Ah Gizmodo, always the paragon of good journalism. The person has explicitly asked her tweets not be used in external websites, and of course this zombie tabloid doesn't give a damn
just because something is public doesn't mean it should be shared with everyone, imagine you and your (ex: facebook group) have a nice spot near a public lake that you worked to clean up and even put a nice fireplace / furniture around it and then some tiktoker comes and says check out this amazing spot and now it's ruined.
Yes it's public, anyone outside the group can find and see it, but it's clearly meant to be enjoyed by the people who made it or/and happened to come across it by chance.
> imagine you and your (ex: facebook group) have a nice spot near a public lake that you worked to clean up and even put a nice fireplace / furniture around it and then some tiktoker comes and says check out this amazing spot and now it's ruined.
This happens all the time though, and it's expected it might happen when you do it.
I live nearby a couple of lakes within a nice little forest, me and some friends found a spot a couple of summers ago a bit out from the trails which we improved to have a fire pit, some log benches, built a mobile sauna, and left notes that its intended to be used publicly. We knew that at some point it'd be found, and potentially ruined. It kinda happened, someone broke the sauna, we didn't feel we were owed anything since we decided to make it public, we knew the dangers.
If I host an event at a public park and hang up a sign "no journalists allowed, no telling anyone about this event, it's our little secret" I don't think it's reasonable to expect that to be honored. I wouldn't be offended to see that reported in the local paper. Quite the opposite.
When you switch the topic to some analogy about a spot in meat space by some lake it derails the conversation as to whether your analogy is on point rather than the conversation topic.
Nah, I think the point is that if you do something deliberately in public, be it social media or something tangible in the real world, you relinquish control over its usage.
If you don’t like this, then you can either try to restrict things to an extent e.g. by obscurity, like posting a YouTube video as unlisted, or building your fireplace somewhere public but remote or hidden, or you keep things enforceably private, like a private online group, or building on someone’s land.
The person who has that setting is the user being quoted, not the top-level post; the bluesky is indeed blocking that post in question, so it isn't appearing on Gizmodo
The tag to not display on external websites is up to Bluesky to enforce. I mean, you understand those Bluesky chirps or whatever are literally being served by Bluesky, right?
I visited the local library (California foothills) during a “book sale”, and what didn’t sell was left out in boxes, either for cheap or free. What didn’t move was destined for the landfill. I was aghast, but without enough room to take in the strays. Real estate is unforgiving.
I am in favor of “little free libraries” [0] where books circulate freely, and if they aren’t returned, hopefully are read and not destroyed. They offer plans to build little libraries, and I hope to build some. “Owner” will have to build the supports, though.
A lot of the bad actors are scanning prices on them and selling them. Deface the title page and inside covers and they will be fine to read but worth almost nothing at sale. A stamp saying "Taken from the Little Free Library of X. Share and enjoy. Please report sellers." would do the job.
We have a small local company that takes bulk book (and cds, dvds, video games, vinyl records) donations. That company has couple of retail used bookstores and also sells both retail and wholesale online but, according to their owner, most of what they get is sold for pulp.
My wife is an elementary school reading teacher and runs a yearly family book night where she takes book donations she gets all year and fills a bunch of portable tables in the gym with kids (and adult) books that are free for the taking. What is left over is taken (by me) to that local company and dumped in huge bins. If you are looking to get rid of a bunch of books I'd also suggest contacting your local schools to see if they take donations.
These free book shelves are no substitute for a real library, are they? In my experience, the offering is really limited. It's nice for a random find, but that's all. It's tough that books get burned, but if nobody wants to read them, there's no alternative.
It takes the right sort of library owner to curate the library and a community amenable to helping out. My wife runs our library and one thing she does is pulls out some books when the library is flush and puts them back in when it’s a little dry. But she works in the book industry so she also has a source of high quality books and knowledge about them.
She’s specifically a children’s book person, so we made sure our library could fit kids books (picture books are big). But many of the kits won’t.
We also live in a walkable college town. There are 5 libraries within 4 blocks of ours. Our neighbors take it upon themselves to clean up and donate. We came back from our Christmas break to someone having installed a motion activated light in the library!
So under the right conditions they work. But you know what works better? Professional librarians, with appropriate resources and facilities. But in all cases, free libraries, public libraries, research libraries, etc. deaccessioning is required so sad for the op, we throw books away.
