The way I see the situation is that every single AI company can clearly see the massive wall they are speeding ever faster towards, they see it and can also see that it is a massive wall, thick and sturdy.

There is however one thing that keeps them pushing the accelerator down hard against the floor, the delusion that they alone are smart enough to find the prefect weakpoint where they can smash through to the promised land of massive promises, while everyone else is just flattened against the wall.

It is extreme narcissism combined with yes men powering this shit.

Investors are starting to notice that it’s all smoke and mirrors in terms of the profits. I am reasonably sure it will pop this year. I will be utterly shocked if it doesn’t pop by the end of next year. It’s just so comically and obviously unsustainable.

This is gonna go down as the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, I swear.

I dunno, the GameStop Bros are still waiting for MOASS. So I'd say the wealthy have more ways to keep the plates spinning than we wish they did.

Depends on how much power the financiers have to fabricate capital from debt. In modern economics that's not necessarily a limitation. I do hope it will be tho.

Be careful, because we will all pay the price when the bubble pops. It won't be just the CEOs paying the bill, it will be governments and people.

Yeah we remember. Because that’s a literal fucking warcrime. You’re not allowed to destroy historical sites.

While I agree that destroying books is bad - even common ones - it’s also not technically illegal. If I want to burn a first edition of whatever book worth thousands of dollars… I’m legally allowed to do that.

I can also see the benefit of having a digital version of a rare book that can be enjoyed by thousands as opposed to sitting on a shelf. But yeah, definitely hold companies accountable for destroying them. There has to be a better way to do that work and still have a useable book afterwards.

Looking at the temperature outside today, it's a pleasure to burn

Yup, and we all have our tv feeds at home. I should reread that. I just remember that Montague was named after the pencil he used.

Have you ever tried scanning a book? It's a huge PITA.

They just cut the binding off so they can be run through a document feeder.

Easier to scan if you cut the binding off, and it costs money to re-bind a book you purchased for 10 cents as part of a lot.

Cause to easily scan them they remove the binding and rebinding is more work %han destroyibg so the point is capitalism

Fair use loophole, they claim they convert one physical book into one digital with no illicit copies, while also supporting the delusion of AI being an equivalent to a human reader. It is weird on so many levels but no one of noticeable weight asked them wtf.

Do make sure that knowledge is only available through their model and otherwise lost to humanity.

Same with bombarding small websites until they give up and pull the plug.

Everything is fucked

To keep their competitors from buying them and scanning them.

I mean have you tried donating books? They just dump them into a storage room with thousands of other books donated that nobody wants.

Copyright. They mustn't make a copy. There is legal precedent that confirms it's okay to transform the copy you bought into digital format. The Internet Archive relies a lot on that. I think they actually litigated it in the first place. So that's why the copyright heads are going so absolutely apeshit. If no one's charging you rent for using some data, then it's "unethical".

They're pissing in the well so their competitors can't access the same information.

you snip off the book and scan the binding

To avoid competitors also scanning the book to get some kind of edge.

As his faculties return, Robert (who has always been technophobic) must adapt to a different world, where almost every object is networked and mediated-reality technology is commonplace.

…

However, jitter and latency are considerable problems with this basic network when long distances are involved. In the novel, Robert Gu develops an algorithm that partially compensates for these technical deficiencies, and might ultimately allow the inclusion of haptics.

This feels like it would be a little Mary-Sue to me, but I haven’t read the book. Is that transition handled well?

Crazy how we had all this information available and all we did was lock it up and make it for sale. The internet was an awesome place we shared ideas easily and without massive corporate "sponsors" now the owners of the internet are the corporations and they are just riding t till the wheels fall off.

So it can’t be traced that they’ve used said books for training data.

The reason they are doing it this way is because it is illegal to not destroy the books if they ingest them. Skirting copyright laws.

Yeah, part of me thinks this is part of why they are desperate for these LLMs to take off.

Get everyone to trust it, then just manipulate it to saw whatever fascist lies they want as truth. Look at how Elon gets all pissy everytime Grok starts going to the left on its ideas.

To be fair, we don't know what books those are, anyone can publish anything as a book these days. It doesn't have to be good or even true. For example, Jordan Peterson shits out some books, and I personally would not mind if all copies were shredded and forgotten.

It's a second dark age approaching. It's slow, maybe not in our lifetime but with the enormous pressure of climate and demographic crisis add the regression of human cognition and destruction of researchable truth and you will get a collapse of the global economy and a shift in priorities (survival first) that will bring a dark age.

Also, if every AI company does this, then it's more books gone. If they cooperated they'd only need to do it once. Good scans of all books in the public domain would be so useful for us all as society.

As much as I think this behaviour is fucked up, once they buy the books it's legally property of the company. And it can be destroyed without consequence since it's legally property of the company.

How would a book seller know? Orders increase and you find out afterwards why. Bit hard to know ahead of time