mups sete

[jorts 🇵🇸 @ftmensch]

my mom started volunteering with autistic children and annoyed one nonverbal student so bad that he literally spoke for the very first time in his life to tell her to shut up

[Farida Bemba Nabourema @Farida_N]

There are many Africans who cite Singapore as proof that colonialism cannot explain African poverty. What they consistently fail to mention is how Singapore actually built itself. Because Singapore did not develop through deregulation and laissez faire capitalism. It developed through aggressive state intervention, strategic nationalisation, public housing programmes that housed over 80% of its population, a government that planned its economy with surgical interventionism and refused to leave development to the invisible hand of the market.

So it is genuinely amusing to watch people invoke Singapore in the same breath as they argue against land reform, against nationalisation, against any meaningful state intervention in the economy, while promoting the very neoliberal policies that Singapore deliberately rejected on its path to development.

You cannot want Singapore’s results while opposing Singapore’s methods. That is a contradiction. You are attempting to achieve the outcomes of socialist politics with laissez faire capitalist policies, and calling anyone who points out the inconsistency an ideologue.

[Tiberius @tiberiusfiles]

Everything is backwards, upside down, inside out. The worst of us are elevated to unimaginable privilege while the best of us are persecuted for daring to pursue decency, and it just keeps getting more and more ridiculous every single day.

[juan @juanbuis]

i can’t believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it

[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🤗

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Links: https://t.co/0XW8WZ27d3

https://t.co/93ZwPQpeOZ

[cyan |🇮🇪| 🇵🇸 @dying_lava]

@foreeeeeal Also the idea that scientists will keep stuff secret to ‘protect’ their field. Lmao no if a scientist finds something that seems to contradict an established fact they’re publishing that as soon as they can verify it to get that Nobel prize fame.

[Renata (Call Me Wren) Ver Duren @Khrystja88]

@SketchesbyBoze I just read this on Facebook this morning. There are 5 "pages/screenshots". So the last one is in a comment thread.

[WW2 The Eastern Front @ShoahUkraine]

One: the hypothetical is rigged. "No disease, nobody knows, no victims".

In actual reality, roadkill is a pathogen buffet. Tularemia, brucellosis, leptospirosis, parasites. You're pressing mucous membranes

Also, fun one, that "victimless" corpse might be someone's cat.
Congratulations, you just violated a dead pet a kid is going to cry over tonight.

Two: virtue ethics, which is fully secular and predates Christianity by centuries. Aristotle didn't need Yahweh. The question was never only "who got hurt." It's "what does this act make you?" Actions carve grooves in character, and character isn't mystical, it's a physical fact about your brain that predicts your future behavior.

A person who trains himself to treat a body, any body, as a pure masturbatory object is cultivating a callousness that does not politely stay in its lane.

Three: your disgust isn't an argument, but it is data. From a materialist view, revulsion here is an evolved pathogen avoidance and norm enforcement system firing exactly as designed. It's not infallible, but a near universal human recoil is evidence about which behaviors are compatible with functioning social animals. You don't get to wave off millions of years of calibration as "just feelings."

Four, The theist answer isn't actually load bearing. "It violates God's created order." Okay: does God forbid it arbitrarily, or because it's genuinely degrading? If arbitrary, your morality is cosmic whim and could've permitted it.

If it's forbidden because it's degrading, then degradation is a real standard that exists independent of the command, and the atheist can appeal to it directly.

[mups sete @mups7]

@mrstorey @TheKevBrown @flying_rodent The goblin bank does look very like an antisemitic stereotype, not helped by the location in the film having a gigantic 6 pointed star in the middle of the floor.

[Aria Faye @Ariafayeee]

I asked this question twice and got 10k+ replies from women and the overwhelming majority said one of four things

1. “Who cares I’m in there to pee just like you”

2. “As long as you wash your hands”

3. “Would you pass me some toilet paper under the stall door if I ran out?”

4. “Of course, you wouldn’t be safe in the men’s bathroom”

Men on the other hand felt the need to speak on behalf of women in these comments and overwhelmingly said NO… my question is who asked you? I asked women.

[Leo @Leonajardinho]

Pretending infrastructure decay is just "consumer preference" is wild. Municipal budgets and zoning laws were heavily lobbied and reshaped for decades to force car dependency, removing any viable choice. People drive because the system was intentionally built to ensure you can't survive without one.

[Jon Jones @JonJonesSnr]

Count Binface wants water bosses to swim in rivers to prove they’re clean.

He could win a by-election on that policy alone.

[𝗠𝘂𝗵𝗲𝗲 ♛ @muheediva01]

The wildest part about POVERTY is how much time it steals. Waiting for buses. Calling assistance offices. Comparing grocery prices. Fighting insurance. Sitting at laundromats. Being poor is a second job nobody pays you for.

[🐇 @lo_l_la_res]

Sempre me deixa perturbada a história da concubina que foi oferecida pra ser estuprada a noite toda pelos homens de uma cidade e depois de morta foi despedaçada e entregue em 12 partes as tribos de Israel, tem a história de Ló que ofereceu as próprias filhas para serem estupradas também pra proteger anjos, o que desde nova me fez questionar muito cedo como a religião cristã vê a mulher apenas como um objeto, isso eu dentro da igreja com 11 anos estudando a bíblia e pensando.

[Chasing Ennui @rwlesq]

Katie Miller has a master's degree and a career. It appears that she has consistently worked since she was 20. She can open a bank account, own property, and have a credit card in her name. She has access to no-fault divorce and would be entitled to child support for her baby if she and Stephen Miller divorce. She has laws protecting her against physical abuse and rape by her spouse. She had access to birth control and abortion, meaning that having a baby was a choice.

She is very much not living the life that the "propaganda. . . convinced" women was oppressive. She is living the life that feminism made possible.

Of course, she knows this. She's just a liar.

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

Stories like today's catastrophic Supreme Court ruling on pesticides go under the radar, but they shape our society and determine our lives. One of the most important things to see about our political system is this: there are concentric circles of undemocratic mechanisms that permit local officials to enact policies that benefit the ruling class but that prevent them from enacting policies that hurt the ruling class.

If a local city wants to do something too progressive, the much more undemocratic state government can preempt it. If a state wanted to do something too progressive, the much more undemocratic federal government can preempt it. This was actually the goal of a lot of the Obama-era corporate transnational trade agreements, which were trying to replicate this system globally to prevent countries from passing progressive economic, environmental, labor, and social policies. At each higher layer, the wealthiest interests typically have more power and control, and it is much harder for people to organize to effectively fight against that power.

[mups sete @mups7]

@MaebiiX @N01N30 @FindingHomeland We all need money to survive. Are you saying that anyone earning a living is in slavery? People do what they are good at. SWers need protecting far better as the situation right now is appalling but you are not helping them get that like this.

[Dmdav @Dmdav1]

Here’s an idea, cut MPs expenses (£242.6 million) , freeze their pay, stop catering/alcohol being subsidised (£7 million to £8 )million, House of Lords catering (£3 million) stop daily rate (£23 m total costs £143 mill)
Because difficult choices have to be made to pay 4 defence