I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits.
If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive.
Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose books and knowledge I consumed without being able to pay them back.)
I wonder how long it will be before they offer bounties for internet scrapes.
Cloudflare captchas have made the internet unusable for me, and I'm sure it will only get worse over time. I'd much rather just browse (or even torrent) a copy of archive.is or similar. The latter would be much better for privacy, and hey, I run ad blockers anyway.
The US should just find a way to quietly share literature access with the Russians, rather than letting piracy be promoted and facilitated for US consumers as freedom-fighter "archiving".
Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.
We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.
Possibly but this act of governmental self-harm is useful to The People. We live in a world where if your valuation is ~1T you can more or less just do what you like. And the work of The People is stolen from you and launderd.
In such a world, isnt it useful that governments are stupid enough to give adversaries reasons to undermine it? When the government props up a corporate tyranny domestically, and racketeering, should we make a temporary alliance with all its enemies?
(Eg., the provision to AI companies of all corporate secretes and competitive practices via prompts, eventually to be used against their capital interests and their labour interests).
That’s misunderstanding why these models are behind. A large part of why they’re behind is they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps that takes a pre-trained model and turns it into a frontier model like GPT 5 or Opus. Instead they do their best to recreate these models using distillation.
Fundamentally, you can never distill your way to being the teacher, so these approaches will not advance the frontier.
Chinese companies giving away expensive models for free is a symptom of the AI bubble, too. It's not a law of nature that they'll always be able to scrounge up the money for yet another training run.
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.
I think it's a deliberate business strategy of commoditization of their complement. China acts like an entire bloc, not single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.
If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive.
Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose books and knowledge I consumed without being able to pay them back.)
Cloudflare captchas have made the internet unusable for me, and I'm sure it will only get worse over time. I'd much rather just browse (or even torrent) a copy of archive.is or similar. The latter would be much better for privacy, and hey, I run ad blockers anyway.
Well, there is this little conflict of interest
Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.
We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.
In such a world, isnt it useful that governments are stupid enough to give adversaries reasons to undermine it? When the government props up a corporate tyranny domestically, and racketeering, should we make a temporary alliance with all its enemies?
(Eg., the provision to AI companies of all corporate secretes and competitive practices via prompts, eventually to be used against their capital interests and their labour interests).
> Purchase all Library of Congress MARC datasets — $3,000 bounty
> English Wikipedia pages about relevant institutions — up to $100 per new page
> Internet Archive Digital Lending — $5000 per 1 million pdf files
> Text version of our full library — $20,000
...
The current situation feels untenable with renting. So many regular people I know have learned about VPN, NAS, etc.
Spotify, Netflix, Amazon etc provided OK value for a while, but now enshitification is biting, this is due a massive comeback.
Fundamentally, you can never distill your way to being the teacher, so these approaches will not advance the frontier.
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.
They all carry political weights, because humans behind defend their interests, and are promoting some social values.
https://pastebin.com/hjhvsBFg
This answer from Claude is so biased that it is ridiculous