Otto Kopra

[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🤗

[Csaba Tóth 🇸🇴 @tothcsabatibor]

Péter Magyar gave the press a tour of propaganda minister Antal Rogán's newly renovated, and now abandoned headquarters in Buda Castle. Just look at this luxury mansion, complete with a cigar room for prominent guests. All this in one of the poorest countries of the EU.

[Otto Kopra @Slagblah]

@wartranslated Error in translation: President of Finland is Alexander Stubb. Juha Sipilä was prime minister 2015-2019.

[Teemu don Hiilinen @hiilinen]

Hirttotuomio pitää panna täytäntöön 90 päivässä. Tämä estää käytännössä tuomiosta valittamisen.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

Orbán's final desperate attempt to turn the elections around, CPAC Hungary, has begun, and the lineup reeks of the Kremlin. The guest list also looks like the saddest in the event’s history. Netanyahu cancelled, Trump only sent a video message, and no prominent guests came from the US.

Here are some notable guests:

- Alice Weidel: leader of German far-right party AfD, whose connections to the Kremlin are substantial and clear
- Andrej Babiš: Czech PM who opposes any further aid to Ukraine
- Eva Vlaardingerbroek: Far-right activist and great admirer of Putin
- Dave Rubin: podcaster who was paid by the Kremlin through Tenet media
- Irakli Kobakhidze: Georgian PM and leader of the pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream party
- Viktor Orbán: the desperate master vatnik, who is running the dirtiest election campaign in the country's history with the help of the Kremlin

[freeonis @freeonis_]

Барьба с НАТОй (animation)

[Otto Kopra @Slagblah]

@stochasticman99 @Bricktop_NAFO Chad... of Kyle? Nomen est omen.

[Euromaidan Press @EuromaidanPress]

Jeffrey Epstein ran a trafficking operation that recruited girls as young as 14 and made them available to powerful men. He died in a New York jail in 2019.

Now 3 million pages of his files just dropped��and they read like a Russian intelligence playbook.

The documents show bank accounts at Alfa-Bank and Sberbank, systematic procurement of women from Russia and Eastern Europe, and an FSB Academy graduate who helped Epstein evade US sanctions while Epstein advised him on cryptocurrency workarounds.

Here's where it gets stranger: emails show Epstein used Thorbjørn Jagland—then Europe's top human rights official—to pass messages directly to Putin's foreign minister.

Warsaw may possibly open up an investigation into Epstein's human trafficking activities in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk warns that there is an "increasingly likely possibility that Russian intelligence agencies co-organised this operation, which can only mean that they also possess compromising materials against many leaders still active today."

https://t.co/xOWrqPFXgU

[Otto Kopra @Slagblah]

Pähkinänkuoressa: Tehdään ongelmista pahempia jotta *joku muu* suiviintuisi ja korjaisi asiat.

[Matti Luonuansuu @MLuonuansuu]

Miten tiivistää hallitusohjelma? Vaikka näin:

- Työttömille ei ole töitä. -> Leikataan siis työttömyyskorvauksia.
- Asunnottomuus pahenee. -> Leikataan siis asumistukia ja rakennetaan vähemmän kohtuuhintaisia asuntoja.
1/2

[Matti Luonuansuu @MLuonuansuu]

Ihmiset, jotka eivät ole Epsteinin asiakirjoissa:

-drag queenit
-transsukupuoliset urheilijat
-mustat journalistit
-”radikaali vasemmistolainen roskasakki”
-nälkäinen perhe, joka tarvitsee SNAP-etuuksia
-lakossa olevat työntekijät
-Sesamkadun näyttelijäkaarti
->

[Jarno Koskinen @jarnokoss]

Miksei kukaan muuten vaadi Carunan pakkomyyntiä takaisin valtiolle perustuen ”kansalliseen turvallisuuteen”? Lafka tahkoo yli 50% voittoa, sen puolittamallakin valtio saisi reilu sata milliä vuodessa tuloja, ja kuluttajat säästäis toisen.

[Yasmina @yasminalombaert]

Amazing how 'tough negotiators' suddenly lose their voice when confronted with their own investment portfolios.

