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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.”

Im a tech guy. In the last week, I have received 4 cold calls about new positions and a couple more emails. This month ive seen more anecdotal hiring going on in my friend group. Is there something going on? I'm not looking, haven't updated my linkedin in years etc...etc...

For the past year, hiring in software development has been dismal and all of a sudden im seeing a huge spike.

Anyone else seeing this or am I just cherry picking?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic, privately complained about President Donald Trump’s ramblings — and compared him to an “obnoxious adolescent” — in personal diary entries released this weekend.

More than a thousand pages of Fauci’s journal were released by Sen. Rand Paul, who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee. As part of an investigation into the origins of Covid-19, Paul has called on Fauci to testify on the pandemic before the committee Wednesday. The Kentucky Republican has long peddled the theory that the virus came from a leak at a lab in Wuhan, China, accusing Fauci and other government officials of misleading the public about its source — claims Fauci has denied.

If this were occurring abroad, to an ethnic minority, we would call it ethnic cleansing

I've been testing VPN services and somehow every one with a client has written their own. Proton, Windscribe, IVPN, Mullvad, AirVPN, NordVPN, and the list goes on.

Don't these services all do the same thing? Connect to a server to get a list of servers, then use WireGuard or OpenVPN to make a connection, and have some fancy stuff like split tunneling or a killswitch. It should just take configuration by adding profiles per service and it should be possible to use the same client.

What am I missing?

Nearly 10 months into a "ceasefire" in the Gaza Strip, as Israel on Tuesday killed at least one Palestinian man with an airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp, Doctors Without Borders declared that "the wounds of war are not only unhealed—they are still being inflicted."

"This is not a ceasefire," said the medical charity, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), in a statement. "It is a continuation of the genocide, calibrated to be violent enough to keep Palestinians suffering every day, yet silent enough to avoid stirring international outrage."

Israeli forces have killed more than 73,300 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded over 174,009 since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel—with global experts warning the true toll is likely far higher. Local authorities have documented at least 1,200 deaths and 3,900 injuries since the ceasefire was agreed to over nine months ago.

Experts with the United Nations and others around the world have denounced the Israeli assault and blockade as a genocide, and South Africa is leading a related case at the International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over the mass slaughter.

Nearly all of Gaza's roughly 2 million survivors have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened. MSF said that "the destruction of homes has not stopped with the announcement of the ceasefire. Sudden and arbitrary orders for people to flee their homes and shelters continue to be used as a tool of psychological warfare by Israeli forces."

Rajaa Jendiya, who was widowed in the "flour massacres," is living in a tent at a school-turned-displacement camp with her children. She told Middle East Eye that she often takes them to the hospital because of illnesses.

"Inside and around the school, you often see sewage water overflowing, while rubbish accumulates, attracting flies and insects," Jendiya said. "These conditions become even worse with the heat, and many times my children have developed skin diseases."

In such makeshift shelters across Gaza, "scabies, respiratory infections, rat bites, and other diseases are rife," according to MSF.

Accessing healthcare has also become difficult in the coastal strip, as Israel has killed and detained Palestinian medical providers, and bombed civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, including in the months since the ceasefire deal was reached.

As MSF detailed Tuesday:

On July 16, an Israeli strike near an MSF clinic in Al-Mawasi sent four injured people to our teams. The following day, two apartment buildings housing our staff in Gaza City were struck without warning, trapping families inside as explosions shattered windows. In one building, rubble and bodies crashed into the lower-floor apartment of an MSF staff member.

The same day, MSF teams in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, treated 12 people—seven of whom were children—who were injured after Israeli forces struck a funeral in Al-Nuseirat. In total, this strike killed eight people and injured 20. Among those killed was the 21-year-old son of an MSF staff member. Our colleague got the news while working in another emergency room.

"These were not isolated incidents," the organization stressed, "but merely a snapshot of 48 hours in Gaza."

Israel has also limited the flow of food and medicine into the war-torn territory. Calling out the country for using humanitarian assistance "as an instrument of oppression," MSF emphasized that "the Israeli state has an obligation under international law to ensure Palestinians in Gaza have access to aid, regardless of political negotiations, military agreements, or conduct of hostilities."

Since October, when the Israel Defense Forces controlled about half of Gaza, the "yellow line" indicating IDF occupation has kept shifting, to push Palestinians into "an ever-shrinking area," MSF explained. "Today, almost 2 million Palestinians are confined to approximately 30% of the strip."

After speaking with residents in Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, Rafah, and Gaza City's Zeitoun, Tuffah, and Shejaia neighborhoods, Reuters reported Tuesday that "Israeli forces have advanced the yellow block markers during the past ⁠10 days, triggering new waves of displacement in areas already devastated by months of conflict."

While loading bags and mattresses onto a truck in Zeitoun, Assem Dawla told the news agency: "The whole war is displacement, displacement. You can't stay anywhere without [Israel] telling you, 'Get out of here, we want to come in.'"

Staying near the yellow line comes with risks. MSF said that "just this week, one mother told our teams that her 14-year-old son, who has Down syndrome, was shot five times by Israeli snipers near the yellow line while he was playing near his home."

"A ceasefire should ensure that hostilities are paused, weapons are silenced, and that people are safe from strikes across the strip," the group asserted. "Using it as a weapon of war and reinforcing the confinement to a fraction of Gaza cannot be justified."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/43269341

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/codebase

Alt text

And when Babbage arrived the whole thing was actually running on a series of Pascalines.

Bonus panel

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/50138099

An Overland couple who had recently returned to Guatemala was found bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field.

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz were killed weeks after González de la Cruz self-deported to be with her husband, who was deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year.

Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying beside her mother’s body in southern Guatemala. The child showed signs of dehydration and was taken to a medical center, where she is recovering, according to Guatemalan news outlet ABC Stereo.

...

In the early hours one morning last April, Pérez Paz was driving his 51-year-old brother, Rolando Pérez Paz, to their roofing jobs when they were stopped near their home by ICE.

A group of agents exited an unmarked vehicle and swarmed them, taking them out of their white work van and later putting them in handcuffs and shackles before taking them to the Phelps County Jail, Rolando Pérez Paz told St. Louis Public Radio on Monday from his home in Guatemala.

The agents didn’t explain much other than telling him there wasn’t a warrant out for their arrests but that they were being arrested for entering the county illegally and that they would be deported.

...

González de la Cruz remained in Overland, where she gave birth to the couple’s third daughter in June 2025. She worked two manual labor jobs while raising their children but eventually decided to return to Guatemala with her girls as financial pressures mounted — and grew increasingly fearful that she would be detained and separated from them despite working through an active asylum case, according to organizers with Fuerza, a St. Louis-based immigrant rights group she was a part of.

...

Rolando Pérez Paz said he is caring for Nixon and Glendy’s three young daughters but has had difficulty explaining the deaths to them.

“If immigration hadn't picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn't be going through this sorrow,” he said. “Unfortunately, immigration — the [U.S.] government — doesn't see that. It makes no difference to them.”

Crossposted from https://lemmy.ca/post/68529758

The "wee hedgehog" was discharged into the care of Cuan Wildlife Rescue.