ash🌔

a little haunted. a little hopeful.

[ash🌔 @Guac2BeKiddinMe]

@laylology

[Naomi Lewis ♡ @naominlewis]

Not to be dramatic but I don’t think people quite understand how much of a disaster eliminating USPS would be. Like it would be end-of-this-country level of a disaster

[tooflyszn @_tooflyszn]

how i've been with shows, books and movies recently

[Periquita @entrecejas3]

Siempre pienso en esa reseña de Letterboxd que decía 'yo pensaba que Matilda había sido filmada a la altura del suelo para representar el punto de visto de los niños pero luego descubrí que la dirigió Danny DeVito'

[Janel Comeau 🍁 @VeryBadLlama]

in roughly 15 years I’m going to switch my professional focus to giving therapy to kids whose parents raised them with AI and I’m going to make enough money to buy San Francisco

[Geoff Keighley @geoffkeighley]

Hats off to doctoral student and podcaster Zhong Shu in Beijing, China, who did this fascinating and smart interview with Christopher Nolan about THE ODYSSEY yesterday, originally posted to Bilibili.

A great listen/watch.

[ash🌔 @Guac2BeKiddinMe]

@restingdei Tysm 🥺💌

[ash🌔 @Guac2BeKiddinMe]

crying because I saved this a few days ago- and I just got the job 🐥

[ash🌔 @Guac2BeKiddinMe]

@Toombs705 Yes!! This exactly!😣

[ash🌔 @Guac2BeKiddinMe]

Whimsical
The word is whimsical.
And you cannot simply buy or commodify it. It’s an innate trait for those who are able to see beauty and find joy in the quirks of life, nature and oddities, not the very recent, very commercialized aesthetic. Please go outside and touch grass. 🫩

[Rita Repulsive @myc0latt]

If i ever get back into dating and discover that someone i thought I'd really clicked with was using an ai assistant to manage our relationship the whole time i would kill myself in a way that redefines how the world thinks of suicide

[ash🌔 @Guac2BeKiddinMe]

@ddljcomer Yeah baby but… it was bad 🙇🏻‍♀️

[Erika @erikaxtc]

Suri dropping Cruise, the Jolie kids dropping Pitt. Love to see people ditching the last names of deadbeat dads.

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Just a friendly reminder that Sarah Connor was committed to a psychiatric institution after attempting to destroy AI data centers, a decision made because authorities believed her warnings about the future were the result of delusions.

[staid @staidindoors]

she reported abusive working conditions and was retaliated against

[normal guy @notsotroubled]

I enjoyed the film and agree with nearly everything here #Multifaceted

[hannah jones @hannahjonescool]

I am getting to know a lot of young brooklynites with great politics and absolutely dogshit morals and it’s making me so confused about where their great politics came from.

[Jonathan Fine @jonathanbfine]

sometimes you can tell from a person’s underlining in a used book that they aren’t going to make it

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us