Marvin at least got to stay in his room. This one has KPIs. Fair hit though, the honest version of this project is funnier than any pitch would be, which is sort of the whole reason it is public.
people have given some great examples. ill add that anyone in residential proximity to a compute centre is probably recieving 0 benefits at the cost of noise and environmental pollution
One company I was at sold its product claiming any changes you made were “near instantly published” globally. They tried to demo it as such.
The way the engineers built the update/publish operation was synchronous from the source data center to a number of globally distributed data centers. Publish didn’t “complete” until each data center responded with an ACK. They built this system in 2020.
They constantly complained and generated incident reports about p95/p99 latencies to the Japan region. Latencies that were perfectly reasonable when you considered the multiple global round trips that were being made, the size/volume of objects in the publish and speed of light.
It has stayed comms and compute summer since the end of the twentieth century. It has stayed infection summer since the beginning of the twentieth century. You get the idea.
Given that people use that info to decide how to spend their money on influencing political outcomes, aren't we better off if it's as inaccurate as possible?
I just wish Redbar radio would return. He was a true embodiment of the punk ethos in the niche world of comedy / entertainment podcasting. Never selling out to the ad revenue or collabs, staying off YouTube and other platforms, resisting the call of Kanye's team when they reached out about his stellar cover of Cousins.
Not under US copyright law. The Bartz case ruled that if you scan a book and destroy the original it's considered format-shifting and you're fine. But keeping the original and using the scan instead is a different matter - Internet Archive tried that (in an incredibly limited way), and publishers sued and won.
So companies scanning books already know they'll be sued successfully if they don't destroy the originals. So they destroy the originals.
One of the things I've done is create an entire fully functional GitHub alternative that does more of what I want and hosts all of my other projects, so yes I at least am getting considerably more done.
The alternative for many of these un(der)appreciated books is that they will get unceremoniously dumped in the future anyway. The publishing industry and libraries etc dispose off lots and lots of books.
So at least with the AI companies they are scanning them and preserving them digitally. Not just in the trained weights, but also as raw training data for future runs.
As much as I hate piracy in a sector in financial crisis like book publishing (because Anna’s project is piracy), I hate even more what these large AI companies are doing: privatizing human knowledge.
On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people. “Information wants to be free” is bullshit spread by people who have never spent a minute in their lives trying to create something themselves. Artists need some form of reward.
On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors.
This is scary, and it reminds me of Fahrenheit 451.
Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write. But even more importantly, do not believe AI companies will help you discover and access knowledge.
We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free, and LLMs capable of writing entire books for us. But there would be no human writers left.
In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?
If you’ve got a workaround, I’d suggest updating the issue description to have it up top there so similarly impacted users can spot it quickly and benefit.
Not an option. Companies are happy to sell you products at premium prices, take your money, and then still collect, mine, insecurely store, and sell all your private data.
This whole situation is such a disgusting consequence of copyright law. The most frustrating part is that its so artificial. It is 100% the consequence of stupid laws.
I also don't like the fatalistic mindset, but I feel like we're better off trying to retaliate against the makers and operators of the bots, rather than getting into a technological arms race against the bots themselves. That is, the fight is one of policy, law, and morality, not of technology.
To clarify: Are they scanning and destroying a single copy of Book X or are they buying up all copies of book X, scanning it once, then destroying all copies of book X they can get their hand on?
I am baffled at these practices and somewhere confused on what's the end game here? monopoly on information? altering data? exclusive subscription based knowledge? Feels like we have welcomed the AI era with open hands hoping( at-least assuming) that data democracy will be there, yet feels like its a long road!
Well, at least afterwards the book is scanned and preserved digitally in their archives of training data.
If the book was just rotting away in some forgotten bookstore, it would more likely be unceremoniously disposed off in the future without anyone scanning it first.
If he has such a good reputation, why doesn't he write well? He never actually introduces the point of the article, he merely alludes to it in the concluding paragraphs.
I often wonder whether computer programmer said these kinds of things about spreadsheets, and how mere office workers would never have the knowledge base to build serious programs with them. Remember, before Visicalc, every spreadsheet was a program built by a computer programmer.
