Exactly, AI-generated text reads so smoothly, that the same short-circuit shifts my attention away from deep focus and onto scanning of the text, looking ahead to get the gist of it. Forcing myself to read the text fully feels almost painful. It's like reading a terms-of-service or any boilerplate document.
How is Anna's Archive getting around the copyright violations of hosting all these books for access to all? I suspect it won't be long before they get sued and are forced to shut down. I spent some time reading the web site, and it doesn't look to be a well thought out project. Even the way it is organized leaved much to be desired. There's much more to library science and the organization of a vast collection of books than meets the eye.
They evade judicial enforcement and try to stay anonymous. They've certainly already been sued (and lost by not even turning up). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#March_2026_pu... (Contrast to Sci-Hub trying to defend themselves in court, in India, and that leading to no new articles since several years ago.)
Unlike archive.org which is a real business, Anna's Archive is basically piracy.
You could try to sue them but you'd have to find them first.
This IMO makes them more resilient against that sort of thing, and also means they can actually do their job.
Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.
> Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc.
That data is useful as a source of scientific knowledge even if it's not current. Although it's probably already online, they probably don't want to download it and risk getting another copyright lawsuit
I think under first sale doctrine you have a much stronger case with destructive scanning. Google Books, HathiTrust, and Internet Archive's book scanning project have had a lot of legal expenses.
I didn't fully understand why but apparently there is also a legal reason to destroy the books, it makes it them less likely to be considered copyright infringement.
Not really. Selling the book onward does seem legally dubious but legally nothing (yet) prevents you from storing the book in a warehouse. obviously it’s cheaper to dispose of them.
That would explain my Radeon Graphics card I never managed to get working properly. It arbitrarily froze. I was told that it did that for Linux and that it was guaranteed to work on Windows. But when I tried it on Windows, it did the exact same thing. They were unresponsive.
Does the state need to encourage charitable giving, though?
Would a person stop donating $1000 of their expendable wealth to their favorite cause (e.g., hunger, cancer, cloning hitler, whatever) if that $1000 donation no longer reduced their taxes by $200 (for example)? If so, what kind of person would do that? Probably not the kind of person who ever donates to anything in the first place.
Worst case, if there were no more tax-deductible charities: that person would pay the $200 taxes and only donate $800 (instead of $1000) to their favorite cause. Best case: Megawealthy would no longer leave $20 billion to their favorite cause (be that their dog, the LDS church, their love of oil drilling, or whatever), but would pay $5 in estate taxes and only have $15 billion leftover for their love of oil drilling (or whatever be their whim).
They did reference satellite data. However, I do not know to what extent satellite data can show turbulence. The article implied a total cause, but I suspect its a bit more complex. Not sure how you would tell if its more common. I remember people complaining about turbulence for as long as I can remember. Maybe people's expectations about flight safety are just higher now, because planes offer a better experience.
Corporate marketing departments have been pretty adept at promoting their products on the backs of this science. They are far from unintelligent. Populists, for all their deficiencies, are fairly adept at eventually detecting marketing ploys and gimmicks.
