Harma-Mae

Edmonton writer with Dutch Reformed roots | Theology lover | Books: Paris in Clichés | Published: @YEGCityasMuseum @Reformed_P_F @globeandmail

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

I wrote an article about the chapel in @Official_WEM !

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

"Family is structured by blood. Marriage by institution. Work relationships by utility. Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do."

So good: https://t.co/TQGvwS5p9I

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

"Friendship has always depended on a certain irrational generosity. A willingness to waste time together magnificently. To listen to the same anxiety for the fifth time. To sit through silence. To remain available without agenda." (1/3)

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

"And perhaps this is why adult friendship feels increasingly radical. It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards everywhere else. Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence." (2/3)

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

@ghhughes Oh! This is why it stopped working! Thanks

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

@SketchesbyBoze truth. I ALMOST completed Order of the Phoenix in a day while the family was driving to a campground, trying to finish the last chapters by firelight after arriving...

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

@Official_WEM I enjoyed reading other sources about this chapel, including this article by @533viking303 : https://t.co/cByrUZV0BR

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

I wrote an article about the chapel in @Official_WEM !

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

@Official_WEM https://t.co/L1W6POVFtf

[Ramin Nasibov @RaminNasibov]

If you missed the solar eclipse, this is what it looked like:

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

My baby throws down her bottle like Thor in Thor 1 - "Another!"

[Reformed Perspective @Reformed_P_F]

Separation is not a new sentiment in Alberta but it is real enough that the question is being posed in a referendum this October. This causes us to look a little deeper at the different sides of this issue and ask ourselves some important questions.

https://t.co/pK2Qd4VZHf

[Ari Schulman @AriSchulman]

"Essay" means "attempt," and the attempt is the thing as much as the output. To hand the effort to formulate one's thoughts over to a machine is to attempt nothing. You could as well say "it's romantic to think there's value in going to the gym when forklifts can out-bench us."

[Hannah Long @HannahGraceLong]

As a book editor, I experience this in a particularly intense way, as I work through hundreds of thousands of words of drafts.

Invariably, I find unique foibles, strategies, characteristic phrases. Authors are always amazed that I can read their personality so clearly in it 1/

[Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv]

“Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside.” – Calvin, 1992 (Nov 25)

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

Follow up: https://t.co/KYQWQfOtFI

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

Hang onto your print books with a death grip

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

Hang onto your print books with a death grip

[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🤗

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

I rarely write "hot takes" - this might be the closest you'll get to one from me!
https://t.co/dokI294EuS

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

This is actually incredibly useful - the kind of old school websites the internet was built on, and which we need more of - easier to see which brands are no longer as good as their reputation

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

This amazing website, called "Worse on Purpose," is cataloguing all the ways companies are deliberately and secretively degrading their own products

As usual, in most cases the culprit is private equity extracting enormous sums while everyone else is left worse off.

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

I think you're grown up when no one you know lives on Whyte Ave anymore

#yeg

[Harma-Mae @harmamae]

So many people I talk to recently are quietly working on some kind of book project, usually one they're quite shy about. It's so personal putting words down on paper and possibly sending them out into the world...

#amwriting