btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.” it was called project panama. here's exactly what happened: 1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.” 2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy. it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.” 3: that piracy created a massive legal risk. so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.” 4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs. those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers. 5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months. 6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them. a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling. 7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data. the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.

AI is gonna take your job and your girl.

🚨 Simulation Theory: The Double Slit Experiment proves particles act like waves until observed then they snap into particles. What if our reality only "renders" when we're looking, just like a video game optimizing resources? Check out this episode from The Why Files breaking it down, tying it to Simulation Theory. Are we in a sim? This could be the key to unlocking the true nature of existence! The Why Files video did a great job on explaining the Double Slit Experiment & Simulation Theory What do YOU think—real or rendered? Drop your thoughts below!

We just passed React on GitHub stars. 🦞 Let that sink in. A personal AI assistant built by a lobster-obsessed Austrian and an army of crustacean enthusiasts just outstarred the library that powers half the internet. We shipped 90+ changes today. They shipped a conference.

I MADE THE BEST 2D SPRITE AI PIPELINE EVER! After testing so much, doing tons of math, trying various different methods I finally got truly the cleanest sprite result I could ask for! You should bookmark this post! ✅ I think this is the happiest 'aha' moment I've had since starting this journey. Day 48 of making a custom webGL game engine using @cursor_ai 🔽🔽🔽 I've been trying to solve sprites since I started this project. I came close a couple of times but it was always something - either dynamic lights wouldn't work, or the genAI results would make them grainy, or I would have to have incorrect alpha etc. After so much struggling, wanting to give up, thinking it's impossible - it was finally done! Perfect matte interpolation of black & white backgrounds resulting in a clean outline of the sprite, half transparent effects keeping their full quality. But this was not enough for me. I wanted more. I wanted those dynamic lights for the most badass anime effects that I'll be creating for the next many weeks! And somehow, I managed to come up with the perfect balance that is nice to the eye with almost no visible imperfections or artifacts when using any kind of dynamic lights. See for yourself! 🔽🔽🔽 How does this magic happen? 1⃣ First, the animation is created using @Kling_ai. I found it the best to keep the quality anime 2D style I wanted, but I guess others may work as well. 2⃣ Then, the frames are carefully extracted at lossless quality and processed via automation through Nano Banana pass to create an opposite background (white->black or black->white). 3⃣ Once we have a proper spritesheet, I then used MiDaS to compute the depth maps, and then algorithmically create PBR maps for lighting. The remaining depth maps can also be used for various effects, although haven't explored it much yet. 4⃣ Finally, all elements are cut into single frames and overlapped with their respective normal maps. If done right, they're pretty much ready for runtime. I like my heroes to be 512 to truly stand out like fighting game characters, but all of this works with far smaller or bigger sprites. Mind you, it's important to note that Nano Banana has a max output of 4k. Therefore you don't want to make your atlases larger than 4k - which is still quite a lot since it allows you 8x8 512 frames. 💡💡💡 I believe the output quality is beyond anything currently available, and I'll be looking into packaging the whole thing into a web app so people can use it. If you find this useful, please repost it! I really wanted to share this method to the world. Thank you for reading! Look forward to day 49 update!

If you’re a high agency person, there’s never been a better time to be alive.