It's very important to recognize that what one executive says is rarely reflective of how middle-managers behave. The bottom line is that nobody should trust Microsoft, especially not it's employees. #GetTheFacts

You just have to wait the correct number of milliseconds until it becomes public information, then execute your trade. I'll bet someone has figured out the delay to allow enough time for some model or another to run. All nice and legal, just like how the two term restriction only applies to consecutive terms.

Something like that might deter high frequency traders who are basically exploiting noise. This is different. It's advance insider access to announcements that cause real changes. Well, that and the usual Trump noise, but even that usually takes well over 24 hours before it's obvious TACO.

Right, lots of institutions send PDFs specifically because you can lock the text, provide specific form entry boxes, and get a reasonably secure signature. All of which are features of PDF, which is an open standard.

They don't send you a Word document which is arguably not an open standard because Word doesn't actually conform to it's own standard.

AI companies want quantity. If they wanted old, rare books they'd download the public domain copies provided by everyone from the Internet Archive to Google.

Fans don't like big camera drones flying around in front of the action they paid ridiculous prices to sort of see. Stadiums are also both big and loud.

One small book seller said that in April,

It's right there. The last story on Slashdot about this was an ad from a company trying to sell books to AI companies. It makes a good story. Ad in some credulous people who suppy their own adjectives like "exponential" and there you go.

Probably a few (as in count-on-one-hand) companies are buying bulk books, one copy of each.

Because nobody was every "first" on any land.

Are we talking Wheel of Time, Battlestar Galactica or some version of Hindu or Buddhist infinite cyclic time?

Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. Finding it is a very long shot that seems to have happened only twice. By the best evidence we have, Hawaii was first settled by Polynesians around a thousand years ago and stayed pretty isolated up until James Cook stumbled upon it in 1778. The queen of Hawaii was overthrown in 1893 by US marines and US fruit growers, and annexed by the US in 1898.

It didn't start with Trump. The US has a lot of enemies and sometimes has difficulty distinguishing between a dispute with a competing nation and individual scientists from that nation. Trump definitely made it worse though.

OOW! This will go nicely with my illusion of choice.

BC search and rescue has lots of very good reasons why they don't charge. It's a public service like police, fire and health care.

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

So, hasn't the slightest idea. Even if the description is true, what they're describing is random. There's no reason to specifically go after rare books. The valuable rare books are going to be old, so not terribly useful for training modern language models, and the newer rare books are going to be rare because they're crap that's not worth printing.

That story never made sense. Stop falling for it. Rare books are expensive. AI companies want bulk text, not expensive text.