Author Archives: Maria Langer

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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Is Any Book Really Dead These Days?

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Good news and bad news about that copyright lawsuit I’m part of.

Since writing a post last month about my participation in the huge copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, there have been a few developments.

The Good News

First, a settlement was reached between the plaintiffs and Anthropic. A big settlement: $1.5 billion to be paid to affected authors. This came out to $3,000 per infringed work. Whoa.

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Fighting Against AI Copyright Theft

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I join the class action suit against Anthropic for the use of text in 16 of my books to train their AI without permission or compensation.

I didn’t expect to spend part of my morning filling in a form on a lawyer’s website to provide information about myself and the books Anthropic apparently used to train their AI. After all, I haven’t written much in the past 10 years and all of what I’d written before then was about using computers. Surely all of those books were so sorely out of date that even an AI wouldn’t be interested in them.

But here I am.

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American Airlines Misadventures

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I experience a grueling travel day thanks to automated systems and basic ineptitude at American Airlines.

I’ll try to make this short, mostly because I’m exhausted and don’t want to spend too much time writing about it. But it was such a crazy experience that I want to record it for posterity.

The Backstory

I just finished a two week delivery/training boat captain gig in Florida. The owner of the boat, a 2024 Beneteau Antares 11, needed to move the boat from Niceville on the Florida panhandle to Jacksonville on the northeastern Florida coast, a distance of more than 800 nautical miles. John had zero boating experience and his insurance company required an experienced training captain on board. John found me through my YouTube Great Loop videos. We had 2 weeks to do the trip and we managed with a day to spare.

There’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll cover the highlights in my Great Loop blog. All I can say is that I don’t know how people can live with the heat and humidity in Florida in August.

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