Frode A. Hegland

Let me be very clear: opposing the genocide in Gaza is not antisemitism.

In 2003 a black man played God in a major motion picture that grossed ~$500M (over $820M today). No one was outraged. No one boycotted. No one cared. Thank the lord this came out before everything became a stupid "Culture War" issue.

NYC Mayor Mamdani announces five city-run, tax-funded grocery stores with "prices set at 30% below retail prices."

Guy who has devoted his life to hoarding wealth: “uhhhhh actually money isn’t real and doesn’t matter”

🦔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🤗

I read saw Nolan's "Odyssey" on Friday at 3am to 6am. I couldn't sleep last night, so I read "The Odyssey" for 12 hours. "What translation?" you ask. "Claude Opus 5" I answer. I couldn't find a translation in the style I wanted, so I asked the AI to create one to my specifications. - I don't want an effort trying to fit the english translation into poetic hexameter. I instead want just a literal translation -- just the prose, like in a novel. - I don't want it updated to modern sensibilities, like Emily Wilson's "translation". That's not a translation but a rewrite. I want to see what the ancient Greeks saw. - I wanted interruptions and footnotes, where a narrator steps in to explain things that modern readers wouldn't understand, as well as reminders of what they are talking about, such as "Earthbreaker" being synonymous with "Poseidon". I generated one "book" (chapter) at a time since the AIs can't produce a long document as one step. The timestamps of the files how how long it took me to read them before I finally dropped asleep in exhaustion.