gerikson

Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.

Mostly VAT fraud.

News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard

This shitshow brought all the tankies to the yard in lobste.rs too:

https://lobste.rs/s/ewofl9/several_russian_developers_lose_kernel

I especially like the dude relitigating the Continuation War from the orthodox Russian historiographical position that the Second World War started on 22 Jun 1941:

https://lobste.rs/s/ewofl9/several_russian_developers_lose_kernel#c_h7ecjy

Edit I wondered about the curious term "genocide-siege" and lo and behold, reading the Wiki page on the Siege I found this nugget

On 18 March 2024, the Russian foreign ministry issued a statement via TASS to the German foreign ministry saying that the siege of Leningrad was a genocide.

Thanks for the clarification. I kinda missed that entire thing online during the time.

I found an Ars piece:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/chatbots-posed-as-therapist-and-adult-lover-in-teen-suicide-case-lawsuit-says/

Asked for comment, Google noted that Character.AI is a separate company in which Google has no ownership stake and denied involvement in developing the chatbots.

However, according to the lawsuit, former Google engineers at Character Technologies "never succeeded in distinguishing themselves from Google in a meaningful way." Allegedly, the plan all along was to let Shazeer and De Freitas run wild with Character.AI—allegedly at an operating cost of $30 million per month despite low subscriber rates while profiting barely more than a million per month—without impacting the Google brand or sparking antitrust scrutiny.

No it isn't you idiot. But please continue to spout 90s era New Atheism propaganda as if it will change anyone's minds at this point.

In this case it sounded like a bunch of amoral assholes on 4chan tried to trick a vulnerable individual to kill themselves. A religion that operated like that would not be able to sustain itself and spread.

That's a terrifying story. I'm happy it seems to have worked out ok.

I'm not familiar with Character.ai. Is their business model that they take famous fictional characters, force feed their dialog into LLMs, then offer these LLMs as personalized chatbots?

The way things are going, KnowYourMeme will be the only reputable journalistic outlet in a few years.

Now construct the rest of the fucking androwl

A fertility doctor here in Sweden took sperm from men who were undergoing investigations for infertiliy and used it as donor sperm.

Imagine their surprise when decades later they found out they had kids.

Not sure why he chose those particular samples, maybe all he had available.

related: Peter Theil-backed startup “General Matter” bags federal contract to enrich uranium to just below weapon grade