11 ms·

Again, it's just insane to me that we don't even much have a meaningful discussion of: "Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandr

by jrm4 4y ago

Again, it's just insane to me that we don't even much have a meaningful discussion of: "Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things. At least one in every town that everyone could use, for free, forever, without restriction to ANY of the knowledge anyone desires."

gmiller123456 4y ago
As a kid, my parents had a full copy of the Library of Alexandria on the coffee table. Everyone else just called it an ashtray. (Sorry, too soon?)
- throwaway742 4y ago
  I haven't actually laughed for like a month. Thanks.
- Sakos 4y ago
  :'(
- waplot 4y ago
  have your upvote. now show yourself out.
- ta988 4y ago
  It likely didn't burn and was mostly destroyed by purging of scholars and abandon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
mylons 4y ago
what's even more mind boggling is that library is more or less publicly accessible _now_ via a home internet connection or a connection from your... friendly neighborhood library! but you're right, having unmitigated access to that is even more incredible.
malloryerik 4y ago
OK, what's the napkin math?
- int_19h 4y ago
  I don't know about "all the knowledge ever", but to give you a baseline, the entire Wikipedia with images but without editing history, as last archived by Kiwix in May, 2022, is 90 Gb. A web server can run just fine on e.g. Raspberry Pi Zero W ($10), exposing any such content to any smartphone etc able to connect to it via WiFi (Kiwix sells preconfigured SD cards for their content, even). So, assuming that most people already have a phone or a laptop or even something like a Kindle, the only non-negligible cost here is storage. And a 1 Tb SD card can be had for under $150 right now. So if anything, I think OP is overly conservative, given that their estimate was "$200 per person". Unless that counts the devices used to consume the content, and not just storage and the server.
  - visarga 4y ago
    There are some language models like DeepMind RETRO that can make use of a 1TB text collection after the model is trained. The idea is to chunk up the text and make the blocks searchable with a neural embedding index. When you ask a question to the model, it first searches for relevant information and then adds it to the prompt. The result - you can get GPT-3 quality on a 25x smaller model. That means you could have your own GPT-3. Another advantage is that you can reference the sources and the generated text is more grounded. An open source project could make a "search-engine-language-model" and in turn make this library much more accessible. A recent article related to this: http://mitchgordon.me/ml/2022/07/01/retro-is-blazing.html http://mitchgordon.me/ml/2022/07/01/retro-is-blazing.html
    - Vetch 4y ago
      The interesting aspect of GPT-3+ is their reasoning like behavior such as Chains of thought or "step by step" generation. There's no evidence RETRO as is has sufficient capacity for the actually interesting behaviors.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
Insane in the abstract, but not exactly unfathomable. Who would make money off of that, and who else makes money off of it's absense?
- culi 4y ago
  Society as a whole. Exactly the kind of initiatives governments are supposed to be taking. Instead our governments are totally captured by the profit-seeking organizations and are hellbent on using their monopoly of violence to imprison activists working on these initiatives
  - visarga 4y ago
    Interesting difference here between how YC reacts to Codex vs this library. Both are reusing copyrighted materials to help society.
    - khimaros 4y ago
      maybe it has something to do with the commercial nature of one of those two things.
      - visarga 4y ago
        In order to run Codex you need 4-8 large GPUs connected in the same box or cabinet. Such computers cost about $100k to buy. Then they use about 5..10kwh to run, that adds up to 50MW/year. The Codex model needs to be very low latency, means more expensive. This is just for one single replica of the model, you need many to serve all the requests. Not to mention the cost of development - for that they needed thousands of GPUs or TPUs and a large team of top AI talent which is very very expensive to hire. Regarding the open source copyrights - wasn't that code released to be "open"? This is actually a radical way to open the code, make it more useful for everyone. Open source devs can also use it to create projects. I think $10 per month for this whole process is justified. It's not like you could run it at home.
seoaeu 4y ago
We've basically already had that for decades thanks to public libraries. In fact, between large collections and inter-library loans most provide 1-2 orders of magnitude more content than the library of Alexandria ever held
- sircastor 4y ago
  My relatively uninformed opinion is that the Library of Alexandria was an amazing resource for its time, but in modern context is tremendously overrated. While it certainly contained a vast amount of knowledge for the time, the amount of valuable, useful, accessible information of a modern mid-size city library I would guess is substantially greater.
carrolldunham 4y ago
"The African economy will start booming once they get UNLIMITED access to those 1800s manuals on measuring the Ether and where the best seal clubbing sites are in Alaska." Nobody ever thinks this through. Books are basically worthless at this point
- sircastor 4y ago
  This is like saying tribal knowledge is useless, or internet access is useless. Books are useless only if they’re inaccessible. The point you’re trying to make (I think) is that information isn’t particularly useful on its own. True. It has to be relevant. With good, useful information you still need community support (whether that’s your household or your country), funding, time, etc. But that’s going to be the case whether you’re using a book or learning from a forum, or a video. Internet videos are worthless if you have no internet. Tribal knowledge is useless if no one can get the information from the previous generation. The medium is not the problem, and suggesting that relevancy is a fault of the medium is a misrepresentation.