I had a lot of good books that I finished reading and wouldn't realistically touch again.
Whenever I went to browse for some books I would leave one of them in exchange. Over time, the quality went up because other people started doing the same.
To be honest, I did curate the available books at it as well.
Obvious crap (self-published conspiracy theory stuff) was thrown out. At some point you will also have to simple throw out some old ones if they never get taken. Space is limited and a 50 year old book that is collecting dust is not useful to anyone.
We have those around our town in a bunch of neighborhoods. Not sure on the usage rates, yet thought they were a pretty cool idea when I saw them, and they seem to always have books available (ie, not like they're just being taken and emptied)
The "magic" of why AI is trusted over humans is that so many humans are terrible at their jobs that people default to not trusting someone who is telling them something they don't want to hear.
The AI always tells them what they want to hear, and so they trust it. It's not magic.
Is there any empirical evidence that librarians are terrible at their jobs?
The reason is not the supposed fallibility of humans but rather the supposed infallibility of technology. Nontechnical people don't know how the technology works, don't know how the sausage is made, and they mistakenly assume it can't go wrong, just like a calculator can't go wrong.
Librarians do hide books. But not as a way of hiding from public but as a way of not throwing them away. Let me explain. Even though libraries are very big still they run out of space and regularly throw out (in India because most don't care) / ( or in Texas sell out books cheaply) and it pains the librarians deeply so they kind of stash books secretly from being thrown away. And if you really show interest in a particular book and request it nicely then the librarian will give it to you and tell you not to tell anyone. Why I know this because it happened to me in my college library in India. I can still after decades remember the love of books on that librarian's face
Almost every library regularly throws out books, and all librarians I know are happy with this. New books arrive regularly, and unless you plan on your library growing unlimited, you need to, in general, a 1 in 1 out policy.
Article is about a librarian in Virginia. OP is commenting about practice in India. Unless there is some secret code to global librarian conduct, chances are you're all correct.
Judging books by their unborrowedness is like judging a youtube video's educational content by its view count.
It's a bad reality created by the powers that be
Depending on goal of library and possible value of book this seems reasonable enough process. If you have library with goal of sharing popular enough content, keeping the popular books and removing truly unpopular that do not have significant value seems reasonable.
Unlike digital world where storage is cheap, in physical world it is limited. Thus focus on what the customers want is reasonable.
Archival libraries are different game. There keeping at least one copy is often reasonable.
You can find entertaining stuff there. My interests can be really niche. I remember once finding an amazing book in our college library from the sixties or seventies about the use of LSD in treating psychiatric disorders. While I didn't agree with all the suggestions in there, it was a fascinating time capsule (with colour illustrations, many of them by patients). With the microdosing debate, it's probably relevant again.
Yet when I took the book off the shelf it looked like no one had touched it in many years.
I once borrowed a book, to find a previous borrowers receipt in it, placed as a bookmark. Upon inspection it turned out that the previous borrower was myself(!) (I recognized the library card number), about ten years earlier.
So probably, no one had borrowed it in the time between. I was very happy the book had not been thrown out.
What you are saying is especially true for fiction, less so for nonfiction. Many nonfiction topics are important and require a large volume of materials to remain as reference. For example, you never know when it might be important to know how something was manufactured 50 years ago, or what happened in Congress 20 years ago, or what a newspaper reported a hundred years ago. This makes it really hard to judge which items could be culled. I'm inclined to agree that borrow rates are relevant but they are not the only thing that matters. The possibilities of digitization and interlibrary loan make culling less risky, but someone still has to decide to keep unpopular reference materials for them to remain available.
A library which was known for having a "last policy" system in place, should not have this difficulty. I would further argue that any library should be willing to accept a copy of any book which they do not have and safely store it until someone wishes to borrow it. I'm still salty that I had to buy a copy of Glenn Reid's _Thinking in PostScript_ when a local library discarded it from their stacks (there are other books which I would check out semi-regularly which have also been discarded which I also need to purchase, but missed seeing on their "discarded" table or at the annual library sale).
Yes, this would require better funding, and yes, I regularly donate to my local library every year.
Libraries are overwhelmed in their inability to store all the "good" books. I was cleaning out my book collection of, what I thought are really good books, but I came to the realization there is no space for them. So, they get sold or pulped.
