Jean-Marc Baketel Daecius

I wrote an essay about the future of food in the AI world. newsletter.osv.llc/p/the-future-o…

@ordinarytings Hey can you DM me? @InfiniteF8lms is interested.

If anyone has £750k to burn, I’d like to turn this man’s story into a movie.

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/charliebec…

@RichDecibels You might enjoy this essay about the future of food:

the robot is building me a permaculture training course customised to my region. I asked it to visualise the water catchments in our local terrain. it found an official dataset and made this 🤯

This was by far the most ground I have ever covered in a one hour discussion. @CultishCreative you are a legend!

There is a recession that the employment data can't see. @EricPachman came with chart after chart unpacking how Data4thePeople is presenting the publicly available data in ALL NEW ways. Out now on @excessreturnpod: youtu.be/62OvNJfqvxY?si…

@EricPachman Killin' it with Data4ThePeople youtube.com/watch?app=desk…

@BerntBornich This is an important step in the direction of a world where AI deflates the cost of food, making it healthier, less reliant on chemicals and incredibly abundant. Essay for the full breakdown: newsletter.osv.llc/p/the-future-o…

Introducing NEO’s 25 Degrees of Freedom, tendon-driven hands — nearing or surpassing human-level dexterity, strength, speed, and reliability. For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips.

Big news: Infinite Films is partnering with Scott Free Productions and Calliope Pictures on THE VESUVIUS CHALLENGE, a documentary narrated by Guy Pearce. For decades, Dr. Brent Seales chased what seemed impossible: reading scrolls carbonized by Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Using AI and advanced imaging, his team unlocked ancient Rome's only surviving library. These are the kinds of stories we want to tell.

It's Friday... Date night! That's gonna set you back $97 though (13 hrs of min wage work). 60 years ago it was $7 (6 hrs min wage work).

Why we made @Bioticorg. I believe biology today stands roughly where construction and civil engineering stood 300 years ago. That needs to change. A Thread 🧵

I did not get here alone, and Biotic would not exist like it does today without @jposhaughnessy and the @osvllc Fellowship. Jim gave me the freedom and the financial security to pause my PhD and commit myself fully to this idea, and a community that genuinely believes ambitious problems are worth pursuing. I am grateful to Jim, whose curiosity and optimism are infectious, and to @atmanpandya and @JMBDaecius and everyone at OSV who believed in this vision long before there was much to show for it. The support, the conversations, and the sheer generosity of the people in the OSV community, (now including my dear friends @alexsaraki and @Shiwei_MW and the incredible @TheMitoQueen) were instrumental in getting Biotic off the ground, and I love them for it.

cc: @EricPachman

You have to work more than twice as long to afford a date when compared to your grandparents.... data4thepeople.com/p/date-night-p…

Is "love" less likely simply because the economic conditions for it have shifted and the shakespearean form of pair-bonding that we've had for the last bit of human history is... over?

It's my opinion that love and happiness are fragile. They are like plants in a garden - flowers. It takes specific conditions for them to flourish, and it's easy to trample them out of existence.

Out today: Researchers have made the first cell capable of “feeding, growth, replication, division and selection...entirely using components scientists put there.” In other words, a cell that self-replicates and was made entirely from the ground-up, molecule by molecule. The cell is called SpudCell. And although it is definitely a cell (in that it has a membrane with molecules inside) it is definitely not alive, because it cannot grow indefinitely, survive without human help, make its own ribosomes, or recycle waste. It "dies" after a few divisions. But it's a starting point! And these same researchers have raised $6-8M+ in philanthropic funding to scale their efforts with a new nonprofit for synthetic cell research, called Biotic.

"These unopened Herculaneum Scrolls look like dead books, but they're not. They're starting to speak again." — Federica Nicolardi, Papyrologist theguardian.com/technology/202…

@KobeissiLetter cc: @EricPachman

The US wealth divide has never been bigger: The top 20% of earners now account for ~58% of all personal spending in the US, the highest proportion on record. At the same time, the bottom 80% account for just ~42%, the lowest on record. This comes as personal outlays growth for the top 20% has averaged +8.3% per year since the 2020 pandemic, almost double the +4.5% seen for the bottom 80%. Over the last year, the gap has widened further, with the top 20% seeing a +6.5% increase in spending, compared to +2.6% for the bottom 80%. To put this into perspective, in the 1990s, both groups accounted for roughly equal proportions of total personal spending, at ~50% each. Asset owners are the only winners in this economy.

Vesuvius buried these scrolls.<br>AI is bringing them back. nationalgeographic.com/history/articl… via @NatGeo