I get the love of physical books and understand it. But I’d rather poor people get the very latest electronically by pirating it via Annas Archive or the like rather than get a substandard education by reading out of date textbooks. In fact, when I was in college, I pirated textbooks I had paper copies of simply because I was tired of lugging around all that weight.

Can’t say I’ve done that. Went to Boston for a work trip, spent the weekend exploring. Nice city, I can see the charm and why people would want to live there. But it also wasn’t a place I’d want to live in.

Not to defend the AI crowd, but ever go to a Goodwill Outlet store? They usually have at least 1 gaylord box (the giant box on a pallet watermelons come in) full of books. Not sure how often they cycle those out, but I’m guessing pretty regularly. Multiply that by every semi major city Goodwill has a presence in. Add in other thrift sores with a similar quantity of books. You’re talking ALOT of books. SO MANY books are thrown out everyday. Including by libraries. I don’t really have a problem if some of those get diverted for a bit to be scanned. Yes, it’s sad to see books getting destroyed. But there’s alot of stuff people just really don’t want. And, if you REALLY want a villain, maybe you can blame copyright law? That’s part of the reason AI companies destroy the books - it helps to make their scanning efforts more legal. Absent that, they could probably be convinced to spend just a little more for nondestructive scanning, assuming they could find a home for the books they scanned (the sellers of these things couldn’t, so good luck).

And it gets even stranger. Apparently, the app is loading JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub site for YouTube embeds. Yes, you read that right, it’s just loading JavaScript from a random GitHub site. So if that account ever gets compromised, arbitrary code could run inside the app’s WebView.

Somebody has the opportunity to do the most hilarious thing.