Just do it and be legends, Larry. ;)
Apple won't even help Asahi linux even though it would help hardware sales and give them a ton of goodwill.
Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
101–110 of 368 posts
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#102Who is behind Annas archive, there is a lot of english speakers involved in the team and forums! Anyway as long as buying isn´t owning no issues here.
I think the main source may be in Russia; or that was with libgen. But I could be wrong. I am more surprised to see that there are so few alternatives to it. Or perhaps I am unaware of them but after Facebook and co declared war on libgen, and libgen going down, there were surprisingly few alternatives. Anna was one of the few. I still don't know what happened with libgen, but since the attack it really is kind of se…
Libgen and similar are more alive than ever with an extended botnet growing weekly. The "googlers" indexed framework is shrinking everyday, so users wont find it in those search engines easily, also it is hard to keep up with a good storage considering price trend last 5 years so the botnet and torrents are some kind of solution I guess. (We for instance are considering to use the old taping system, cause is at least a viable alternative.
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, this looks fascinating! I can't quickly tell what all you have archived^, but I have some friends who are academic historians who might be interested in certain categories of work (and could help verify some esoteric languages) - is it possible to search by region or language? Have you reached out to any types of historians WRT the project? It seems like some PhD students might be able to find some projects in t…
Yes, this is designed with historians and librarians from the Embassy of the Free Mind ( https://embassyofthefreemind.com ) in Amsterdam, stewards of the collection of the Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica Please share with historian friends. I’m not great at socials or fundraising but this was really designed to support humanists. It can give DOIs for the versions of the translated books, which means they can be quo…
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.
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, fair enough from your perspective. But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed. Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This…
> But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I think that's at least a bit debatable. People thought that about (normal) libraries back in the day, but it ended up having the opposite effect. Not to mention out of print books or academic books which is a big usage of sites like these, since lots of people prefer physical books and only reach for pdfs as a…
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.
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, fair enough from your perspective. But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed. Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This…
> But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I think that's at least a bit debatable. People thought that about (normal) libraries back in the day, but it ended up having the opposite effect. Not to mention out of print books or academic books which is a big usage of sites like these, since lots of people prefer physical books and only reach for pdfs as a…
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."
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#106How is Anna's Archive funded? I see they have memberships, but it's hard to believe that can fund all these bounties - some going into six figures. Ask any FOSS project about funding by that method. It seems like there are some deep pockets funding them.
Chinese (and some other) AI companies buying fast access to their dataset.
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, fair enough from your perspective. But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed. Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This…
> But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I think that's at least a bit debatable. People thought that about (normal) libraries back in the day, but it ended up having the opposite effect. Not to mention out of print books or academic books which is a big usage of sites like these, since lots of people prefer physical books and only reach for pdfs as a…
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
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not worried about that, you will only have to wait 3-6 months and get a Chinese model just as good.
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 adva…
> you can never distill your way to being the teacher
Are you sure?
What if you distill from 10 teachers?
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious as to what your budget was to get where you are today? That's a lot of tokens. I presume you are using gemini flash?
All the models used are shown with each page of translation and each book has a whole data provenance treatment. You can add it up!
Can't you just tell him?
Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
#110Piracy / copyright predictions? The current situation feels untenable with renting. So many regular people I know have learned about VPN, NAS, etc.
Hopefully the guillotines. Look up how much the authors and artists who create the actual work get paid.
All authors should have a pay + linktree type thing so pirates can pay them directly.
Or something like thanks.dev