4 ms·

> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. It is common for academic books to have publication runs in

by pibaker 2mo ago

> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. It is common for academic books to have publication runs in the low three digits. You may argue these books are not important. But how do we know if we fail to preserve it?

quietsegfault 2mo ago
Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning? I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.
- etdznots 2mo ago
  > Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning? Is there evidence that they aren’t? All of the common works are already on libgen, if these books are worthless repetition they will contribute little to the training corpus, labs want high quality interesting texts and they have unlimited budget to spend on it. Paying $300 for something rare with millions of tokens of interesting and original text for training is definitely fucking worth it, spending $1,200 to get all the copies and block your competitors from getting it is most definitely worth it! > I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense. Do you think it would be OK to rail against for example, a genocide if I wasn’t substantially contributing to some effort to stop it? This sophistic (and uninteresting) bit of rhetoric boils down to: if youre not trying to fix it yourself, dont complain! (reminder that one of the basic principles of a democratic society is that each person has some concern outside of their personal affairs)
  - quietsegfault 2mo ago
    we're done - straight to genocide, later buddy.

by pibaker 2mo ago

quietsegfault 2mo ago

Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning? I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.

etdznots 2mo ago
> Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning? Is there evidence that they aren’t? All of the common works are already on libgen, if these books are worthless repetition they will contribute little to the training corpus, labs want high quality interesting texts and they have unlimited budget to spend on it. Paying $300 for something rare with millions of tokens of interesting and original text for training is definitely fucking worth it, spending $1,200 to get all the copies and block your competitors from getting it is most definitely worth it! > I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense. Do you think it would be OK to rail against for example, a genocide if I wasn’t substantially contributing to some effort to stop it? This sophistic (and uninteresting) bit of rhetoric boils down to: if youre not trying to fix it yourself, dont complain! (reminder that one of the basic principles of a democratic society is that each person has some concern outside of their personal affairs)
- quietsegfault 2mo ago
  we're done - straight to genocide, later buddy.