By a plurality of reports, I have been released from the Gmail dungeon. Big thanks to all of you who let me know whether your copy of the newsletter came through. I still have no idea why that one email was marked as spam, and I suspect I’ll never find out.

This Week’s Links

The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers

Iaso, who said she deals with some generative AI at her day job, told me that “from what I have learned, poisoning datasets doesn’t work. It makes you feel good, but it ends up using more compute than you end up saving. I don’t know the polite way to say this, but if you piss in an ocean, the ocean does not turn into piss.”

Pilot Callsigns: The web’s largest collection of callsign stories

The Three Rules of Callsigns

1. If you don’t already have one, you will be assigned one by your “buddies”.
2. You probably won’t like it.
3. If you complain and moan too much about 1. and 2., you’ll get a new nickname you’ll like even less!

Fake Hafez: How a supreme Persian poet of love was erased

Ladinsky claims that Hafez appeared to him in a dream and handed him the English “translations” he is publishing:

“About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to ‘my artists and seekers’.”

It is not my place to argue with people and their dreams, but I am fairly certain that this is not how translation works.

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Listen, sometimes you get distracted trying to cook a brisket and forget to put your newsletter to bed until the day it’s supposed to go out. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

-K