Big Tech’s $1.1 Trillion Cloud Computing Backlog
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) – signed contracts for cloud computing services that can’t yet be filled and haven’t yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.

[![](https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.pn … ⌘ Read more

Spotify Plans To Sell Physical Books
Spotify is planning to let premium subscribers in the U.S. and U.K. buy hardcovers and paperbacks directly through its app starting this spring, partnering with Bookshop.org to handle pricing, inventory and fulfillment.

The Swedish streaming company, which entered the audiobook market in 2022, will also introduce a feature called Page Match that lets users scan a page from a physical book or e-reader … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de if they haven’t, I would recommend a “subtle” nudge. You know, like leaving an advert flier at their door for a “Basic English (including swearing words!) for Dummies” book, or something like that. :-D :-P

‘Hundreds’ of Gatik Robot Delivery Trucks Headed For US Roads
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Gatik, a Silicon Valley startup developing self-driving delivery trucks, says its commercial operations are about to scale up dramatically, from fewer than a dozen driverless units running in multiple U.S. states now to hundreds of box trucks by the end of the year. CEO Gautam Narang said it’s also booked … ⌘ Read more

Behold! 🥳 My first (hopefully it doesn’t fail 🤞) µSaaS (microSaaS)

Audiofern

Turn PDFs into audiobooks.

(only supports PDF(s) at the moment, books, papers, etc)

Happy reading/listening 🤓 👂 #Audiofern #Audiobooks #microSaaS

How Anthropic Built Claude: Buy Books, Slice Spines, Scan Pages, Recycle the Remains
Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called “Project Panama” to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies.

The company spe … ⌘ Read more

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

Nvidia Allegedly Sought ‘High-Speed Access’ To Pirated Book Library for AI Training
An expanded class-action lawsuit filed last Friday alleges that a member of Nvidia’s data strategy team directly contacted Anna’s Archive – the sprawling shadow library hosting millions of pirated books – to explore “including Anna’s Archive in pre-training data for our LLMs.”

Internal documents cited in the … ⌘ Read more

Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback
San Diego Comic-Con changed an AI art friendly policy following an artist-led backlash last week. From a report: It was a small victory for working artists in an industry where jobs are slipping away as movie and video game studios adopt generative AI tools to save time and money. Every year, tens of thousands of people descend on San Diego for Comic-Con, the world’s premier comic book conven … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Contacted Anna’s Archive To Secure Access To Millions of Pirated Books
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna’s Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim (PDF) that the trillion-dollar company directly … ⌘ Read more

Uma pessoa nem pode sair de casa, que vem logo com mais livros…

#SuperMario #Zelda #bookstodon

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More US States are Putting Bitcoin on Public Balance Sheets
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:

Led by Texas and New Hampshire, U.S. states across the national map, both red and blue in political stripes, are developing bitcoin strategic reserves and bringing cryptocurrencies onto their books through additional state finance and budgeting measures. Texas recently became the first state to purchase bitc … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is Closing Its Employee Library and Cutting Back on Subscriptions
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft’s library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft’s digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift des … ⌘ Read more

• Neal Stephenson’s “Polostan” is the last of these books, and the book worth mentioning but not necessarily a recommendation. If you know me well enough, you know that I think Neal Stephenson is the best writer of all times (prove me wrong). And I’m sorry to say, this - while a five stars book - is not Stephenson at its best: in fact, it was his first book ever where at a certain point I felt the book wasn’t probably edited (probably rushed in). This is the first of a series, and it almost feels like just the first part of what should be the first book, it is almost as if he rushed publishing it to appease the editorial gods or something. Now, don’t take this criticism as a sign that Polostan isn’t a book worth reading, not at all. But if you didn’t read all the rest he wrote, do that first, and give Polostan some time… because I’m sure it will best read if you have its sequel ready to be picked up once you finish this one.
  

(end of 🧵)

• @kirschner@kirschner ’s “Ada & Zangemann: A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream” was a wonderful surprise – I knew I’d like this book since I’ve heard he had written it, but I’ll admit I only actually read it once I had the actual physical book in my hands… and ended up being surprised by it a couple of times, the book has plenty more depth than I assumed! Sure, it is what I thought it would be, “a book for children about free software”, but it is so much more than that…

• @o_sarilho@o_sarilho is a webcomic - and fortunately it is also collected in physical format. There are versions in Portuguese and English, but this is a SciFi comic book from a Portuguese author, and that alone would get my attention… the fact that part of the action happens on the region where I actually live just made it even more interesting! So, well, I knew I would need to read it, and I bought the books, but only in 2025 did I actually started reading it… and, well - all I can say is that I glad I have the rest of the series so far, so I can catch up!

5 star reads of 2025 worth mentioning

#bookstodon 🧵

Someone has asked recently on a toot for others to share their ‘list of 2025 books’. Instead of pointing out to the list of what I’ve read, I’ll instead mention a few ‘5 star’ books I’ve read in 2025 that I think is worth pointing out towards.

