Society

Crypto was a wonderful Wild West of anarchic financial innovation, absurd idiocy and scamming. Lots of scamming. Then regulators came along and made everything a lot more sensible and boring. Given how fast Generative AI has developed — from computer science theory to high school cheating scandals in but a few years — it was inevitable that the lawsuits would quickly follow. On Friday, the comedian Sarah Silverman joined authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey in class action copyright lawsuits, claiming OpenAI and Meta had stolen material from their books to train their Large Language Models (LLMs). They allege the LLMs were trained on their books through pirated online libraries, such as Library Genesis and Z-Library. (No, I haven’t used them for years, don’t ask.

The New York Post was censored by Twitter and Facebook after breaking the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, despite the fact that the story was true and not, as some claimed, “Russian disinformation.” Now the Post is doubling down in exposing what the newspaper calls “the Biden family criminal enterprise” with an exclusive, but, as far as Cockburn can tell, unsubstantiated video of Gal Luft, whom the Post asserts is “a key would-be witness on Biden family corruption.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg formally challenged each other to a cage fight on June 21. Out with free-market capitalism, in with post-liberal tech feudalism, and accompanying duels! However entertaining, this whole debacle was spectacularly stupid, for two core reasons. The first is that the jiu-jitsu trained Zuck would clearly obliterate the rather portly, older Musk. The second is that this came as a response to a Twitter post on their real fight, with $44 billion on the line, between Musk’s Twitter and Zuckerberg’s clone competitor of it, Threads, which launched last night. It had 2 million users within two hours; 10 million with seven hours; and this is without any mainland Europeans, as the EU continues to be led by the moronic.

During the height of the coronavirus, the Department of the Interior teamed up with a scandal-plagued nonprofit organization to investigate whether humans can infect bats with Covid-19. According to hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust, or PPT, the Department of the Interior worked hand in glove with EcoHealth Alliance through subsidiary agencies.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the "1619 Project”, almost brought herself to lift a finger in defense of affirmative action — almost. She took to Twitter on Thursday to denounce the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action. The anger was not strong enough, though, to make it worth picking up the pen. Hannah-Jones tweeted: “Was going to write an essay about it, but why even bother. (Also, Clarence Thomas is actually irrelevant here. So thanks but no thanks)” The Wall Street Journal’s new editor-in-chief has criticized the work ethic of the paper’s staff, but clearly the New York Times is not much better — Hannah-Jones wrote her last piece for the paper in February 2023, which itself was the first in two years.

Pedro L. Gonzalez, a very online polemical paleoconservative writer who has a knack for inspiring nicknames indicative of his jackbooted Latinx style — “Burrito Mussolini,” “Barrio Nazi” and “Taco von Ribbentrop” are just a few — found himself in a dunk tank of hot water this week upon the publication at Breitbart of a hit piece authored by Matt Boyle. Headlined “Exclusive — Rising Conservative Influencer Pedro Gonzalez Regularly Espoused Racist and Anti-Semitic Sentiments in Private Messages,” the piece was really just a stringing together of screencaps from texts purportedly sent by Gonzalez over several years, including a torrent of offensive racist and antisemitic material.

Fox News has announced its new primetime lineup post-Tucker Carlson: Jesse Watters will take over the coveted 8 p.m. ET slot vacated by Tucker, while Laura Ingraham is moving from 10 p.m. to the 7 p.m. hour. Sean Hannity will stay in his spot at 9 p.m., and Greg Gutfeld is slotted forward an hour to 10 p.m. The shuffle is an attempt by executives to resuscitate the network after the unceremonious firing of its top host, Tucker Carlson, which led several loyal viewers to jump ship.

There's rich and there's rich. There's a number beyond which stuff starts to get boring. I'm not sure what it is, but it's the point at which you run out of restaurants to frequent and clubs to join and clothes to buy and you start thinking bigger. You start thinking about going to space and colonizing Mars — and exploring the dark depths of the deep blue sea. It is the reason that Elon Musk sold his seven homes and chucked out most of his possessions and torments his staff by sleeping at work. It is also part of the reason that five men are now sadly believed to have died while aboard a missing submarine after a "catastrophic implosion." If we didn’t love to hate the rich, this would have been seen for what it is: a tragedy.

The US Coast Guard said Thursday afternoon that the five passengers aboard the missing Titan submarine are presumed dead after debris from the vessel was found on the seafloor.  “The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said. “Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families. On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families.” The announcement came after the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic deployed a remotely operated vehicle that found five major pieces of debris 1,600 feet from the Titanic. According to Mauger, the Coast Guard is uncertain if they will be able to uncover the victim’s bodies.

Are Harry and Meghan set for a rebrand? According to Tom Bower, author of Revenge: Meghan, Harry, and the War Between the Windsors, the couple's latest scheme is to recast themselves as Meghan and Harry Spencer, the maiden name of Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana. “What’s really interesting in the rebranding of the Sussexes is... that Meghan decided that her real objective in life was to be Diana," the author told GB News Tuesday. "Meghan went to the extent of suggesting that they should drop the name 'Windsor' and take the surname 'Spencer,' so she would be Meghan Spencer, the new Diana." https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1671397543182213121?s=20 “They’ve actively discussed this," Bower continued. "Not only by themselves but with others too.

Back in November, Cockburn wrote an entry of his gossip column titled "Meghan Markle: America’s laziest interviewer." While the piece may not have popular at the time, especially with Meghan’s #girlboss fans, boy does Cockburn feel vindicated now. It has recently come to light that while many were eagerly awaiting the one-hour-a-week podcast where the duchess investigated, dissected and subverts the labels that try to hold women back, Meghan Markle isn’t exactly the workaholic boss babe she made out — and Spotify has realized.  Last week, Spotify released a joint statement with Archewell Audio, Meghan and Harry's content creation label, announcing that "Spotify and Archewell Audio have mutually agreed to part ways and are proud of the series we made together.

No doubt Rupert Murdoch breathed a sigh of relief when Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter proved disastrous. The announcement, hosted by Elon Musk, was derailed by technical glitches, leading to twenty minutes of awkward silences interrupted by occasional hot-mic moments of frustration. Even after Musk and his team at Twitter got things going, the highly anticipated event drew a meager audience of just 300,000 live listeners. The second stop of the DeSantis campaign, immediately afterward, was at Fox News, for an interview watched by an average of 2 million viewers.

Former MSNBC host Mark Halperin is charging high-prices for his news service that launches Thursday.  Wide World of News Concierge Coverage, which starts at $400 a month, is set to replace the Substack Halperin has operated since 2020. The new service will include the Wide World of News newsletter that Halperin currently publishes on his Substack, as well as several other features designed to give subscribers greater access to Halperin’s reporting.  “This new service will give you – and your company or organization — actionable insights beyond dumbed-down cable news chatter or social doom scrolling,” Halperin’s new website says. “Instead, you’ll get the inside track on what will happen next and why, from Halperin’s unbiased, curated reporting.