Author Archives: Maria Langer

A Short Self-Improvement Video, an AI Summary of It, and What I Think about Both

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I’m impressed by a 15-minute you tube video and surprised by how the Claude AI/LLM summarized it.

I’ll try to keep this short. Let’s see how I do.

As some people know, I often watch boring YouTube videos on my iPad in the middle of the night to help me sleep. The other morning — probably too late to get back to sleep anyway — this one was suggested to me. I tapped it and was soon pulled in by the concise way the creator presented 30 excellent tips in about 15 minutes.

If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare and think your life could use some improvement, I highly recommend watching this. (If you don’t think your life can use some improvement, you’re only fooling yourself; we can all improve.)

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My Anthropic Copyright Claim

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I file my claim in the Anthropic copyright case — and sit back to wait for the results.

I wrote about the Anthropic copyright case in three blog posts here, so I’m not going to go into the details again. If you want to get up to speed on my thoughts, read these:

My Claim

My infringed work
This is the official list of my work that Anthropic illegally accessed, violating copyright law.

The case went back and forth and it seemed for a while that the $3,000 per title settlement was not going to be accepted. But then it was and recently the legal team handling the claims for copyright holders including authors like me published the definitive list of infringed works. I used the lookup feature and found nine of my books.

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Follow Your Dreams

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A blog post I felt I needed to write that is mostly already written for me.

Lately, my brain has been stewing over the situation faced by an acquaintance. Without going into too much detail or identifying him, I’ll just say a few things to set the backstory for this post.

My acquaintance — I’ll call him Joe — is recently retired in his early 60s. He’s married and his wife still works, but she is set to retire in spring. They’re financially secure, living in a nice home in a nice neighborhood. They have friends and family and are involved in a community organization they like.

Joe has some rather serious health issues and they are definitely slowing him down. But he also has a personal goal that means a lot to him. He started taking steps to achieve that goal, despite a total lack of support by his wife and family — in fact, they actively oppose him. In a way, I was part of the steps he took, providing assistance and training to the best of my ability in the circumstances. But when I recently followed up with him, he indicated that he was going to give up on this dream.

And that’s what I’m stewing over.

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No-Knead Crusty White Bread

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A King Arthur recipe modified for a single person household that doesn’t eat much bread.

I don’t remember exactly who shared this recipe, but it likely came from someone on social media as a link, probably this one: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/no-knead-crusty-white-bread-recipe

Fresh Baked Roll
Yes, you can make just one fresh baked roll at a time.

It’s in my recipe binder now, shortened to fit on one page. I’m shortening it more here to reflect how I actually make this bread.

Keep in mind that no-knead does not mean no yeast or no rise. You have to have yeast and you have to let it rise. So don’t expect to whip this up in an hour.

But the magic of this recipe — at least for me — is that you can make single rolls with it and store remaining dough in the refrigerator to use again and again until it’s gone. This is the kind of hot, crusty bread you can’t get in supermarket bakeries. As the dough ages, it develops an almost sourdough flavor.

Here are the details:

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Copyright Basics

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The correct answers to your questions are pretty easy to find if you just look.

Making Trouble on Mastodon
Here’s my exchange with an angry self-published author. I’m not surprised that he’s blaming someone else for his problem; that seems to be a big trend these days.

Yesterday, I wrote an update to my August blog post about the Anthropic copyright case. In it, I mentioned that in order for a title to be included, it must be listed in the database of books Anthropic illegally obtained and used to train their AI and have its copyright registered with the US Copyright Office.

Apparently, it’s this second qualification that has a lot of authors freaking out — especially self-published authors. This came to light when I replied to an Ars Technica post on Mastodon — the same one I linked to in yesterday’s post. Yes, I was being flip, but I was also being honest. As someone who has books that qualify, I’ll definitely settle for $3,000 per qualifying title.

Apparently a lot of self-published authors have books that were illegally used by Anthropic but because they never bothered to register copyright of their work, they’re not eligible to receive compensation under this settlement. And they’re pissed.

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