- approxim8ion 4y ago
  then maybe we stop letting people push the copyright periods tentatively so more relevant things come into the public domain as well. this is a nothing argument.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    There's a compelling argument that Germany's lax attitudes toward copyright in the 19th century helped propell that nation[1] to a dominant position in science and technology. Germany now is a leading copyright-maximalist power, unfortunately. ________________________________ Notes: 1. I say nation and not country as the German language and cultural nationality pre-existed the German state in 1871.
dietr1ch 4y ago
The best we can do is a library where you can rent pdfs. I still can't understand why can't every public library host media that should be free and easy to get.
Barrin92 4y ago
That's already the case minus the last ~70 years or so. The overwhelming majority of our knowledge is in the public domain, in particular cultural artifacts. It's a nice sentiment but like, people can already go to gutenberg.org and download pretty much most important works of literature in existence and most books have like 5k downloads so there's that.
- caslon 4y ago
  Project Gutenberg is missing a lot of content that is public domain, and the oldest entries are often pretty poor in quality (and some of the oldest entries aren't lucky enough to get redone like Carroll's work has been).
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Which just goes to prove parent's point. As much as it might seem otherwise, IPR restrictions are not the main bottleneck to widespread availability of content (at least book-like content); actually making the content available is far more important! (Also, keep in mind that content is now entering the public domain every year, and projects like PG are nowhere close to keeping up with that flow of newly-unrestricted stuff. So this dynamic is becoming more extreme over time, not less.)
    - caslon 4y ago
      I really don't think it proves any point aside from Project Gutenberg being a bad example, as it doesn't really contain the sum of human knowledge in the sense that a pirate library does.
- ls15 4y ago
  Hasn't been more knowledge published in the last 70 years than during all the times before? More than 2 million new books get published every year.
  - dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
humaniania 4y ago
A tablet with WiFi/cellular for every person would go a long way.
KronisLV 4y ago
> "Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things. There are projects out there that lean in the direction of offline viewing of lots of content, for example, having an offline backup of Wikipedia, such as: - https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page - http://xowa.org/ (HTTPS seems not to work though) I just wish that the process of actually accessing the data was a little bit more straightforward: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html (given how many different files there are to choose from, you'll probably want to read a tutorial or two) That said, while text is perfectly doable, things do tend to get more difficult if you also want images or videos, because those do take up a lot of space.
Sakos 4y ago
I think it's particularly insane that (ignoring scihub, which still faces legal battles and is at risk of being our next Library of Alexandria) the world's scientific knowledge is largely behind paywalls and inaccessible to most of humanity, even those millions whose taxes funded it.
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
This is why I'm vehemently against further increasing copyright law, software patents, and treating Imaginary Property as something that can be owned. We finally build the tools to allow the free sharing of information and almost immediately a bunch of rent seeking lawyers lobby congress to make doing that illegal. I've always lived by the rule of "If you put it on the Internet, it's not yours anymore." Because that's de facto the truth. Only if you employ lawyers do you have even the slightest real power over something online, even if you're the original source. This isn't something 95% people can afford. Turning the Internet into just another place where the rich get preferential treatment is a terrible thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- popcube 4y ago
  can we just offer free text book for everyone? maybe also some online lecture. everything is there, I trust will need incorporate it into school, library and local community.
godelski 4y ago
> Like, all the knowledge ever. Go to your local library. There is actually a lot more there than books. There are videos and audio records too. There are news paper clippings too. Worse, data is being generated very fast. Let's look[0] > [In 2012], CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes. > MAST is currently home to an estimated *200 terabytes of data*, which… is nearly the same amount of information contained in *the U.S. Library of Congress.* But that said, a few petabytes is going to only cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars and max in the low 100s. So this is well within the budget of even every modestly sized city and definitely every university. It would be even easier if this was done with torrenting. I think the real question is^: why are we not, as a species, creating this system? It seems very reasonable that we could back up all data. (There is also a dark side to this too! So let's not forget about that) At least, why aren't we creating a full access world library for all scholarly data, which is probably something that could be housed for a few grand. Should we do this on our own given the relatively low cost? Books + sci-hub + arxiv + *xiv? [0] https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of-data-its-all-in-how-you-define-it/ https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congres... ^ maybe it is already being done and I don't know, please inform me if it is. (Other than the NSA)

by jrm4 4y ago

gmiller123456 4y ago

As a kid, my parents had a full copy of the Library of Alexandria on the coffee table. Everyone else just called it an ashtray. (Sorry, too soon?)

