Altro Mare

A European.

[Barbarian Herodotus @BBHerodotus]

After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books.

They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude.

They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong.

An internal memo from 2024 stated:

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Why used books?

Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work.

So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet.

The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft.

Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website.

When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!”

Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.

They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling.

Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country.

But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning.

Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever.

AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils.

May the most moral company win.

[Tim Hamilton @TSHamiltonAstro]

Okay, that’s pretty funny.

[Tina K. @TheEsteemedFox]

Flaubert's Sentimental Education is one of the best socio-political satires I've ever read, what with its hilarious irony, social-climbing, delusions of grandeur, fruitless pining after love, ludicrously opulent consumption, mountains of debt, and it just gets funnier when the Revolution of 1848 and its idiot politicking erupts in the middle of it all. Flaubert's "opulent world of salon intrigue" was informed by his experience hobnobbing in the court of Napoleon III in the 1860s, a place of "absolute egotism [and] unscrupulous hostility of each towards his neighbour", and yet it truly feels so contemporary to me. Plus ça change, eh.

Importantly also one of Kafka's favourite novels too btw

[aapayés @aapayes]

El embajador del régimen sionista israelí en Dinamarca protestó por la difusión de este vídeo.

Hagámoslo viral escribiendo un punto para romper con el algoritmo.

Genocidas, llenos odio, contra las familias Palestinas que protestan contra la destrucción de sus propiedades

[Vive con Propósito. @PropositoyVida]

Esta transformación de la basura es una auténtica locura

[Nicia 🌍🚲🚋🚍🚇🌳 @Terra_Futur]

🚘Després no us queixeu si no podeu circular
Les ciutats són les mateixes, els cotxes s'han inflat🥳

[El Club del Arte 🎨📷📚🖼🕍🎼 @Arteymas_]

Este bogavante hembra, de entre 40 y 60 años de edad y con entre 70.000 y 80.000 huevos, es una rara "abuela" del mar, por lo que su conservación es vital para las futuras poblaciones.

[Nathalie Chalard bis @BisChalard57545]

Écoutez ! Un baume pour l'esprit et le cœur.

"Je préfère le doute de Descartes à la sagesse de Montaigne". 1967, dans le sud de la France, des bergers évoquent leur rapport à la lecture. Lors de la transhumance, quels livres les accompagnent ?

[Franco Maria Fontana @francofontana43]

Quando 10 anni fa morì Umberto Eco, si seppe, con sorpresa, che nel suo testamento aveva chiesto ai suoi eredi diretti di non promuovere né organizzare convegni su di lui per 10 anni
Non si trattava certo di una decisione dovuta a modestia.
Modesto Eco non era, perché aveva contezza del proprio valore, ma di una geniale scelta, da sommo esperto di comunicazione qual era, per evitare di essere monumemtalizzato e mummificato, dal presumibile fiume di elogi scritti a caldo dopo la sua morte.
10 anni era per lui il periodo giusto per far decantare la sua fama, al ripario dell’emozione e del profluvio di sentimenti che inevitabilmente segue la morte di un personaggio noto.
Ora 10 anni sono passati e Roberto Crotoneo gli dedica un libro e lo fa proprio con la Nave di Teseo, la casa editrice che dopo la vendita della Bompiani alla Mondadori, lo stesso Umberto Eco contribuì a fondare
Dal @Corriere

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

Chris Mason’s inadvertently revealing @BBC piece on Starmer’s “dire” predicament is textbook Westminster insider journalism: mood, metaphor, anonymous sourcing, and ticking-clock drama frame the PM as uniquely exposed after McSweeney’s resignation.

McSweeney is lionised as the indispensable technocratic operator who “got us here,” delivered the #GE2024 landslide and acted as a protective “lightning conductor.”

Starmer, by contrast, is subtly diminished as a late entrant who “travels light ideologically” (code for thin conviction and over-reliance on elite machinery rather than political depth or vision). The implied tragedy is not governing failure, but the squandering of electoral success through personal misjudgement and the loss of sharp operatives.

