If this is not bad faith argument, then I don't what is. When someone is violating an OSS licence, they are doing it for commercial gains and monetary profit. Nobody is angry at someone using FOSS software for himself with no money getting involved.

As opposed to that, books, movies are pirated for personal consumption. Not monetary gains. If someone bought a $30 book, and then ran a BaaS with millions of VC money in his pocket, people in HN would be angry at him, too.

There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity.

I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren should benefit from a government mandated monopoly on your work?

Copyright is not an unalloyed good.

In small doses, and short terms, I might agree with your classification.

But when copyright is 150 years It no longer has anything to do with reward for the author or encourage you creativity, it’s just a cartel.

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks.

If you look back through the annals of Free Software, one often encounters the claim that the GPL was a way to use copyright against itself, and if there were no more copyright, there would be little need for these licenses.

The issue with copyright law is that it is all or nothing. Rights to a work are either tightly held by an author/publisher, and even downloading a small excerpt can get you in trouble, or it is fully public domain and open for any and all use.

There needs to be a middle ground, such as: after 15 years of publication any private individual can access and read the work for free, but the rightsholder still controls commercial sales, merchandising, licensing, character rights, movie rights etc.

Just because something is challenging, that doesn't mean you should get paid for it. Art and business are two distinct endeavors. All the copyright and IP issues come up because of this one confusion.

Taken out of context, you're right. But the parent comment couldn't buy these books even if they wanted to. I'd say there's a consensus that the primary motivation for piracy is hurdles to access having nothing to do with payment.

Keep in mind "copyright" explicitly does not cover "knowledge" or "ideas".

The reason I buy books is rarely for knowledge or ideas, its either for a good story in the case of fiction (which the author definitely should have the right to exclusively commercialise), or for the authors explanation of and idea or some knowledge which goes beyond the raw information I could find in the scientific papers or higher level descriptions.

Good storytelling and teaching are valuable and should come with some sort of exclusive rights to control and profit from by the author. And even bad storytelling and teaching should have that same protection from other people distributing it in ways that restrict the authors rights.

Clearly 130 years of protection is insane, and all it does is keeps Micky Mouses lawyers able to buy new yachts. But as others in this discussion have pointed out, after 20 year almost all of the authors who are still earning money off their works are already rich beyond most authors realistic hopes. I'm not sure 20 years is "the right length" for protection, you sometimes hear stories of works being rediscovered and becoming wildly popular more that 20 years past the original publication date (Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill getting back into the charts on the back of it being used in Stranger Things - for example).

We certainly wouldn't want to return to the pre-1976 era, where, as we all know, no books were written.

Things have changed a lot since the late twentieth century. The kind of people you imagine, who can live full-time off writing, are responsible for a vanishingly small amount of the books that appear today. Piracy has little to do with it; this is primarily due to the fierce competition from other books, the glut of content available today, but especially from mobile phones as fewer and fewer people read books. Even for those who make appreciable income off books, the books are nevertheless usually a side gig alongside other hustles.

Imagine that terrible time before Copyright existed, and there was no motivation for anyone to make art, literature, or music.

"What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing." --Arthur Schopenhauer

You forgot to stipulate, “…living in an ultracapitalist country with no meaningful social safety net,” i.e. the USA.

Yes, but do their publishers need to be compensated for a century after their death?

But do their grandchildren deserve to live off the proceeds for the rest of their lives as well? Say I'm a carpenter and I make chairs. How many chairs do I need to make before I get to retire? If I make a really really good one and get it put it in the right place, one should be enough. Just sit back and collect $1 for every time that someone sits in it. I don't have to make the chair particular good or comfortable, just get it into the right place where people will pay. And then I don't have to work for the rest of my life. Nor do my children. Or their children either. Framing the question at the extreme, that one should be expected to work for free, is just as absurd as framing it as some people should just never have to work at all, ever. No one put me in charge, but I believe people need to do work of some sort. Who gets to decide what counts as work or not isn't for me to decide though, so the system we've got is just this whole unorganized unplanned economy.

I rambled so much that I forgot to say what I laid all that introduction for.

I'm not part of the market for these products. I don't have access to them nor even if I buy some imported (probably illegally and by single persons) or printed version, am I going to benefit them since I'm disconnected monetarily from yhe author.

Me reading pirated versions of these books has no negative effects on the earnings of the authors.

Libraries spend like $2B / year buying books https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/fy19-pls-re..., which is like 10% of the total book market. So even if no one ever bought a book because they first encountered the book, author, or genre in the library that's already a signficant difference

I think I agree, the FAR bigger impact on my book's sales was Google search deciding not to surface it in search results. Presence on pirate websites had no effect, and eventually I switched to the PDF as "pay what you want."

Can you imagine if we didn’t have libraries and someone tried to create them today? From publishers to right wingers, they would be painted as communist plots to destroy creativity.

Moon reader is amazing. I love mine so much I don't see a point of having a separate book reader.

I’ve noticed that people today often bristle at any suggestion that one connect a device to a phone or computer with a cable – on Reddit, one will often get downvoted for this. Apparently, a lot of younger people are hardly aware this is possible and it strikes them as overly complicated or for old people. People want to wirelessly transfer stuff, and what the OP linked to is a popular way to do that with Kobo.

Yes. You can literally ssh into a kobo. I usually just put my books on a WebDAV share that is mounted on the kobo.

Lol it never occurred to me that they might just save every single upload

I agree that a USB cable is the most practical option. However, the aforementioned site is useful in a specific scenario: if your Kobo is very old, macOS won't recognize it.

