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21 Responses:

1. Via Mastodon

   49 square miles and they're on the other side of the Bay, but there's just nothing they can do!

   • 2

     United States

     Other side of the Bay? You must be using Apple Maps.

2. 3

   United Kingdom

   There was a story the other day that one of these companies was now searching for particularly rare books in London bookshops to feed to the text-extrusion machines.  And, needless to say, destroy.

   This has to be some kind of peak techbro cargo-cult bubble moment: they're reduced to hunting through second-hand bookshops for that last, elusive bit of training data which will bring their idiot god into existence.  And when the god fails to be born, all they will have done is destroy the last copy of some book.  When this is over, I want public trials for these fucks, and for everyone who took their shilling.

   • Proxomitron says:

     1

     Germany

     I really wonder what the rationale could be for these people.

     "Do you have AGI yet?"
     "No."
     "What's missing?"
     "I'm pretty sure the only thing we need can be found in a book from the 1800s that sold poorly and was never reprinted. I'm so sure which one, so we'll have to scan them all. But then I'm confident that we'll have sufficient knowledge to cure cancer and colonize Mars."
     "You got it. Here's the company credit card."

     • United Kingdom

       There's a movie here: a man (yes) searches rare bookshops looking for copies of an obscure  book (perhaps it is the tractate middoth) for some unspecified purpose.  It becomes clear that he believes that, if he should acquire and read (and by reading, destroy) the book, he will ascend to godhood.  (Insert here much of the plot of The Ninth Gate.)  At the end of the movie it becomes, perhaps, clear, that a book he found at the beginning was the book he sought, and it has not granted him godhood because godhood is not to be had.

   • United Kingdom

     You don't have to cut the spine off a book to scan it, but it is cheaper, so of course that's what they do.

     • asan102 says:

       United States

       Their legal defence strategy is actually built around the fact that the original copy is destroyed after scanning, so they are not increasing the number of copies they own.

       • thielges says:

         United States

         Sounds like they are leveraging the privileges granted to lending libraries which allow dozens of people to read the same copy of a book at no additional cost.  If so then that approach is perverse because when a new LLM is compiled, they can instantiate as many copies as they want across the cloud which in turn are "read" by thousands of agents every minute.  Scale makes a difference.

         The Law will eventually catch up to Tech to restore copyright protections though that might not happen until the "AI" boom has scoured all of the value possible to extract from centuries of writers' work.

3. 1

   United States

   Hey now, give 'em credit - they haven't heard of this new "Sam Frances Ko" place; it's not as if it's 250 years old (yes, the same age as the country it's in).

   Besides, Google had to redirect all their mapping energy towards being the very first to jump on the bandwagon with that "Gulf of America" bullshit. Kissing the ring took a lot out of 'em.

   (Seriously, with it lookin' like the fall of MAGA will be simultaneous with the bursting of the AI bubble, I truly hope it destroys Google from the top-down.)

4. 4

   Via Mastodon

   I've worked in data the past ~15 years and I still find myself regularly laughing out loud about "utm_source=roof", thank you for that gift that keeps on giving 🤣

5. Jeff L says:

   United States

   Not sure this was in a previously:
   On the subject of the plagiarism woodchipper, now isbndb.com is destroying books at scale:
   https://archive.ph/9MQrK
   Reactions:
   - Gotta sell shovels during the gold rush
   - Burning of the library of Alexandria  V2.0
   - I'm putting a sign on my lending library "Please do not put books into the plagiarism woodchipper"
   - Man, this timeline sucks

6. 9

   Via Mastodon

   Fun fact I learned recently for anyone wanting to take a look: SF does their own aerial flyovers of the city every year or so, with multiple photos and angles of most city addresses. Here’s DNA Lounge: https://gis.sf.gov/ipa/?lat=37.7711&lon=-122.41263

   • 4

     Via Mastodon

     Nice! And it scans!

     

     • United States

       Gotta be honest, a tiny part of me was hoping for a Rick-roll.

7. Jon says:

   United States

   The Google maps of the area immediately around my house are 2-3 years old (based on the state of various construction projects) but 20 miles away they’re probably less than a year old. I was looking at Alaska recently and there were random blocks of snow covered ground in the middle of snow-free summer pictures. They have a weird algorithm for deciding when to update their photos.

8. 79

   Via Mastodon

   At long last we have created the book wood-chipper from Vernor Vinge's classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Book Wood-Chipper

   • 24

     Via Mastodon

     (Note: "Rainbows End" is set in 2025.)

     • 12

       Via Mastodon

       crumbles to dust

     • Via Mastodon

       Thanks! I've been trying to remember which book featured the book shredder, clearly too long since I've read Rainbow's End.
       @jef @jwz

   • 1

     Via Mastodon

     Fahrenheit 451rpm

9. dzm says:

   4

   United States

   When my father-in-law died we found that the Street View (yes yes, not the same thing) of his house had caught him out front using the push-mower to mow the lawn. For 2+ years it was kinda heart warming to go look at his address and see him out front mowing with an antiquated, 1960s era push mower.