Lars Š. Laichter

[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🤗

[Lars Š. Laichter @larslaichter]

@DavidSHolz I have had my openclaw sync all longer text outputs to my xteink and it has been great on the go. To get rid of my phone, a mic on the eink might be enough for input most of the time.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Gutenberg invented the most important technology of the millennium and immediately went bankrupt — and so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices.

Gutenberg could make a batch of 300 books for the cost of one, but there weren't enough buyers in his small, landlocked village in Germany.

It it took the better part of a century of further innovations, social changes, and setting up of distribution networks before you could have a pamphlet like Luther's 95 thesis get from Wittenberg to London in 17 days.

[Aran Nayebi @aran_nayebi]

1/10 Ten years ago, I received a handwritten manuscript by Alan Turing’s only PhD student, Robin Gandy. He wrote it a couple years before passing away in 1995.

AFAIK, it’s never before been in print, so I typeset my copy & put it online here: https://t.co/OwQtlNG3AE

🧵👇

[Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone]

Out today! https://t.co/HAK4plV01K

[Lars Š. Laichter @larslaichter]

@AnnaLeptikon ghost in the shell

[Raquel Fernández @raquel_dmg]

⚡️JOB ALERT⚡️I’m looking for a postdoc to join our group! If you are interested in linguistic interaction / visual grounding / human-inspired model analysis and keen to join the NLP/AI community @AmsterdamNLP, take a look: https://t.co/SKvFG5KI8B

RTs appreciated! More info👇

[Patricia Churchland @patchurchland]

Interesting perspective: https://t.co/YCelL1Av7m Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper about Itself.--Then We Tried to Get It Published via @sciam

[Joris Baan @jsbaan]

New blogpost 🎉! I implemented the original transformer from scratch and highlight seven things that I found particularly surprising or insightful - and that you might not know about. https://t.co/JL4JwOtd1k

[Chris Taylor 🖋️ @FutureBoy]

The full transcript is incredible.

[Taste of Cinema @davidcinema]

What is the best movie you've ever seen that is mainly based on dialogue?

[Ed Hawkins @ed_hawkins]

Mapping changes in temperature (1850-2021).

[Carla_Zoe_C @CarlaZoeC]

Protest can reduce the risk of human extinction. My co-authors and I make a case: https://t.co/zQZpexDoMm ; https://t.co/kwAx2Drmam

Here's thus another reason to reject the UK's Crime and Policing Bill. It does not secure a safer future. #KillTheBill @AmnestyUK @DeborahFW

[Molly Mielke McCarthy @mollyfmielke]

my main goal in most convos is to find the thing that makes the other person’s eyes sparkle

[Jeremy @HandwavingComic]

Right

[Sean J. Taylor @seanjtaylor]

Often people say “I’m not good at X” when they really mean “I’m not good at tolerating the negative feelings I experienced when I was trying to learn X.” For me it’s learning languages. Being a beginner at stuff is frustrating, embarrassing, jealousy-inducing, and even hopeless.

[Lars Š. Laichter @larslaichter]

@sabrina_p_leeds because most university environments don't encourage asking the 'wrong' questions. this is one of my favourite resources on how to change that https://t.co/rmUQsfN94a

[Ulle Endriss @ulle_endriss]

Great new post at the #ILLC Blog @UvA_Amsterdam by @IrisProff, who talked to Adrian Haret about the wisdom of the crowds https://t.co/wDmxnte8Ps

[Joscha Bach @Plinz]

Instead of complaining that collective agents are irrational, make explicit control models that can predict the degree of irrationality of an organization, based on the unregulated conflict with the rationality of its constituents

[traf @traf]

6 reasons why web3 is eating the world ↓