Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster.
The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization
> They are destroying the foundations of civilization
No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory".
If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ?
> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.
Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web.
And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training.
When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each.
So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period.
This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it.
Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.
Many were out of print or were used copies, so they weren't books you could simply order new from a publisher. They are out of print. Anthropic deliberately sourced large quantities through used-book sellers such as Better World Books and World of Books and destroyed the physical copies after scanning them.
If you find this a "breathless emotional take", then I don't even know what to say. Nothing will meet your "evidence" criteria to dislodge your fervent fawning and support for destruction carried out by AI corporations.
> They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
By your reasoning, if I could afford to buy every surviving painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt and I burned them in a bon fire I wouldn't be taking anything from human culture and nobody should care at all about what I do with my belongings.
Destroying something that is rare or one of a kind and valuable does matter. Doing it so that you can exclusively profit off of charging people for software that regurgitates lossy and error filled versions of what was lost makes it even worse.
In your scenario, the bug is letting someone control all of that in a private collection. But that scenario is completely divorced from what is actually happening, so I don't think it's worth discussing too deeply here.
If you actually object to the concept that people that own a physical object get to decide how to dispose of it, that would be an interesting discussion to have because it would fly in the face of property ownership rights.
Why such a blinkered argument, I own the soda can I just drank but it is still, arguably, wrong of me to chuck it in the trash instead of the recycle bin. Yes, you have the "right" to dispose of things you own but there's more to what's right than that. There's human decency, consideration, awareness of the environment, the spirit of the laws, cases the laws were not designed for in mind etc.
Like, tell your mother or HS teacher you decided not to recycle because you own your trash. See how well that clever argument goes.
you should indeed be able to, but maybe buying art shouldn't be allowed at all, with people only being allowed digital recreations.
why do you need more than a picture of the rembrandt? there's so much good artwork easily available that the rembrandt is only worth money because hoity toity people want to store their money in it and in the future sell it again
> There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.
Perhaps, but there are certainly now catchphrases and words that can indicate it was written with AI i.e. load-bearing, idempotent, etc. Style and structure are in and of themselves, a fingerprint.
For that, there's ProTube[1]. On the surface it behaves like YouTube Premium, under the hood it's just the mobile version of YouTube bundled into an iOS app. I have no idea why ads aren't served, I analyzed the network requests with Fiddler Everywhere and saw nothing nefarious.
It's web scraping, and occasionally falls behind yt changes (2 years ago it was unusable for about a month). It could be described as an arms race, but Google appears to suffer it to live.
I suppose they understand that zero is not the optimal corruption target. (Because, as you asymptotically approach total control, the user cost also rises asymptotically.)
It's not a perfect solution - I have occasionally noticed it leading to some buggy behaviour in the YouTube/YouTube Music sites using Safari, but nothing anywhere near as bad as using those websites without it!
The only odd behaviour I can call to mind was one time that it continued playing audio when I answered a phone call. It was easy to stop the music playing, and the other person on the call couldn't hear the music. I was actually disappointed that the other person couldn't hear the music, and I've been disappointed every time I've taken a phone call since and the music hasn't continued playing. I wish that was a feature :)
I think Vinegar was well worth the small one-time price, and I like supporting the developer. I've heard that Brave allows playing with the screen off, but I like my setup enough that I don't want to install Brave just for that.
If there’s news, then yes. This is a pretty great new release for those still stuck on Qwen3.6 35B A3B if they have enough memory but don’t have super powerful compute.
I wonder if I could get this running through vLLM on 6x Nvidia L4 - the 3.6 worked great on 4 cards but sadly TP6 just isn’t a thing and I don’t have 8 cards available, maybe it’s gonna be okay with like TP2 and MTP. I have no idea at this time, probably need to test out what even might be possible.
This particular release is interesting because it's a preview of qwen4 architecture. And, while benchmarks are iffy, this is a direct comparison, by the same team, with qwen3.8-27b that was pretty well received for a local model.
This "next" release adds a new concept, first public release with n-grams, I think. And it's in a MoE size that is likely to be very fast and cheap to serve (faster than 27b for sure). It's also well suited for inference on alternative compute (i.e. sparks, macs, etc) so it's relevant to local users.
to be honest, having to walk inside to use the bathroom or refill your cup of coffee seems like a nice way to stand up and get the blood flowing again + breathe some fresh air.
All of my childhood friends who bragged about being good at GH/RB only ever bragged about being good at the _games_. Never ran in to someone trying to pass it off as being able to play the guitar.
Anecdata, friend. Two old friends became extraordinarily good at guitar hero and even won competitions. They're also some of the best guitar players I know. One of them is an extremely good drummer and can do improv piano like a beast. They'd both agree that guitar hero helped them play better.
What are your thoughts on games like Keyboard Hero?
[Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe...
reply