Ah Gizmodo, always the paragon of good journalism. The person has explicitly asked her tweets not be used in external websites, and of course this zombie tabloid doesn't give a damn
It’s a request, and requests may be denied or ignored.
If they cared, they wouldn’t post publicly or the service would not allow that message to embedded.
An enforceable request is called a “demand”, and unless you’re actually capable of enforcing it, it is in fact still just a request.
It would have been polite to honor the request, but they are under no obligation to do so.
Don’t make public posts if you don’t want them publicly displayed.
To paraphrase, you're not wrong, you're just a jerk.
“Please don’t show people my public post” is an absurd request to make.
Why can the post even be embedded at all in this case? If Gizmodo was forced to screenshot it to circumvent that you might have a point.
just because something is public doesn't mean it should be shared with everyone, imagine you and your (ex: facebook group) have a nice spot near a public lake that you worked to clean up and even put a nice fireplace / furniture around it and then some tiktoker comes and says check out this amazing spot and now it's ruined.
Yes it's public, anyone outside the group can find and see it, but it's clearly meant to be enjoyed by the people who made it or/and happened to come across it by chance.
> imagine you and your (ex: facebook group) have a nice spot near a public lake that you worked to clean up and even put a nice fireplace / furniture around it and then some tiktoker comes and says check out this amazing spot and now it's ruined.
This happens all the time though, and it's expected it might happen when you do it.
I live nearby a couple of lakes within a nice little forest, me and some friends found a spot a couple of summers ago a bit out from the trails which we improved to have a fire pit, some log benches, built a mobile sauna, and left notes that its intended to be used publicly. We knew that at some point it'd be found, and potentially ruined. It kinda happened, someone broke the sauna, we didn't feel we were owed anything since we decided to make it public, we knew the dangers.
If I host an event at a public park and hang up a sign "no journalists allowed, no telling anyone about this event, it's our little secret" I don't think it's reasonable to expect that to be honored. I wouldn't be offended to see that reported in the local paper. Quite the opposite.
When you switch the topic to some analogy about a spot in meat space by some lake it derails the conversation as to whether your analogy is on point rather than the conversation topic.
These things happened, are notable, and even (or especially) embarrassing things should be remembered for history.
A compromise would be to have screenshotted and crossed out names.
Nah, I think the point is that if you do something deliberately in public, be it social media or something tangible in the real world, you relinquish control over its usage.
If you don’t like this, then you can either try to restrict things to an extent e.g. by obscurity, like posting a YouTube video as unlisted, or building your fireplace somewhere public but remote or hidden, or you keep things enforceably private, like a private online group, or building on someone’s land.
It’s public or it’s not public.
The person who has that setting is the user being quoted, not the top-level post; the bluesky is indeed blocking that post in question, so it isn't appearing on Gizmodo
See here :https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile...
The post they quoted is the one that's marked as "do not share".
Do not read this comment.
Wait...you're still reading, defying my T&Cs!
The tag to not display on external websites is up to Bluesky to enforce. I mean, you understand those Bluesky chirps or whatever are literally being served by Bluesky, right?
it is being 'enforced' by the bsky embed, the post not shown is the quoted one: https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile...
Ah this makes much more sense. So instead of it being a label on the embedded item, it's noting the one that's missing.
I visited the local library (California foothills) during a “book sale”, and what didn’t sell was left out in boxes, either for cheap or free. What didn’t move was destined for the landfill. I was aghast, but without enough room to take in the strays. Real estate is unforgiving.
I am in favor of “little free libraries” [0] where books circulate freely, and if they aren’t returned, hopefully are read and not destroyed. They offer plans to build little libraries, and I hope to build some. “Owner” will have to build the supports, though.
[0] https://littlefreelibrary.org/
My wife runs one locally. She's pretty happy with it, but I have to bite my tongue when talking about it with her.
People frequently take all the good books, all at once, and don't return them.
Someone just emptied out half of it yesterday, and I don't even think they were picky. They just took a whole shelf of books.
It's such a crappy thing to do, and there's nothing that can be done to stop the bad actors.
A lot of the bad actors are scanning prices on them and selling them. Deface the title page and inside covers and they will be fine to read but worth almost nothing at sale. A stamp saying "Taken from the Little Free Library of X. Share and enjoy. Please report sellers." would do the job.
