fidzu : nerd

Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. "The employee worked at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business," reports 404 Media. "Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada." Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an excerpt from the report: [...] What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books? It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone. After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate -- I'm guessing -- the different books. I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there. What do you think about Amazon doing this? At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people.

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26 Aug 2026 8:00pm GMT

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26 Aug 2026 7:45pm GMT

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26 Aug 2026 7:44pm GMT

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26 Aug 2026 7:43pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program. The program -- announced today ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31 -- will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and Xbox Series X disc-based games" simply by inserting the disc into a console and launching it. That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in. The digital entitlement will also allow access to features like Xbox Play Anywhere (for play on PC) and Xbox Cloud Gaming, for supported titles. Microsoft says that your physical disc will "continue to work exactly as it always has" after the digital entitlement is claimed. But before you get any ideas, the fine print on the announcement mentions that there is only "one revokable license per game disc," so if you resell that disc or loan it to a friend, that digital entitlement could be transferred to a new account when someone else puts it into their console. A leaked memo obtained by the Verge earlier this month suggests that publishers have to actively opt in to allow their game discs to activate digital entitlements, which could explain why "most" but not all Xbox One and Series X titles are supported. Windows Central separately suggests, based on discussion with unnamed sources, that "some discs may be incompatible due to how they were manufactured at the time," which could explain why original Xbox and Xbox 360 discs are not being discussed for the program. "While not every title will be available at launch, this is an important step toward a future where players can have greater confidence that the games they buy remain with them for years to come," said Xbox Vice President Jason Ronald.

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26 Aug 2026 7:00pm GMT

Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, bringing the team behind the popular open-source DuckDB database into AWS. "The deal fits Amazon's broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it," reports GeekWire. "It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage." The DuckDB project itself will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the independent DuckDB Foundation. From the report: Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Muhleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project's technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects. [...] Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September. Jordan Tigani, the CEO of MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, sees Amazon's acquisition as a predictable move to turn DuckDB's growing popularity into an AWS business. "That's Amazon's playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "they're not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source." Tigani also believes the deal could ultimately strengthen DuckDB, since Amazon has an incentive to keep the project open and widely adopted: "If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money."

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26 Aug 2026 6:25pm GMT

The "everyday" GT3 delivers, despite looming regulations and an ever-inflating price tag.

26 Aug 2026 5:25pm GMT

"Most" Xbox One and Series X games are compatible; discs will still work after being claimed.

26 Aug 2026 4:59pm GMT

Republicans demanded that parties and fundraising committees be given lowest ad rates.

26 Aug 2026 3:45pm GMT

FreeRDP 3.31 is out with numerous security and bug fixes, plus faster graphics performance for AVC/H.264 Remote Desktop sessions.

26 Aug 2026 3:13pm GMT

LibreOffice 26.8 is now available with a new Paragraph Composer in Writer, native OpenType variable font support, Calc improvements, and better document compatibility.

26 Aug 2026 11:32am GMT

The first public Multikernel Linux release lets several independent kernels run side by side on one machine with dedicated CPUs, memory, and devices.

26 Aug 2026 9:50am GMT