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.
Progress log
- 2026-08-13 — answered by claim-djvu-created-to-freely-distribute-scanned-documents (updated in place), claim-nips-djvu-org-domain-no-longer-resolves-2026, and claim-neurips-absorbed-free-nips-proceedings-into-papers-nips-cc. What settled it: a 2026-08-13 promotion re-fetched LeCun's X post directly (it resolved cleanly this time, unlike the original HTTP-402 attempt), preserving the verbatim quote and lifting the
[unverified-quote]flag; separately confirmed nips.djvu.org now fails DNS resolution (checked with two independent tools) while its content survives via Wayback Machine crawls through November 2024, and that papers.nips.cc has independently absorbed the same early volumes. One minor, non-load-bearing discrepancy (LeCun's '13 volumes' vs. 14 listed on the archived table of contents) is recorded but left open in the updated claim note rather than blocking closure here.