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>he specifically notes that they used the paid subscriptions, iirc.

Where are you seeing that? He only says "We used several LLMs throughout: Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, especially with GPT-5.6 Sol and, more recently, Astra. The latter was only used for writeups and auditing our arguments."

I might be missing something, but he doesn't seem to confirm that he opted out, at least in the written writeup, maybe he has on social media? He also likely had early access to Astra given the timing, and I thought early access customers couldn't opt out? (Am I wrong about that?)


It's in this statement he released (linked in the article) [0]:

"I pay for the tools my group uses out of my own research funds, including footing a large bill to OpenAI."

[0] https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf


API or consumer subscription? And did he share drafts of the work with anyone who fed it back in on a consumer subscription without disabling training?

I have reason to believe OpenAI doesn't respect training opt outs, but there is a good chance they let something get through without an opt-out too.


> API or consumer subscription

It's not given in the statement, so I don't know

> And did he share drafts of the work with anyone who fed it back in on a consumer subscription without disabling training?

To this, the statement does have the following:

"... the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack"

Note his collaborator (Levent) works at Anthropic, so presumably he knows about opt ins/outs, etc.

> I have reason to believe OpenAI doesn't respect training opt outs, but there is a good chance they let something get through without an opt-out too.

I believe that, at this point in time, OpenAI's reputation speaks for itself. The stakes for success are already enormous, and the CEO has been repeatedly described by those around him as a pathological liar.

People who choose to expose anything remotely sensitive can surely be expected to know the risks of doing so.


>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.

This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.


Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.


Quality vs variety trade off. Costco only has a couple options but they are well better and you don't have to do extra work to make sure you're not buying a piece of crap.

Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.


>Gardasil 9 seems to be the best available HPV vaccine.

Only in high income countries. The 4-valent version is still the dominant version available worldwide.


For Gardasil 9, some lower income countries also use just a single dose rather than two, due to cost.


Not just gut flora. High levels of circulating xylitol (and erythritol for that matter) have been shown in both mouse models and humans to be associated with increased platelet reactivity and elevated 3-year risk of major cardiovascular events.

But we're talking significant levels of xylitol/erythritol, such as from keto-friendly ice cream and drinks, not the modest levels from chewing gum, and the dental benefits are well established.


The mushroom smell isn't from either the substrate or respiration. That distinct odor is 1-octen-3-ol. Biochemists call it "mushroom alcohol." It's caused by enzymatic breakdown of their cell walls, and it thought to be related to signalling.

I doubt it would be strongly present here. The article says the mycelium are close to dormant.

You can actually purchase mushroom alcohol commercially as a food additive.


The claim in the article that saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) naturally produced the deep blue color in the butterfly example is not actually true, although it's a gorgeous effect.

These are genetically engineered variants of brewer's yeast designed to produce pigments.


Wow you weren’t kidding that’s a beautiful color


You can buy this color for 3€/meter at any weekend fabric market.


You could, but getting it from pigments in a chitinous matrix produced by genetically engineered brewer's yeast is just a little bit cooler.


I think they're saying that's exactly what you're buying for 3€/yd.


No, I'm saying if the color is the only part you want, you can get it more easily.


Ok? I just think it’s neat.


>Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.

Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.


"wine dark sea" is the best example of this. It's a poetic/literary leap by Chapman and Pope that then became a functional convention in most subsequent translations.

The alternative translations aren't any better though, at least in English.


The original is οινοπα ποντον which indeed is very close to wine-dark sea. Literally "wine-faced" where -faced is a metaphor for "having the appearance of".


Literally "wine-faced" or "wine-eyed", yes. The problem with the literal wine-faced/wine-eyed is it doesn't convey luminosity/depth to readers, so it kind of misses the point. The missing context is that ancient wine was often unfiltered and cloudy, and diluted before being served.

"wine-looking" would be better for modern readers in terms of conveying the actual meaning, but again, it doesn't convey the actual idea Homer is getting at, and sounds awkward to repeat.

It's fun to think about alternatives far from the text like "garnet-hued sea", "sapphire-hued sea", "burgundy sea", but they all miss on either hue or clarity. "Lee-dark sea" is probably the closest, and hits the wine idea.


>Civil breach of contract. Anthropic's TOS explicitly say you can't do what Kimi is alleged to have done.

This is true, but Kimi also has a variety of defenses. Kimi can't raise unclean hands if Anthropic systematically violated others' terms of use, but it can raise copyright misuse (which is similar in some respects to unclean hands) as well as lack of standing to enforce restrictions in the contract due to the third party beneficiary principle (i.e., Kimi would argue that Anthropic cannot sue Kimi for derived IP that rightfully belongs to third parties whose terms of use were violated by Anthropic, and the proper party to sue Kimi, if any, would be those third parties). That latter argument usually fails in small-scale cases (ProCD) but has been successful in larger ones where the alternative would be anticompetitive.


>Cohere (HQd in Toronto)

Cohere keeps changing their story about where they're headquartered. From 2019-2020 they were HQed in Toronto. Then from early 2020 to 2026 they billed themselves as dual-headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco. Then in April 2026 they started to bill themselves as dual headquartered in Toronto and Berlin. Sometime in the last two months they've started to bill themselves as HQed in Toronto again.


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