(After sleeping on it it’s possible the book I was thinking of was written in the earliest 21st century).

There was an announcement on their mailing list here: https://lists.pglaf.org/archives/list/gmonthly@lists.pglaf.org/thread/MTHHI3TD7YXD3EHLKVBBA57KRBBWRI72/

We then worked with the same programmers [as AI generated categories] to provide automated summaries of nearly every book in the collection. You can find those summaries on book landing pages. These summaries are intended to be helpful for people trying to decide what book to read, or to get an idea of what a book is about.

For example, here is the automated summary from book #1, the US Declaration of Independence (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1): […]

If you spot errors in summaries, let us know. Summaries of most books are based only on the first 12,000 characters, because the costs would have been too high for if we included all of every book.

We have also been corresponding with another programmer seeking to instruct AI technologies to “read” books from Project Gutenberg, summarize them, and answer questions about them. We hope this might be described further in a future newsletter.

Based off Wayback Machine poking around it looks like they were added sometime between September 20th to October 1st.

The file metadata of the oldest copy on the gutenberg webserver says 2003 – and the document itself says Gutenberg created it in 2003 and published it in 2005 (whatever that means, maybe they were delaying ebook releases to ensure a steady stream)

Anyway this 2003 copy had their public domain boilerplate; it was described as a book in the public domain.

There are indeed a lot of websites about this, but none with any more information that Project Gutenberg so I’m guessing they all trace back to the Gutenberg release. Probably you’d have to find some physical information about it in an actual library to trace it further.

But I’m not like a professional book researcher or anything, that’s just my opinion!

Hackernews woke up feeling like fascism ( make sure to enable dead + flagged comments if you hate yourself):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696

(Two comment threads about the CDC purging “woke” research, the comments are bad even by HN standards)

Gee given a forum full of hackers you’d expect them to be against arbitrary removal of scientific studies. What happened to “information wants to be free”?

Bonus US terribleness: the NTSB suddenly thinks Twitter* is the bee’s knees and way better than email! What coincidental timing https://xcancel.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1885734974298435943

Also I know I know, more US politics. It turns out silicon valley fascists have gained power so expect this to keep happening for the forseeable future 🙃.

These past two weeks have made me very uncomfortable working in Silicon Valley, I know last time I said I was planning to get out; but now it feels urgent both for my own well being, and to stop contributing to this industry. In trans communities we immediately saw coupy stuff** for the attempted transgender genocide that it is, the wider public and media is waking up to this very slowly.

* An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool.

** If there’s interest I could try turning all of this into a top level post on morewrite or techtakes. I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.

Heck yeah walkability!

Also note how the author said the city transcends geography, as if geography was something useless or to be overcome by an advanced civilization (except for a bunch of artsy folks tucked away in a corner I guess?). But humans need variety. I would get so antsy if I lived in a perfect grid city with nothing out of order (or even a perfect hexagon city, no offense hexagons). There need to be paths and trails and rivers. There need to be trees and mountains in the distance.

Stop stop I can only update my priors so fast!

Aaaah my eyes

The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.

This future doesn’t have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.

I don’t remember (reading it was a bit like a fever dream) but there’s a non-zero chance it has racist vibes in parts you have been warned.

But oh so quotable:

We have been treating the trees on a ten mile radius with an anti-flammatory solution for several years as well, and it is quite impossible to set them on fire.

Project Gutenberg has AI generated summaries?? How the mighty have fallen.

I was researching a bizarre old sci-fi book I once read (don’t judge; bad old sci-fi is a trip), and Gutenberg’s summary claims it was written in the 21st century. There’s actually no accurate information about this book online, as far as I can tell the earliest reference is Project Gutenberg typing it up into a text file in 2003.

Given that it’s in the public domain, no one has any idea where it came from, and it has old sci-fi vibes; I strongly suspect it was written in the 20th century*; making that misinformation. It’s also just a bad summary that, while not wrong, doesn’t really reflect the (amusingly weird) themes of the book.

Anyway someone needs to tell them that no information is leagues better than misinformation.

* maybe the '70s give or take but I’m not a professional date guesser

Oh no it’s more US politics.

So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it’s the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA’s email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.

Now that there is a good maze!

I don’t think so, it looks pretty darn cool though. I’ve definitely seen mazes with those sorts of ideas, but I don’t remember in what books.

OK I lied I need to say more

I had transferred from a private school to a public elementary school which was way behind in my math education and for some reason no one thought to put me in a better math class. During this time my dad gave me Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure.

This was a textbook with a lot of illustrations and little cartoon characters discussing the fourier waves overly enthusiastically. It was put out by a weird Japanese school (“The transnational college of LEX” – I’m still not 100% convinced they’re not some math and language cult or something).

Despite being about the fourier transform it assumed no knowledge from the reader besides basic arithmetic; and so covered trigonometry and calculus concepts where needed.

So despite only vaguely understanding a lot of the concepts in the book, it really set me up well for calculus class (when I finally got to that years later), and is probably the only reason I was good at math through university. That weird little math book that no one has heard of but I was obsessed with.

Sure is weird how all the people distrustful of ideologies have an ideology.

I read this and immediately typed out a lesswrong length blog post about all the books I’ve read without thinking, but that might be a bit much so I’ll only focus on “one”:

Maze books and puzzle books. I was obsessed with mazes as a kid. Hedge mazes, mazes with twisty staircases, mazes with tunnels and shortcuts, mazes with monsters, mazes with puzzles. There is (almost) no such thing as a bad maze book! My friend and I would always check out maze books from the library and solve mazes together. One of the earlier puzzle books I read had some absolutely stupid stuff in it like a guy saying “I need some HJKLMNO” with the answer being he’s thirsty and needs H2O. There were also a bunch of puzzle books I can’t remember with these really great settings like exploring another world or stuff like that. Also I know it’s not a maze book or a puzzle book but mentally Dinotopia fits in this category for me and that book was the bee’s knees.

you can’t invent new pieces during the game

Yeah. That’s what my (chess) captain keeps telling me.

Well I can’t translate it but if you search for it… holy smokes are search engines amusingly bad at indexing federated content.

That random other Lemmy instance is actually doing the right thing here since it includes the right link rel canonical, so I guess Google just hasn’t caught up yet or something. I have no idea why Google chopped off the last byte of the IP address.

(Reposting from the last thread)

Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment

P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.

Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment.

Nights into Dreams. I’d have dreams about that game as a kid.

Yeah production of consumer writeable CDs / DVDs / BDs has basically stopped already. The end is in sight.

Also I’m not sure how much of a problem this is for newer CD drives, but older ones tend to give out sooner or later.

My Sega Saturn*'s drive still works, but I also installed a Satiator** drive emulator in case that changes.

* ^{My username is serious business after all}

** ^{Had to go with this option since it’s the only non-destructive one}