Millions of books are dumpstered every day. MILLIONS. Ever go to a library used book sale? Ever notice that - in MOST cases - 75%+ aren't purchased, even at 50-cents a book?

Sure, some get donated but a lot of book donation places are filtering as they don't need a 100th set of Encyclopedias from 1981.
I know of at least a couple of organizations that fill 20' containers and send to some associated groups in Africa to provide books for kids, but "Morning Glory Milking Farm" as well as Chilton's 1999 Pontiac Minivan manual isn't going to make the cut there either. It costs $ to ship them and they don't have money to waste.
Largely...they get thrown away/pulped. For some reason I'd once noticed that a local library (part of a county-wide metro association) was dumpstering books. Like... a LOT of books - talking a half-full 5 yard dumpster EVERY WEEK. I'd look and there were dozens of heavy duty black garbage bags FULL of books, and not just shitty old ones, there were multiple copies of popular fiction titles, NEW periodicals, all sorts of good stuff. I recognized the dumps were clearly by section as one night several bags would be "history" for example. In the bags they were totally clean too.
I probably dumpster dived 1000 books over the better part of a year, before my wife drew the line bringing home 1-2 shopping bags (eventually i just left a heavy-duty recycling tub in my car for it...) every week. I'm a big reader but that's a lot.
This was a library in an extremely wealthy suburb of 50,000. So I called them and asked about it. IMMEDIATELY the library *insisted* they only threw away damaged books. When I provided pictures, they claimed they were moving to a new facility and someone was just being a little overzealous in their cull.
Their new building was - I shit you not - MAYBE 50 yards away.

Anyway, the point is, I am saddened by the loss of any book, but let's not cry fake tears over this just because it's AI and people are 'shocked' to find out that the public doesn't give much of a shit about books anymore. Because they don't.

Firstly, US courts have no jurisdiction in most places, so what.

The EU rulings thusfar have been even less restrictive - for example, the LAION ruling, which actually allowed scraping (within constraints).

And if even the US courts are ruling that training with US materials is legal, do you really expect a foreign court to ban training with US materials? And you actually expect that to do anything?

Wishing it wasn't doesn't change the fact that stuff written online has automatic ownership

First off, this is a myth. It's not "everything" that it is written that has automatic copyright, it is everything that is written that involves more than a de minimis standard of creative effort that gains protection. There is a huge range of things that fundamentally lacks copyrightability. It's not "everything".

Secondly, copyright does not make the owner a God to their works. It grants a limited set of rights. The boundaries of these rights get ejudicated by the courts. The very courts whose rulings we have been discussing above. "because...The Law" is what gets determined by the courts.

But open source AI is no such thing

Seriously, please stop what you are doing right now, go to Huggingface.com, and start browsing. This is a maddeningly ignorant statement.

Fifthly, do I personally care about open source AI? No.

Then you must love the idea of giant corporations and billionares controlling things far more than they even do today, because that is the future you get otherwise.

but I view current state of the art AI as statistical toys

LLMs work by chained logical inference.

but that's going to have to run on a motor spinning 25fps in the other direction. It could work if frictionless was possible though. I wonder if gyroscopes, low friction and a counter prop like a helicopter would make that feasible.

i was thinking something similar, then I realized that with a 25fps camera, it's made an entire rotation in the time the aperture was open. I was thinking more about taking pictures OF the drone. But if I was designing some automated machine to attack this thing, like another drone, putting a 120fps camera on it would give a decent picture of it. that's only about 1/5th of a rotation. Tracking software doesn't need to get a perfectly clear picture to track something.

What exactly do you mean by "woke" and "DEI"? Like, contains black people in more than just the background? Has two major female characters that talk to each other about something other than a male character? Has people who aren't straight cis anglo-saxon protestants?

You massively overestimate the capabilities of state of the art AI tools.

A badly done movie by a talentless hack that got a lot of press hype does not a technology define.

First off, a lot of AI use in movies is not "generating the movie". It's special effects. Replacing backgrounds, adding in effects that look better than CGI at lower cost, "tweening", fixing filming errors, etc.

Secondly, you can do a lot better than that terrible demon movie. For example.

The problem is that first off, by and large, it doesn't. Some cases have but perfectly legitimate alternatives - for example, the courts found that Anthropic copying material they haven't bought is illegal but that it's perfectly legal for them to buy used/surplus books en masse for pennies on the dollar, scan them in, and train on that.

