/reader

That feels apt, as I find myself swiping at lots of little data gnats swarming in my email, message, and notification inboxes.

No wondering they call it “fly”ing 🥁

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My friend Francis couldn’t play the piano, couldn’t or simply wouldn’t, wouldn’t or just wasn’t, and whatever the reason was I didn’t like the sound of it, so we made a bargain: if he could not play for himself, I would call him every morning and he would play the piano for me. It would be my job to listen and his job to play, a mutual task, as I needed obligations, and he needed to leave his mind and return to his hands… Each of my calls with Francis began the same way—brief hellos, how are you feeling, then one of us would ask the other whether they were ready, and the reply was always the same. We were always ready. I had pictured myself writing as Francis played scales or practiced songs, but for the first few days his hands hardly remembered the keys, and I had nothing to work on, no thoughts worth keeping, hardly any thoughts at all. He played slowly, sometimes with a metronome, shards of chords or songs in parts for no more than a few minutes, but after a week he began, as if by some miracle, to sing, and I muted myself and folded onto the floor to cry, not for him and not for myself and not for anything other than the fact that any pattern can be broken, that there is no end of patterns breaking down. Weeks went by and months went by, and I called him from different cities, different rooms, and over time he could play a little longer, a little freer, songs he knew by heart and songs he was still trying to write. It was as easy as it was unusual, this distant company, this regular puncturing of our tendencies toward solitude and shut doors…

But then I thought of the mornings when Francis fumbled a note or fell short of his falsetto and how he used to shyly apologize, and how over time he stopped saying he was sorry and simply continued, allowing the errors to live.

— Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 17, 2025)

Notes:

• Image Credit: Catherine Lacey and the cover to her book “The Möbius Book.” (Granta Publications/Willy Somma)
• NY Times Book Review: June 15, 2025 – A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book” is both an elliptical novella and a seething memoir. Decoding the connections is at once frustrating and exhilarating.

…the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library.

This strikes me as a defensible conclusion. As I’ve written before on AI training, the invention of LLMs may require updating copyright law. But for now we have to work with what we’ve got. There are some similar themes in the text of the judge’s ruling and in my own blog post linked here about C-3PO. This ruling is much more comprehensive, though, starting to narrow in on a path forward.

In a nutshell, the judge says that legally purchased books can be used to train AI, as long as the models do not reproduce verbatim the original copyrighted works. Pirated books, of course, are a separate issue. They are unlawfully acquired! We can’t steal a book from a store, regardless of what we planned to do with it.

Crawling the web is also a unique problem that is out of scope for this decision. If someone writes on the web and makes that web page freely available, hoping that people will read it, downloading that web page is not the same thing as pirating a book. It’s a gray area in copyright that could be made clear if everyone used something like the proposed no-training Creative Commons license.

People who are deeply concerned that all AI training is theft will likely be disappointed with this decision. But the issue is so complicated, it makes sense that there will be layers to it. Some actions are theft, such as pirating books. Other actions to train AI may be fine, such as purchasing books or licensing web content that has been otherwise excluded from training. I guess the courts will continue to sort out the less obvious questions in the middle.

.site-title {
  background: linear-gradient(to right, #ef5350, #f48fb1, #7e57c2, #2196f3, #26c6da, #43a047, #eeff41, #f9a825, #ff5722);
  -webkit-background-clip: text;
  -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;
}

Update: Here’s a way to add a colorful border to your avatar too. Totally unnecessary, of course — you’re already stunning! But if you want to, here you go:

.u-photo {
  height: 45px;
  width: 45px;
  border-radius: 50%;
  border: 3px solid #0000;
  background: linear-gradient(to right, #ef5350 0%, #f9a825 25%, #43a047 50%, #26c6da 75%, #2196f3 100%) border-box;
  background-clip: border-area;
  -webkit-background-clip: border-area;
}

Check out my blog for a fabulous example.

“Google essentially invented the business of crawling in exchange for monetizable traffic a generation ago with Adwords,” writes Fred. “It remains the source of its dominance today. And it has been an essential fuel for the growth of the $16 trillion global internet economy.“

The writing’s been on the wall since ChatGPT launched, but nobody wanted to read it. We’re watching the great traffic heist in real-time. “Not only are more and more searches going through AI chatbots that generate zero traffic for publishers,” Fred writes, “Google itself is now sending publishers less traffic. Instead, Google is increasingly choosing to use its own AI product Gemini to respond to queries as a way of competing with the chatbots.” 

In other words, AI chatbots are swallowing searches whole, while Google is playing both sides with Gemini. Don’t ignore the fact that this is a big challenge to how Google makes money. But it has deep pockets. Established media is living on fumes. One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity. 

Tollbit is the first to capitalize on this. But as Fred points out, Cloudflare and Matthew Prince are cooking up something new and will give @TollbitOfficial some competition and a boost.

I have been talking about this for a very long time, but the establishment media is always the last to realize their own existential threats. Just as they were slow to recognize the emergence of blogs, social media, and how Facebook was a chimera, they have been slow to realize that the old “destination internet” as a behavioral construct is over.

The addiction to traffic and impressions-based advertising has been an Achilles’ heel of the media establishment. It is hard for them to look at the world through the lens of engagement. The rise of “chat-based” informational interfaces is yet another victory for engagement-trumps-all doctrine. 

To get a better understanding of this, feel free to dig into the archives of our CrazyStupidTech newsletter. If you like what you read, please subscribe. It is free. But before you do all that, read Fred’s piece. It is very good.

“You have to dare, and you have to fail, and you have to make a fool of yourself, and you have to do terrible things to do good things.”

It’s easy to forget this when we look at people who’ve succeeded in one way or another. It’s rarely instant success from the start. More often, it’s a long trail of failures and wrong turns that eventually leads to something that works.

Those “terrible things” he mentioned? They could be anything from embarrassing mistakes to pursuing dead-end ideas. It’s all part of the necessary learning process.

The road to success

The goal is just one part of the journey. If we want to get from point A to point B, we have to go through the whole trip. It doesn’t matter if we’re holding a first-class ticket with a luxury hotel waiting, we still have to board the plane.

We can’t just sit still and try to plan every little detail. Or, well… we can. But it won’t take us anywhere. It’s like sitting in a rocking chair: it keeps us moving, but we’re not actually getting anywhere.

The road towards the goal is the real teacher. Only when we let go and throw ourselves out there are we truly on the right track, however long or winding it may be. There are no shortcuts.

We can sit on a hundred blog post drafts, but it’s only when we hit “publish” that we start to understand what it’s really about. What our role is, where we can contribute, and how to actually do it.

True success is daring to fail.

Ik abonneer me op het kanaal van Public Spaces, om de video’s vanuit mijn feedreader te bekijken. Dat gaat helaas niet zonder slag of stoot. Ik heb een korte video opgenomen om je te laten zien wat er gebeurt in de RSS feed van Peertube

Ja, de ironie ontgaat me niet dat deze video niet op Peertube zelf staat, maar bij een partij in de Verenigde Staten. Alle overstap is moeilijk! Ik ben blij met Peertube, ik gebruik het eerlijk gezegd nog té weinig en ik acht de kans niet heel groot dat ze Youtube zullen overschaduwen. Als ze het voor elkaar krijgen om de RSS feeds ook net iets toegankelijker te maken, dan hebben we wel weer een kleine stap gezet!