Ranting and Raving

This is really cool.

In the town of Pornainen, they've built a 13 meter tall battery of "low-grade" sand that they warm-up to 450 degrees C - that 842 degrees F! - and it can hold that temperatures for weeks if not months, then they can use the hot air from it to heat the town's local heating network!

I think that's a pretty awesome use. They're using excess energy generated by renewable sources - free energy - to heat up the sand, then piping it around town. The former method to warm up the town was a woodchip furnace plant, clearly they're drastically cutting their CO2 footprint with this. And by using low-grade sand, their costs are pretty low.

But let's talk about sand for a minute. Businesses are literally dredging up ocean floors for sand to make more concrete. And you can't recover it from broken-up concrete when buildings are demolished. Now, to use sand to make a thermal battery I think is a worthwhile endeavor. I just wish they'd work out better ways to repurpose and recycle existing demolished concrete.

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/sand-battery-renewable-energy-finland-b2818348.html

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/06/027211/a-very-finnish-thing-huge-sand-battery-starts-storing-wind-energy-in-soapstone

To briefly recap, a group of authors sued the AI company Anthropic for pirating their books off the internet through illegal downloads and incorporating it into their AI data training sets, alleging piracy, copyright violation and theft. Which it clearly was. In an interesting twist, Anthropic then went out and bought quite literally tons of books, cut the spines off of them, scanned the pages, then trashed the then-scanned books, claiming the rights of first-ownership that they could do what they wanted to with the books.

But that was a bit of ex post facto reasoning: they'd already committed the crime of stealing the contents of the books, subsequently buying them after having already incorporated the contents into the datasets doesn't make it all better.

From the article: "In June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of the books in training models was “exceedingly transformative,” one of the factors courts have used in determining whether the use of protected works without authorization was a legal “fair use.” His decision was the first major decision that weighed the fair use question in generative AI systems.

Yet Alsup also ruled that Anthropic had to face a trial on the question of whether it is liable for downloading millions of pirated books in digital form off the internet, something it had to do in order to train its models for its AI service Claude. The books were obtained from datasets Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote. (emphasis mine)

The piracy issue was a huge one. in court, Anthropic IT staff testified that they used bit torrent software to download vast troves of books at the direction of management. The problem is with bit torrent. Bit torrent uses "seeds". When you download a file, you are downloading small pieces of it from many clients and servers from around the world. And your computer becomes one such piece of this network and starts serving up pieces of the files that you've downloaded to people requesting those files.

As a general rule, companies don't go after people downloading pirated material if they're not downloading it 24/7/365. But they do go after people providing pirated material! And if you use bit torrent software to download pirated material, you're downloading AND uploading material that shouldn't be shared! Eventually they're going to notice you and their attorneys are going to dust off their giant mallets of loving correction.

I've used bit torrent software before. But what I use it for is downloading books that I've bought from Humble Bundle where I've got 20 large PDF books to download, it's the only practical way to do it even when I have a fairly fast fiberoptic internet connection. And I leave my torrent connection open so other people who've bought the bundle can benefit from my PC having those books on it.

I have no idea how many books Anthropic downloaded. It's quite possible that Anthropic has no absolute count as to how many books they downloaded. And that's probably why they agreed to this settlement. They wanted to avoid a damages trial which would dig into exactly how many books they had stolen.

And let's take that one step further. This would have branded them - in court! - as the world's largest piracy case. EVER. That's one thing that they definitely did not want to be branded with. A great big Scarlet P that they would wear forever. Much better to pay $1.5 billion and be rid of it.

Two additional things about this of interest. First, the settlement only covers their misdeeds through August 25. If they are found to have conducted any additional piracy after this date, then all the court processes could get reset and everything starts over again. Second, and this is the most significant part: "Anthropic also has agreed to destroy the datasets used in its models."

I have no idea what this fully means. Since they bought all these books and scanned them, they presumably have an even better dataset on standby once this pirated set is destroyed, so it shouldn't affect them much. Perhaps this is purely a symbolic victory, but it is an important one. We shall see.

https://deadline.com/2025/09/anthropic-ai-lawsuit-settlement-1-5-billion-1236509423/

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/05/1941245/anthropic-agrees-to-pay-record-15-billion-to-settle-authors-ai-lawsuit

My, my, how time flies! But fly it does, and October will see the release of a 4K HDR box set of the newly-restored movie that will have TWO documentaries!

A lot of the movie cast is still with us, though we lost Meatloaf a few years back. Interestingly, the movie was not a success in its initial run, it wasn't until the midnight circuit picked it up and the shadow casting and other fun started and it took on a life of its own that it really became a success. According to the article, RHPS may be the origin of cos-play!

I'll definitely be ordering this when it comes out. As it happens, I listened to the soundtrack just a week or so ago.

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/08/celebrating-50-years-of-the-rocky-horror-picture-show/

There are a couple of problems with recycling plastics. The biggest is that an overwhelmingly vast amount of it doesn't get recycled. It mostly doesn't matter that we separate it out into its own little bin, there are few actual plastic recycling centers. For the most part it still goes to the dump. Sometimes it may get separated into its different classes and baled and sold on for reuse, but that's actually pretty rare.

The other part is that it takes forever - almost literally - for plastics to break down in the environment. And I'm not even going to talk about microplastics in the environment - and in our bodies and in the bodies of pretty much every living creature! Plastic is pretty perfidious stuff. But hey! It made the petroleum industry billions of dollars, so it can't be all bad, can it?

Well. Scientists have developed a process in which PVC can be used to create "chlorine-free fuel range hydrocarbons and [hydrochloric acid] in a single-stage process," the researchers said. Reported conversion efficiencies underscore the potential for real-world use. At 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), the process reached 95 percent conversion for soft PVC pipes and 99 percent for rigid PVC pipes and PVC wires."

Now, PVC isn't the only plastic out there, but it's a beginning. And if you can reclaim the PVC cladding from wires, you're also now in a position to recycle the now-clean copper in the wire! Twofer!

Very interesting, especially since the process is at a - relatively-speaking - room temperature environment. Increasing the process temperature to 80c/176f, decidedly above room temperature, only increased the efficiency to 96%. Perhaps some discoveries can raise the efficiency or lower the temperature, but that temperature increase I think the energy cost is going to ruin the yield savings.

Obviously there are lots of philosophical, ethical, ecological, etc. issues to consider. If we can increase recycling, we decrease the amount of plastics in the environment, which could decrease the amount of microplastics therein - but are we already at or too far beyond that tipping point? We'd also be decreasing the need for the amount of oil being pumped out of the ground. We don't know the costs of this process, it sounds like it would be pretty expensive, but we also don't know the yield: gross pounds in for barrels out. And would an improvement in the production of petroleum/gasoline decrease demand for EVs, which are decidedly better for the environment?

Lots of things to consider, I'm sure a lot more than I've posited.

https://interestingengineering.com/science/us-china-turn-plastic-to-petrol

https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/27/2258214/worlds-first-1-step-method-turns-plastic-into-fuel-at-95-efficiency

At the end of September, Typepad goes dark. And with it, all of the blogs that have been accumulated over the last 22 years.

Interestingly, their front page has buttons for Start Now and Pricing & Sign Up, but they stopped taking new accounts several years ago while reassuring then-current users that the service would continue on. At least until the end of September.

Their Need Help? page has info about the shutdown, including refunds for people who have paid beyond the shutdown date and information on exporting your blog.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-competitor-typepad-ends-its-slide-into-obscurity-by-shutting-down/