Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73107495

Goldman's strategists reckon this means around one in 30 adults in the country, or 3.4% of the adult ⁠population margin called

https://www.reuters.com/commentary/reuters-open-interest/korean-stock-volatility-comes-america-can-wall-street-take-heat-2026-07-20/

The award-winning team behind Google DeepMind's AlphaFold program is no more, according to Financial Times. Google has reassigned most of the team's key members and the original authors of its papers, while a few others have already left the company. AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It's now being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold.

In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold's methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.

Keep the slop, kill the science. Got it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73078605

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73048134

Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.

ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.

“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”

I’m aware that I’m falling into the AI trap of personifying these results, writing as if Google’s AI imagines and presumes. Google the company, of course, wants this too–it wants me to see my search results as a conversation with a helpful problem-solving buddy. The company has aims down the line to introduce actual agents that can search for you, jumping on the latest Silicon Valley obsession to basically make a version of Google Alerts that are worse for the environment. Maybe its current version of search is something of a test balloon for an eventual service it can charge for.

But the same way it drives me crazy when Stripe’s AI customer service tells me it’s so sorry, omg that must be so hard to hear about whatever utterly mundane, thoroughly unemotional issue I’ve brought it that day, Google search’s hollow facsimile of the human desire to help lays bare how badly its inventors misunderstand what regular people want and how we feel when we’re searching for information. (Full disclosure: I wrote my library school Master’s thesis literally about this, so it really riles me up!) It exposes how Google sees its users: helpless and intellectually lazy, longing for machines to solve our problems for us, unable to sit in the sometimes uneasy space of unknowing that motivates information searching in the first place. Shortcutting yourself out of this space–or, worse, letting AI do it for you–robs you of the chance to explore and discover, to let your search take you to new places and learn new things.

The case centers on Tunick's use of GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users enter a passcode to wipe a...

There is no doubt that many creators recognize the competition from GenAI as an existential threat. In the U.K., a survey released in January 2026 by the Society of Authors, the Association of Illustrators and other creator organizations found that around a third of illustrators and literary translators, and more than half of photographers, had lost commissions to GenAI. Among the authors, more than 85 percent reported decreased earnings and feared that GenAI could imitate their style. Also in January, the French division of Harlequin, which is part of publisher HarperCollins, announced a trial with an AI translation company. According to the Association of Literary Translators of France, the trial saw translators’ contracts being terminated and replaced with lower-paid work editing AI-generated translations.

The current landscape is particularly difficult for emerging authors, Eli Keren, a literary agent and chair of the U.K. Association of Authors’ Agents sub-committee on AI in publishing, told me. It’s difficult to break out when magazines, competitions, literary agents and online retail platforms are flooded with AI-generated work. This year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize became mired in controversy after speculation that one of the winning entries, Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” contained AI-generated text. (After an investigation, the Commonwealth Prize decided it was satisfied that AI was not used to write Nazir’s story.) More established writers are affected too: Bad actors are releasing copycat AI-generated books on the same day as highly anticipated novels and biographies, Keren explained, to trick readers and steal book sales that they have not earned and do not deserve.

Earlier this year, Grammarly, a platform that claims to improve people’s writing, launched a short-lived GenAI tool that provided editorial feedback in the style of famous authors, including writer Stephen King, historian David Abulafia and journalist Julia Angwin. Angwin is now leading a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman, the owner of Grammarly, in the Southern District of New York. “I have worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor,” Angwin said, speaking about the case. “I am distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise.” But Angwin’s case is not based on copyright infringement. This is likely because an author’s literary style is not generally protectable under copyright law, despite it being the essence of what makes their works unique. Instead, Angwin claims that Grammarly infringed the privacy and publicity rights of her and many other authors by appropriating their names and identities for commercial purposes without consent. But not all jurisdictions offer these so-called personality rights, meaning protection of this nature for authors is patchy.

If these forms of market dilution, which result from the mass theft of creators’ works, are not recognized under copyright law, this raises urgent questions about the purpose of copyright in the age of AI, what it can protect and the future of creative labor.

Faced with these gaps in protection, some creators and legal experts argue that copyright law is no longer fit for purpose and needs to be reformed. Yet there’s no guarantee that reform will make things better for creators.

Companies including Meta, Open AI, Google, and Anthropic have scraped nearly all available data from the internet to train their AI models, and have been accused of using copyrighted material without consent. Tech companies have said it qualifies as fair use, which allows the use of such material for research and other purposes. Some countries are trying to balance the need for good data with the need to compensate creators.

