You think someone's picking up a first edition Steinbeck and destroying it so it gets into the next training corpus?
Or is it like, technical manuals and incredibly dry almanac content?
I think the details actually matter here. I'd love to see a realtime list of these titles being scanned and processed. Then we'd know if anyone actually gives a care.
That said I'm willfully ignorant of most "headline news" so I'd be curious to see how heinous the issue really is.
> You think someone's picking up a first edition Steinbeck and destroying it so it gets into the next training corpus?
I doubt the low-paid workers stripping, scanning and shredding the books are checking what anything is. I'd imagine they are dumped with a big crate of old books and an hourly quota they have to rapidly process.
Arguably old technical manuals with limited print runs are even rarer or more valuable to historians. We have lots of copies of Steinbeck, albeit not first editions.
We don't know, and the fact that the process is so opaque and would have been totally undisclosed if not for journalists doesn't exactly make me confident they are "doing things by the book" on this one.
You should already be upset. A company with far greater resources than you has potentially prevented you from accessing a portion of the world's information. Because they haven't been transparent, you don't know. You should react to the facts, which are that a company has taken moves, largely surreptitiously to prevent you from accessing intimation. There is zero reason to assume good will in this scenario. You should demand more transparency and more insight into operations, period. Unless you have a vested interest in the company.
You understand that what you just said is true of almost every company in the United States... right?
Sorry, but I'm going to save my efforts for the people who are ACTUALLY doing bad things - not just the people who I don't like who MIGHT be doing bad things.
> You understand that what you just said is true of almost every company in the United States... right?
No. It definitely isn't. There are plenty of US companies, one of them large and recognizable, that actually make it their mission to give you access to information in some fashion.
We have different definitions of "bad thing". In my opinion, unilaterally potentially erasing human history is already bad. Is it the worst thing someone could do? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be bothered by it. I'm not sure what kind of argument you're really trying to make here.
I don't find LLMs that valuable, a few companies being the only providers of "frontier" models bothers me, and their possibly destroying works of historical interest also bothers me. Until they come out and find a way to make their scans available to the public, I'm not going to be happy about this. In my opinion, you shouldn't be happy about it either. These companies have everything to gain by making it harder for you to access knowledge (so that you are forced to pay them continuously for their "knowledge" in the form of information sparse LLM tokens). They have almost nothing to gain by enhancing your access to knowledge.
> Are you aware that the publishing industry itself has destroyed more than 500X as many books as Anthropic ever will?
I'm not sure why everyone on hacker news so often falls for the "my friends are jumping off the bridge, so I can too" fallacy. Not to mention, there are clear differences between the processes under consideration, which might bother you, even if the outcome is the same. No, I don't care that publishers destroy books because usually they only do that when the book has proven to fail to sell (not the case here, clearly, since the books were sold!) and out of necessity because of resource constraints and not because they are using them to build a proprietary alternative product they plan on charging me for. I don't understand why people are engaging is such shoddy, shallow thinking here.
I think the difference in our viewpoints ultimately lies in our faith in the companies involved. I have little to no faith that the digital scans of these texts will make it out to the public based on historical behavior of companies and the current legal complications around copyright. As such, I find it grossly unfair for several companies, which have significantly more economic and logistical resources than interested individual buyers, to systematically purchase rare works and thereby prevent individuals from accessing those works, possibly in perpetuity. The point is that even if they were to eventually release these, they are effectively, as of now, as of my lifetime, no longer available. Again, we have little information on the specifics, but it's the principle of the matter, the gross asymmetry here, that bothers me. It's all worsened by the fact that they are doing this so that they can use a commodity which you could have paid for once to train a new utility, tokens, that they want to charge you for on a metered basis.
If I understand you, you seem to be more confident that they might eventually release the works, or you are less bothered by the power asymmetries here. I actually do hope you turn out to be correct, and they find a way to release the material, or at least tell us what they bought. However, I doubt this will happen.
I hope you have a good day too! Thanks for sharing your perspective on the matter.
