Free Republic

The ruling does change the fundamental nature of what the books were intended for: they were intended to be read by human beings, not used as training for machines to replace human thought and ingenuity. ============================================================== AI companies are buying old books, scanning them, then destroying them. Anthropic has been buying the books to feed the machine with human knowledge and ideas written down before the AI era, so only books with publication dates before 2022 will do. Once they have the books, they rip off the spines, feed them through a scanner, and then on into the gaping maw...

The upshot of Wang’s creative fervor is the GD01, which Unitree bills as the world’s first mass-produced, transformable mecha robot. Standing 9 ft. tall and weighing half a ton, it can transport a pilot in its torso-mounted cockpit, walk on either two legs or four, and wield fists powerful enough to knock down walls. Heavy-duty mechanical hinges connect titanium-alloy limbs to a protective casing of carbon fiber, enabling smooth, deliberate strides on brutish red legs.

Thousands of tourists have been forced to flee a top French holiday hotspot, with many evacuated by boat to escape a raging wildfire. The area of Lege-Cap Ferret in southwestern France - an upmarket tourist destination known as the French Hamptons - is in the middle of a total evacuation with thousands of hectares of forest burning and villas going up in smoke. French President Emmanuel Macron has already requested help from the European Union as the country's growing battle against wildfires intensifies. Images showed scores of residents boarding boats this morning as they evacuated the area while a French...

The incident, which targeted the computer systems of another company called Hugging Face, happened while OpenAI was testing the systems.OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers.The incident, which happened last week while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, displayed the kind of science-fiction potential that A.I. companies have warned would soon become a reality.A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have over the past year released A.I. models that are customized to expose cybersecurity problems,...

President-elect Donald Trump made raising tariffs on imported goods a tenet of his reelection campaign. And while that could raise prices on everything from jeans to children’s toys for everyday Americans, Trump has also floated the idea of another tariff that could impact Wall Street’s current favorite trade: AI. During an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast ahead of the election, Trump lambasted the idea of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation Biden signed in 2022 designed to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US. He called it “so bad.” Instead of using legislation and billions in subsidies to...

Former Navy Secretary John Phelan is calling on the help of Congress and the Pentagon to help the Navy work better, faster and smarter to keep up with U.S. adversaries.Phelan, in a new op-ed published Tuesday in The Washington Post, "The depleted Navy needs immediate rebuilding as dangers rise," argues that the United States is at most responsible for the current state of the naval fighting force. His heeded warning comes amid an ongoing war in Iran played on the backdrop of the major international shipping channel, the Strait of Hormuz, which has been strategically used by Iran to flummox...

The J-35A’s journey began with the FC-31 Gyrfalcon, a stealth aircraft prototype that first flew on October 31, 2012. Initially developed as a privately funded venture by SAC, the FC-31 aimed to attract potential export customers. However, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), especially the PLA Navy, soon took an interest in the project. This led to further development and modifications, resulting in the J-35A, which officially debuted ahead of the 2024 China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition. The J-35A is the second Chinese fifth-generation fighter, following the Chengdu J-20. This makes China the only country other than the United States...

Even people who dislike Donald Trump tend to give him credit for one thing: getting NATO to pay its fair share. American presidents have long grumbled about burden sharing. Trump has been crude, theatrical and transactional, but the sentiment he expressed was broadly shared. And Europeans got the message. Non-American NATO countries collectively spent 1.4 percent of their combined gross domestic product on defense in 2014; in 2025, it was close to 2.3 percent.But be careful what you wish for.The usual assumption is that if Europe spends more, the United States will spend less. This is demonstrably wrong. European defense...

Temperatures could climb to 30 degrees in parts of the country this week, with Met Éireann issuing a weather advisory over expected heatwave conditions. The weather advisory, which is in place from Wednesday until Tuesday next week, states that daytime maxima will “widely exceed 25 degrees Celsius with values climbing to the high 20s or even low 30s in places from Friday”. It adds that possible tropical nights may occur in places this weekend and that there is also the chance of some thunderstorms later this week. Nationally, there will be a lot of dry, settled weather with plenty of...

Buyers, beware. The San Francisco real estate scene, one that’s historically presented an uphill battle for buyers, has tilted toward all-out war. The catalyst is the artificial intelligence boom, a phenomenon generating new jobs, new wealth and unprecedented demand for housing in the Bay Area. Rents are up, homes are selling faster, prices are rising, and overbids (and we mean way over) have gone bananas. Only the wealthiest, most intrepid, most determined buyers will succeed in such a market. According to a June 2026 report released by Compass Real Estate, the AI boom has affected virtually every aspect of the...

