norbu-ai.org/ is an LLM with expertise focused specifically on the Pali Canon. It's supposed to have narrow expertise and be used for a single purpose.

Norbu is useful for searching through the canon and say, "Where does the Buddha talk about alcohol?" "Where does the idea of the seven factors of awakening come from?"

Norbu allows you to get from concepts you've heard about back to primary sources. It does have some advantages over just searching suttacentral.net or accesstoinsight.org: you don't have to know the keywords you're looking for, you can look for things you're only starting to understand when you don't know the jargon.

The works of Marx and Engels are about the same size as the Pali Canon. Imagine a narrowly-expert LLM, a fine-tuned open-source model, and baby leftists asking it things like –

• Where is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall discussed?
• What was Marx's understanding of international trade? (and it wouldn't just tell you what it was but what chapter and verse it's citing)
• Did Marx ever consider there wouldn't be gold-backed money?

and the LLM gives answers grounded in the primary sources.

What do you think of my idea?

Hey all, I’m Rick — presenting texttotalk.org v0.3.

Some of you, especially from 4chan, might already know about it. If you haven’t heard of it: it’s basically an anonymous imageboard-style community, minus a lot of the usual moderation.

What is texttotalk? A text-only board that combines 4chan-style open/custom boards with Reddit-style community structure and moderation tools.

Why text-only? Simple: no images means no image-based moderation headaches, and it gives the board a distinct identity that’s different from every other imageboard clone out there.

Why Windows 7 theme? Because I think retro UI is fun and nobody else is doing it. It’s a nice break from every board looking like Reddit or Discord.

How it’s built: Pure PHP + MySQL. I built it with a lot of AI assistance (Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, others) — I’m upfront about that. If you’ve got opinions on AI-assisted coding, I’m happy to hear them, but the site works and it’s genuinely mine in terms of design and iteration.

Who’s it for? Anyone who wants a lighter-moderation alternative to the big platforms, wants to run their own board/community, or just likes messing around on something different.

Come check it out, join a board, make your own. Feedback welcome.

22 July 2026. GreenX Metals Limited (ASX:GRX, LSE:GRX, GPW:GRX, Germany-FSE:A3C9JR) (GreenX or the Company) is pleased to announce that fieldwork has commenced at its Eleonore North project in East Greenland (Eleonore North or Project). The exploration program is targeting gold (Au), tungsten (W), and antimony (Sb).

GreenX’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Ben Stoikovich, commented: “Greenland is an exciting frontier for GreenX, and this program advances a portfolio of gold, tungsten and antimony targets that has seen very little modern exploration.

Tungsten and antimony are critical raw materials for both the European Union and the United States, and Eleonore North gives us high-grade occurrences of both in a stable Western jurisdiction at a time when supply is heavily concentrated in China. Importantly, the tungsten and antimony mineralisation has a surface expression, which allows us to make rapid progress in expanding the known mineralisation and generating additional targets.

This year we are in the field to advance our existing prospects, including the Noa Pluton gold-antimony target and the North and South Margeries deposits. At the same time, our growing understanding of intrusion-related gold systems in the region has enabled us to identify a number of new targets.’’

Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing.

title: "EU hits Google with $1 billion fine over its Play app store and search"
url: "https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/eu-hits-google-1-billion-fine-play-app-135010885"

author: "SAM MCNEIL Associated Press"

The European Union has fined Google $1 billion for breaking digital antitrust regulations

BySAM MCNEIL Associated Press

July 23, 2026, 3:08 AM

BRUSSELS -- The European Union on Thursday hit Google with a fine of 890 million euros ($1 billion) after it said the technology behemoth broke digital antitrust regulations by setting up Google Play and its ubiquitous search engine to corral consumers towards its own services and apps to the detriment of competitors.

It was the latest major crackdown on Big Tech by Brussels, which has led the world in reining in some of the world’s largest companies from Silicon Valley to Beijing.

Google had recently lost its appeal of a $4.5 billion antitrust fine imposed by the EU for throttling competition and reducing consumer choice through the dominance of its mobile Android operating system.

The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch and highest antitrust enforcer, said it was acting in the interest of consumers after running an antitrust investigation of Google.

“The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine. And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut,” said Teresa Ribera, the commission's Executive Vice President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.

Google’s President of Global Affairs Kent Walker blasted the fine as “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants” that will have a negative impact on European businesses and consumers.

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He said that the EU’s Digital Markets Act forces Google “to strip away real-time search features Europeans love — like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants — and dismantle safety protections on Google Play.”

Brussels has ratcheted up the pressure on U.S. and Chinese tech giants despite the risk of incurring the wrath of President Donald Trump, who has lashed out at the 27-nation bloc’s digital regulations and vowed to retaliate if American tech companies are penalized.

The EU describes the world’s seven tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance — as “gatekeepers” that control access for consumers.

“In the EU, businesses have the right to compete fairly. Gatekeepers have the obligation to ensure a level playing field and consumers the right to choose for cheaper alternative offers," European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said.

The Luddites see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.” Collective effervescence, I suspect, was what I was surprised to encounter in myself that winter day by the Apple Cube. The phrase, first coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, refers to the electric and exhilarating energy you might find at raves, protests, marathons, and houses of worship: the feeling you have when you’re connected to something larger than yourself.

The Luddites I met made few direct demands of institutional power. There was no lobbying for antitrust legislation, or for regulating addictive design features and removing ed tech from schools (though a couple of Luddites volunteered for Alex Bores, the New York congressional candidate, and some were tracking the writer Jonathan Haidt’s work around adolescent smartphone use). Unlike their forebears, these Luddites did not advocate for property destruction, save the symbolic iPad at S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. Instead, their focus was on the prefigurative, revolutionary potential of events—specifically free, public, participatory, unpredictable events.

There was a theory of change behind this. Back at S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E, someone had handed me a zine titled The Event Is The Medium, a nod to Marshall McLuhan that doubled as a succinct description of the Luddites’ strategy. The event: no tickets, no invitation on social media, no closed guest list, and no promise that things would unfold according to plan. The Luddites ran these events and hoped other people would run their own events, and in doing so, change their own norms around sociality.

The aim was lofty: to undo decades of social conditioning by technology and reorient people toward unmediated, embodied connection. One in-person meet-up at a time, they would inspire people to make tech work for them instead of the other way around.

For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.

Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.

Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.

“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”