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Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

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Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#21

Post by throwaway11460 »

hervature wrote: post #20
throwaway11460 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's research it very probably is at least partially publicly funded. Regardless of whatever the law says, I don't think it's immoral to take it and offer better services around it that will be useful enough that someone decides to pay.

Do you not see the hypocrisy in stating that someone should be able to take something partially publicly funded and profit from it while the creator of said work should not retain some rights over said profit? By extension of the transitive property of the nebulous "partially", the LLM wrapper should be provided for free with complete disregard to the wrapper's creator since it is a derivative of partially publicly f…

Yeah, the LLM maybe - though nobody paid for the training costs in that case and that feels weird. If the public paid for a work, it should be able to use it and not be required to give away their own derivative work for free since they already paid for it through taxes.

While I rather like the idea of having to provide access to derivates of publicly funded works, I fear that people would rather not use it than invest money into innovative approaches of using it. Of course if the public pays for the training and development costs, then by all means it should be available.

And the library itself and the computing resources to operate it cost money that someone needs to pay. Publishers didn't pay for the research and yet they can profit from it - why this guy shouldn't?

Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#22

Post by squigz »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #15

I work in a very interdisciplinary, and somewhat niche, tech/engineering field. For the past 15 years, I've been saving every relevant PDF that I can find -- mostly studies of the sort published by Elsevier and Springer, but also books and presentations. I now have around 10k, which probably makes it the largest private library focused on this particular domain of expertise. It has been extremely useful, especially b…

The data hoarder community would encourage you to release that collection for free, not try to profit from it.

Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#23

Post by znpy »

hervature wrote: post #17
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #15

I work in a very interdisciplinary, and somewhat niche, tech/engineering field. For the past 15 years, I've been saving every relevant PDF that I can find -- mostly studies of the sort published by Elsevier and Springer, but also books and presentations. I now have around 10k, which probably makes it the largest private library focused on this particular domain of expertise. It has been extremely useful, especially b…

> If I make it available via the web, I can probably sell access to other scientists and engineers in my field. Out of curiosity. Does this statement come from complete ignorance of or complete disregard to copyright of the author?

OpenAI et similia seems to be doing just fine though

Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#24

Post by jddj »

hervature wrote: post #20
throwaway11460 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's research it very probably is at least partially publicly funded. Regardless of whatever the law says, I don't think it's immoral to take it and offer better services around it that will be useful enough that someone decides to pay.

Do you not see the hypocrisy in stating that someone should be able to take something partially publicly funded and profit from it while the creator of said work should not retain some rights over said profit? By extension of the transitive property of the nebulous "partially", the LLM wrapper should be provided for free with complete disregard to the wrapper's creator since it is a derivative of partially publicly f…

Rightly or wrongly, Elsevier has a market capitalisation of £62B for essentially doing what GP is proposing.

Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#25

Post by dartos »

unshavedyak wrote: post #5
dartos wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would an LLM-driven "Personal Library" require manually annotated textual interpretation of each curated item No. In something like this you’d probably have the LLM annotate and curate your personal library for you. Potentially by creating and assigning tags or topics based on the content of your library.

Yea. I had this discussion not too long ago about this. I'd love to have a combination of a library (Personal Knowledge Management style), data ingestions, and a current world view/state. The PKM is the stored info to write to and query against (both for LLMs and humans). The data ingests are just a pipeline of digital inputs to the system, like chat logs, maybe (transcribed) webcam feeds, files i'm currently editing…

FWIW LLMs have been advancing on benchmarks but the practical usage of them (RAG, React, CoT, etc) hasn’t really changed much in the past year.

Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#27

Post by squirrel »

quest88 wrote: post #7

I've had related ideas lurking at the back of my mind for a while now. Essentially, I want to save more things locally and and interact with it. For example, I have a bunch of book notes stored in Bear. I'd like to be able to ask questions about those notes, and also show the pages of the book itself.

Try Zenfetch. It's designed for this use case.

Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#28

Post by gabev »

squirrel wrote: post #27
quest88 wrote: post #7

I've had related ideas lurking at the back of my mind for a while now. Essentially, I want to save more things locally and and interact with it. For example, I have a bunch of book notes stored in Bear. I'd like to be able to ask questions about those notes, and also show the pages of the book itself.

Try Zenfetch. It's designed for this use case.

Thanks for mentioning Zenfetch :)

Happy to answer any questions

Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#29

Post by WillAdams »

Not too long ago, I managed to pretty much ruin the wiki for a small (and at that time opensource) CNC machine by using it as my personal notebook --- probably my usage of it thus was a big part of why it was left off-line when the person hosting it moved.

You can see it on the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211127090321/https://wiki.shap...

In retrospect, I should have put some of that effort into:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hobbyist_CNC_Machining

although since then, a machine owner worked up:

https://shapeokoenthusiasts.gitbook.io/shapeoko-cnc-a-to-z

I still regret a bunch of stuff I didn't keep copies of, esp. the scans of Barry Hughart's notes for his novels.

The irony is that one can see a bit of the result of discussion of this sort of thing at the top of one's browser window --- the URL bar, where URL == "Uniform Resource Locator" --- the originally proposed term was "Universal Resource Locator", but the argument against that was that people were not librarians, and that unlike Ted Nelson's Xanadu, there wouldn't an over-arching data structure and organization, so a given document wouldn't have a single canonical location.

Anyone interested in this sort of thing who hasn't read it, should read Tim Berner-Lee's book:

https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html

Re: Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

#30

Post by WillAdams »

detourdog wrote: post #26

If one remembers NeXT included all sorts of non-computer documents and literature. The idea of storing vasts amounts of data for personal use was at the dawn of the PC era.

I miss Librarian.app --- it was quite useful for a project of mine:

https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

(basically used copies of _The Bible_ and The Works of Shakespeare to determine if a given set of letters appeared in the English language or no)

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