By no particular order (well, the order in the photo, really…)

• AJ Pearce’s “Yours Cheerfully” and “Mrs Porter Calling”, books 2 and 3 of The Emmy Lake Chronicles. I’d already read the first book in the series and considered it a five stars read, and I plan to eventually read the fourth and last book in the series - the paperback edition is out next August. This isn’t a deep or profound book series - and doesn’t need to be in order to be a good one. It’s a series depicting the life of a young woman in war-time London. Each of these books made me cry and made me laugh, and I have found some comfort reading them in a time where, in many aspects, it feels like we’re living in a pre-war era…

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HarperCollins Will Use AI To Translate Harlequin Romance Novels
Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. 404Media: Publisher’s Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. Accord … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net They’re not completely impossible, but C makes it much easier to run into them. I think the key point is that in those “safe” languages, buffer overflows are caught and immediately crash the program (if not handled otherwise) instead of silently corrupting memory, not being noticed right away and maybe only later crashing at a different location, where it can be very hard to find the actual root cause. This is a big improvement in my book.

Some programmers are indeed horrible. I’m guilty myself. :-)

I like the article.

2025 Ends With Release of J. R. R. Tolkein’s Unpublished Story
2025’S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury — specifically, ire over mankind’s obsession with … ⌘ Read more

Reading is a Vice
The International Publishers Association spent the past year promoting the slogan “Democracy depends on reading,” but Atlantic senior editor Adam Kirsch argues that this utilitarian pitch fundamentally misunderstands why people become readers in the first place.

The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that less than half of Americans read a single book in 2022, and only 38% read a novel or short story. A Universi … ⌘ Read more

Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Franz Kafka…

Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature:

(download in epub here, and) Read 20 of the “best books” entering the public domain in 2026!

Slashdot Asks: Your Favorite 2025 Movies, TV Shows and Books?
Another year wraps up, and with it comes the annual ritual of taking stock. What were the movies, TV shows and books from this year that stood out to you? Not necessarily the ones that dominated conversation or topped charts, but the ones you found yourself recommending to friends, or returning to for a second watch or read.

Share your picks and, if you’r … ⌘ Read more

California To Require All School Districts To Restrict Student Smartphone Use by 2026
Starting in July 2026, every public school district in California will be required to have policies on the books that restrict or prohibit students from using smartphones during the school day, thanks to Assembly Bill 3216 that Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law back in 2024.

The legislation also mand … ⌘ Read more

Some Audiobooks Are Outselling Hardcovers
In a year when print book sales have slipped 1% to 679 million copies through early December, according to Circana BookScan, audiobooks continue to carve out territory that once belonged exclusively to hardcovers, and in several notable cases this year, the audio versions have outright outsold their physical counterparts.

S.A. Cosby’s southern crime novel “King of Ashes” moved more copies a … ⌘ Read more

Global Hotel Groups Bet on Customer Loyalty To Beat Online and AI Agents
The world’s largest hotel chains are aggressively pushing customers toward direct bookings as they brace for a future where AI “agents” could reshape how travelers find and reserve rooms. Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and Wyndham have all expanded their loyalty programs and perks in recent months, aiming to reduce their reliance on onli … ⌘ Read more

#FridayReads #bookstodon

#NealStephenson’s #Polostan

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John Carreyou and Other Authors Bring New Lawsuit Against Six Major AI Companies
A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it’s because another set of authors already filed a class action suit … ⌘ Read more

Is the Dictionary Done For?
In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States – but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis’s new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker … ⌘ Read more

Spotify Says ‘Anti-Copyright Extremists’ Scraped Its Library
A group of activists has scraped Spotify’s entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna’s Archive, a search engine for “shadow libraries” that previously focused on books.

Spotify described the activists as “anti-copyright extremists … ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe I think I never watched it. In any case, enjoy reading your books.

Got a nice conspiracy theory for you:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115670290552252848

Actually wait I just thought about this and realized that the precise timing of the ACTUAL GitHub seed bank, by which I mean the Arctic Code Vault, on 2020-02-02, makes it more or less a perfect snapshot of pre-Copilot GitHub. Also precisely timed before we all got brain damage from COVID. This is the only remaining archive of source code by people with a fully working sense of smell

(Bonus points because the Arctic World Archive is located in Svaldbard and that’s the name of the AI in Stacey Kade’s “Cold Eternity”.)

New Kindle Feature Uses AI To Answer Questions About Books - And Authors Can’t Opt Out
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has quietly added a new AI feature to its Kindle iOS app – a feature that “lets you ask questions about the book you’re reading and receive spoiler-free answers,” according to an Amazon announcement.

