FaceDeer

I download everything, I just may not ultimately keep it long-term if it turns out to be uninteresting or bad. Streaming and downloading transfer the same amount of bits, one just has higher demands for timeliness.

Never. There’s absolutely no need to use humanoid robots for that, other form factors would be much more efficient.

Choice is a good thing. Small communites are good. Decentralized is good because then big bullies can’t come in and take your community away. Small size and fragmentation are features, not bugs.

Would be nice if the Fediverse had more of that.

There are three or four different “Technology” communities. But there might as well just be one, it’s the same bubble in each of them.

In another comment regarding these books, you said:

They can keep both for all I care, tbh.

So it really seems you’re just insisting on this because you think it will make things harder for them. You don’t care about the books or who they go to in the end.

First people complained about them pirating, now people are complaining about them following copyright. It should be clear at this point that the people complaining don’t really care about either, they just don’t like AI.

But donate them to whom? The books were one step away from the pulpers when they bought them in the first place, who’s going to take them that values them more than that?

Also, these companies are not charities. What do they gain out of all that extra expense?

Well, who’s talking about buying?

How else do you think they got the books?

Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other “normal” people. By our definition of “normal.”

And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, “normal.” Often when an election happens.

I can imagine a couple of reasons.

The most straightforward one actually is “capitalism”, but maybe if I explain it a bit you’ll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they’re probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they’re still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It’s like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for “disposal” in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.

The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There’s lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that’s easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called “signatures”, typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn’t leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that’s a cost that produces a book that’s probably worthless for resale anyway.

Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can’t blame them too much.

Is it one of those setups with a glass wedge the partly-open book is placed on with two digital cameras under it to photograph the pages? I’ve seen those contraptions, they’re neat and I’d love to have one for my personal library someday.

The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.

And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not “rare” in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren’t interested in quality, they’re interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they’d release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that’s where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They’re just following the law, unfortunately.

I’m all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna’s Archive. But that’s a separate issue.

So, a ton more developers for the GrapheneOS ecosystem.

DRM is suddenly popular and people think it will work this time.

Here’s an unboxing video, this timestamp skips straight to Moxie coming online. Moxie is a real product. And the video is from three years ago, before convincing video generation AI was a thing, in case that was a concern.

Moxie does pose as well, its various joints are motorized. The arms exist entirely to point and gesticulate, they don’t have grippers.

We don’t have people walking around trying to put human faces on cats and dogs, but we can understand them well enough all the same.

They do have faces, though. Dogs literally developed additional facial muscles compared to wolves apparently as a means of improving their communication with human companions. Moxie’s face isn’t a human face, it’s highly stylized.

Yup. IIRC they paid the movie’s producers for the product placement, and then the company went under before the movie’s release date. So it ended up advertising a defunct product. But at least it fit perfectly into the movie’s plot.

Right before the AI boom really started to take off there was a robot “companion” named Moxie that I thought struck exactly the right balance - it was nowhere near the uncanny valley, staying firmly on the cute robot side, and it used a projected cartoon face that was simple but expressive. Unfortunately the company’s timing was rather poor, they went out of business right before the AI back end would have been able to make full use of an avatar like this. I’d love to see another version of this approach.

Sure, if they subscribed to literally everything and had started doing so right from the beginning.

Not holistically, as an archive. When new content is posted on an instance it gets pushed out to any other instances that are subscribed to it. That’s the only time the content is sent out. So if you start up a new instance but don’t subscribe to anything nothing will be sent to you, and you won’t get any historical content sent to you from beforehand. The Fediverse isn’t a “flood fill” mesh.

You can download archives of Reddit comment and submissions from Academic Torrents.

I’m not aware of any similar public archives of Fediverse content.

I just spent a bunch of time talking about PC emulators, why would I just keep repeating myself?

I just checked, that game came out in 2001 so I assume it runs on Windows 98. You can install that on DOSBox.

The PS1 hardware isn’t being made any more, it’s not going to last forever either. PS1 emulators will be needed for that as well.