Fahrenheit 2026 🔥📕

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the curious trail of rare books being bought in bulk to feed the machine. Are AI companies buying up rare tomes and then destroying them after using the data to train their models? It sure looks like it. We also have news of Fairphone's launch in the US, Apple’s bid for a cut of purchases outside the App Store, a revamp for Reddit, an app that can help your kids eat a little better, and all the latest from 3Advance.

🎬 Our Top Take

📘🔥 AI – A Trail of Suspicion Leads to Accusations of Book Burning

A few days ago, several second-hand booksellers across Ireland and the UK began raising concerns that some of their rarest books were being ordered in bulk. The Guardian reports that the phenomenon is occurring elsewhere across Europe, Australia, and, most certainly, the United States. The reports come amid earlier reports in the summer that Anthropic has been spending millions of dollars to acquire books, then scan the pages to train AI models. Copyright issues aside, it hardly feels like a scandal, yet what happens to the books – particularly unique and rare books – after they have been fed to the AI models? Forbes claims they are sent to the trash; others report that the books are being burned. As AI companies have been secretive over the practice, the folks at 404 Media decided to run a test, tracking a shipment of rare books with the ingenious trick of sticking Apple Air Tags to the texts. They claimed that the shipment ended up at an Amazon AI training facility, where they were “destroyed” (404 Media’s words) after the pages were separated and scanned for AI training. Futurism reports that many book companies are happy to help, with some even promising discretion on the bulk orders. The optics of book destruction are horrendous, but robbing humans of the knowledge contained in rare and unobtainable books feels even more egregious. More like a crime than a mere scandal. #BookBurning Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: Teach Your Monster Eating

If you’ve got kids and constantly fret about their reluctance to try new foods, Teach Your Monster Eating may help. It turns food – healthy food – exploration into a game, with proven results to show that it can, indeed, get kids eating a more varied, balanced diet. Alright, it’s basically an app that lets parents psychologically trick their kids into eating some broccoli or carrots, but we see nothing wrong with that, right? It’s part of the Teach Your Monster family of apps, which are also lauded for helping kids in areas like reading or math. The app is free, but a one-off payment of $4.99 is required to unlock the full capability. Check it out here for iOS and here for Android.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 1B MAUs

📈📉 Gemini – Milestone Hit as Google Releases Slew of App Data

Google boss Sundar Pichai hit social media with a wave of info on the success of Gemini and related products, with the former now exceeding one billion users. There were other stats, such as 150 million images now generated daily. But we loved this little nugget: Gemini is Google’s 14th product to have hit over one billion users. Love or hate Google, that’s an incredible achievement. #Milestone. Read more here.

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

It’s been a busy summer so far for the team at Shift, the app for the Irish and culturally Irish around the world. But we aren’t done yet: Last week, we were at the Milwaukee Irish Fest (like the t-shirts? Read below to snag yours); this coming week, we’ll be at Mor Fest NYC (Aug 19-23) and Chicago Irish Fest (Aug 21-23). Come along and say “dia duit” (hello 🇮🇪) if you happen to be in the area on those dates! ☘️

We’ve responded to overwhelming demand – well, sort-of-whelming demand – from you guys for Shift t-shirts. So you can get your very own Shift Tee and several others by following this link… Better still, get on over to NYC or Chicago, and maybe you’ll win a free one.