These books are specific requests. They are sent in lists to booksellers. The booksellers are rejecting some of the rare books in the lists. Many of them are nonfiction books produced before 1990. They are clearly identified requests for specific items. They are not random. Many of them have ISBNS https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/08/17/nz-bookstores-receive-bul... it is not we are jumping off the bridge. It is we are asking for specific to buy so we can them into LLMs. Some of them are rare and they are being destroyed. The booksellers object to this because many of them believe it is their job to preserve old and rare books. It is not hard if you have a list of items and you know exactly what you want to differentiate between items that should be scanned and items that are mass produced and are readily available.
This is a consistent pattern over many months very specific requests for ingestion. https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/08/10/wellington-second-hand-bo...
This indicates the companies requesting them know exactly what they are looking for and probably have done some research on the books in question.
It creates a further issue, when the rare books are ingested, and the books are hard to acquire or get, they are limited to existing inside artificial intelligence. This gives an advantage to control of information by the companies that have ingested them.
Meanwhile, Hedera remains carbon negative and 7 orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin.
"Today, Hedera is performing the equivalent of over 10,000,000 transactions and 788,000 transactions for the same amount of energy it takes Bitcoin and Ethereum to process 1, respectively."
I find extremely funny that I came across this spammy comment while sitting on a vulnerability in their code because my attempts of contacting them have been unsuccessful
I refuse to enter into joinder with this discussion, but for the record:
The all-caps name, PYREX, is the de jure, natural bakeware, created of the land (borosilicate). It has inherent, unalienable rights to withstand thermal shock. It is a true vessel.
The lowercase name, Pyrex, is the corporate fiction, the STRAWMAN created under the maritime law of commerce. It is a mere vessel in name only, subject to the whims and defects of its corporate creators. By purchasing it, you are unknowingly consenting to be governed by their rules of catastrophic failure.
Do not be deceived by their fraudulent conveyance. I do not consent to being a party to this contract. I am a free man, traveling upon the land with my original, common-law PYREX.
He was a Christian and a intellectual thought leader in one of the more reasonable groups of conservative youth in the USA. You can paint TPUSA however you like but political engagement is political engagement, whether it's happening with the same color uniform you decide is the better choice or not.
Welcoming and encouraging the free exchange of thought and ideas in an open forum. Free speech and American values are based directly in morality which comes to us from a higher power. This is all quite clear in the writings of the Founding Fathers and other contemporaries, but of course nowadays "American values" is shibboleth for "Nazi dogwhistles" to some population.
Yes, you're wrong. He was very influential and a leader of the youthful conservative movement in our country. TPUSA is extremely popular. This was an abhorrent, horrifyingly public assassination of a very popular figure -- one who has been honestly quite milquetoast in terms of conservative ideology compared to other well-known figures. He wasn't even running for political office, he simply encouraged political participation, open debate, and the free exchange of ideas in a public forum. He grew TPUSA into a bastion of grassroots revitalization in community-first politics. Truly truly sickening.
Dude, if you followed his teachings you wouldn’t feel this way…
"I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up. new age term, and it does a lot of damage.” - Charlie Kirk
Dude, that quote is out of context. He said he prefers "sympathy" to "empathy" and went on to call out those who push selective empathy when it suits their political agenda. He was right.
In my country Australia, there's a backlash on self-destructive "empathy" decisions in criminal courts. Violent repeat offenders are granted bail or short sentences for violent crime, why? Because the judge empathises with their traumatised upbringing, for example when they come from a war-torn country. This pattern of "justice" has spiked crime rates including violent home invasions and stabbings.
You think someone's picking up a first edition Steinbeck and destroying it so it gets into the next training corpus?
Or is it like, technical manuals and incredibly dry almanac content?
I think the details actually matter here. I'd love to see a realtime list of these titles being scanned and processed. Then we'd know if anyone actually gives a care.
That said I'm willfully ignorant of most "headline news" so I'd be curious to see how heinous the issue really is.