From the website of the company that’s destroying books to feed them into the ravenous AI maw.

[geoffberner@zeroes.ca]

@allpoints @overholt "Aw damn, looks like someone migrated the value of my bike!"

[nedhamson1@mastodon.social]

@overholt forget rare historical books, scrolls, tablets … not!

[june@mspsocial.net]

@overholt these people are so detached from reality.

[stevenheywood@mastodonapp.uk]

@overholt
The CEO of an AI company is merely a delivery system for genetic coding. Once the genetic coding has been transferred from the CEO's genome to a digital repository the delivery system has done its job. The CEO has not been butchered in an abattoir, their value has migrated. The body goes back into the material cycle, the genetic information into the intellectual one.

[europlus@social.europlus.zone]

@overholt what soulless ghouls.

[sharpcheddargoblin@reclusive.blog]

@overholt These fuckers need to be strung up and prevented from damaging another human pursuit ever again.

[glassresistor@sfba.social]

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @overholt oh we know

they copy the isbn and metadata
save each scan in some datalake
ocr each scan into another datalake
associate metadata in db with artifacts in lake
sucked into a model
each retraining can reuse as needed

no way they delete the artifacts but also no way they would share

[rothko@beige.party]

@overholt "its value has migrated." but BOOK WAS NOT VALUED.

i'll take my golden egg now, thank you.

[wesdym@mastodon.social]

@overholt
These fools have never seen the original 'Rollerball'. They should.

[linguistory@code4lib.social]

@jessamyn @overholt I think that sometime in the 2010s they shifted to sending a lot of books to China and the Philippines for scanning.

I'm going off of this DH project, which looked at the metadata attached to scanned IA items in addition to talking to scanning staff: https://scanninglabor.github.io/IAScanningLabor/discussion.html

I saw these folks present at a conference, and recall them saying the books were being destroyed rather than sent back across the Pacific—but can't find confirmation

[wesdym@mastodon.social]

@overholt They're just very foolish people. They think we're living in the Star Trek age, which is set three centuries from now.

[jessamyn@glammr.us]

@linguistory @overholt Thanks -- it's entirely possible I am not correct about that

[wesdym@mastodon.social]

@overholt It would be difficult for them to be more wrong about this. But it sounds like they might be too stupid to ever understand any better.

[c0dec0dec0de@hachyderm.io]

@drwho @Remittancegirl @kimlockhartga @overholt you know what I say to that? “Arrrrr you serious?”

[lydialurch@mastodon.social]

@overholt That’s some cold shit right there.

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@c0dec0dec0de @Remittancegirl @kimlockhartga @overholt Back up fully and often.

[libroraptor@mastodon.nz]

@overholt They don't believe in the information that isn't in the print. Their awareness of "bibliography" goes no further than "list of works cited". They probably use APA style and think that it's the best.

Much of this applies to a vast number librarians outside the special collections, too.

And unfortunately even to a fair few within special collections.

I once flew to another country to see a book. The desk assistant brought it out to me, and at first glance it was obviously a different copy. I told the assistant this, and she was mystified. How could I be so sure so soon? Because it had a bookplate postdating the person whose traces I was hoping to find. He'd borrowed it repeatedly over several years, keeping it for months each time. I knew when because he was a hoarder and I'd see his borrowing slips, on the back of which he wrote brief reviews of every book documented.

There was evidence in the card catalogue that the copy I wanted had been thrown away because this one was in better condition. So I wasted a flight, accommodation, taxi fares, restaurant food, and several days because someone had not valued the non-print information that I wanted and not bothered to document that in the on-line catalogue in one of those projects where someone says "Let's make the card catalogue digital" and then runs out of resource between making stub entries and filling in the finer details.

[misty@digipres.club]

@overholt Also striking me that that the paragraph itself is almost certainly AI generated. It’s exactly the set of cliches they’re biased towards.

[jigmedatse@social.openpsychology.net]

@rothko@beige.party @overholt@glammr.us The "information" in the literal text, isn't the only information contained even in a brand new book. Even from that perspective, the scanning, and destroying the book, is destroying information. No idea what titles this involved, because it might change my mind. I own books that I'd be willing to throw in the fire. Not as a "book burning, censorship" thing. But as in, "this book was so bad, but at least it can keep me warm." Personal judgement, nothing more.

[libroraptor@mastodon.nz]

@ManWhoTalksToHisHand @McCrankyface @janeishly @overholt doesn't even understand maths – one of the celebrated stories in natural statistical distributions is all about the dirt marks left by fingers in the numerical tables