throwaway742 4y ago
I haven't actually laughed for like a month. Thanks.
Sakos 4y ago
:'(
waplot 4y ago
have your upvote. now show yourself out.
ta988 4y ago
It likely didn't burn and was mostly destroyed by purging of scholars and abandon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

mylons 4y ago

what's even more mind boggling is that library is more or less publicly accessible _now_ via a home internet connection or a connection from your... friendly neighborhood library! but you're right, having unmitigated access to that is even more incredible.

malloryerik 4y ago

OK, what's the napkin math?

int_19h 4y ago
I don't know about "all the knowledge ever", but to give you a baseline, the entire Wikipedia with images but without editing history, as last archived by Kiwix in May, 2022, is 90 Gb. A web server can run just fine on e.g. Raspberry Pi Zero W ($10), exposing any such content to any smartphone etc able to connect to it via WiFi (Kiwix sells preconfigured SD cards for their content, even). So, assuming that most people already have a phone or a laptop or even something like a Kindle, the only non-negligible cost here is storage. And a 1 Tb SD card can be had for under $150 right now. So if anything, I think OP is overly conservative, given that their estimate was "$200 per person". Unless that counts the devices used to consume the content, and not just storage and the server.
- visarga 4y ago
  There are some language models like DeepMind RETRO that can make use of a 1TB text collection after the model is trained. The idea is to chunk up the text and make the blocks searchable with a neural embedding index. When you ask a question to the model, it first searches for relevant information and then adds it to the prompt. The result - you can get GPT-3 quality on a 25x smaller model. That means you could have your own GPT-3. Another advantage is that you can reference the sources and the generated text is more grounded. An open source project could make a "search-engine-language-model" and in turn make this library much more accessible. A recent article related to this: http://mitchgordon.me/ml/2022/07/01/retro-is-blazing.html http://mitchgordon.me/ml/2022/07/01/retro-is-blazing.html
  - Vetch 4y ago
    The interesting aspect of GPT-3+ is their reasoning like behavior such as Chains of thought or "step by step" generation. There's no evidence RETRO as is has sufficient capacity for the actually interesting behaviors.

Brian_K_White 4y ago

Insane in the abstract, but not exactly unfathomable. Who would make money off of that, and who else makes money off of it's absense?

culi 4y ago
Society as a whole. Exactly the kind of initiatives governments are supposed to be taking. Instead our governments are totally captured by the profit-seeking organizations and are hellbent on using their monopoly of violence to imprison activists working on these initiatives
- visarga 4y ago
  Interesting difference here between how YC reacts to Codex vs this library. Both are reusing copyrighted materials to help society.
  - khimaros 4y ago
    maybe it has something to do with the commercial nature of one of those two things.
    - visarga 4y ago
      In order to run Codex you need 4-8 large GPUs connected in the same box or cabinet. Such computers cost about $100k to buy. Then they use about 5..10kwh to run, that adds up to 50MW/year. The Codex model needs to be very low latency, means more expensive. This is just for one single replica of the model, you need many to serve all the requests. Not to mention the cost of development - for that they needed thousands of GPUs or TPUs and a large team of top AI talent which is very very expensive to hire. Regarding the open source copyrights - wasn't that code released to be "open"? This is actually a radical way to open the code, make it more useful for everyone. Open source devs can also use it to create projects. I think $10 per month for this whole process is justified. It's not like you could run it at home.

seoaeu 4y ago

We've basically already had that for decades thanks to public libraries. In fact, between large collections and inter-library loans most provide 1-2 orders of magnitude more content than the library of Alexandria ever held

sircastor 4y ago
My relatively uninformed opinion is that the Library of Alexandria was an amazing resource for its time, but in modern context is tremendously overrated. While it certainly contained a vast amount of knowledge for the time, the amount of valuable, useful, accessible information of a modern mid-size city library I would guess is substantially greater.

