Author: Kate

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI Books Google Commemorative Logos You'll Never See 25 Comments

“We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026.

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.” […]

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.

If An Elbow Falls In The Forest

Gradually Then Suddenly New Governor 16 Comments

Canadian lumber giant is shifting corporate support operations to Georgia

Canadian lumber giant Interfor Corp., which blamed U.S. tariffs on softwood lumber when it idled two Northern Ontario sawmills indefinitely in April, has told employees it plans to shift its corporate and functional support operations from the company’s current headquarters in Burnaby, B.C., to an office in Georgia.

In a memo sent to employees earlier this month and viewed by the Financial Post, chief executive Ian Fillinger said the Peachtree City office, which is on the outskirts of Atlanta, will be established as Interfor’s “primary hub for corporate and functional support.”[…]

Since last year, Interfor and other lumber companies have been grappling with the impact of U.S. tariffs on softwood lumber. A 10 per cent tariff came on top of longstanding anti-dumping and countervailing duties, and softwood lumber shipments to the U.S. now face a cumulative levy of 45 per cent.

The United States is a big customer for Interfor. According to a November 2025 investor presentation, the U.S. accounted for 84 per cent of Interfor’s lumber sales by market. At the time, 62 per cent of the company’s operations were in the U.S. south and northwest, with the balance in the B.C. interior and eastern Canada.

Still nothing at the CBC this morning.

City Of Vanity Projects

youmightbeinsaskatchewan 20 Comments

Having witnessed its decline over the past two decades, my advice is get out of Saskatoon while you still can.

It’s about to get much worse.

“The DNC is flat broke.”

Democrats Republicans 38 Comments

The cash-strapped Democratic National Committee is in full-blown meltdown, according to a New York Times report, with its chair, Ken Martin, descending into fear and “a growing sense of paranoia” about his job security.

Facing a cash crunch, the Democratic National Committee has asked vendors to hold off on sending bills until after the midterms, The Times reported — an unusual move exposing the party’s financial struggles with just a few months left before the November election.

The comparative financial status of the two parties is stark: President Trump has a $400 million war chest — and the RNC has another $130 million available — and the DNC is reportedly about $2 million in debt, according to The Times.

Martin is reportedly growing increasingly anxious about the DNC’s financial woes and whether or not he will be able to keep his job. The chairman, responsible for fundraising, party operations, and campaign infrastructure, is “relying on a vanishingly small circle of people he trusts,” The Times reported Sunday.

It’s almost as though the tap to an invisible flow of money was quietly squeezed shut.

Corpus Derelicti

Chief Big Screen TV 20 Comments

Jamie Sarkonak;

Heller’s saga began when he spoke up about the wording in the Indigenous competency course mandated for all lawyers by the B.C. Law Society. As things stood back then, all members of the profession had to read through materials endorsed by their professional overseers to maintain the ability to practice — only, the course materials were objectively false. The thousands of professionals gatekeeping everything from real estate deals to criminal sentencing — professionals from which the next generation of B.C.’s judges would be drawn — were being told to internalize the unproven claim that the bodies of children were found at the Kamloops residential school grounds.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 29 Comments

As Jim Geraghty writes, “For the entirety of 2020 and long after, the ‘it started in a wet market’ view was the respectable one. Believing that somebody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn’t been careful one day and had gotten accidentally infected with a virus that had gained a function or two during its time in the lab made you a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, the lab leak theory was evidence of your racism. And now — in July 2026! — we learn that Fauci himself had dismissed the wet market as a potential source at the end of January 2020.”

And much more.

What kind of doctor wants to work for government? Biggest mistake [Trump] ever made was letting the federal government do its job re covid. We’re only now starting to plumb the depths of what the federal government’s job was.

Tony’s Diary.

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