Probably because there are 1000x or whatever human driven miles compared to AI. And no one wants to be crippled by an AI have have to fight $billon_dollar_corp for compensation.
As soon as anyone starts talking about alignment, my question is why we don’t seem to be paying nearly as much attention to alignment when it comes to CEOs, billionaires, and national politicians.
The answer is of course that those people are exactly the people using “alignment” as yet another red herring to divert attention away from themselves and their actions.
I agree with the premise and have also learned to apply my engineering habits to other domains that I normally struggle with. It helps a lot and allows me to churn through projects that previously would have not seemed tractable.
But in this article, the TLDR and first paragraph have textbook LLMisms. The landing page for the book is clearly vibecoded both in structure and copy. This is very alarming for material that is meant to market a book, which I expect to not be vibe-written.
So whose book is this, actually? What otherwise could be a very useful lesson comes off as a trojan horse for automated viral marketing slop in order to promote a book which I have to assume at this point is vibe-written. To be clear, I use AI heavily in my work today, and understand the difference between AI-assisted work and vibe-coded work. This appears to fall in the latter camp. How much editorial control did you assert over this project? Where did the ideas come from? How do I know a given snippet is a well-researched fact or the product of experience, instead of an unfounded potential-hallucination?
I've also been making websites for decades, Ben, and most people I know in that camp are more interested in letting their hard-earned experience elevate their output to the top of the pile in an increasingly competitive space.
If this is the direction we're going in, vibe-coded marketing campaigns and vibe-coded landing pages for books that we rationally have to assume are also vibe-coded and basically a medium for Claude, then we as authors must adopt an atmosphere of clarity and transparency towards our audience. A book like this needs more information about the process so that people like me don't immediately and rationally disregard it as slop. I can see your blog goes back to 2011 so I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and a chance to explain yourself further.
Cutting the pages out makes them machinable. Non-destructive scans involves gently turning pages, and paying a lot of attention to the state of the spine. Destructive scans involve guillotine cutting the spine off, scanning the covers by hand, putting the pages into a hopper, clamping them in and hitting a button. While that book is scanning, you're already cutting the spine off the next book. If the machine jams, try to work the jam out gently, scan the pieces, and let the computer stitch it together.
India is forced to subsidize farmers to the tune of $37B JUST for urea. Governments routinely offer free bus services to women, free cash handouts to women, free electricity to farmers (who then use the power to pump out groundwater and grow paddy in areas otherwise not suitable for it). The list goes on.
A $1B subsidy to eliminate friction on the payment front is peanuts.
I've heard of people doing this kind of rotating "Everyone pays $X in each week/month, a different person decides how to spend it each week/month" thing. It's mostly for building social connection/community.
Think about it like a secret santa with a $20 limit - wouldn't it be more efficient for everyone to just do what they want with $20? You're "purchasing" time and connection with friends.
Well, is ”not actively make things worse in the short term?” too ambitious a goal?
Considering the vast amount of money, world-class talent and political and industry vonnections Anthropic has access to, it feels a bit unfair to ask me to solve this for them.
No I'm just saying that slaying the monster has secondary effects. Yes if the whole world one day ate some mushrooms and decided that war was completely over, there would be some upheaval. We would agree that it'd be worth it.
To make my position perfectly clear, I would rather Meta died a slow death than was assassinated by the judiciary. It is better for most - the 80,000 easy-sleeping order followers, my 401(k) - if they take a few big hits and then disintegrate.
Not true. To the extent that it is fair use to digitize a work for various purposes, it is also fair use to keep the original. It is only if they wanted to resell the original that they would have to delete their digitized copy. The reason they are destroying them because removing the binding is the most efficient way to scan them, they have no use for the originals after they have been scanned, and don't want to spend money storing them.
Nice. I made my solar clock here: svennidal.is/solarclock
I'm currently in Iceland and I've been using my clock as my main clock since the Icelandic clock is set to be almost one and half hour to early. I've never really shared it so that is why it's just hardcoded to my location haha.
I thought the exact same. There is also a growing problem with people using AI to summarize everything instead of reading the actual text. I thought this addressed that issue by having a section for the AI to help summarize or something similar.
Think of it as OpenRouter, but for different agent harnesses, not models. Instead of sticking to any one harness, you can route to and use any of them through a unified API
Yes, breaking changes need to be staged carefully/compatibly across versions.
Simple renaming/reordering is not a breaking change between code versions. The wire format knows numeric ids, not names. It breaks code compilation until the renames are put into effect. There is a subtle breakage where someone renames a field (think: field -> old_field) and then later adds "field" to mean something else; software that isn't recompiled in this window might not recognize that "field" is potentially different. Uncompiled languages may suffer this even more subtly. -- All of this to say, breaking compilation is not the end of the world but there are more dragons as the scope grows.
Stop-the-world is usually only needed when someone has made an unplanned/incompatible change with versions that are still running. If your infrastructure+development is done right (hah) this should never happen.
> I don't understand why these companies haven't just licensed the scans Google has already done.
Because for the vast majority of the books, Google doesn't have the legal right to license those scans. It would be legal if the books were out of copyright, but despite the connotation of "rare books" those generally aren't the books we're talking about. Further, in the cases where Google didn't destroy the original of the book they scanned, their scanned copy may be considered infringing under the new standard, so Google doesn't want call undue attention to what they have.
It’s quite fun and engaging.