voidhorse

6 ms·

31.
by voidhorse 1mo ago
I disagree. There is plenty of writing that operates at the same level of abstraction (philosophy, mathematics) without being needlessly convoluted. Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to p
32.
by voidhorse 1mo ago
> Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. No it isn't. It trades concrete imagery for empty abstractions which could encompass just about anything and are basically meaningless. If you think this is good wr
33.
by voidhorse 1mo ago
To me, a lot of the child comments on this thread are technically correct (the best kind) in that, yes correctness bugs in Lean boil down to compiler bugs in a language like lean. What these comments all miss is that ensuring your 13 mil
34.
by voidhorse 1mo ago
That's largely because we intentionally model llm "brains" after the human brain.
35.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
> Are you aware that the publishing industry itself has destroyed more than 500X as many books as Anthropic ever will? I'm not sure why everyone on hacker news so often falls for the "my friends are jumping off the bridge, so I
36.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Again, you're assuming a lot about this situation that we don't actually know to be true. For example, that these purchases are limited to "bargain bin" books that have essentially no market value. These may be cases we
37.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
> You understand that what you just said is true of almost every company in the United States... right? No. It definitely isn't. There are plenty of US companies, one of them large and recognizable, that actually make it their missi
38.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
There was never any reason for it to be slow in the first place, yet here we are. In my view, we have slow software not because knowledge of optimization comes at a premium, in fact, most compilers do well enough at optimization that you ca
39.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
While I agree with this in principle, I think the market is a separate problem. As much as this is correct, the market is not going to select for competence. The market is going to select for affordability. Ultimately the most affordable wo
40.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Assuming these texts exist in large quantities seems to definitionally contradict the term *rare* book. Plenty of books have small print runs or have reached out of print status. One could obviously reproduce films too. Ultimately, you don&
41.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
You should already be upset. A company with far greater resources than you has potentially prevented you from accessing a portion of the world's information. Because they haven't been transparent, you don't know. You should
42.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Yesterday you could have purchased one of these books and read it. Good luck doing so today. I don't know why you're so quick to assume this will all just "work out" such that the scans are ultimately accessible. Arguabl
43.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Because destroying the book makes it possibly inaccessible permanently because we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know t
44.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Why assume it is? We don't know, and the fact that the process is so opaque and would have been totally undisclosed if not for journalists doesn't exactly make me confident they are "doing things by the book" on this one
45.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
How would film be any different in any capacity whatsoever? Believe it or not, what matters here is the message and access to the message, not the medium.
46.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Since we don't know what was actually purchased and what was actually destroyed, how do you expect us to furnish an example? This would require the destroyers to admit it, and beyond that it would require all of them to admit it since
47.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Why would amazon buy "crap"? Surely they want their model to succeed and they want to train it on valuable input, no? They have more than enough resources to determine whether or not the books are worth buying. They have been in b
48.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
You don't know that. A major part of the problem here is the lack of transparency. Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.
49.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine. But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, traini
50.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Then give up training on antiquated books. Why does an LLM aimed at providing utility for people living in 2026 need to be trained on rare (thus probably obscure) texts of yore in the first place? Because these companies have no real strate
51.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Yeah, which is completely fine. There's a major difference between: A. Company destroys a book forever for training. Its scan is locked away forever in company records. In this case: - This information is locked away in the improvisati
52.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
That's not really the point. You are defending the right of a massive corporation, to harvest and systematically and unilaterally make it impossible for people to purchase such books in the future without any oversight, just so they ca
53.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Who gets to decide what's "special"? Written works might be personal stories or expression of feeling. I've read a lot of unknown old literature that has little to recommend it as far as literary history goes, but it all
54.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
> So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong wit
55.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
What are we gaining other than your silly little hypothetical? The whole problem here is: - Not everyone agrees on the utility / value of AI. - A small handful of companies control frontier models and get to shape how these inputs are
56.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
It's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The article doesn't emphasize copyright issues or fair use, because that is
57.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Most people agree it isn't normal. The problem is the people at the levers of power think otherwise. Capitalism as it exists in the US today, with effectively no regulation and deeply intertwined with governance, but in the wrong direc
58.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
I believed this idea of kids = dead dreams for a long time. I don't think it's true. I think the author of the blog is letting his particular interests and cherry-picked examples cloud his judgment. If you look beyond the narrow
59.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
No I'm not. Russell spied the paradox in the Begriffscrift. One only needs to check the wikipedia page, even: > he announced the discovery to Gottlob Frege of the paradox in Frege's 1879 Begriffsschrift https://en.wi
60.
by voidhorse 2mo ago
Hey man, I completely agree. I love the begriffschrift and recognize the very important role it played in the history of logic. The reason I say it's in the rubbish heap is because basically only experts and people with strange hobbies

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