Absolute masterclass in accountability from Caolan. While the rest of the Davos elite are back-slapping, Caolan is out here showing what happens when a so-called 'tough' negotiator meets a real journalist. Witkoff can run, but he can’t hide from what Philip Haworth’s research has laid bare.

Steve Witkoff might have the title of 'Envoy,' but Caolan is the one doing the real work for the people. It takes guts to corner a man with these kinds of connections and ask the questions that actually matter.

Caolan didn't just expose Witkoff’s financial ties to putin!s inner circle. He exposed the cowardice of those who try to negotiate peace while their pockets are lined with Russian money. Bravo, Caolan, Ukraine needs journalists like you.

@CaolanReports

[Lars Christensen @MaMoMVPY]

The problem isn't Trump. The problem is the US.

When the outside world observes Trump's insane behaviour and his threats against allies, and we at the same time observe that there is no real action from the US public, Congress, the US Supreme Court, or the US media about this insanity, we will all have to conclude that the US accepts this behaviour.

The public in the US think the US is entitled to a certain position in the world where there is no room for decent behaviour and where there are no norms and rules.

That means that we all have to conclude that the US — not only Trump — has betrayed the international order that the US, with its Western partners, were the main architects of after the Second World War.

This is the conclusion that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney so clearly laid out in his speech at Davos yesterday. We simply cannot trust the US to play by the rules any more. Therefore, we also fundamentally have to ask ourselves — should we trust the financial and economic structure which is an integral part of the global rules-based order?

Americans live in the illusion that the US can do everything on its own, despite the fact that the US for nearly 20 years has lived beyond its means.

US private and government consumption has been funded by, among others, European central banks and pension funds. But we now have to ask ourselves — why would we trade in dollars? Why would we put our savings into US Treasury bonds?

If the US is not a rules-based society, we cannot trust the dollar to be a stable currency, and it would be insane to hold dollars. As domestic US institutions are eroded and governance structures destroyed, the US will be turned into an emerging market economy — or more accurately, a de-merging economy.

If the US threatens the territory of allies, then the US acts as an authoritarian bully nation. Nobody in their right mind would lend money to the US government. If the US doesn't live up to its international obligations and respect the sovereignty of other nations, why would we expect the US government to honour its debts?

If Trump can tariff nations that will not give up their territory, then there is certainly no reason to believe that the US will not introduce capital controls. And if that is a risk, why would you risk investing in the US?

It is not a question about Europe standing up to the US. It is a question about being prudent with our investments — about reducing risks.

Every day Trump remains in office, distrust of the US increases, and the cost for the US will go up day by day. And this is irreversible. It takes years to build trust, but you can destroy it by your actions in minutes.

Europe has now completely lost trust in the US. And so has Canada. It is up to the people of the US to demonstrate that Trump is an 'outlier', and it is up to the American people to stop him.

If you don't do that, we will have to assume that this is what the US is about — whether the name of the President is Trump or something else, whether the President is a Republican or a Democrat.

[Magyar Péter (Ne féljetek) @magyarpeterMP]

80 days left. Onward to victory!❤️🤍💚

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

The most suppressed account on this platform is the candidate that is about to unseat Russian-backed kleptocrat Victor Orban.

Although polling 12 points above Putin's puppet party, on this platform Magyar needs your follows.

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

1/8 Europe is sleepwalking into a forever war because we are too afraid to actually win.

We need to stop managing the conflict and start ending it.

Here is how 🧵

[Otto Kopra @Slagblah]

So *this* is where Trump gets his ideas.

[Stephan Pastis @stephanpastis]

I published these strips 10 years ago.

I'm sorry, @GreenlandMFA.

Good luck, @CityofSarasota .

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

The media is ignoring the most damning part of the Epstein emails:

Emails between Epstein and former Norwegian PM show Epstein acted as a backchannel to the Kremlin.

He explicitly offered to teach Putin's circle how to handle Trump. That means blackmail.

Trump is compromised

[LeftHandedOctopus @AggieCapitalist]

"Recently, senior executives at Salesforce have admitted, both internally and publicly, that they massively overestimated AI’s capabilities. They have found that AI simply can’t cope with the complex nature of customer service and totally fails at nuanced issues, escalations, and