Of Course It's Amazon

You've hears about the AI groups that are shredding old rare books in order to train AI without having copyright issues.

We now have at least one of the culprits. 

A book seller put Airtags in a bulk book order, and it's Amazon that is shredding the books.

On an emotional level, this is the single most offensive thing that Jeff Bezos' monster has ever done. (Intellectual level, the mistreatment of workers is worse)

For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon.

On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented.

I have advocated breaking up Amazon on a few occasions.

Screw that, send the whole C-Suite to Gitmo. 

Jeff Zuckerberg, Meet Barbara Streisand ⃰

The criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ is aggressively trying to suppress a tell-all memoir by its former global public policy director, and rather ironically, this is getting a lot of ink lately.

They have tried for an injunction, and the most that they have gotten is temporary injunctions preventing Sarah Wynn-Williams from publicizing her book, but the publisher is not subject to her arbitration agreement, so the book will be printed and distributed. 

What Facebook's hardball has done is generated a fair amount of press coverage that would have otherwise not occurred.

I understand why they are doing this, the details are horrifying, though not a surprise:

During the 14 years Sheryl Sandberg worked at Facebook, chief operating officer to Mark Zuckerberg’s chief executive, it was often assumed she was the grown-up keeping the unruly tech kids in line.

Not so, says Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook between 2011 and 2017, rising to become its global public policy director. “There were no adults in the room,” she says. “These are people who have assumed a lot of power, thinking none of the rules apply to them.”

Wynn-Williams’s crusading new memoir, Careless People, has been the talk of Silicon Valley this past week. It is a shocking, darkly funny and highly critical exposé of the six years she spent at the tech giant.

Zuckerberg does not want you to read Careless People. He doesn’t even want you to read this interview. On Wednesday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, obtained a temporary injunction from a US arbitrator preventing Wynn-Williams from doing any further promotion of the book, although Macmillan went ahead with its UK publication. By Friday night the book had reached No 4 on the print bestsellers list on Amazon.

Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, says the book includes “defamatory and untrue allegations” about its executives, that it is a mix of “out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company” and described Wynn-Williams as a disgruntled former employee “fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour” (recollections differ). Although it axed independent fact-checkers from its own platforms in January, Meta demanded the right to fact-check the book in a legal letter before publication.

 The revelations are not a surprise:

• Zuckerberg is an immature jerk.
• Lots of nepotism and Harvard bros. 
• Cheryl Sandburg seems to have been creepy at best, and a harasser at worst.
• Facebook does not give a f%$# about its employees.
• Zuckerberg did not believe that its action had the effect on the 2016 elections.  When his staff finally explained it to him, his response was considering running for President himself. 
• Facebook promised the Chinese that it would, "Pomote social order."
• That Facebook's right wing advocate, Brooks Brothers Riot participant Joel Kaplan, had sexually harassed her. 

This book sounds like a fascinating read, and but for the lawfare against Ms.. Wynn-Williams, I would never have known of it.

^*For those of you who have been living in a cave since 2003, the Streisand Effect refers to when attempts to suppress information leads to wider notoriety for the aforementioned information.

An Overdue Library Book Is Returned to a Library 119 Years Later

You know, this sort of thing leads to irate librarians:

Have you ever returned a library book late? Perhaps by a day or two or maybe even a week? How about 119 years? …No? Well, a particular volume from the New Bedford Free Public Library in Massachusetts actually took that long to make its way back to the library’s shelves. A copy of An Elementary Treatise on Electricity by British scientist James Clerk Maxwell that was checked out in 1904 was finally returned in 2023.

The book was first spotted by Stewart Plein, curator of rare books at West Virginia University Libraries. The librarian was sorting through a recent donation of books when she spotted the copy of Maxwell's treatise. It was in great condition for a book that old, but there was one problem: it appeared to have once been part of a library collection and it didn’t have any sort of stamp indicating it was officially withdrawn. So, it appeared to be a lost and very long overdue book.

Plein got in touch with Jodi Goodman, the special collections librarian in New Bedford. While the library staff had seen overdue books returned 10 or 15 years later, this was something new. “This came back in extremely good condition,” New Bedford Public Library Director Olivia Melo says. “Someone obviously kept this on a nice bookshelf because it was in such good shape and probably got passed down in the family.”

………

Since the New Bedford library has a 5¢-per-day late fee, a book overdue by 119 years would mean a late fee of $2,100; however, the library’s late fee limit maxes out at $2. If anything, its true value lies in the history it has witnessed since being borrowed.

Daym!  After 119 years, they were remarkably gracious.