6 ms·

This was a problem before "AI" and will definitely be a bigger problem going forward. That said, there are more great books than I could read in 100 life times

• belter 3y ago
  Your post makes me sad. "The Value Of Owning More Books Than You’ll Ever Read" - https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-books-than-youll-ever-read-3d60a6046994 https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-bo...
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • ajdude 3y ago
    https://archive.ph/G7H9s https://archive.ph/G7H9s
    • belter 3y ago
      "...The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?”* and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there..."
      • throwaway4aday 3y ago
        This was partially solved by the internet and Google Books although there's still a lot of room for improvement. We really need to get all of the books in the world digitized and behind an API that allows anyone to access all of the content with some sane pricing scheme rather than charging per book. I doubt this will ever happen so the best we can hope for are the various efforts to pirate as many books as possible and make them available for download. It would be a dream to have a really good search over all of the written works of mankind though.
        • skydhash 3y ago
          Yes, but some books require extensive effort to write while others are produced factory like. How do we take that in account?
          • throwaway4aday 3y ago
            It shouldn't be, the effort with which something is produced has zero weight when judging its value. For books they should be rated based on their purpose. Non-fiction should be rated along dimensions of accuracy, new information, utility, clarity and absence of errors. Fiction should be rated on how entertaining and inventive it is among other things. If you want to subdivide further I'm sure you could come up with other meaningful criteria.
• deleted 3y ago
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• beardyw 3y ago
  > This was a problem before "AI" Yes, I knew someone who was in "publish as remainder", that is publish at a high price then sell in bulk at a discount. Creating the books involved: 1. Think of a subject 2. Get some pictures 3. Find someone to write something which goes with the pictures 4. Repeat There has always been a market for the undescerning.
• Freak_NL 3y ago
  Contemporary literature is valuable for its insights in the present. I love classics, and much of what I read was published before this century, but I would be missing out if I stuck just with tried and proven titles and authors.
  • pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    I would say that contemporary literature can't provide any insights, by definition. Because it's a slave to its zeitgeist. Anything touching politics, history, economy and especially society will be tainted.
    • api 3y ago
      Wouldn’t this apply to all literature then? Because it was all a product of its time.
      • pi-e-sigma 3y ago
        Of course all literature is a product of its time but when you are reading an old book most of the time you are distanced from the events or then-new ideas presented and it's much easier to think objectively about them. As an example I'll give Marx works on communism. If I was XIX century working man I would be ecstatic about the idea, with the hindsight how communism actually works in practice I would have second thoughts. But the difference between the theory and the practice would be the actual insight. And in case of the contemporary events the actual insight would be in how they were presented and perceived when they were happening compared to how they are seen now
        • spookybones 3y ago
          Marxism is very antiquated without modern insights applied to it.
        • AlotOfReading 3y ago
          Reminds me of The Machine Stops: “Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. [...] And in time there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality.”
• api 3y ago
  This is a general problem with art, music, movies, books, etc. There is just so much! Performances and storytelling was pretty much ephemeral before printing presses, records, and now computers. Now it’s cumulative. All the writing and art of the past several hundred years is out there. Kind of creates an overproduction / saturation problem.
• hnbad 3y ago
  Zoe Bee did a video essay[0] on her experience as a ghostwriter producing essentially the kind of junk that is now being automated with LLMs. In her case she was (somewhat unknowingly) paid to write unlicensed Minecraft stories. I think the video is worth a watch if you're not aware of the state of ebooks (especially on Amazon) prior to LLMs. It's also worth mentioning that this problem isn't limited to ebooks. There's also a cottage industry of mass produced minimal-effort audiobooks on Audible as part of various "passive income" scams. Dan Olson made a pretty good video essay[1] about one such scam where he actually played along for most of it and also gave it a try as a ghostwriter. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aqLLiIjgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aqLLiIjgA [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw EDIT: Considering the most cited examples are Amazon/Kindle and Audible, I think parallels can also be drawn to the proliferation of no-name brand Chinese whitelabel dropshipping products on regular Amazon. Everyone already knows not to trust Amazon reviews but at this point it's hard to find reputable brands for products you're not already familiar with (e.g. which of the one hundred brands featuring near identical products are actually brands you might find in a retail store rather than a random name slapped on the product in the same Chinese factory?). LLMs will definitely make reviews even more untrustworthy but they might also help generating even more plausible copycat product descriptions and designs.
  • rightbyte 3y ago
    > e.g. which of the one hundred brands featuring near identical products are actually brands you might find in a retail store rather than a random name slapped on the product in the same Chinese factory? Ye this one is annoying. I often look for automotive tools and before I realized this I thought I was turning insane. Different store fronts pretend they are making some tool or like has sourced a factory to do their design. But they like order the tool with a sticker and paint job from the same supplier. Sometimes nuts and bolts or like cover plates vary but it is the same base. I was browsing for tool hooks for the garage the other day and it felt like there are two factories in China that make hooks and two factories that put rubber on them for 4 combinations and that is it. But 20 flavours of branding. Edit: It would be really neat if the factory had to mark everything they made.
• macilacilove 3y ago
  Current LLMs can not summarize books even if they are in their training set. It is only possible if the training set also includes human summaries.
  • apwell23 3y ago
    > Current LLMs can not summarize books even if they are in their training set Why is this? due to legal reasons?
    • avandekleut 3y ago
      The context windows aren’t large enough, as I understand it. It might be possible via a chain-of-summarization, though.
