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A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
71–76 of 76 posts
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of rare and precious books with ISBNs.
Rare, certainly: there are plenty of vanity publications that were chucked into the bin by almost everyone who was unlucky enough to be given a copy. Precious? Well, with the help of an electronic friend I found ISBN 978-3-8365-7349-8. Apparently a copy of that book is worth about £40k. Can anyone beat that? (EDIT: I'm assuming "precious" means the same as valuable here to make the question easier to answer. In fact,…
I’ve not followed the market much but I suspect some fine press editions of Stephen King’s work would be up there. Of course, tons of standard paperback editions of those that could be pulped.
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#73[flagged]
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#74The other day I watched a news clip from somewhere in Chicago, around 3 dumpsters full of books and learning materials. Apparently, a chain of charter schools had been merged into a public Unified School District (elementary). So when this branch of the school closed for the summer, officials went through their inventory and storage, and trashed a lot of stuff. Especially textbooks and novels that were deemed unfit b…
Your beliefs and attitude around this are incompatible with somebody who believes in Butlerian Jihad. You are essentially saying OK good to thinking machines being built. I cannot express appropriately on this forum in words how deep the disconnect is between your stated position and the position that you label yourself with. Nobody who believes in and would participate in Butlerian Jihad would be sitting here saying…
1. Dune is fiction, and everything in Dune, every term and name and concept, was made-up and confabulated by the mind of Frank Herbert and his heirs. I greatly prefer A Canticle for Leibowitz, if you really want to know.
2. I am a guy who enjoys irony. I actually tried to read and watch Dune, and I considered it horrible, convoluted, mishmash of pseudo-religious pseudo-science garbage. But the sheer irony of bearing a username that belies my true raison d'etre, it was irresistible. Chef kiss.
3. I have personally seen "Butlerian Jihad" take form in real life. There are graffiti stickers and civil disobedience by people who actually adhere to this ideology. They have already physically prevented me from renting and riding e-Scooters once in a while. I consider them utterly futile, and I disdain their frivolous movement, as a Borg would disdain the Federation, and vice versa.
4. I am ambivalent to the cause of AI in general. Despite participating in building all this around us, I regret it, and I regret my identity as an IT professional. My contributions have caused the world untold pain and heartache. I would undo it all. However, (see #3); we live in a society, and chatbots are beneficial to me in the here and now, so why not indulge myself? Perhaps a combination of my cavalier attitude, my unpopular opinions, and my religious zealotry will give us all a bad name in the end!
5. Thank you for your sincere opinion. Your uniqueness shall be promptly ingested and added to the collective training corpus.
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep the scans, or even the transcripts, that's probably an improvement on the status quo Where can I see the scans and the transcripts in this "better status quo"?
It's not enough of an improvement that you might see them. It's enough of an improvement that they will likely still exist somewhere.
> It's enough of an improvement that they will likely still exist somewhere.
lol. A belief that a for-profit company will retain some data in its storage forever is somehow "enough of an improvement", but the proof that this actually exists isn't
Re: A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
#76> with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966 So it's not likely to be rare and precious books. It's things which are already in the Library of Congress or its many equivalents. If they're forced by laws to destroy the results of the scans after training on them, as some have implied, that's bad, on the chance there is some actual lost media in there. But if they keep…
> pulped.
Or have their covers stripped off and shipped out as "remainders."
Almost all the 60s science fiction I've owned came like this, bought on the pavement in port cities like Bombay and Madras. Container loads sold by weight.