Hard Pass

“We will not let authoritarians dictate how we legislate in this state,” Jaelynn Scott said.

The deal that Donald Trump signed at Versailles in June set an ambitious 60-day deadline for ending the war with Iran and reaching an accord on its nuclear program.

The deadline was Monday, and the two sides are further apart than they were then.

Talks, such as they are, have focused on reopening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting a U.S. blockade on Iran, both of which were supposed to have happened under the interim deal. There has been no sign of any compromise on the strait, or that detailed nuclear talks have even begun.

The U.S., meanwhile, has no good options for getting out of the war it started alongside Israel.

This website made me reconsider if 99.9999% SLA and always online is really that important for lots of websites. I used to self-host my own server in my own apartment, but gave up on that after my internet provider had their first major outage that lasted almost a week. Also I didn't want to worry about the fire hazard, or the server going down when I was traveling etc.

But a solar powered server seems interesting, if the batteries could be made fire safe.

The mouse did not survive interrogation.

Also mouse not pictured.

The symbol for Amazon's VGT3, the Las Vegas facility where it scans book for AI training data.

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.

“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.

The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.

In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”

📖 Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.

These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.

In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order. 404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.

Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday said the Department of Justice believes Congress has already granted President Trump the authority to construct the White House ballroom under existing presidential authority.

“We don’t believe we have to go to Congress. We believe Congress has already given us the authority to do what we’re doing,” Blanche said during a Sunday appearance on Fox News’s “Fox News Sunday.”

“Many presidents have done a tremendous amount of work to the White House, as they should, and Congress has authorized them to do so,” he added in discussion with anchor Shannon Bream, a lawyer criticized by Trump after the interview aired.

Bream asked Blanche why he wouldn’t go to Congress for approval on the reported $900-million project if he believes they’ve already been granted the authority to complete construction on the White House campus.

An appeals court has ordered the administration to stop all work on the project by Aug. 21 unless the Supreme Court steps in to approve the overhaul.

“We’re hopeful that the Supreme Court recognizes that so we can get the ballroom finished as soon as possible. Remember, yes, it is a ballroom, but it’s also a meaningful upgrade and necessary part of the security of this city and the security of the president and his family,” Blanche said Sunday.

Customs and Border Protection awarded contracts today to four companies to collect immigration fines from people the United States has deported, ending a competition that closed earlier this month after an unusually brief bidding period.

Each contract is capped at $9 million and was issued by the same contracting office. The winners are Global Recovery Group, Caduceus, Response AI Solutions and the Baptiste Group.

The agency wants contractors to travel to homes in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala, confirm that a deported person lives there and get that person to photograph their own face as proof that a fine notice was delivered, according to solicitation documents reported this month by Project Salt Box. The agency told bidders it had not identified a way for people without a U.S. bank account to pay what they owe, and said the winning contractor would have to propose a solution.