Bad actors? Bad readers surely.
The trick is to plump up such a library with a few books no one will take. Cheap romances etc.
I hate to be cynical, but that's always been my first thought with those too, and that just sucks...
I really like devilbunny's idea of a cute little stamp though! It probably wouldn't stop very determined people, but would probably deter a lot.
We have a small local company that takes bulk book (and cds, dvds, video games, vinyl records) donations. That company has couple of retail used bookstores and also sells both retail and wholesale online but, according to their owner, most of what they get is sold for pulp.
My wife is an elementary school reading teacher and runs a yearly family book night where she takes book donations she gets all year and fills a bunch of portable tables in the gym with kids (and adult) books that are free for the taking. What is left over is taken (by me) to that local company and dumped in huge bins. If you are looking to get rid of a bunch of books I'd also suggest contacting your local schools to see if they take donations.
These free book shelves are no substitute for a real library, are they? In my experience, the offering is really limited. It's nice for a random find, but that's all. It's tough that books get burned, but if nobody wants to read them, there's no alternative.
Everyone had loads of books at home 50 years ago. Now far, far fewer homes have books.
They don't all have a home anymore.
Sad, but that's where we're at. It's not book burning in the traditional meaning, wven if that's what is happening.
> I am in favor of “little free libraries”
Do these work for kids' books? Whenever I've seen them geared towards adults, the content is absolute crap.
It takes the right sort of library owner to curate the library and a community amenable to helping out. My wife runs our library and one thing she does is pulls out some books when the library is flush and puts them back in when it’s a little dry. But she works in the book industry so she also has a source of high quality books and knowledge about them.
She’s specifically a children’s book person, so we made sure our library could fit kids books (picture books are big). But many of the kits won’t.
We also live in a walkable college town. There are 5 libraries within 4 blocks of ours. Our neighbors take it upon themselves to clean up and donate. We came back from our Christmas break to someone having installed a motion activated light in the library!
So under the right conditions they work. But you know what works better? Professional librarians, with appropriate resources and facilities. But in all cases, free libraries, public libraries, research libraries, etc. deaccessioning is required so sad for the op, we throw books away.
You get of what you put in. (Sort of)
I had a lot of good books that I finished reading and wouldn't realistically touch again.
Whenever I went to browse for some books I would leave one of them in exchange. Over time, the quality went up because other people started doing the same.
To be honest, I did curate the available books at it as well. Obvious crap (self-published conspiracy theory stuff) was thrown out. At some point you will also have to simple throw out some old ones if they never get taken. Space is limited and a 50 year old book that is collecting dust is not useful to anyone.
We have those around our town in a bunch of neighborhoods. Not sure on the usage rates, yet thought they were a pretty cool idea when I saw them, and they seem to always have books available (ie, not like they're just being taken and emptied)
The "magic" of why AI is trusted over humans is that so many humans are terrible at their jobs that people default to not trusting someone who is telling them something they don't want to hear.
The AI always tells them what they want to hear, and so they trust it. It's not magic.
> so many humans are terrible at their jobs
Is there any empirical evidence that librarians are terrible at their jobs?
The reason is not the supposed fallibility of humans but rather the supposed infallibility of technology. Nontechnical people don't know how the technology works, don't know how the sausage is made, and they mistakenly assume it can't go wrong, just like a calculator can't go wrong.
Librarians do hide books. But not as a way of hiding from public but as a way of not throwing them away. Let me explain. Even though libraries are very big still they run out of space and regularly throw out (in India because most don't care) / ( or in Texas sell out books cheaply) and it pains the librarians deeply so they kind of stash books secretly from being thrown away. And if you really show interest in a particular book and request it nicely then the librarian will give it to you and tell you not to tell anyone. Why I know this because it happened to me in my college library in India. I can still after decades remember the love of books on that librarian's face
Almost every library regularly throws out books, and all librarians I know are happy with this. New books arrive regularly, and unless you plan on your library growing unlimited, you need to, in general, a 1 in 1 out policy.
They used to say that one of the chief roles of a librarian was to keep people away from books. There is a lot of truth in that.
Libraries remove unborrowed books and sell them. Borrowed books stay on the shelf. That's what they do with books.
No it’s a lot more complicated than that …
Librarians try to “market” books based on what they think the public wants or needs.
