Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today)
Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing.
The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.
The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'
Knowing and enacting are two distinct things, "you should do what I want you to do" means you're already doing the wrong thing, and yes, there is an agreement on what the right thing is, its what is ethical, that is, what non profits and archivists are forced to do.
I can’t believe that in the multipolar world of 2026, where hundreds of conflicting world views coexist, where universalism is being disproven on a daily basis, it’s still possible to read things like “there is agreement on what the right thing is”.
This is as blatantly false as claiming that the Earth is flat, and the fact that there is no such agreement (descriptive moral relativism) has been firmly established in philosophy for well over a century.
If you think ethical arguments like "murder is bad" or "human knowledge should be preserved" and a demonstrable falsity like "the earth is flat" are equivalent arguments then you are so far gone you might as well be a flat earther.
Blind futurists and AI cheerleaders scare me on how cavalier and how many crimes against humanity they ignore.
> The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today
If I may be flippant, not to you but to the sentiment, skill issue.
We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.
And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era?
What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time?
What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?
Or, heck just the alpha from a hedge fund point of view of finding old climate patterns and... :)
Your ability to make the most of knowledge is only limited by your imagination.
> Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
> The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
"No-kill shelters" are very rare and very controversial (thanks to PETA); most still have to kill by law (overpopulation), and they instead tend to focus on not taking in more than they can handle. They are very controversial because they are more of a "moral" than a "practical" solution to animal overpopulation. They try their best to let animals have their "normal natural life to the end". They are just more focused on the animals' well-being, kind of like a library for books, but they still have to kill if they overpopulate.
The main article is written like it is the "end of the world", just like your random rambling about "climate instability" is just the natural course Earth has been on for its existence, with melting ice.
Random article about powder and stone, completely irrelevant.
The old book mentioned was just a farmer's book; you can find all this history in the area's historical records.
"Skill issue." How old are you? I think it would help you more if you contacted a shelter and talked about what they really do.
Better sources than Wikipedia that explain what they do; it is, of course, different from shelter to shelter, but euthanising due to overpopulation is still part of it. (Like too many books in a library, they need to make room for other books that people want, if it just end up roting on the shelf and nobody loans it over years, either destruction or storage, most don't have space for storage)
Because destroying the book makes it possibly inaccessible permanently because we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.
If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up. Hopefully someone will at least be able to purchase their digital scan and hopefully the scan is of decent quality and clearly indicates the provenance of the text.
> we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.
Books are considered super high quality training data. Anthropic has no reason to get rid of this data that 1. They’ve spent a ton of money on and 2. Will remain useful indefinitely for training LLMs.
> If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up.
The same applies for a digital scan? The information isn’t any more likely to be lost.
Yesterday you could have purchased one of these books and read it. Good luck doing so today.
I don't know why you're so quick to assume this will all just "work out" such that the scans are ultimately accessible. Arguably the most likely scenarios are either Anthropic survives and holds them away in perpetuity or Anthropic fails and they are sold off to the highest bidder who does the same.
I don't think that changes the message at all. If a librarian doesn't like routine book destruction, they would still feel worse about this different thing that is happening.
Weeding (deselection works) is a fundamental part of collections management. Every trained librarian is going to understand this.
The interlibrary loan system has mechanisms in place to make sure the member libraries keep two copies of each work in each region. Collection managers consult these databases during weeding to make sure they don't deaccession the last copy.
If the monograph was never collected by a library and it gets caught up in a destructive scanning project then I guess it was pretty "rare" in a literal sense. "Rare Book" in library land is sort of a term of art and I'm not sure if the books in these destructive scanning projects meet the criteria.
I'm not a bsky person so I didn't click though but library books aren't "retired" to a farm upstate. My SO works at a library, they are mostly shredded. This is a nothingburger
Just go to a local library and ask a librarian or anyone who has a lot of books and tries to give them away; sadly, in most cases, they pick the valuable ones, and the rest just get sent for destruction (Burning).
The difference everyone is missing, is that now there is commercial incentive to burn books aka destroy them after scanning. It's now a profitable business to do so, not something that only has to be done to clear up space
It is also not "tip" anymore, it is just "whatever pays the most" gets the service. It is just to maximise profit out of suckers, something US have perfected (from insurance to fast passes).
"in the US sense" being the key word. Hence my previous comment about people not reading...
None of the replies I got address the point. They are at best beside it, at worst they are misrepresentations and bare insults (guidelines, indeed!) for no apparent reason. Is it because "EU good, Trump bad"? I have no idea.
The restrictions on "free speech" that European countries implement, and which are increasing, would be unthinkable in the US because of their understanding of "free speech" and the legal protections in place.
>The restrictions on "free speech" that European countries implement, and which are increasing, would be unthinkable in the US
This is why you don't get a "serious" reply. You think too highly of US free speech, and it does not have a foot in reality, and you use "US good, Trump bad" crap when Trump is not even mentioned, it is more than you have a bias of "US good, EU bad".
>"in the US sense" being the key word
There is no difference; free speech is free speech. That is your core issue in the argument.
> The restrictions on "free speech" that European countries implement, and which are increasing, would be unthinkable in the US because of their understanding of "free speech" and the legal protections in place.
Concrete examples please.
Please also explain how examples differ fundamentally from limits on speech that have historically been and are currently imposed in the US.
Germany has a rich history, particularly in the gaming industry. Not the best example for "EU countries" since most of their censorship was blood and gore and anything related to Nazi symbolism, which was a plague of video games in the 1980s-2000s, since they were always the bad guys in video games, leading to heavy censorship in video games. In 2018, they lifted it significantly, and the list of censored or banned video games in Germany is relatively short.
Hate to say it mate, UK is already one of the worst offenders.
In their own "internet bubble," with curated Google searches that only present a very "Commonwealth countries bias" in search results. After I worked in the UK for a couple of years, I noticed there is a strong bias toward the same sites (Government and UK companies, especially biased toward "facts"). Second, you leave the UK. You will never get it. Try a VPN outside of the UK and search for the same stuff, you will notice it right away.
The UK have used the "think about the children" excuse for different stuff they don't like (Remember the Porn pass Idea? Where you had to go down to your local Tesco to get a "wanker pass" from the cashier.)
Same thing, now just for EU, and they use the "protect the children" excuse, but they have now started to aim at video game companies and others to "verify" age for the sake of "protecting the children". It is horrifying that they want to ID children in the excuse of their "safety". In a couple of years, they will likely offer free in-game currency to trick users into giving away their personal information.
Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.