scan them and destroy original copy...
And this is considered "fair use" of course 🤦
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/23/ai-vendors-ar…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…

Anthropic reported disrupting a Beijing-aligned operation to monitor religious leaders and diaspora communities, including a DC-based advocacy group for Tibet (Richard Gere/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/beijing-turns-

An Invisible Force Has a Mysterious Effect on Aging, Scientists Discover in 'Startling' Breakthrough https://www.404media.co/earth-magnetic-field-effects-on-aging-study/

Nextdoor keeps trying to get me to “Discover [my] neighborhood,” but it does so by using slop photos for my city and neighborhood that have no relation to reality (and make the not-my-street look a little gross).
Strong signal to not join the platform that can’t be arsed to use existing imagery.
#Buffalo

If you get a spare 30 mins or so, you should have a listen to the Ibrahim Alfa Jnr mixtape in the middle third of this edition of Late Junction. Quick, before it disappears from Sounds. Start from about 30 mins in, to hear his intro first.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00309lp

Man, I’m utterly despairing at this. Not only do they give them until 2029, but they even say they won’t be able to enforce it.
Why would you center businesses over the health of your constituents and the employees of those businesses, much less the environmental damage and noise? And from an ostensibly progressive member of the board at that.

Gas-powered leaf blowers will be banned in Arlington starting in 2029 | ARLnow.com
It's official: gas-powered leaf blowers are getting banned in Arlington. County Board members on Saturday adopted a 29-month phase-out period for gas-powered leaf blowers countywide, a timeframe officials said would help to make sure the transition goes smoothly. "It's really about, how do we set ourselves up for success?" said Board member Maureen Coffey, who