Interesting site. I picked a random topic to listen to — flying chariots or something like that — and the conversation of one person talking and the other whispering was definitely not to my preference. I’ll have to take another look when I have more time.

I don't see raw token counts, just a list of steps and page counts. For example, what is the rough average token count per page in the ocr and in the translation steps for a Greek book?

I have seen Gemini costs change quite a bit when processing very similar books from the same series lately, mainly because thinking tokens have increased about 5x. Has that has happened to you as well?

Edit: for ocr I am using about 15k-25k tokens per page, but I have a complex prompt.

How do you handle the more densely written pages in script ? I did a very similar exercise OCRing works from this exact collection, but I stuck with the English books for the first pass.

Can't you just tell him?

>Stands up "I am Anna!!"

This one's good as well. This is an example of a rare good Reddit thread.

Apparently this is the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKCmyiljKo0

But this is what I thought of: https://youtu.be/hdsB99HQ2S8?t=194

All are examples of people with less power protecting each-other from a more powerful force.

There are not too many mentally-sharp, fully-employed, terminally-ill people that I have met. Even fewer at tech companies.

And even fewer who are single and childless. (Google would likely go after the estate of anyone who did this.)

It’s the “ Copy data into extra large capacity micro sdcard” step that gets you caught. Nobody is stopping you from leaving with an SD card or USB stick at Google.

Importantly, this would work way better on a speedcube than the rubick's brand cubes. Never use the rubick's brand rubicks cubes. I use the Moyu RS3m V5 maglev, and I think that it would work well for hiding uSD cards.

I wish an extra capacity SD card was enough, google books holds (probably) an insane numbers of books

Sui generis database rights

Good point. But it would still be a breach of Google policy, most likely and they signed a pact with the devil so ...

i'd strongly caution anybody foolish enough to go down this path

financial watchdogs and international treaties make it impossible unless you are perhaps a multi billionaire who can afford to buy people at the political level

Except perhaps jail time.

Lying about your assets to avoid paying a lawful fine is criminal. Just because they can’t see your money doesn’t mean they can’t prove that you have it, and can’t jail you for hiding it to get out paying a fine.

No specific figures, but see, for example:

https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html

> Virtually all major companies building LLMs contacted us to train on our data. Most (but not all!) US-based companies reconsidered once they realized the illegal nature of our work. By contrast, Chinese firms have enthusiastically embraced our collection, apparently untroubled by its legality.

> We have given high-speed access to about 30 companies. Most of them are LLM companies, and some are data brokers, who will resell our collection. Most are Chinese, though we’ve also worked with companies from the US, Europe, Russia, South Korea, and Japan. DeepSeek admitted that an earlier version was trained on part of our collection, though they’re tight-lipped about their latest model (probably also trained on our data though).

It's at least 30 companies, each of which paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They likely use intermediary companies, but NVIDIA might have purchased from them directly, I don't remember the full story.

Well, you needed the means to get an education, since most of the poor in those days were illiterate, which is something of an impediment to becoming a successful writer.

I can only think of one writer off hand who wasn’t a wealthy landowner, although it is a particularly notable example; that of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wasn’t poor (his parents seem to be of upper middle class standing), he was able to get a basic (but not a university) education and then pursue an acting career (with perhaps a side hustle as a teacher). Whatever the case he certainly wasn’t independently wealthy before he started writing, he needed to earn a living.

He did seem to be in it for the money (and fame) since he wasn’t just a writer he was an actor, theatre owner, and something of a celebrity, and he did make enough money to become a wealthy landowner by the time he died.

Everyone has their own opinion as to what the best literature is, just like what the best music is.

But there is also some consensus. For music it would be Beethoven, Mozart, the Beatles, etc.

For literature it would include Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Austen, Tolkien, and many more. I would bet it will eventually include Stephen King but it's too early to make that call now.

They could get access for free through torrents.

That’s not remotely true. They did distillation as a cheap solution to the cold start problem. You need data/trajectories to hill climb to higher capabilities. All large Chinese labs do RLAIF.

I think GLM 5.2 having a higher ELO than Opus 4.8 shows that they did it [https://gptbased.com]

> you can never distill your way to being the teacher

Are you sure?

What if you distill from 10 teachers?

>"they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps"

Not yet.

If there is a need someone will come and fulfill. Personally for me now I do not even want to use top models. Professionally I use AI to help with the coding using Junie agent that comes with IDEs from JetBrains. Junie is told to use Gemini Flash and works fine for what I ("I" being an emphasis here) ask it to do. I tried more advanced models and different vendors only to discover credits going down the toilet without any extra benefit.

Shaping the tool that does the thinking is quite valuable when you're in the business of changing how people think - I think we can expect propaganda agencies to be subsidizing model creation forever.

This doesn't strike me as a symptom of a bubble - except in so far as the bubble pushes the competitors models forwards and thus they need to invest more to stay competitive.

As long as it is in the CCP's national interest to have a frontier model, Chinese companies will have the resources for another training run.

I think it's a deliberate business strategy of commoditization of their complement.

China acts like an entire bloc, not as single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.

I never wanted the IP from dotcom bubble companies.

"The Internet" was not a bubble. Companies with no long-term business model / sufficient product-market fit that were riding hype were the "dotcom bubble". But when those companies crashed, nobody said "I really want to get my hands on their IP", because it wasn't valuable – an important pre-requisite to the the bubble popping. Seems to be a different case here if people actually want the SOTA models.

Railways were both a bubble and, eventually, one of the most significant technological innovations in history.