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Somewhere Else
Joined February 2022
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Headaboveclouds retweeted
anyone who has a single thought about practicality when they see this, simply doesnt get it and never will
Headaboveclouds retweeted
The only generation that knows how computers work is also the most relaxed about AI:
Headaboveclouds retweeted
BOOM! I BROKE OPEN THE AI DOOM CULT!
Major AI Labs just handed over super powers to a shady group called METR some may very well know who they are and some AI leaders may not.
This Beth Barnes the founder and CEO of METR and is a leader in the Effective Altruism cult. You can’t make this stuff up.
Full article out soon at ReadMultiplex.com.
Here is Beth who makes a good couple with Temu Harry Potter given her passionate speech on how to engineer people and their goals like software.
Out soon at ReadMultiplex.com.
METR was just given super access and super power over AI and its direction.
You will not believe who they are.
Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), pronounced “meter,” presents itself as an independent nonprofit dedicated to scientifically measuring whether frontier AI systems can autonomously complete long-horizon tasks that might pose catastrophic risks. In practice it has become one of the most influential unofficial regulators in the field.
I will release this soon.
Headaboveclouds retweeted
How quickly do humans become convinced AI becomes “dangerous”. They thought this 1960s ELIZA was too dangerous for humanity. Many psychologists tried to ban it.
We laugh today, like they will laugh at us.
Headaboveclouds retweeted
The strangest thing about losing Mac Miller isn’t just that the music stopped. It’s that an entire generation lost the person who was growing up at the exact same pace they were.
Most artists build a myth. Mac built a mirror. You could trace his exact emotional evolution from teenage carelessness to deep existential anxiety to a quiet, fragile acceptance; album by album.
When an artist like that dies, you don't just mourn their past work. You mourn the wisdom they were supposed to give you five years down the line, when you both got a little older.
Headaboveclouds retweeted
Adults are saying “unalived” now.
Sex is “seggs.” Porn is “corn.” People jam asterisks into ordinary words like the computers running civilization can be defeated by punctuation.
FUCK?
Dangerous…
F*CK?
Holy shit. He cracked NORAD.
And nobody really knows how much of this is necessary. Maybe advertisers care. Maybe monetization does. Maybe one app cared four years ago. Maybe some guy got 312 views, blamed the word “suicide,” made a video about it, and now ten million people are speaking fluent dipshit.
That’s how doctrine works now. Nobody reads the rules. They read omens.
Bad reach? Must’ve been the word.
Post took off? Interesting. I said “unalived” twice.
Write it down.
Tuesday did well. Thursday died. Thursday must hate vowels.
We’ve officially turned language into digital astrology.
Millions of adults staring at analytics like medieval peasants inspecting a goat liver.
Change the word. Check the numbers. Add an asterisk. Check the numbers. Sacrifice a noun. Refresh.
Pretty soon nobody is speaking naturally. Everybody is trying to charm a machine they don’t understand.
Nobody ordered us to say “seggs.” We just got nervous, watched what everybody else was doing, and joined in like idiots forming a line outside a restaurant because there was already a line. The restaurant is closed!
Which is a hell of an achievement. We spent billions teaching computers to understand human language.
Then we started deliberately misspelling words because they were afraid the computers understood them.
Progress
Headaboveclouds retweeted
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: open.substack.com/pub/charli…
🦔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🤗
Headaboveclouds retweeted
WHAT I HAVE BEEN WARNING FOR DECADES IS HERE, THANK YOU FOR YOUR BOOK BURNING TOO ANTHROOIC.
“Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email”
We are the amnesia generation and this is The Great Forgetting.
🦔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🤗
Headaboveclouds retweeted
The 4th @ThePlagueNFT Pond Gathering space is this Sunday!
Join up and let’s chat 🐸
🐸👊SMASH the reminder👊🐸
Headaboveclouds retweeted
The House is scheduled to vote this week on a National Defense Authorization that would integrate our military tech & supply chains with Israel’s.
Today, the Rules Committee will decide whether my amendment to strip section 219 will get a vote.
RT to support the Massie amdt.!
Headaboveclouds retweeted
Need to figure out how to get these type of posts to escape my 6 friends and 20 bots. Pls halp
Dads who fish (or just love real food) deserve better than store-bought salmon this Father’s Day.
Give him wild Alaskan sockeye straight from our boat in Prince William Sound — flash-frozen portions, pin-boned or skin-on, ready for the grill or smoker.
Subscriptions mean he never runs out… and you save 10-15%.
What’s the best Father’s Day gift you’ve ever given or received? Drop it below 👇