    • macilacilove 3y ago
      Most importantly due to the context length not being long enough. If the context length was long enough, it is possible that they could do it with clever training. I only trained much smaller language models though.
  • dTal 3y ago
    "Even if" is an odd phrasing. Why would you expect that to be possible? LLMs don't have direct access to their training set. Having a book in the training set just means they emit text in the style of the book - it's not like a database they can query. But they can summarize very well, if the text is front of them.
    • macilacilove 3y ago
      I mean, currently you have to wait for a human to summarize a book, before you can read an llm rephrasing of that summary. Or you have to buy the book and pass it to the llm employing some tricks to avoid reunning out of context length.
• bambax 3y ago
  The complaint that too many books are being written and that most of them are useless nonsense is indeed as old as time -- or at least, as old as books. Montaigne (1533-1592) famously said il y devroit avoir quelque coerction des loix contre les escrivains ineptes et inutiles ("there should be laws against stupid and useless writers"). This was about just a hundred years after the invention of the printing press.
  • jakderrida 3y ago
    I remember wondering what books on the stock market would have been like before like the 50s as a curiosity. I've taken 2 CFA exams and have a Finance degree and noticed that none of the major concepts introduced seem to go back further than the 70s and market was definitely older than that. So I searched on Google Books and limited the timeline... What I found were the pretentious ramblings of an old man that thought way too highly of himself for getting lucky at a time that a little luck could make you a fortune to last a lifetime. He wrote a bunch of books on the market. It was like 1910s or something. They were so worthless, but I did find them hilarious to read.
    • djkivi 3y ago
      Here's a couple of well known ones. Not sure if they were what you found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Opera... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor
      • jakderrida 3y ago
        Nah, those are different. Especially the second one. lmao. It also happened to have few sales till a bit later on. I think my goal back then was to see what someone would find if they were just trying to learn about it at the library. Reason why is because the ROI using the Fama-French data back then would suggest someone could have rapidly become a millionaire and billionaire off of a thousand dollars if they performed even the most basic value investing formula back then to bifurcate the market or, better yet, divide it into deciles based on (book equity)/(market equity). Only in the past 10 years, you'd actually underperform the market return. So, considering a very simple formula could have been so effective, I wondered what they'd find at the library and if even that simple concept would have been available. What wouldn't be available is SEC data. But, as your second suggestion made clear, you could get the information for ratings agencies.
• BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  > That said, there are more great books than I could read in 100 life times published before 2020, so I doubt this will be an issue for me personally in practice I spam this fact whenever someone makes arguments against piracy. I am utterly fine if no new culture is produced, as there already exists more than I could ever enjoy. Besides, creatives will create (with lowered production values) regardless of money. It’s a primal drive for them.
  • jakderrida 3y ago
    > I am utterly fine if no new culture is produced Although, I would be a little upset if they stopped making high-budget binge-worthy series. Then again... What the hell do I care if it's made by AI? Especially if they use one of those preference-based RLHF and penalize the model against episodes where the series lost all its viewers.
  • spookybones 3y ago
    The same can be said for most code. It isn’t improving quality of life for most people. Like I really need another todo app. Let all the programmers live on scraps. It’s a primal drive for them. /s
    • BeFlatXIII 3y ago
      This but without any irony.
• akudha 3y ago
  I wonder at what point people would consciously spend less time online and go back to physical books, especially those works that were published decades/centuries ago? If I am a normal, non-tech person reading something online, how am I supposed to know who wrote it (software or human), what is the agenda behind it etc? Of course I understand physical books can also be written by AI (just last week, I saw a physical poetry book fully written by AI, except for the preface). But it is much more cost to produce a physical book than throwing up something online only.
• jterrys 3y ago
  >That said, there are more great books than I could read in 100 life times published before 2020, so I doubt this will be an issue for me personally in practice. I'm personally split on this viewpoint. Through a series of events this year (starting with the death of Charlie Munger), I've started reading the Harvard Classics. Doing the 15 minutes a day challenge, which started on New Year's Day. I bought the full original 1910 set on Ebay. They're pretty cheap because they're essentially just room decorum and probably nobody reads them. People on Ebay will gladly sell cool looking leather cover books because it makes their offices look nice. This is an actual descriptions many sellers use. For me though, above all else it's been an incredibly humbling experience. Because its been a very long time since I've read works from genuine professionals who spent a lifetime mastering their craft. I'm struggling with prose and vocabulary. I'm not an avid reader. I will at most read maybe 5-10 books a month. Some of which are technical or industry related. But I still like hardcopies so I tend to visit bookstores. And the crushing reality is that what's generally available on bookshelves (at least in the USA) is fucking garbage. Half-assed ghostwritten autobiographies of no-name celebrities or politicians, lifestyle in-your-face FEMALE EMPOWERMENT books that give questionable advice, pseudo-historical nonfiction books, bland and uninspired Star Wars science fiction rip offs (and their accompanying video game expanded universe novels). The list goes on. Barnes and Noble realized that their audience doesn't really buy physical books anymore (or just plainly don't fucking read) so have moved in to fill the gap that Toys R' Us left behind. Half the floor space is a glorified toy store. Most of the people that come here either bring their kids or are kids themselves hanging out in the Manga section. The cliche is obviously here and repeating itself: but with each consecutive generation we become less literate. AI has made it so the illiterate get nifty summaries of other less literate summaries of great works and ideas, which then get challenged by the pseudo-intellectual hack frauds extracting wealth from their fanbase and college students pumping out bullshit papers to meet graduation requirements. Just how fucking low exactly can we limbo before it's too late? In this context AI is basically Accelerationism