LSM: President Čakste’s daughter who feigned insanity in Siberia for her children’s sake. The story of Maiga Šīrone’s self-sacrifice Pianist Maiga Šīrone, a daughter of Latvia’s first president Jānis Čakste, was deported to Siberia with her two children in 1941. Realising that her children could only be sent home if she herself were declared legally incapacitated, she deliberately […]
links: 13.06.2026
TechCrunch: Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it Meta’s newly formed Applied AI unit — roughly 6,500 employees “drafted” with no real choice — generates puzzles and coding problems to train models, and many call the work a “gulag” and soul-crushing. Wired reports simmering rage, including a livestreamed meltdown at a […]
links: 12.06.2026
WIRED: You Probably Won’t Get Rich Off the SpaceX IPO As part of SpaceX’s IPO the company set aside an unusually large share of stock for retail investors, but experts warn the big gains stay with existing shareholders — employees, institutional funds and Elon Musk. Even if you manage to buy a few shares at $135, the average […]
links: 11.06.2026
Le Monde: ‘The egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies has often been exaggerated’ An opinion piece on new anthropology research suggesting the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies has often been exaggerated: resource sharing in them is driven not by innate altruism but by social pressure and the preservation of status, and human nature aspires more to autonomy and respect than to […]
Mythos light: Fable 5
Didzis sent me a message on Matrix about Anthropic releasing a new model that’s supposedly almost Mythos. I went to check. First TechCrunch — there it is! I open the company’s page — and there’s a banner: “Fable 5: Our most capable model yet”. I had been preparing for this moment for a long time — ever since […]
links 5: 10.02.2024
Meduza: Roskomnadzor has begun investigating Duolingo for “LGBT propaganda” The Kyiv Independent: Russian military increasingly using Starlink terminals on battlefield LSM: “The corncrake has no tractor to drive to the Saeima.” An interview with ornithologist Ķerus @vkerus@mastodon.online NPR: Cheap, plentiful and devastating: The synthetic drug kush is walloping Sierra Leone The Verge: Apple argues against right-to-repair bill that […]
links 4: 08.02.2024
The Verge: Google’s use of student data could effectively ban Chromebooks from Denmark schools Meduza: Valery Zaluzhny dismissed. Oleksandr Syrsky becomes the new commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces LRT: More oil spilled from Orlen’s terminal than first reported, some reached Latvia’s waters PBS: PHOTOS: Icelandic volcano begins erupting again, spewing lava and cutting off heat and hot water […]
links 3: 07.02.2024
LRT: Long-lost stained glass masterpiece discovered in Vilnius strip club ERR: State has to write off much of the €100,000 spent on failed Eesti.life website The Verge: The fediverse, explained +972 Magazine: Palestinians abused, forced to chant anti-Hamas slogans in ‘safe corridor’ NPR: Portraits from El Salvador’s nearly 2-year, sprawling crackdown on gang suspects Mexico News Daily: How […]
links 2: 06.02.2024
LRT: Russian reconnaissance sonar discovered on Curonian Spit in Lithuania Axios: No presidential immunity for Trump, appeals court rules ABC News: World may already be 1.7C warmer according to Puerto Rican sea sponge record NPR: A new purple tomato is available to gardeners. Its color comes from snapdragon DNA Новая газета Европа: Nadezhdin out of the race. How […]
links 1: 05.02.2024
Politico: Hungary’s ruling party balks at Swedish NATO vote Buenos Aires Times: Fire destroys more than 3,000 hectares of native forest in Patagonia DW News: Germany’s trade unions: What’s behind the wave of strikes? Al Jazeera: Fire Beneath Her: Battling wildfires in Indonesian Borneo CBC: In the line of fire: In Gaza, anyone can wind up a ‘human […]