Kabi 🇰🇪

Don't mind my laugh lines, they each tell countless stories full of love and joy.

[Tshayingwe @LukanyoMngqolo]

@ArtOfDialogue_ Ohhh Jasmine was RIGHT about her

[Holly Blake @hollycurates]

need you all to know that in june 2027 The Whale by Dorte Mandrup opens in Andenes, Norway. it’ll be an immersive museum dedicated to whales and the ocean, and the building is designed to look like it’s emerging from the Arctic coastline, like a whale. also, the curved roof will be walkable

[Ochieng Oginga @ArnoldOginga]

The High Court has agreed with us that the General Elections ought to have been held this year on 9TH AUGUST, 2026…holding the elections on any other day would be contrary to Article 136 (2) of the Constitution. The declaration of unconstitutionality has however been suspended until after the next general elections.
Cc @Dr_OOwiso @otienowill @Ashioyabiko @KhelefKhalifa

[I am Chege @_James041]

I have managed to get the Parliament Hansard Report for 29th April 2014, The Public Finance Management Act, Amendment Bill.

Manson Nyamweya raised a very valid point on how the amendment was going to negatively affect our economy,

Specifically the amendments on borrowed loans being sent direct to suppliers, bypassing the Consolidated Fund.

We are now in a mess. We are being overtaxed to service debts which cannot be traced in the economy nor the Consolidated Fund.

Speaker was J.B. Muturi. Politicians united against Kenyans to commit economic terrorism.

Notable names which supported the murderous amendment: Aden Duale, John Mbadi, Irungu Kang'ata and others as shown on the thread.

[I am Chege @_James041]

This is the Public Finance Management Act 2012 which was amended in 2014 to fix Section 50 subsection 7 Part C and D which allowed the executive to deposit borrowed money in foreign accounts out of the Consolidated Fund. Immediately the amendment was made, Uhuru went for Eurobond. This section MUST be repealed.

[Dr. Anderson N. Maina, PhD @Maina_Poultry]

Science is clear: affordable, local solutions exist. Kenya needs subsidised poultry, pig & fish feeds, livestock/aquaculture policy reform, stronger smallholder extension, investment in intensive production, and school meals built on eggs, pork & fish: not maize & beans alone!

[Dr. Anderson N. Maina, PhD @Maina_Poultry]

Kenya's protein crisis is silent but catastrophic. 26% of children under 5 are stunted. Malnutrition costs the country KES 273.9 billion/yr, 6.9% of GDP. The cognitive damage is irreversible. Here's what the evidence says, and how poultry, pigs & oily fish can fix it.
A short🧵

[UEFA @UEFA]

Statement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National AssociationStatement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National AssociationStatement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National AssociationStatement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National Associations

[Jake Liker @JakeLiker]

“No one has the moral authority to sell what they merely hold in trust for the next generation.”

[Edwin Sifuna @edwinsifuna]

Ruto just spent 40 minutes trying to create a false equivalence between our national values set out in the constitution and his so called “development”. Kenyans, please trust me when i tell you there is a reason the Preamble comes before Article 43. You don’t get to the “development “ clauses until and unless you have taken into account the reasons we passed this constitution in the first place. Democracy, Human Rights, Freedom, Equality, Rule of Law and Social Justice.

[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

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[anomali @Anomali210830]

Charles Simic

[anomali @Anomali210830]

as if to make amends

[roobz 🌙 🌸 @tishray]

Bringing this back in case anyone needs it

[Miranda Holmqvist @MirandaHqv]

Margaret Atwood

[Di (Yee) - Currently not here @nguyenhdi]

I don't know who needs to hear this, but there's a Youtube channel called Shakespeare Network which not only has many Shakespeare productions (original & some other languages) but also has Verdi's operas based on Shakespeare, ancient Greek plays, the plays of Ibsen & Chekhov...

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

for everyone feeling exhausted:

[todd dillard @toddedillard]

fantastic final line in this Naomi Shihab Nye poem from today's Paris Review poem-a-day