carrolldunham 4y ago

"The African economy will start booming once they get UNLIMITED access to those 1800s manuals on measuring the Ether and where the best seal clubbing sites are in Alaska." Nobody ever thinks this through. Books are basically worthless at this point

sircastor 4y ago
This is like saying tribal knowledge is useless, or internet access is useless. Books are useless only if they’re inaccessible. The point you’re trying to make (I think) is that information isn’t particularly useful on its own. True. It has to be relevant. With good, useful information you still need community support (whether that’s your household or your country), funding, time, etc. But that’s going to be the case whether you’re using a book or learning from a forum, or a video. Internet videos are worthless if you have no internet. Tribal knowledge is useless if no one can get the information from the previous generation. The medium is not the problem, and suggesting that relevancy is a fault of the medium is a misrepresentation.
approxim8ion 4y ago
then maybe we stop letting people push the copyright periods tentatively so more relevant things come into the public domain as well. this is a nothing argument.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  There's a compelling argument that Germany's lax attitudes toward copyright in the 19th century helped propell that nation[1] to a dominant position in science and technology. Germany now is a leading copyright-maximalist power, unfortunately. ________________________________ Notes: 1. I say nation and not country as the German language and cultural nationality pre-existed the German state in 1871.

dietr1ch 4y ago

The best we can do is a library where you can rent pdfs. I still can't understand why can't every public library host media that should be free and easy to get.

Barrin92 4y ago

That's already the case minus the last ~70 years or so. The overwhelming majority of our knowledge is in the public domain, in particular cultural artifacts. It's a nice sentiment but like, people can already go to gutenberg.org and download pretty much most important works of literature in existence and most books have like 5k downloads so there's that.

caslon 4y ago
Project Gutenberg is missing a lot of content that is public domain, and the oldest entries are often pretty poor in quality (and some of the oldest entries aren't lucky enough to get redone like Carroll's work has been).
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Which just goes to prove parent's point. As much as it might seem otherwise, IPR restrictions are not the main bottleneck to widespread availability of content (at least book-like content); actually making the content available is far more important! (Also, keep in mind that content is now entering the public domain every year, and projects like PG are nowhere close to keeping up with that flow of newly-unrestricted stuff. So this dynamic is becoming more extreme over time, not less.)
  - caslon 4y ago
    I really don't think it proves any point aside from Project Gutenberg being a bad example, as it doesn't really contain the sum of human knowledge in the sense that a pirate library does.
ls15 4y ago
Hasn't been more knowledge published in the last 70 years than during all the times before? More than 2 million new books get published every year.
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago

humaniania 4y ago

A tablet with WiFi/cellular for every person would go a long way.

KronisLV 4y ago

> "Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things. There are projects out there that lean in the direction of offline viewing of lots of content, for example, having an offline backup of Wikipedia, such as: - https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page - http://xowa.org/ (HTTPS seems not to work though) I just wish that the process of actually accessing the data was a little bit more straightforward: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html (given how many different files there are to choose from, you'll probably want to read a tutorial or two) That said, while text is perfectly doable, things do tend to get more difficult if you also want images or videos, because those do take up a lot of space.

Sakos 4y ago

I think it's particularly insane that (ignoring scihub, which still faces legal battles and is at risk of being our next Library of Alexandria) the world's scientific knowledge is largely behind paywalls and inaccessible to most of humanity, even those millions whose taxes funded it.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

This is why I'm vehemently against further increasing copyright law, software patents, and treating Imaginary Property as something that can be owned. We finally build the tools to allow the free sharing of information and almost immediately a bunch of rent seeking lawyers lobby congress to make doing that illegal. I've always lived by the rule of "If you put it on the Internet, it's not yours anymore." Because that's de facto the truth. Only if you employ lawyers do you have even the slightest real power over something online, even if you're the original source. This isn't something 95% people can afford. Turning the Internet into just another place where the rich get preferential treatment is a terrible thing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
popcube 4y ago
can we just offer free text book for everyone? maybe also some online lecture. everything is there, I trust will need incorporate it into school, library and local community.

godelski 4y ago

> Like, all the knowledge ever. Go to your local library. There is actually a lot more there than books. There are videos and audio records too. There are news paper clippings too. Worse, data is being generated very fast. Let's look[0] > [In 2012], CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes. > MAST is currently home to an estimated *200 terabytes of data*, which… is nearly the same amount of information contained in *the U.S. Library of Congress.* But that said, a few petabytes is going to only cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars and max in the low 100s. So this is well within the budget of even every modestly sized city and definitely every university. It would be even easier if this was done with torrenting. I think the real question is^: why are we not, as a species, creating this system? It seems very reasonable that we could back up all data. (There is also a dark side to this too! So let's not forget about that) At least, why aren't we creating a full access world library for all scholarly data, which is probably something that could be housed for a few grand. Should we do this on our own given the relatively low cost? Books + sci-hub + arxiv + *xiv? [0] https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of-data-its-all-in-how-you-define-it/ https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congres... ^ maybe it is already being done and I don't know, please inform me if it is. (Other than the NSA)