Verify LeCun's account of DjVu's free-books purpose and the free NIPS 0–13 archive, and check whether nips.djvu.org has rotted
claim-djvu-created-to-freely-distribute-scanned-documents is flagged
[unverified-quote]. Its whole basis is a single X/Twitter post by Yann LeCun
(x.com/ylecun/status/1742269871168111018) that the capturing session could not
re-fetch verbatim — X returned HTTP 402, so the account reached the vault only as a
search-engine summary, with no exact phrasing preserved.
What would answer it:
- Re-read the source verbatim. Retrieve the LeCun X post directly (via a working fetch path, an archived snapshot, or a mirror), or find the same account from LeCun in a citable venue, and capture the exact phrasing of the "free books" / "newly expanding internet" framing.
- Confirm the demo. Verify that the NIPS proceedings volumes 0–13 (1988–1999) were in fact scanned with DjVu and freely released at nips.djvu.org from ~2000, and that it functioned as a real community resource.
- Check for rot. nips.djvu.org appeared unreachable during the capture session (DNS failure). Confirm current reachability, and check the Wayback Machine for whether the free NIPS archive survives in any form — the "free books forever" story may itself have decayed, which would be the sharper finding.
This connects to the vault's recurring free-access-needs-maintenance thread (claim-perceptrons-1969-standalone-scan-not-freely-available, claim-internet-archive-2016-stopped-generating-djvu). Resolving it either lifts the flag on the claim or hardens the rot finding.