The company says the feature, which is called Ask this Book … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Changes How Copyright Protection is Applied To Kindle Direct’s Self-Published Ebooks
Amazon says it will allow authors to offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through its self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. Starting on January 20, 2026, authors who set their titles as DRM-free will see their books made available in these more open formats. Fro … ⌘ Read more

**Water leak in Louvre damages hundreds of books **
The leak in the Egyptian department comes just weeks after a jewellery heist that put the museum’s security infrastructure under scrutiny. ⌘ Read more

#ptpol #debates #presidenciais

0 - Há uma pergunta mas #LMM diz que responde a tudo mas primeiro tem outro tema obrigatório: a acusação de #Cotrim Figueiredo há 15 dias de LMM ter feito pressões, pede a Cotrim que concretize - Cotrim não pode ou consegue, tenta atacar LMM noutro tema com um book review, a dizer que LMM vai lançar um livro que é pior que o livro que Cotrim lançou - isto não se inventa. De certa forma isto influencia o debate porque quando o jornalista pode então fazer perguntas já não fala do que queria falar, e em vez disso pergunta o que distingue as candidaturas deles e voto útil e essas coisas. Cotrim responde que ele é o mais energético ou qq coisa dessas, mas em prática só diz que vai jantar com jovens mais vezes que LLM. 12 minutos de debate e ainda não se disse nada - mas só menos mostra bem que entre estes dois há claramente um menos sério que outro. Cotrim critica LMM estar no Conselho de Estado há tantos anos e Portugal está cheio de problemas - pena que LMM não diga a Cotrim que foi deputado e eurodeputado, e Portugal e Europa estão cheios de problemas também…
1 - finalmente a pergunta que o moderador queria: o pacote laboral. LMM repete a conversa de que é preciso uma reforma e esta é uma reforma por isso não entende as críticas. Cotrim promulgaria (duh)
1/n

Scorchers book finals spot with Renegades WBBL defence over
Beth Mooney’s flawless 94 not out leads Perth to victory in its must-win game against Brisbane, ensuring the Scorchers will play finals again in the WBBL. ⌘ Read more

Driving test touts offer instructors £250 monthly kickbacks
Touts use instructor login details to bulk-book tests and sell them at a huge mark-up, the BBC finds. ⌘ Read more

Driving-test touts offer instructors £250 kickbacks so they can bulk-book tests
Touts use instructor login details to bulk-book tests and sell them at a huge mark-up, the BBC finds. ⌘ Read more

Bunbury elders write children’s book in Noongar preserve culture
Once forbidden from speaking their local language, a group of Indigenous elders in WA use it in a children’s book, hoping to breathe life into a dying dialect. ⌘ Read more

Higher proportion of patients in England now contacting GPs online, figures show
All NHS practices were required by the government to provide web bookings from October - but the union opposes the move. ⌘ Read more

Higher proportion of patients in England now contacting GPs online, figures show
All NHS practices were required by the government to provide web bookings from October. ⌘ Read more

Higher proportion contacting GPs online than by phone in England
All NHS practices were required by the government to provide web bookings from October. ⌘ Read more

Zipcar To End UK Operations
“The car-sharing company, first launched in the U.S. in 2000, has been active in the UK since 2010 and has just under half a million members,” writes Slashdot reader guesstral. “‘I’m writing to let you know that we are proposing to cease the UK operations of Zipcar,’ wrote Zipcar UK’s general manager, James Taylor, in an email to members today. He went on to say that Zipcar will temporarily suspend new bookings after D … ⌘ Read more

The best new science fiction books of December 2025
From a new collection of shorter fiction by Brandon Sanderson to Simon Stålenhag’s new work, via a Stranger Things novel, December’s new sci-fi features some compelling and intriguing offerings ⌘ Read more

Aboriginal healers seek to share power of ‘open hands’ with Western doctors
The Ngangkaṟi in Central Australia use traditional healing techniques to draw out illness with their hands. A new edition of their globally read book aims to share this knowledge Western health workers. ⌘ Read more

Kangaroos make history in the books and on the field in flag defence
North Melbourne proves to be ground breakers and history makers as it extend its match-winning streak to 27 games in a comprehensive win over Brisbane. ⌘ Read more

Eight books that knocked our critics’ socks off in November
Wondering what to read next? This month’s best books include a novel that brings to life Britain’s only named wind and a new book by the author of The Handmaid’s Tale. ⌘ Read more

Our verdict on sci-fi novel Every Version of You: We (mostly) loved it
New Scientist Book Club members share their thoughts on our November read, Grace Chan’s Every Version of You ⌘ Read more

Read an extract from The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading Iain M. Banks’s classic sci-fi novel The Player of Games. In this extract, we meet protagonist Gurgeh for the first time ⌘ Read more

Why sci-fi novelist Iain M. Banks was an ‘astounding’ world-builder
The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading the late Iain M. Banks’s Culture novel The Player of Games. Fellow science fiction author Bethany Jacobs reveals how his work inspired her ⌘ Read more