Blender harvesting data to train gen AI would blow up in their faces so badly Anthropic would have had to donate a lot of money to make it worthwhile. And have you looked at the list of Development Fund members? Meta, Google and Adobe are already on there. I’m not sure that taking money from one more company that would be interested in that data really tips the scales.

From Blender’s post:

After an in-depth discussion with the team and several community contributors, we have decided to receive the funds as a singular donation instead of a Development Fund membership, similar to how other open source organizations have handled such contributions. Anthropic has been informed and supports this decision.

To use your metaphor, it sounds like they took the money as one-time gift instead of ongoing rent payments.

As far as generative AI:

Most importantly, we need to urgently tackle the topic and clearly define how Blender is positioned in regards to generative AI technologies when it comes to the product, software development, documentation, and other activities. Discussions will happen in the public blender.org channels, based on drafts by the Blender team.

Blender is a tool for artists and creators, it’s made by humans for humans. No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender.

And with Artist Profile Protection (currently in beta), artists now have greater control over what appears on their profile, which helps to ensure the music you see is coming from them.

From the Artist Profile Protection link:

Music has been landing on the wrong artist pages across streaming services, and the rise of easy-to-produce AI tracks has made the problem worse. That’s not the experience we want artists to have on Spotify, and that’s why we’ve made protecting artist identity a top priority for 2026. Today, we’re announcing a first-of-its-kind solution to a problem that’s affected streaming for years.

How the hell is that something that is only in beta in 2026 and not a standard feature? It’s currently optional, but they better automatically opt in verified “No AI” artists if the label is going to be worth anything. There should not be AI-generated songs from randos getting attached to a “No AI” artist.

Google’s bound to do more layoffs, and any employee backlash to anything is mostly going to help management make up the list.

There’s a whole lot of Canada south of the tundra. We don’t need to make the north “useful” at the expense of the rest of the country.

Russia is banned because of its invasion of Ukraine. Not banning Israel for similar actions is political.

Obviously Israel talked him into the war and told him to deny it.

This is especially handy on immutable Linux distros like Bazzite in cases where your provider’s client is only officially available as a .deb or .rpm and you don’t want to get in to layering.

“Effective immediately, the ​United States Navy, the Finest in ​the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING ‌any ⁠and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” said Trump, who is strongly opposed to the ​idea of ​Iran charging ⁠ships a toll to pass through the strait.

“I have also ​instructed our Navy to seek and ​interdict ⁠every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one ⁠who ​pays an illegal toll ​will have safe passage on the high seas,” he ​said.

Pretty sure what Trump is opposed to is him not getting a cut of the toll.

The Daily Show did a segment on him a couple months ago.

If anything it should be a joint venture between Iran and Oman, the country on the other side of the strait that’s mostly getting ignored in all this.

Israel: We’re not included in the ceasefire
Iran: You sure about that?

And yet somehow the part where there are active MLB players who share names with Cold Play’s lead singer and Carlos Santana is not wrong.

Apparently it was just Gmail:

Reuters was ​not able to ⁠independently authenticate the Patel emails, but the personal Gmail address that Handala claims to have broken into ​matches the address linked to Patel in previous ​data breaches ⁠preserved by the dark web intelligence firm District 4 Labs. Alphabet-owned Google, which runs Gmail, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The authors of the article don’t seem to be the media though:

Steve Hanke is a professor of applied economics at The Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Board of Directors at the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation. He is the co-editor, with Barry W. Poulson and John Merrifield, of Public Debt Sustainability: International Perspectives (Lexington Books, 2022). David M. Walker is the former Comptroller General of the United States and the Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation.

100 AI-written emails per day

There are at least 2 dead people on the plane. I think I’d wait for another flight…

Also: Shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons development that accelerated after “Trump I” pulled the US out of the deal that was keeping it in check.

How much video information does a project file even have though? Like, if it’s just instructions for editing together the video clips, that aren’t even being uploaded, that doesn’t seem very useful for AI training.

The program now requires video projects to be saved to Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service in order to continue editing them, reports Windows Latest.

According to Microsoft, the media files themselves (such as video clips and images) don’t necessarily need to be synced to the cloud.

This is less shitty than I expected. Forcing people to put videos and images in OneDrive could have pushed them towards paying for more OneDrive space, but if it’s just the project file I’m not even sure why Microsoft made the change. Are Clipchamp project files big?