Secondly, even if you take an ultra-restrictive view on copyright and heavily strengthen copyright legislation, you're not getting rid of AI. You're just handing control of it over to e.g. Disney, Google, etc. Do you honestly think that's better? Also, what you're killing is free, open source AI. You think that makes for a better world?

Your complaint is practically word for word the complaint that weavers had against the introduction of industrial looms. Should we ban machine-made clothing?

It feels like the simple requirement of needing a warrant to search rather than "bored officer looking up his ex" would solve 99% of these issues.

And BTW, to all the people obssessed with "paleo" / "cave men" diets and think that means "meat":

While there certainly were (just like today) some hunter-gatherer societies (such as in the high arctic) that got most of their calories from meat, the average hunter-gatherer got the majority of their calories from plants. But not highly bred high-calorie plants, but rather high-fibre wild plants, meaning that they had to eat significantly more of these fibre-loaded plants. Your average hunter-gatherer ancestor ate way more fibre than a person eating a "modern" diet today eats.

A proper "paleo" / "cave man" diet isn't a high-meat diet - it's a high fibre diet.

No, the last fad was antioxidants. Bodybuilders being obsessed with protein is entirely different from maxing protein in normal consumer food products (even things as non-protein-related as water itself)

Do be careful with that. Do remember that inflammation isn't inherently bad. Inflammation is the activity of the innate immune system, doing things like fighting/preventing disease and cancer surveillance/attack. Just shutting down inflammatory reactions (for example, long-term taking prednisone or an equivalent steroid treatment) can certainly make you feel great, but can significantly shorten your expected lifespan.

Don't get me wrong, if you have a chronic inflammatory disease, it absolutely needs treatment, and the medical system is often pathetically bad about treating them. Chronic inflammation itself can even lead to cancer, such as lymphoma. But you need to find a targeted way to control your specific condition. For example, if you have say Sjögren's with small fibre neuropathy, an appropriate treatment might be IVIG or something like HyQvia or Hizentra - not broad-based immunosuppression. Unfortunately, such treatments are expensive, and doctors often resist prescribing them, or patients end up in insurance-denial hell.

They really haven't. Nutrition science has been a process of refinement as we've learned more over time. E.g.:

"Fat is bad"
"Saturated fat is bad, non is good"
"Saturated fat is bad, monounsaturated is good, polyunsaturated is bad. Oh, and trans fat is really bad."
"Well, among the polys, omega 3s are good, others are bad"
Many refinements later: "Concerning this specific fat molecule, the health impacts are X, except there's evidence that people with Y genetics have Z impact..."

The earlier statements weren't wrong, they were just overly broad.

This is part of why I had the new "ultraprocessed" label. We've been working so hard to separate out what specific things are causing what impacts, and then they just leap backwards and lump everything back together again : Homemade doughnuts deep-fried in coconut oil and lard: "not ultraprocessed". Store whole-grain bread: "ultraprocessed". Such a moronic grouping. Yes, the average of the ultraprocessed category is worse than the average of the non-ultraprocessed category, but that says nothing about individual foods. It's also a back door for anti-tech/anti-science woo to sneak into food science.

The issue is that this is only relevant to sustenance farmers, people with certain diseases, and alcoholics.

It's almost impossible to end up with an essential amino acid deficiency eating any "normal" modern diet. Even a vegan eating junk food is going to get sufficient quantities (they're going to suck at bodybuilding, but they're not going to get deficiency symptoms). There's too many staples that go into modern food. Nobody eats "only corn", "only wheat", "only potatoes", "only soy", or whatnot; it's always a mix. And there's no need to get everything all at once within a single meal - it's fine for it to be spread out not just between meals within a given day, but across multiple days.

Yeah, even on a vegan junk food diet, it's almost impossible for a modern person to not get all the amino acids they need, for the simple reason that there's not just one plant used in vegan junk food - corn, wheat, potato, soy, etc - and together, even if their protein is watered down with a lot of carbs and fat, any realistic mix still hits sufficient levels of essential amino acids, as the required amounts of each to avoid deficiency aren't huge.

Vegans have other actual things to worry more about. B12, for example, requires fortification or supplements (the body stores years worth at a time, but eventually you will run out if you don't consume it). Iron is highly likely to be in the low-but-acceptable to deficient range if either the diet isn't specifically high-iron or supplements taken. Some other minerals are real but lesser risks than iron as well. Etc.