Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.
We could also refrain from turning to fantasy and sci-fi to look for serious answers on how to develop technology or structure society. They are stories designed to tell a tale that sells copies, not necessarily as accurate or rigorous predictions of things to come.
More will go up.
Ultimately what needs to be done is to solve those existing problems. You get extremists like this when the people feel like there’s something wrong that the “mainstream” politicians are unable or unwilling to fix.
Oh no, 341 foreign tourists! This is serious.
(The snark isn’t aimed at you, OP, just at the general way that news articles like this are written)
I download everything, I just may not ultimately keep it long-term if it turns out to be uninteresting or bad. Streaming and downloading transfer the same amount of bits, one just has higher demands for timeliness.
Security robots should be able to fill most of those roles, I would imagine.
Trump doesn’t joke. He doesn’t really comprehend the concept. What he does is say something outrageous and then if there’s pushback he’ll claim he was joking so it doesn’t look like he’s backing down.
Alas, sometimes smart people do really dumb things now and then.
It really baffles me sometimes how clever people can make such basic mistakes when doing crimes.
If you’re planning to do something illegal don’t literally document your crime. Or if you do need to do some written-down planning ahead of time, a major part of that plan should include how to destroy that documentation at the earliest possible moment.
The only people inconvenienced by “poisoning” your old comments are actual humans who come across old threads through Google or whatever in search of helpful information.
When Reddit sells data to AI trainers or whatever, they sell their internal database. It’s got the deleted content in it still. So do the public archives that third parties have collected and made available as torrents.
In another comment regarding these books, you said:
They can keep both for all I care, tbh.
So it really seems you’re just insisting on this because you think it will make things harder for them. You don’t care about the books or who they go to in the end.
First people complained about them pirating, now people are complaining about them following copyright. It should be clear at this point that the people complaining don’t really care about either, they just don’t like AI.
But donate them to whom? The books were one step away from the pulpers when they bought them in the first place, who’s going to take them that values them more than that?
Also, these companies are not charities. What do they gain out of all that extra expense?
Well, who’s talking about buying?
How else do you think they got the books?
I can imagine a couple of reasons.
The most straightforward one actually is “capitalism”, but maybe if I explain it a bit you’ll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they’re probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they’re still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It’s like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for “disposal” in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.
The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There’s lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that’s easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called “signatures”, typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn’t leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that’s a cost that produces a book that’s probably worthless for resale anyway.
Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can’t blame them too much.
Is it one of those setups with a glass wedge the partly-open book is placed on with two digital cameras under it to photograph the pages? I’ve seen those contraptions, they’re neat and I’d love to have one for my personal library someday.
The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.
And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not “rare” in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren’t interested in quality, they’re interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they’d release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that’s where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They’re just following the law, unfortunately.
I’m all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna’s Archive. But that’s a separate issue.
Because it’s not just about him. It’s about the fact that nobody is reining him in. There were supposed to be all sorts of checks and balances in the American system of government but apparently they either don’t work at all or congress is okay with the president threatening to forcibly annex former allies because he wants their territory.
That tells us a lot about America and gives us plenty of things to think about long after Trump’s dead and buried.
The King of Canada is the King of Canada.
He also happens to be the King of some other minor countries here and there, but those are separate titles.