Tesla cars are constantly capturing video data from all their cars that is sent back to their servers. No doubt, this data could be used to track criminals or anyone else by a query to the database. I have not seen this discussed anywhere, but seems like LE or those with ill intent could see this as a treasure. I saw this post: This little blue dot on your phone is a revolutionary invention https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4386790/posts and it made me remember this question. Tesla uses the data to improve their self driving algorithms so billions of videos are uploaded from cars...

Technology, banking, and entertainment companies are significantly restricting employee access to AI tools as monthly costs skyrocket into tens of millions of dollars, according to internal documents and communications obtained from multiple organizations. 404 Media reports that companies across multiple industries are implementing strict limitations on employee use of AI tools after experiencing dramatic cost increases that have caught executives off guard. Internal communications from organizations including Atlassian, Adobe, Amazon, Citi, and GitHub reveal a growing crisis as AI spending triples in some cases, forcing companies to cut access to powerful models and plead with workers to reduce consumption. The...

The tech industry faces a paradoxical crisis: companies are shedding human jobs to invest in AI tools that are currently more costly than the workers they replace. Major players like Uber and Microsoft report exorbitant AI spending, with budgets exhausted rapidly and little correlation to tangible value. This "tokenmaxxing" culture, where AI usage is incentivized over actual productivity, fuels massive waste. Despite widespread layoffs justified by AI reallocation, studies indicate AI is economically viable in only a fraction of roles. The unsustainable model of subsidized AI pricing is unwinding, forcing a market correction. The industry must now shift from indiscriminate...

Temperatures on the ocean surface hit a record high in June, European scientists warned Wednesday, fueling fears of more dangerous heat waves this summer and fanning concerns over the escalating global climate crisis. Two separate services under the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program — the Copernicus Climate Change Service and the Copernicus Marine Service — announced they had both independently confirmed the record temperatures. Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, warned that the rising temperatures could mark the “beginning of a new phase.” “With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we...

Men's Journal: Breaking News It seemed hard to believe at first. The National Weather Service was really issuing WINTER storm warnings for snow in late June? But it really happened. Three U.S. states were hit with the winter storm warnings, and Yellowstone National Park was seeing snow. That has a lot of people wondering why and what caused the unusual phenomenon. Even stranger, the summer snowfall alerts were coming as the eastern third of the U.S. faced what could be a record-breaking heat wave with the heat index even predicted to reach 115 degrees in some places. According to USA...

Local moratoriums spring up after state inaction, while New Mexico and Utah fight “hyperscale” data polluters .... Local governments in Colorado are moving quickly to slap moratoriums on new data center development in reaction to a public backlash against rising electricity prices, heavy pollution and lucrative tax breaks. Denver, Jefferson County and Longmont have all moved in recent weeks to limit data centers, which house servers for mass computation that demand enormous amounts of electricity and cooling water. Cities and counties are moving in part because the state legislature failed to act in 2026, eventually letting two competing bills die...

“The Social Security Administration recently gave us their annual report with a few blockbuster footnotes. We all know that Social Security as it is currently constructed will run out of money in the early 2030s. Social Security’s cost has exceeded its non-interest income since 2010. Since then, payments have been made out of the so-called trust fund. Except the trust fund does not hold cash. The money was borrowed by the rest of the federal government to cover other spending, and the government now owes it back.”

Editing the genes of a human embryo remains highly controversial, particularly after Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world eight years ago by doing just that using the popular gene-editing technique CRISPR — and then allowing the embryos to be carried to term and born. Proponents say the tech could allow us to treat diseases in powerful new ways, while critics liken it to eugenics, arguing it could set a dangerous precedent by allowing parents to select certain desirable traits. It should therefore come to no surprise that the most recent attempt to edit human zygotes, embryos at their earliest...

Andrei Jikh 3.21M subscribers Your 401K Is Their Exit Strategy (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI) Their massive IPOS are coming that will be difficult for markets to absorb. Taken together their IPOs are valued at 4.2 trillion dollars. Watch the video if you have the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhRjvX_t4hc&t=216s

The paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, notes that the fertility rate in the U.S. has fallen by 22 per cent since 2007, when the first iPhone went on sale in the country... Until 2011, the iPhone was only available in the U.S. to subscribers of AT&T, allowing the researchers to compare birth rates in counties with near-universal AT&T coverage to counties with little or none in the four years since the first iPhone’s release. Their findings suggest a striking relationship between iPhone access and declining birth rates... As for why exactly this is, the researchers present...