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First, most of these books are old and plentiful, not rare at all. Think "Master Windows Exxcel '95!", not first editions of "Master and Margarita". Libraries routinely destroy plentiful old books that nobody is reading any more. Anything actually rare and valuable is too pricey to hand over.

Second, they HAVE to destroy the books because US copyright law REQUIRES it. They're only allowed to digitize the books if it's considered "transformation" and not "copying". That's only allowed if they destroy the book afterwards.


Sadly, they're just following in the footsteps of every large media/publishing/music conglomerate that already screwed over the vast majority of artists/musicians/writers. For every Taylor Swift striking it rich, there's 999,999 who can't even pay their bills with what their copyright gets them.

I don't always agree with Doctorow, but he's written a lot of good stuff on how stronger copyright won't help broke artists. Even just today, it turns out: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/#sign-here


It is not just about artists. It is about every kind of intellectual work: scientific research, essay, fiction, painting, software, etc - the list goes on..

Nobody normal talks like this.

There's no non-douchey reason anyone tries to take a general statement about slavery, and brings up curated facts designed to allow you to trash talk whichever region and people you were queuing up.


But that's not actually guaranteed at all.

You "accumulate" an answer one item at a time, but there's no guarantee any dimensions are getting reduced.

You can easily duplicate the effects of map with reduce, for example, so the dims would stay the same. You could even expand dimensions, if you like, turning a 1-d array with n elements into an s X t 2-d array. If the reducing function tracks the total number of elements seen, it can easily know when to start a new row.

This is part of why people keep pointing out the name, "reduce", is a bit misleading.


His name was Milton.

You're right. My bad. Shit.

In Kanye's case, I think:

1. He should probably go back on his bipolar medication, even if he feels less creative on it. 2. Paying for the surgery his mother died during really messed up his head. Partly because he probably blames himself, partly because she was one of the few stabilizing influences in his life. He really started going downhill after.

He might have always been impulsive-grandstanding-interrupt-Taylor-Swift Kanye, but it's conceivable he wouldn't have morphed into slavery-is-a-state-of-mind-"i-love-hitler"-antisemitic Kanye.

Sigh. "I miss the old Kanye." Time to give 808s and Heartbreak a re-listen.


Regulations maybe, but CEO expectations? Doesn't seem to be happening.

Shopify's CEO was in the news just recently for arguing that rich people should be able to cast more votes. That's the most naked anti-democracy stance I've heard in ages.

(And this is before we get into funding "deport-the-foreigners-and-minorities" DHH's Omarchy.)


Because they're not paying only for Wordpress-the-software, they're paying for scalability, maintenance, etc. $100k/mo is probably cheaper than a team of high-end WP experts.

Same reason a ton of us pay for AWS/GCloud/Azure instead of dealing with bare metal. (And I say this as someone running an edge fleet. If I didn't need to, I wouldn't.)


Except they didn't actually solve it, they just suggested it was a book cipher, which was a known strategy.

Yes, imagine it's a book cipher and then you hand it to a tool which famously has had every book in existence cleaved apart and fed into it.

The number of permutations you can try to decode a book cipher is near infinite. Just "a book cipher" does not tell you how the numbers map to words or characters in each book.

You just try creating random book ciphers and see whether an LLM would solve them without hints.


Apparently neither found it worth pursuing, and just phoned it in.

> “…leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.“


And it's not like it was a load of detail either, it's a comment on a blog 16 years ago.

You don't get points for throwing out a possibility for the type of cipher, you get points for solving it.


> where higher is better

Bit of a nit, but can you add that as a note to the legends/graphs in the future? As a layperson, it helps us to orient to graphs with unknown metrics.

Thanks for the article, btw!


Will do going forward, thanks for the feedback!

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