Riskable

If you think any more than 0.1% of these physical books would ever have ended up in antique bookstores, you’re dreaming.

Think about how many books out there are things like Donald Trump’s biography, or pointless drivel from non-experts, self-help books that tell people to down “essential oils”, old editions of programming books, or just plain shitty fiction that never sold much in the first place.

It’s ok to throw trash away! Really!

That’s like saying, “they had some failure modes from the synthetic data, so they should just obviously stop trying forever.”

They’ll just fix the edge cases and move on. Like any programming task.

Yes. That does make sense.

If you bought a book, scanned it—destroying it in the process—then read it on your computer, that would be completely acceptable.

Why is it wrong when a corporation does the same thing?

They’re not claiming ownership of the copyrights, just ownership of a copy. Which is how copyright works.

Big AI mostly switched to synthetic training data anyway. The books they’re digitizing are being used to gather knowledge, not writing styles or logic (mostly).

As in, when you ask ChatGPT how long some book is, it can just go check (if it’s in the database). It’s also useful if you ask about that book or about knowledge contained in that book. It’ll even reference books now (if you demand that in your prompt).

It’s not the same as earlier LLM tech which relied on scanned text to figure out how to respond to any given prompt (from a language standpoint). The “language” part of LLMs is a solved problem now (thanks to the synthetic training). At least for English 🤷

Is it really destroying though? They’re digitizing them, and publishers still have the digital copies ready to print more at any time. So it’s not like they’re destroying the texts, they’re just shifting them.

Nobody complained when Google did this over a decade ago 🤷

When you say they’re “destroying the books” you make it sound like they’re erasing one of the last known copy of some important work when in reality, most of these books were purchased in bulk from bookstores and libraries that were planning on discarding them anyway.

Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center. They’re just being digitized on the way.

You’ve obviously never tried to get any given .NET project working in Linux. There’s .NET and then there’s .NET Core which is a mere subset of .NET.

Only .NET Core runs on Linux and nobody uses it. The list of .NET stuff that will actually run on .NET Core (alone) is a barren wasteland.

If it’s written in C# that’s a huge turn-off though because that means it’s likely to only run on Windows.

I mean, in theory, it could run on Linux but that’s a very rare situation. Almost everything ever written in C# uses Windows-specific APIs and basically no one installs the C# runtime on Linux anymore. It’s both enormous and a pain in the ass to get working properly for any given C# project.

As an information security professional and someone who works on tiny, embedded systems, knowing that a project is written in Rust is a huge enticement. I wish more projects written in Rust advertised this fact!

Benefits of Rust projects—from my perspective:

• Don’t have to worry about the biggest, most common security flaws. Rust projects can still have security flaws (anything can) but it’s much less likely for certain categories of flaws.
• Super easy to build stuff from scratch. Rust’s crates ecosystem is fantastic! Especially in the world of embedded where it’s a godsend compared to dealing with C/C++ libraries.
• It’s probably super low overhead and really fast (because Rust stuff just tends to be like that due to the nature of the language and that special way the borrow checker bitches at you when you make poor programming choices haha).
• It’s probably cross-platform or trivially made cross-platform.