🦔Someone is buying Japanese used books by the ton. Not novels or comics. Philosophy, history, medical law, Edo-period cultural texts. Multiple buyer accounts all ship to one logistics center in Okayama Prefecture that won't answer questions. Export records show over 50 tons, roughly 100,000 volumes, shipped to the US since last year. No buyer has been identified. Separately, court documents confirmed Anthropic's "Project Panama" bought millions of books in the US, cut the spines off, scanned them, and shredded the originals. An internal memo said the goal was to "destructively scan all the books in the world." Similar operations have been reported across Europe. My Take Anthropic's US book operation came out in court filings earlier this year. Project Panama. Millions of books, cut the spines off, scanned, shredded. Their VP chose the codename so nobody outside the company would find out. That story broke and apparently the same operation just moved to Japan. Anonymous buyer accounts, a warehouse in Okayama that won't take questions, and 100,000 volumes of specialized academic texts that nobody buys to resell. I don't know how you build a trillion-dollar industry on material you had to acquire in secret through middlemen because you knew the public would object. Authors spent years on those books and now they're fed through a scanner and thrown away so a chatbot can sound smarter. If the data was free to use, they wouldn't need codenames and anonymous warehouses. The lawsuits over who owns this material have barely begun and I think the copyright exposure across the whole AI industry is enormous. Anthropic's internal memo said the goal was every book in the world, which describes the foundation of the product. Hedgie🤗

GOP Sen. John Kennedy says no public official, including President Trump, “should spend public money on private ads for themselves,” after the White House aired a government-funded ad prominently featuring the president. “You can’t spend public money to promote yourself,” Kennedy (R-LA) says, adding, “I also think that we ought to have a rule that no politician can have a building named after him while he’s alive.”

#GodzillaMinusZero# first reactions are calling the sequel "jaw-dropping," an "overwhelming achievement" and a “glorious continuation of the first film.” "Toho should win another Oscar for this film. Should be nominated for best picture."

On paper, I’m in my 50’s & it’s really confusing… In my head, I’m 35. At a concert, I’m 25 After 10pm, I’m 72. Getting up off the floor, I’m 93. When someone makes me mad, I’m 2 BUT- When an 80’s song comes on, I’m 17, drunk in a field, & my mom thinks I’m at a sleepover 🤪

This says a lot about "the frontier wins everything" narrative. We have planes that fly 3x the speed of sound but airlines don't use them. We have cars that go hundreds of miles an hour, but we just use them for racing, not for ordinary driving.