They try to assure a variety of books put forward, with a special emphasis on “good for you” books.
Books deed as “not good for you” are likely to be shelved in the back.
in practice, libraries use the Dewey decimal system, but that excluded the many “exhibits” of “good for you” material.
I don’t mean “good for you” in a good or bad way. It’s simply what the librarian believes will be most helpful to the readers.
There are currently some very real and important controversies in public libraries that have no clear solution.
> No it’s a lot more complicated than that
Article is about a librarian in Virginia. OP is commenting about practice in India. Unless there is some secret code to global librarian conduct, chances are you're all correct.
Judging books by their unborrowedness is like judging a youtube video's educational content by its view count. It's a bad reality created by the powers that be
Depending on goal of library and possible value of book this seems reasonable enough process. If you have library with goal of sharing popular enough content, keeping the popular books and removing truly unpopular that do not have significant value seems reasonable.
Unlike digital world where storage is cheap, in physical world it is limited. Thus focus on what the customers want is reasonable.
Archival libraries are different game. There keeping at least one copy is often reasonable.
> Judging books by their unborrowedness is like judging a youtube video's educational content by its view count.
I disagree with this. Libraries are notorious for being open about their processes; they will happily reveal flows of materials, down to the item.
Perhaps both things are true depending on circumstances.
Why have shelves full of books that haven’t been borrowed in 15 years? what benefit is that providing?
You can find entertaining stuff there. My interests can be really niche. I remember once finding an amazing book in our college library from the sixties or seventies about the use of LSD in treating psychiatric disorders. While I didn't agree with all the suggestions in there, it was a fascinating time capsule (with colour illustrations, many of them by patients). With the microdosing debate, it's probably relevant again.
Yet when I took the book off the shelf it looked like no one had touched it in many years.
I once borrowed a book, to find a previous borrowers receipt in it, placed as a bookmark. Upon inspection it turned out that the previous borrower was myself(!) (I recognized the library card number), about ten years earlier.
So probably, no one had borrowed it in the time between. I was very happy the book had not been thrown out.
What you are saying is especially true for fiction, less so for nonfiction. Many nonfiction topics are important and require a large volume of materials to remain as reference. For example, you never know when it might be important to know how something was manufactured 50 years ago, or what happened in Congress 20 years ago, or what a newspaper reported a hundred years ago. This makes it really hard to judge which items could be culled. I'm inclined to agree that borrow rates are relevant but they are not the only thing that matters. The possibilities of digitization and interlibrary loan make culling less risky, but someone still has to decide to keep unpopular reference materials for them to remain available.
A library which was known for having a "last policy" system in place, should not have this difficulty. I would further argue that any library should be willing to accept a copy of any book which they do not have and safely store it until someone wishes to borrow it. I'm still salty that I had to buy a copy of Glenn Reid's _Thinking in PostScript_ when a local library discarded it from their stacks (there are other books which I would check out semi-regularly which have also been discarded which I also need to purchase, but missed seeing on their "discarded" table or at the annual library sale).
Yes, this would require better funding, and yes, I regularly donate to my local library every year.
This seems to have a simple solution - if you can't find any reference to a particular book by googling its title, then it likely does not exist.
You have too much faith in Commissar Google. I know of numerous books which don't appear on Google. Likely the tip of the iceberg.
The problem is that this solution runs counter to what is expected from AI customers today: subscribe and turn off your brain.
(Yes, I know about the phrases written below every singe one of them. They're probably being taken just as seriously as ToS.)
It depends on the title. Many titles are difficult to search for.
Ah they are hiding Necronomicon again.
To be fair, the original title was Azathoth Traditional Cooking, by Chef Abdul, and is often listed under "Domestic Arts."
I wonder if lawyers will try to sue law libraries that don't have hallucinated case histories.
Of course, what we need now is for someone to store those books. A book being catalogued before it has been written - a cool idea.
it shows there is a demand!
Libraries are overwhelmed in their inability to store all the "good" books. I was cleaning out my book collection of, what I thought are really good books, but I came to the realization there is no space for them. So, they get sold or pulped.
Who knew Borges library of babel is just yield()
Original source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-slop-is-spurri...
I had hoped that Gawker rag was finally shut down for good.
this is a good example of what a post-truth world looks like.