Data collectives, or cooperatives, offer a blueprint for the responsible use of data, and ensure the value goes to those generating the data, Astha Kapoor, co-founder and director of Aapti Institute, a tech research firm in India, told Rest of World.

“Beyond consent and compensation, collective action around data gives communities the opportunity to direct data towards issues they may care about,” she said. “Communities can negotiate the terms on which their data is used at every stage of the AI lifecycle [with] mechanisms for accountability and redressal, in case their terms are breached.”

Workers, producers, consumers, and others have been establishing cooperatives and other community-led associations to pool resources, share benefits, and address socioeconomic challenges for centuries. The United Nations marked 2025 as the year of cooperatives, positioning them as “essential solutions to today’s global problems,” kindling renewed interest in data collectives and cooperatives.

I doubt this will take off like, say, GlassDoor, but if it catches on, could be an interesting resource to make oneself feel better. Orders of magnitude more data are needed for this to be useful.

I find the tech really cool, especially it being so thin. It's also not that expensive.

Buuuut it's google so I fear this thing is a privacy nightmare.

Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/51252396

The Luddites see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.” Collective effervescence, I suspect, was what I was surprised to encounter in myself that winter day by the Apple Cube. The phrase, first coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, refers to the electric and exhilarating energy you might find at raves, protests, marathons, and houses of worship: the feeling you have when you’re connected to something larger than yourself.

The Luddites I met made few direct demands of institutional power. There was no lobbying for antitrust legislation, or for regulating addictive design features and removing ed tech from schools (though a couple of Luddites volunteered for Alex Bores, the New York congressional candidate, and some were tracking the writer Jonathan Haidt’s work around adolescent smartphone use). Unlike their forebears, these Luddites did not advocate for property destruction, save the symbolic iPad at S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. Instead, their focus was on the prefigurative, revolutionary potential of events—specifically free, public, participatory, unpredictable events.

There was a theory of change behind this. Back at S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E, someone had handed me a zine titled The Event Is The Medium, a nod to Marshall McLuhan that doubled as a succinct description of the Luddites’ strategy. The event: no tickets, no invitation on social media, no closed guest list, and no promise that things would unfold according to plan. The Luddites ran these events and hoped other people would run their own events, and in doing so, change their own norms around sociality.

The aim was lofty: to undo decades of social conditioning by technology and reorient people toward unmediated, embodied connection. One in-person meet-up at a time, they would inspire people to make tech work for them instead of the other way around.

For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.

Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.

Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.

“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”

Nintendo urged a court to dismiss a lawsuit demanding that it pass tariff refunds on to customers, saying that people who bought a Switch console or other products have no legal right to refunds that Nintendo is due to receive from the government.

Nintendo said in a motion to dismiss yesterday that plaintiffs are “ask[ing] this Court to invent a legal duty out of whole cloth to retroactively re-price completed sales simply because the legal landscape has changed.” Nintendo said the plaintiffs “have no legal entitlement to the tariff refunds Nintendo stands to receive.”

The lawsuit was filed in April by two customers who seek to represent a class of all US residents who bought Nintendo products from February 2025 to February 2026. California resident Gregory Hoffert and Washington resident Prashant Sharan filed the class action complaint in US District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleging unjust enrichment and a violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act’s prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts.

“Nintendo engaged in unfair acts by: (i) raising prices due to tariffs; (ii) failing to disclose that it intended to seek tariff refunds; and (iii) retaining tariff refunds despite having passed the costs to its customers,” the lawsuit alleged. In their unjust-enrichment claim, plaintiffs said Nintendo profits were “unjustly obtained as a result of its price increases on goods subject to unlawful tariffs.” Nintendo raised prices for the original Switch console by $30 to $50 and added $5 to $10 to the prices of various Switch 2 accessories.

Nintendo told the court that “the doctrine of unjust enrichment does not apply when a party voluntarily pays a purchase price and receives a product in return.” Nintendo said plaintiffs “received exactly what they paid for: Nintendo products that Plaintiffs knowingly and voluntarily purchased at the advertised price. Nor is there anything ‘unjust’ about Nintendo retaining money that it may receive from the government as tariff refunds. The fact that Nintendo stands to receive tariff refunds does not give Plaintiffs any legal entitlement to those funds.”