Jayne Bond, a consultant in the jewellery industry, ordered a £2.99 ring on Amazon marked “925 silver”, sold by a brand called The Construction People. Independent testing of the ring showed that it was made up of approximately 92.3 per cent cadmium.

Bond claimed Amazon was notified of this on May 12 but the item remained on sale. Bond re-purchased the item weeks later on July 1 with similar results in its cadmium content. One reviewer on the site said the ring gave them a “severe allergic reaction” that needed medical treatment. The ring has now been removed from Amazon’s UK site.

An online customer review for a ring, stating it was falsely advertised as sterling silver and caused an allergic reaction. “If people are reporting the problems, why are [Amazon] not looking at their own reviews that these things are damaging people? It’s neglect,” Bond said.

Don’t buy things from Amazon. They’d rather kill their customers than miss a dollar.

Here’s a link with more details of that attack:

https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/claude-ai-just-cracked-post-quantum.html?m=1

I have been enjoying Qobuz, since quitting Spotify a couple of years ago. Everything’s better quality, they have proper credits and PDF CD booklets, the classical music metadata is much better, it encourages you to listen more deliberately to music you choose, and I don’t feel dirty for funding scumbags.

It is better at producing relevant information, but it may never be great, or even as good, at producing reliable information.

OK, but the point still stands if you allow that: It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are often not, in fact, helpful.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if all the corporate leaders believe it will change everything and, in a fit of FOMO, force it into every corner of our lives, then everything will be changed. But not so much because of what AI can do, as because of a mass delusion among the LinkedIn types.

I was with you until you referenced Sabine Hossenfelder. She is no longer any kind of trustworthy source.

I was apprehensive about buying a used Pixel to install GrapheneOS on, so I put it off for a year or two. When I finally did it, it was so easy I wished I had done it sooner. It’s a great OS and you’ll probably be surprised how easy it is to set up. Things have really changed since the old days of finding half-baked custom Android images on dodgy file shares through forum sites. GrapheneOS installation is slick.

Karp is a nut; Thiel is a nut. Is Palantir elvish for “bag o’ nuts” or something?

In ISBNdb’s now-removed marketing materials, it admitted that getting caught destroying printed books during the scanning process would not be a good look. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site said. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

So their solution was to do the evil thing secretly?

Sends like we have that anyway. Let’s replace them with AI then switch the AI off.

There’s no legitimate purpose for destroying these books.

There are non-invasive ways scan books. But the destruction is an added bonus. These companies make a copy of these public domain books and then pulp the remains. They’re rare, so that means they’re hard to find (that’s what rare means, after all).

Then, they can turn around and sell their dataset to AI companies.

The destruction is the point.

Capitalism always creates perverse incentives. The most profitable thing you can do is seize something readily available and make it impossible to get without paying you.

But which companies are doing this? It sounds like these are companies that supply training data to AI companies. I think we need names.

LLMs are bullshit machines. I dont see how there’s any question.

We all need to communicate better. Yeah the pedophiles!

Hmm

Yes, though I don’t suppose he’ll ever be free of surveillance by various countries’ intelligence agencies.

Maybe they’ll make it a crime not to carry evidence of something they think you should have evidence of.

The USA is close, with a two-week concept of a plan.

What a coincidence that it was the guy protesting the police who was also suspected of possessing such materials. If it turns out they had real independent grounds to suspect he had such images, I’ll change this view, but for now I assume that’s the cops’ standard line to shut down people’s questions. Just say they thought the political target had CSAM, and immediately people see him differently, plus the police can accuse anyone who challenges their actions of supporting pedophiles.

Mustn’t evidence be clearly relevant to the suspicion of a crime? If we call anything the police might take an interest in “evidence”, then in principle destroying anything could land you in prison. All the cops would have to do is declare they wanted to see the thing you destroyed.

Once again, the cruelty is the point. They’re not even trying to solve an immigration problem; they just want to hurt people who aren’t white enough.