Crisis is then ratcheted up through doom-laden language, dramatic metaphors and a manufactured sense of unanimity, turning insider anxiety into an apparent party-wide verdict of impending collapse.

Countervailing facts such as Starmer’s mandate, his resolve, and international standing are briefly acknowledged, then sidelined, overwhelmed by a narrative in which politics becomes Westminster soap opera: elite missteps, personalities and parliamentary mechanics crowd out policy substance or structural constraints.

Perhaps most revealing are the omissions. There is almost no engagement with governing choices, no serious attempt to explain why the Mandelson appointment angered people beyond optics, no mention of Palantir contracts, and no analysis of whether any of this turbulence matters outside SW1.

Power is reduced to position and atmosphere among elites, with the public cast as a passive audience simply reacting to Westminster drama.

Most strikingly, Mason never even mentions #Epstein. By reducing the Mandelson controversy to vague “misjudgement” and “lies,” the article depoliticises a global scandal about elite networks, vetting, and sexual abuse, reframing it instead as an internal mood crisis and a test of Starmer’s personal resilience.

All this while maintaining @BBC surface impartiality. The relentless focus on insider sentiment and technocratic competence privileges Westminster drama over governing substance, reinforcing perceptions of Starmer’s fragility rather than neutrally observing them.

Politics, in this telling, has fuck-all to do with issues that shape our lives, such as inequality, migration, media power, housing, the cost of living, taxation, or public services. It is reduced to something that happens primarily among elites, which the public then reacts to later.

From the perspective of the Masons, Kuennssbergs, Pestons and Rigbys of this world, ‘the political is personnel’.

Whereas second-wave feminism insisted that the ‘personal is political’ (that lived experience reveals underlying structures of power requiring collective solutions) my inverted aphorism names a different reality: politics is interpreted through individual competence, appointments, and elite manoeuvring, while the structural forces shaping people’s lives are relegated to background noise.

This reflects the deeper victory of a neoliberal rationality that privileges competitive individualism and elite managerial skill over collective solidarity, structural explanation, and shared purpose.

Westminster journalism doesn’t just report this worldview, it helps manufacture and sustain it, rendering structural politics unintelligible and collective alternatives invisible, while elite personalities and appointments pass for politics itself.

#Starmer #Mandelson #EpsteinFiles #Palantir

https://t.co/bL7sIc4OfE

[Altro Mare @AltroMare]

"turning ambulances into treatment rooms"

[Roy Lilley 💙 @RoyLilley]

system 'push-back'... when you treat symptoms rather than constraints.
Handover delays are avoided, or, 'pushed back' by turning ambulances into treatment rooms, when we can't solve hospital upstream problems. https://t.co/tb28bqxOvp

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

The Hadza language, spoken by one of East Africa’s last hunter gatherer tribes, is considered the hardest language to transcribe.

[omi @cram_box]

雪の中の日本の暮らし

[Altro Mare @AltroMare]

@spectator sounds like good value for £1

[Alex Taylor @AlexTaylorNews]

Amazing moment on French TV. A French judge explains how Trump sent people from the US Embassy basically trying to intimidate her during Le Pen's trial for embezzlement - something they've done to other judges around the world

My English sub-titles 👇

[Censored Humans @CensoredHumans]

"The Romans occupied England in the 5th century, so anyone of Roman descent has a historical claim to the land."

It's one of the best sketches I've ever seen, it is so accurate and highlights the situation in Palestine.

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

Declare a bogus ceasefire and watch the world's media turn away.

Then keep killing Palestinians, just at a slower, more grinding pace. Keep denying them food and medicine. And keep them living in flimsy tents as they are whipped by brutal storms. That's the plan. It always was.

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

Heartbreaking: This is how displaced people in Gaza woke up this morning, flooded and soaked tents

[E A @AyodejiEA]

Yes it’s AI created by @kellyeld using #VEO3 and song made using @suno It’s called Night Owl.

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

Gaza now.