Good morning good morning. How are you? Bit overwhelmed over here this morning. Real assaultive wake-up. Jane jumping on me, yelling “you stink! brush your teeth,” work fire drills at both jobs blowing up the phone. Give a man a second to feel his hangover headache first, woncha?

But we carry on, we carry on. Breakfast has been had, teeth have been brushed, much caffeine has been consumed. Business dashboards have been checked. I am ready to face the day. At the bright and early 11AM.

Lovely night last night, got to go visit Abby’s restaurant, the lauded Urban Hearth, in its beautiful new location. She pulled the surprise and delight on me and had some High Life ponys in a champagne bucket after i had two of their delicious cocktails and needed to slow down. Scrumptious. Gorgeous. And once she changed the music to Italian Disco, lol, basically perfect.

So was seeing old friends, man, friends are just great. Friends rule. Yay friends. Except when you start companies with them and you suddenly have to talk about payrolls and pipelines instead of gossip and goth. Still friends but boy everything is so much more serious all the time.

When we were leaving Urban Hearth to ill-advisedly proceed to a second location, a friend (who shall remain nameless in order to protect her reputation) pulled out a pack of cloves and OH MY GOD. CLOVES. Some readers may recall we had a brief clove discussion a month or two ago. They are now illegal in the US. Mostly. She gets them from under the counter at a certain tobacco shop.

Reader, I confess I took a drag. The smoke sucked. But the taste on the lips? My god, my god. Every goth girl I ever kissed passed through my mind. What a rush. What a world.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

We’re listening to the new Charli XCX this morning. I was trying to hold out till I got my super deluxe vinyl version delivered but I suspect it’ll be months before that arrives and I’m not home yet anyway. I am enjoying the album. It is something different. It has all the feels. 2007 was a great year for me. Rock music. Rick music. All the feels all the feels.

That video for “Camera” has really stuck with me. And the lyrics. Being in front of a camera is not the only way I feel like I’m really being me — writing is — but I certainly understand the sentiment. Now you gotta wonder if for the rest of her life the people hanging out while she’s in front of the camera are going to think about this song. Probably, I suppose. Meta photo shoot. Meta living. Keeps things interesting. What else can we do in these trying times.

Was talking to Ivel last night and she asked how I was and I explained my new 750 words journaling system. I have added category prompts to Sen Fitty: Health, Job 1, Job 2, Brain, Chore House, Daughter, Wife, Politics, Other. I write a hundred-ish words for each one of them. I’ve been doing it for about a month. I am finding that the more structured journaling system is working well. And when Ivel asked the open-ended “how are you,” my brain approached the question in a totally different way than it used to. It also helps when my depression kicks in and my brain wants to spiral and convince myself my life is terrible but I’m like “no no no. You are only stressed or sad in 2 of 8 categories right now and you gotta admit that is pretty fuckin good,” which is also how I found myself thinking about it when faced the question. Very useful. I like it.

Maybe this is what people talk about it when they use that weird journaling method that involves grids or something? I never really understood that.

I wrote a very long thread on Threads (lol) yesterday about the new approach of AI companies to buy, scan, train upon, and pulp thousands of used books. I have many thoughts, many thoughts. I really wanted to save it for you guys, but I could not contain myself. Thus, for the first time ever, I am going to steal content for GMHHAY from elsewhere in my life. I feel dirty. But it’s worth it I think. And so:

(Thread One)

The thing about AI companies pulping books is a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, it's true there are millions of unwanted books and, MOST OF THE TIME, it is fine to pulp extra copies of books no one wants.

But the problem is the outliers. I know this from firsthand experience. After setting out to track down every ad economics book ever published, I learned this. There were SEVERAL books where only a single copy of one of these books was available for purchase

Sometimes — but not always! — additional copies of the books existed in libraries. But I am not a formal academic. It is very hard to obtain most of these copies. And, again, oftentimes, there wasn't even a copy in the library.

