Casket Arts Building

The elements which compose human society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of monsters to be produced in the place of it... #EdmundBurke

[Casket Arts Building @casketart_3]

'Shannon' #HenryGross #LifesongRecords @SonyMusic https://t.co/dBKYIM2tdF

[KARE 11 @kare11]

Family members say the painting was stolen in 1939 after its original owner Edward Epstein, a Jewish businessman living in Austria, attempted to flee the country. https://t.co/YWHLTvaVDy

[Bernard T. Joy @bernardtjoy]

One of the reasons for the invention of the novel was that it became more and more obvious that human beings suffered from a great deal of individual pain. However, whenever a specific person approached another or a group of others and tried to express their own individual pain it was made clear that the others could not listen and could not understand because at bottom there is no collective will to care about the individual pain of just one person. Human beings care about categories of pain and care very much about group pain— the pain of the party, the identity type, the tribe— but when faced with the unique agony, the indescribably particular problem of the one, then the mass of people, and even people taken individually, glaze over and ignore. Enter the novel, which whatever else it may be is a technology for abstracting the unique pain of the individual and presenting it to a populace as something worthy of hermeneutic curiosity. We interpret endlessly the single day in the life of a Leopold Bloom and wonder for decades what makes a Benjy Compson cry. And in that interpretative effort— made palatable to us only by virtue of its cultural weight and capital— we discover a compassion we could never discover for the real man or woman walking down the street or crying alone somewhere unseen. The novelist tricks us into a fellow feeling for paper that we ought actually to feel for flesh.

[The Wild North @TheWildNorthTV]

Golden hour in Grand Marais ☀️ 🙌

[hi hat @hi_hat]

Following the reporting @404mediaco that #ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models... https://t.co/OdpSPk2Tu9

[Bernard T. Joy @bernardtjoy]

This is how proud civilisations die.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

AI companies are buying large volumes of used, rare, and out-of-print books, scanning them for training data, and in many cases destroying the physical copies afterward.

This practice has accelerated as labs seek high-quality, pre-2022 human-written text free of AI-generated content that now saturates much of the open web.

The most documented example is Anthropic’s internal effort known as Project Panama. Court filings from copyright litigation revealed that the company acquired millions of physical books from used-book sellers and wholesalers such as Better World Books. Workers used hydraulic cutting machines to slice off the spines, fed the loose pages into industrial high-speed scanners, and then discarded or pulped the remains. An internal planning document described the goal as an effort to destructively scan books at massive scale. A federal judge later ruled that purchasing the books, creating internal digital copies this way, and destroying the originals constituted transformative fair use under U.S. copyright law, relying in part on the first-sale doctrine.

Similar activity is now widespread. Specialized brokers, including ISBNdb, openly market bulk acquisition services to AI labs, offering orders ranging from thousands to as many as one million titles. They emphasize older printed books as “structurally clean” training data.

Booksellers in the United States and Europe have reported sudden surges in bulk orders for mixed, random selections that include rare and out-of-print volumes. Some of these titles may represent among the last readily available physical copies. While a substantial portion of the books involved would otherwise have been remaindered, recycled, or sent to landfills, the inclusion of uncommon editions has drawn criticism from archivists, collectors, and rare-book dealers who note that gentler, non-destructive scanning methods exist yet are slower and more expensive.

The process remains largely quiet because the intermediary services promise anonymity to their AI clients. Public attention has grown mainly through litigation disclosures and reporting by outlets that examined the court records and interviewed booksellers.

The practice highlights a practical tension in large-scale AI development: the demand for vast quantities of reliable human text collides with the finite physical supply of older printed works and the cultural value of preserving rare copies.

[TNW @thenextweb]

Clean data is running out. So AI firms are buying old books. A broker sells labs pre-2022 print books as the last text no AI has polluted. The catch: scanning them means slicing the spines off, so buyers get a strict NDA. Its own site admits "AI company destroys two million books" is a bad headline. https://t.co/HnYf9BLxtH

[Casket Arts Building @casketart_3]

So, in MPLS logic, isn't that somehow some good karma, or no...? 🤔 🤔

[Vince Mpls @vincempls]

The former Star Tribune printing plant in the North Loop will become a data center. On waterfront property in Minnesota’s most valuable neighborhood.
https://t.co/4I4iPzKRDI

[Casket Arts Building @casketart_3]

@vincempls So, in MPLS logic, isn't that somehow some good karma, or no...? 🤔 🤔

[Casket Arts Building @casketart_3]

St. Paul? Whatever... no worries...

[The Minnesota Star Tribune @StarTribune]

Northern Iron in St. Paul, facing pollution claims and a permit challenge, will close https://t.co/MuKTCNNaRM

[Stevehead ᴬʳᵗˡᵉˢˢ ᴾᵃʳᵒᵈʸ @bomansays]

Morocco and Spain do not have a scheduled match against each other next season, as they play in different continental confederations (CAF and UEFA) and friendly fixtures for the upcoming club or international window have not matched them together... 😕

[Casket Arts Building @casketart_3]

Milling the cylinder heads reduces the volume of the combustion chamber. This increases the engine's compression ratio, which generally translates to more horsepower.

[hi hat @hi_hat]

Little Deuce Coupe @TheBeachBoys @CapitolRecords
https://t.co/B4b3OINu4h

[Breaking911 @Breaking911]

INSANE FOOTAGE: Thousands of migrants continue crossing from Morocco into Spain’s Ceuta enclave, as local officials reportedly urge Madrid to declare a national emergency.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

"Get the state out of our bedrooms!" I used to hear activists cry.

Get the state out of our bloodstreams.

[Bernard T. Joy @bernardtjoy]

I really don't mind us having MCU and Christopher Nolan films for the kids. I just think we should have some cinema for adults too.

[hi hat @hi_hat]

'Forever' (Instrumental track from Sunflower sessions, 1969-70)
@TheBeachBoys @CapitolRecords @UMG
https://t.co/waW37J4Hu9

[Providence Journal @projo]

General Mills recalled 4,340 cases of Pillsbury dough for possible glass. The more than 730,000 rolls were to be baked and sold at Walmart bakeries. https://t.co/x3K16dZMir

[hi hat @hi_hat]

While wildfire can have devastating consequences for people and communities, fire is also a natural ecological process in many environments. Ecological research has long recognized that, in many ecosystems, fire is a recurring natural process.

[hi hat @hi_hat]

The BWCA Wilderness shut down July 14 amid a series of wildfires and excessive heat. The length of the closure is unknown at this time.
https://t.co/sl1BpeOgLI