astro🍪

they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.

"One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller told 404. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books.

From a Google search:

It's just the changing density of the air refracting light weirdly, so it looks like there's a reflection of the sky on the ground, which our brains often interpret as a pool of water. It can also happen upwards instead of downwards, especially at sea, when the air is much colder near the surface and a warm front appears above it:

Here's Fata Morgana

Dropping a double mass attack on my first year:

Tags under cut: (for those with Tumblr)

AI videos are labelled on Douyin, but I still haven't made a habit of checking the label immediately, so I usually only see the label after I've already noticed an AI quality to the video, although I've been tricked before (I think it was a parrot video). My point of reference for AI videos is those Youtube ads for AI vertical short dramas, though, so I'm not all that great at spotting them.

AI is viewed much more positively in China (84% of Chinese respondents agreed with "Products and services using artificial intelligence make me excited" in 2025), and in some polls, China views AI the most positively/least negatively out of all countries polled. Compare this to the West, where 30-40% of Europe and the anglosphere view AI positively. This could be partly because physical labour is still a large portion of China's workforce, or that Doubao (China's most popular AI assistant) is kinda dumb (from what I've heard), so it's less of a threat, but that's speculation. I don't live in China, so I can't say how it is IRL, but that number is definitely reflected on Douyin.

For instance, people candidly talk about their use of Doubao for anything and everything, and often use it to generate images to post in Douyin comments. People commenting under AI videos also pretty much only do so to express shock at the capabilities of AI, and I see pretty much no pushback on the actual use of AI. AI does get brought up a lot under non-AI videos, though, mostly "I can't believe it's not AI!" and the like. One comment I see a lot under process videos is: "In a time when AI is popular, there are still older generations that persevere in making things by hand."

Whenever I do see people concerned about AI, their concerns are pretty much limited to employment, the uncanniness of AI-generated content, and that the ease of generating AI content squeezes out real creators. On the other hand, comments under the video linked above talk about how OP is a talented director (prompting the AI), that the common people creating short films about social issues like this is what AI should be used for, and that "this is what high quality looks like".

What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?

It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.