These books were often published versions of doctoral theses, or economic tracts that were not necessarily "disproven" but, let's say currently out-of-favor. So on the one hand you might think "that's fine, the information is obsolete in those books."

But that is absolutely not the case! The most obvious example is if you are trying to write a piece regarding the "history of thought" of a subject. If I could not get that Janet Yellen or Joan Robinson or early Edward Hastings Chamberlain book, I would lose valuable information and insight into the evolution of both their thinking and the entire field.

Also! Very frequently, these "obsolete" books would contain some predictive nugget that, for example, didn't feel true through the entire television era but now seemed eerily prescient in the internet era.

Again, amongst a batch of books that Anthropic pulps, these gems would be maybe 1 book in... I don't know! A million? A thousand? A hundred? Ten? Does anyone know? CAN we know? The whole point is the undiscovered!

And now you could argue that "well the whole point is that these books are now available to everyone" and fair point — It was deeply unpleasant spending $300 to purchase the single copy of some obscure Doctoral Thesis.

But now that single copy is in the hands of a for-profit, gate-keeping company: one using an opaque methodology to put itself between the text and the writer. And that sucks

The world desperately needs a better way to search the contents of old books: I was a big fan of Google Books and wish it had gotten to see its full potential. I also firmly believe LLMs would be vastly better if they were trained on books instead of the garbage of the internet. But the pulping is concerning and author compensation questions are real.

(Thread Two)

OMG I have so much more to say on this topic. Slow work day. Gonna keep going. Thrice in my life I have discovered the existence of a book of major importance to my family, where only 1-2 copies were available anywhere: library or bookstore, worldwide.

One was an Anthology of the Saturday Evening Post, where my mom's dad had two pieces, One was a research report about a government program my dad's dad ran. One was a small-press-printed autobiography of a distant relative.

How many people in America have this situation with at least one book? Do we even know? Do you know? How would you feel discovering your great grandma wrote an autobiography, printed 20 copies, and Anthropic pulped the last known copy?

I know these things are "edge cases" but those edge cases contain human knowledge!

And defenders say "well these companies are making this publicly available to everyone" but.... are they? Do we know that? Can you actually read the whole text? Because you certainly can't right now with LLMs.

f they are, great! I absolutely support the digitization, preservation, and distribution of the EXACT FULL TEXTS, fully readable. It would be ideal if you did that without killing the physical book, and it would be ideal that any profit did not accrue solely to a single large company. But yes this is a worthwhile goal.

But it is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT THING if they wanna pulp the last copy of my great grandma's book to teach a robot to talk and never let me READ THE BOOK.

Don't get me started on the poor historians of book binding.

And I know, I know, millions of books get pulped every year. BUT I also know there is a hardened, robust, incredibly talented world of used book purveyors — from small shops to warehouse operations — who preserve millions more. These are the people who's stock the AI companies are depleting.

And these people aren't (usually) keeping random books! They are smart! They are sophisticated! They will keep a book that is rare even if obscure. If they see a book is not for sale anywhere else on the web, they don't pulp it. They jack the price up, sure, but they preserve it. This is very very obvious by looking at Amazon's pricing system.

The ones THEY pulp are excess copies of books with hundreds or thousands of copies sitting around. They pay attention to each book. Will the AI companies do the same thing?

The end

Jane just drew me the best picture. Was it a “chore” for her to do so in order she could use iPad? Yes, yes. But it was worth it and the originality was solid. I am pleased. It’s pretty awesome isn’t it? Now she’s on the iPad and it will probably ruin her for the rest of the day. I am such a terrible summertime parent.

Got justa mix for you today. All new stuff. Excited about the (sadly short) new Fiona Apple. There is new Jesus Jones, weird. Kinda boring? But fine? Will wait for the album. Love the new Will Shef, new Snow Patrol sounds exactly like Snow Patrol but i am okay with that. Promising. New Mike Posner is confusing that guy is such a fascinating character. I will always have time for his spiritual journey.

All right. I got a lot to do today. Best get to it. Talk to you Monday! Have a lovely weekend!