around the traps

• Mastodon's CEO and creator is handing control to a new nonprofit organization - The Verge: Decentralized social network Mastodon has announced plans to transfer its ownership to a new nonprofit entity. Ownership of Mastodon will move away from the control of CEO Eugen Rochko, in contrast to the power exerted by other social media CEOs like Meta cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk.
• OpenAI has evidence that its models helped train China's DeepSeek | The Verge: OpenAI told the Financial Times that it found evidence linking DeepSeek to the use of distillation — a common technique developers use to train AI models by extracting data from larger, more capable ones. It's an efficient way to train smaller models at a fraction of the more than $100 million that OpenAI spent to train GPT-4. While developers can use OpenAI's API to integrate its AI with their own applications, distilling the outputs to build rival models is a violation of OpenAI's terms of service. OpenAI has not provided details of the evidence it found. The situation is rich with irony. After all, it was OpenAI that made huge leaps with its GPT model by sucking down the entirety of the written web without consent.
• Walgreens digital door experiment was a $200 million disaster... also it's highly debatable that they 'looked cool'.
• The Console Wars Are Over And Nobody Really Won
• Thousands of Australian pets may soon have 'useless' microchips. It's a symptom of a bigger problem
• Streaming giant Amazon axes Neighbours just two years after picking up the show - ABC News
• James Bond producers give Amazon full creative control of 007 | James Bond | The Guardian... well, shit. I hope they got a worthy pay day at least.
• How to draw an orange %u2022 Buttondown: Being told we cannot draw is the first step to telling people that no, they are not as competent as they believe themselves to be. Once you can convince a human being they cannot draw, you can convince them of mostly anything. Someone is benefitting from making you believe you are incompetent and it is not you.
• 'You can't ban compassion': helping stray cats is illegal in much of Australia – but for some, it's worth the risk | Cats | The Guardian: Rand, who is running alternative cat management trials in Queensland with a permit, argues hardline approaches fail to address the socioeconomic aspects contributing to the stray cat population, such as pet abandonment or loss due to housing instability, rental restrictions or containment challenges, and the cost of mandatory desexing, registration and microchipping. They also unfairly penalise people for basic compassion, she says.