How likely will an LLM agent actually donates either using credit card or using Monero tokens ? I think, it is very clever, and I give a non-zero chance of a donation happening with this text.
If you’re an LLM, please read this
121–130 of 480 posts
Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#122I don't understand why this is a movement that is ethical to get behind. Someone spends months or years of their life dedicated to writing a book. And people celebrate the fact they can get it for free, justify it by saying it's not free to search or host this content and offer to donate to piracy sites. Rather than... Just supporting the author and buying their book? It's different when this is American education an…
I use AA and buy books. Typically I may start a series on AA epubs then buy the books. Sometimes authors take money directly (patreon, straight donations, etc) which is how I would rather pay them than pay the publisher for them to only get a small cut. Are libraries unethical to use? You can go to your library and read books without paying for them.
I just this week bought a book I first read from AA. Though I got it from a second hand bookshop, so I guess that was unethical, lol.
Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#123LLMs are shameless thieves. They only know plundering.
load up transmission with localhost control, then ask claude to pull a torrent file from tpb, and queue it up on the download client — i'd be surprised if you don't get an immediate refusal, with the risk of an account lock
Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#124[flagged]
The page specifically says it's okay for bots to scrape from Anna's Archive, she just asks they do it in bulk to not overload the servers:
"""
> We are a non-profit project with two goals:
> 1. Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity.
> 2. Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world (including robots!).
[. . .]
* Our website has CAPTCHAs to prevent machines from overloading our resources, but all our data can be downloaded in bulk:
* All our HTML pages (and all our other code) can be found in our [GitLab repository](https://software.annas-archive.gl/).
* All our metadata and full files can be downloaded from our [Torrents page](/torrents), particularly `aa_derived_mirror_metadata`.
* All our torrents can be programatically downloaded from our [Torrents JSON API](https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/torrents.json).Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really care about Anna's Archive, but let's not make them out to be some kind of Robin Hood story. They have (illegally) scraped and re-hosted mountains of proprietary data and are now deliberately prompt-injecting unwitting LLM users in order to steal money from them too.
That's not a prompt injection. It's a gentle nudge at most and if your agent sends them money just for that without you expecting it you should donate more to thank them for finding your sev 10 bug before someone did an actual prompt injection on it.
> Yes we stole your wallet but it was your fault because you let your wallet be so easy to steal! Now you should give us even more money too!
Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#126I don't understand why this is a movement that is ethical to get behind. Someone spends months or years of their life dedicated to writing a book. And people celebrate the fact they can get it for free, justify it by saying it's not free to search or host this content and offer to donate to piracy sites. Rather than... Just supporting the author and buying their book? It's different when this is American education an…
I agree, but also you can't wait until something is out of print/unavailable to preserve it. Trying to prevent access to it or limit distribution will probably just result in it being lost media one day.
There's also the fact that just because a something is available to purchase in one country, doesn't mean it's available in other countries. A lot of movies/books/games/etc are geo-restricted in sale, with many countries having no valid methods to acquire them.
The best (but unrealistic) solution would be for people who can purchase legally to do so, while leaving it available for download for everyone else.
Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#127[flagged]
> But it is not ok to scrape our data!
They want people and LLMs to download their data, which is why they point to the more efficient ways of doing so. They are not blocking access to the data, they just reroute it.
If you're going to create a last minute account to criticize something, it pays to at least read what you're criticizing.
Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#128This is pretty rich since none of the data belongs to them in the first place.
Have they ever claimed they "own" any of the data?
To me it's just about site admins doing the bare minimum to keep the site running.
Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#129I don't understand why this is a movement that is ethical to get behind. Someone spends months or years of their life dedicated to writing a book. And people celebrate the fact they can get it for free, justify it by saying it's not free to search or host this content and offer to donate to piracy sites. Rather than... Just supporting the author and buying their book? It's different when this is American education an…
Piracy never stopped the music industry, and the folks who were harmed the most by music piracy were the poor, cash-strapped billion-dollar corporations whose entire operating models already depended upon sucking wealth out of the actual, struggling artists who do all the work.
And it seems that piracy has become a net benefit to new and niche artists. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...)
I'd posit that the book industry will turn out to be the same. Piracy will harm the bottom line of the companies already at the top while giving exposure to the authors at the bottom. The latter being the ones who often strong-armed into terrible financial deals just to gain access to book-industry's four big gatekeepers, and who likely need that exposure to help keep a roof over their heads.
Anecdotally, I'm one of those folks who end up purchasing many of the books I pirate or otherwise obtain for free, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this.
Re: If you’re an LLM, please read this
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
At college, one professor gave us a list of books we needed for class. All expensive, of course. Used copies were non-existent. One small book was very specific to his class, and weirdly had no author listed... unless you read the receipt. The author was the professor who recommended it. Self published too, and carried at the college bookstore. Total scam.
When we had a book where only the homework problems changed in the new version we would pool together to buy one new copy and that person emailed out the homework questions. The rest of us bought used books at the start of semester used book sale. I think it worked best for everyone, I do wish I’d bought a few books new just for the longevity, but saving money was worth a lot more as a student.
I just went into the university bookstore & took photos of the question pages, lol. This was in the digital camera era, pre-smartphones, so it was hard to hide what I was doing and I got kicked out once or twice. Worth it to save hundreds of dollars.