Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.
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.
Mass and complexity are not equivalent. I doubt that a mountain is more conscious than either.
I think your question is equally poorly defined regardless of where the zero point is placed. Enough for what? What is this threshold for?
There are often things in nature that have natural “division points” along some particular spectrum, where conditions abruptly change (phase changes in chemicals when they pass through transition temperatures, for example) or where you have natural gaps where you don’t find many examples because of dynamic feedback effects (the gap between planets and dwarf planets when it comes to their ability to clear their orbital neighborhoods, for example). It’s possible that once we can actually measure consciousness and put a number to it we’ll find that there are similar gaps, for whatever reason. That would be a very interesting and useful thing to know about. But that’s putting the cart before the horse, we don’t know how to measure consciousness in a numeric way yet. So any such patterns in the results are purely hypothetical.
If you’d like to go all the way down this rabbit hole there’s panpsychism, which posits that consciousness is a continuous scale with “zero” literally being down in the elementary particles. So even a single molecule is not quite zero on the scale, having an extremely minuscule degree of consciousness to it.
I actually kind of like this because it means we don’t have to try to put that zero point at some other arbitrary location.
So, a ton more developers for the GrapheneOS ecosystem.
Because it’s not just about him. It’s about the fact that nobody is reining him in. There were supposed to be all sorts of checks and balances in the American system of government but apparently they either don’t work at all or congress is okay with the president threatening to forcibly annex former allies because he wants their territory.
That tells us a lot about America and gives us plenty of things to think about long after Trump’s dead and buried.
I recall reading that obsessions are a common symptom of dementia.
Indeed, these are way better than a simple opinion poll if your goal is an actual prediction. People who are good at making predictions will be rewarded and continue to participate, those who are just going by vibes or whatever will lose money and hopefully learn to stay away. “Insider information” is kind of the point of markets like this, it’s a way to surface that information to the outside world.
Even though most of the things he says will never happen it’s still worth noting that this is where American discourse has reached. Their president can freely threaten to forcibly annex former allies simply because he wants their territory, and yet for some reason this isn’t an impeachable action. It’s not even a top headline.
DRM is suddenly popular and people think it will work this time.
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.
perfectly tuned for it… for how long though?
Perfectly tuned forever, just keep the game bundled with the same emulator.
If eventually the system that the emulator runs on diverges too far from what the emulator was able to run on, then wrap it in another emulator to emulate that. Or just update the emulator, DOSBox is under the GPL.
How many indie titles on PC aged out of the platform and have no maintainer?
If you have an emulator then you don’t need a maintainer. As far as the game is concerned it’s still running on the exact same computer that it did when it was first released.
A person who purchased Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for PC would be unable to launch the game in any modern OS. But if they have it on PS1, it still works.
They’d need a PS1 emulator for that. DuckStation, for example.
A person who purchased Minecraft in 2011 can no longer play that game on the same computer they purchased it from.
The newer versions of Minecraft can’t. The old version they purchased in 2011 still can because it hasn’t changed.
I’m saying PC is a moving platform.
And I’m pointing out that an emulator need not be a moving platform. It can be a frozen snapshot of a particular moment in time. Get a game working on an emulator and you can freeze that emulator’s code and configuration and then you’ll know that the game will always work on it from then onward. Bundle the emulator with the game, like GOG does, and there’s no “fiddling around” - you can indeed just sit down and play it.
The answer there is emulation. Good Old Games sells old DOS games and they work fine on modern computers because each comes wrapped in a DOS emulator tuned perfectly for it…
How else do you think they got the books?