Yanqing Wu

Love Robots. Want to teach them to love people back. MSc (RL + Robotics) @UAlbertaCS. BASc @WaterlooENG

[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🤗

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

Belludum
#Belludum

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

"to be continued" should not exist in a movie.

[オリコンニュース【アニメ】 @oricon_anime_]

『コナン』初の100億突破🎉
「哀ちゃん100億の女」トレンド入り
https://t.co/PYblNkMOsD

🎞近年の大台までの期間
「鬼滅の刃 無限列車編」公開10日間
「ONE PIECE FILM RED」20日
「名探偵コナン 黒鉄の魚影」24日
「呪術廻戦 0」43日
「すずめの戸締まり」45日
「SLAM DUNK」67日

#コナン100億

[ESL StarCraft II @ESLSC2]

"Everyone told me to retire. Everyone told me to give up. But... look at me now!" 🥹

#IEM #ESLProTour

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

我们是冠军！二十年了！一路上斩41z,41p,41t！太不容易了😭恭喜理赔难
#starcraft2

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

今天熬夜值了！理赔难，让二追三雷诺！

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

Not "fixed" choices of hyperparameters, but an "anchored" range of hyperparameters; not actor "behaves optimally" in X; but actor "attains no regret" in X (game); not "parametric" uncertainty, but "epistemic" uncertainty; not "return" uncertainty, but "aleatoric" uncertainty...

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

@carriegates @GoDaddy @GoDaddyHelp thx, my domains wasn't new thou... it was running perfectly until today

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

From the top right schedule to the bottom one, I had my soul my back. Thank you UofA

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

- Spent around half day to beat #superautopets w/o guides. Can uninstall now :)
- The game is like a cuter version of Hearthstone battlegrounds (weaker currency operation requirement than Auto Chess)
- Didn't know there was a 50/50 cap, lv.2 bison shall suffice

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

最近这些封锁说明任何事物都是有国界的，包括体育，音乐，科学，知识。

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

:%s/World/Western/g

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

Managed to bypass the paywall of MelvorIdle; thanks to Chrome, we can force loading overrided scripts. First few attempts to load modified cloud.js failed, not sure why... thou later found changing a single func in main.js easily does the job... also damn my completionist soul

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

OMG!!! StarCraft 3 pls!!!

[XBOX @XBOX]

Today is a historic moment. We are excited to announce that the world-renowned franchises and talented people at @ATVI_AB will be joining Team Xbox!  

Full announcement details here: https://t.co/RwF0QgXVwE

[MIT EECS @MITEECS]

About to write your personal statement for grad school?

Check out this CommKit resource that discusses the criteria for success in personal statements for grad school applications, and includes three authentic, annotated examples:

https://t.co/OoQCTAZNUf

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

Lua's documucation is so unnecessarily verbose. Learn from Python please

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

Trying to learn harmonica recently.. Why are there so many different notations for music, such as numeric, latin, alphabet, simplified, staff...? It's so insalubrious.
Is there any software that can seamlessly convert them?

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

"When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. ... Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. ... What's is the cost of lies?" -- Chernobyl

#StopLying #BelieveScience #COVID45

[Yanqing Wu @P_WYQ]

I candidly do not comprehend how the author could relate and even heap opprobrium on measures that saved lives, minimized the spread of a epidemic and bought precious time for foreign countries to counteract. I am glad that most NYT comments disappreciate this strange article.

[Amy Qin @amyyqin]

Lack of timely care for critically ill patients, schools and workplaces shut down, economic paralysis, depression.

Even as global coronavirus infections surge, China’s blunt force approach to curbing the epidemic seems to be working — but at what cost? https://t.co/0R1yBMg4sj