Technology

Instagram has suspended the account of Track AIPAC, a widely followed watchdog project that tracks political spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and related pro-Israel lobbying groups. The social media giant cited alleged violations of the platform’s intellectual property and trademark rules. The suspension places the account at risk of permanent deletion unless successfully appealed within 180 days.

Track AIPAC — also known as AIPAC Tracker — was launched in 2024 by Cory Archibald and Casey Kennedy as a transparency and advocacy platform documenting AIPAC’s political donations, endorsements and influence on US elections. The project publishes Federal Election Commission data on pro-Israel political spending, highlights which lawmakers receive the most support, and endorses opponents of candidates reliant on AIPAC funding.

The watchdog has become a prominent source for voters and activists seeking to make AIPAC funding “politically toxic” and to hold elected officials accountable for their ties to the pro-Israel lobby.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

(For starters, please don't respond "Just go to anna's archive" or something like that; they have a lot of stuff, but they don't have everything, and sometimes the quality of their scans are less than stellar).

I'd like to be able to be able to easily scan some of my books and get decent-looking PDFs as a result.

I have a flatbed scanner, but in my experience, you have to really really really mash the book flat up against the platen and practically break the spine to get a good quality image. Even doing this often requires several tries to get it right. I can do this, but it's very labor intesive, very time-consuming, and probably not great for the book being scanned.

I would love to have a dedicated book scanner—a scanner specially designed for books; I've seen some for the academic market that have /\ shaped platens that automatically turn the pages and so forth, but they often run to the tens of thousands of dollars.

I've also seen scanners that look like an oversized itty-bitty book light that are placed above the spread of an open book; I don't have any experience with these, but I'm not sure how good the end result is.

Well, so if anyone can recommend a relatively easy and quick way to scan my books and get a decent output, I'd be happy to hear from you.

P.S. I didn't mention epubs anywhere because I can't stand them (if they work for you, great, but not for me!)

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7563423

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