Hello everyone. This issue is late and I am sorry. I had to go out of town, and I did not send a separate email about the delay because I did not want to send you one more email. Some of you wrote to me while I was away and I could not answer, but I am planning answering all of them today. Sorry for the wait.
It was worth the wait. A court finally made Meta pay for what it did to children. Someone is quietly buying up all the old books in the world, cutting them into loose pages and then destroying them. Every river on earth follows the same formula on its way to the sea. Claude was told to keep going and moved a 167-year-old problem forward. A museum shaped like a whale is going up in Norway, and there is a man whose hat grows as his ego grows.
I am Ali, and every week I read a lot and keep only what is worth your few minutes. This letter gets written because some of you pay for it, and I am grateful to all of you. If you do not want to use Substack, you can support it on Patreon.
🔢 This week I put together a list of the words you can spell with a calculator on Abakcus. Exactly 355 of them. Back when I was a student, this was one of our greatest amusements in Calculus class. You can find the whole list here.
🖼️ Robert Mangold’s Double Square Frame artwork made me look. In both prints, made in 2015, there is really only one line. It crosses over itself, draws a figure eight, and ties the two loops together. In the yellow one the loops are round and the openings inside them are square. In the red one it is the other way round, the ground is split into two flat panels and the openings are circles.
🌊 There is a mathematical fact about every river on earth, spotted back in 1957, and it is a beautiful example of how carefully the divine power behind nature thought through every detail. A raindrop landing on the ground has countless routes to the sea ahead of it, and the one it chooses is always the route that costs the least friction and the least energy. Water finds its way, as the saying goes, and it turns out the way it finds is always the most efficient one. As for the mathematics, the length of a stream is proportional to the area of the basin feeding it, raised to the power of 0.6. Where that ratio does not hold, flowing water grinds away at the rock, the wasteful channels erode and vanish, and what remains is the efficient path and the ratio above.
I have shared River Runner here before. You pick your house, or any point you like, on the map, and then you follow a single drop of water all the way down to the sea with a smile on your face.
📚Interesting things keep happening in the world. When an incredible rise in book sales was seen lately at second-hand bookshops all around the world, the people who looked into the reason ran into a frightening fact. Since 2022, the artificial intelligence content that has turned the internet into garbage has become a problem for the models themselves. The performance of models fed with texts that artificial intelligence produced earlier naturally goes down, and their errors go up. This even has a name, model collapse. Like the snake that eats its own tail. That is why companies are quietly buying books printed before 2022 from second-hand bookshops anywhere in the world, through front companies. Physical books printed before the age of the LLM are the cleanest, the most orderly and the most reliable source of knowledge, not polluted and not poisoned by artificial intelligence. They immediately take the books they buy apart into pages, scan them one after another, and then destroy them.
✍️ Anthropic, meanwhile, agreed to pay 1.5 billion dollars to more than 300,000 authors whose books it used without permission.
🏴☠️ Meta did not even bother buying books, it torrented 81.7 terabytes straight out of pirate archives. Somehow nothing has happened to them. The law is a spider’s web, flies get stuck, birds tear straight through.
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