A privately owned physical book and the public-domain work embodied in it are different things. Keeping an old book in a dresser, even without providing access to it, is also meaningfully different from deliberately acquiring the sole remaining copy in order to extract its content, destroy the artifact, and preserve exclusive commercial control over the only remaining usable version.

Destroying the sole surviving copy would not literally steal publicly owned property. But it could irreversibly remove a public-domain work from practical human access and destroy a unique piece of cultural heritage.

In that very narrow situation, preservation, archival deposit, digitization, or public-access requirements may be justified, especially when the material is acquired for commercial use that depends on destroying or withholding the only surviving source.

The company would not be reasserting copyright in the legal sense. It would, however, be creating copyright-like control over practical access.

The work would remain legally free for everyone to reproduce, while the company’s conduct made it impossible for anyone else to obtain it.

I know there are more pressing issues than this one in the world, particularly those involving immediate human life.

But I also believe that the value we assign to human life is connected to the value we assign to human knowledge, memory, invention, and culture. When those things are casually treated as disposable inputs for extraction, something important erodes.

Companies should be free to use public-domain material commercially. The issue arises when that use creates a negative externality by permanently destroying the public’s future opportunity to access and use the work.

Mining our cultural heritage and locking away what remains is still extraction and exclusivity.

Let's say one of the books to be digitized and destroyed is the sole remaining copy of a book from 1850, which is now considered public domain.

On one hand, hoarding such a book, stealing its content from the public domain, locking its content behind a for-profit machine, and destroying the only remaining copy is clearly wrong. It's equivalent to stealing a public resource, just like mining minerals or oil on public lands without a permit or mineral rights. Pure extraction.

On the other hand, taking care to digitize the copy and making it available for free in perpetuity, as well as being required through regulation to provide access to that content through, let's say a public utility LLM/AI available for free through libraries and online... and perhaps after fair due diligence being required to preserve physical copies in a public archive of rare books of which there are no known remaining physical copies...

That seems much more reasonable to me at least. I can imagine there are many who would not see it that way though. Do we see it happening or gaining regulatory, moral and/or public support?

[1] https://htmx.org/essays/future/#writing-research-and-standar...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

It's awesome, I'm not criticizing Htmx at all to be clear, I am criticizing our seemingly inability to advance the core web technology of HTML in browsers to include this kind of tech natively.

If somebody from the WhatWG, e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla, etc. wants to embrace and support the creators of Htmx and wrap this into the browser natively, I will proudly retract my comment.

Presumably we haven't heard as much after Northrop bought them?

I think it's awesome that Scaled Composites is involved... they really have such specialized knowledge of all kinds of aeronautical engineering.

Duplicates are not always what they seem - duplicates have a relative quantity of how duplicate they are, for example - 100% duplicate identical is what it sounds like, but then what is a 50% duplicate? Well.. that could be a duplicate where semantic meaning that only a human is aware of (missing information) could be used to determine that these two datum are in fact duplicates in different forms, where 50% is identical, but the other 50% is semantically identical. Or 50% truly identical could, in some case, be "good enough" to be considered identical. These are just examples.

Why this example is relevant is because, when deduplicating data, we often have to consider which value(s) we keep as the true singular representation.

The problem is, long after the data is created, this may be impossible to do.

The solution? Often times it is no better than flipping a coin and guessing, i.e. randomly keeping one datum and discarding what we consider to be the duplicate. Or you can try to be fancy and merge the data or choose, based on some rule, what you assume is the data with the highest valid signal and discard or ignore the noise.

This happens every day in practical information systems with messy data.

I always come to the conclusion that in the end, one cannot truly replace missing signal precisely - one can only infer the correct signal. If the information was not recorded and or compressed or corrupted beyond recoverability, there is no way to get it back - only to infer or guess with some degree of confidence, and accept or reject the outcome.

This to me actually clarifies something deeply about the conversion between the real world to the digital one as data, and the conversion of data into information- it is a real physical process.

In my mind it makes clear that the recording of data (or generation of data) is a real physical process of transfer, from an instrument making observations to physical bits in a physical system, which become the raw data.

Without the raw, precise, complete data, your observation is lossy, and therefore everything above it is as well- e.g. information/interpretation, etc.

This isn't a negative. If stated correctly, the above just helps to explain how we imperfectly navigate through the real world with our tools.

All the same, we can do some pretty amazing things in the absence of data, even if some of it is "false" or "wrong".

Unfortunately, capitalism of today appears to find public goods and strong, public, healthy public goods to be undesirable investments. Yet, it seems inevitable that some things trend that direction.

I feel if we could get a better handle on what goods fall into which category, and find ways to make those things sustainable and even grow, the situation could get better.

I'm speaking purely from observations here but it also looks like in some ways, the "invisible hand of the economy" (i.e. Adam Smith) might sort these things out by itself, albeit, painfully.

We could look at the fact that LLMs were mostly created from the public domain (except when they were not), and the resulting products/services (expensive to create/operate, benefits a huge swath of humanity, has all kinds of externality issues) as something that perhaps should again almost be considered as a public good.

If we look at the struggles LLM/AI companies have had with legal structure choices, such as nonprofit, for profit, etc and pricing (e.g. do we make it accessible at a loss? Do we extract huge profits?) as a kind of moral dilemma of classifying this new economic good (LLM-based AI).

In the US, the government has been taking investment interests in some tech companies, and recent proposals even include establishing sovereign wealth funds around AI/LLM. I think this is further evidence that the system is trying to figure out how to classify these new economic goods and corporations.

I'm curious about how the unifying architecture is going to evolve between CPU/GPU having direct access to a singular pool of memory/storage also.

I also keep wondering when memristor technology might enter the ring, because as I understand it, it would be like moving compute into the memory, which would potentially remove the need to move the data in and out of storage as much also.

It feels like computing hardware infrastructure is fundamentally evolving.

I am wondering about.. SQL as a declarative structured query language that can be optimized into essentially any kind of distributed, directed acyclic graph of processing - vs the special characteristics of relational databases (relational algebra, relvars, etc. etc.) is an important distinction as - of yet, I see the author linking both together so I'm trying to understand what it is about relational structures that specifically helped here (just not seeing it yet, not that it isn't there).

Also, wondering if ISO/IEC 9075-15:2023 SQL standard for multidimensional arrays (MDA) is of any use here? Paper describing SQL/MDA here [2].

[1] https://madlib.apache.org/documentation.html

[2] https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/Lectures/WS-19-20/N...

Seems like developer tools/tooling are a hot commodity to the current big AI companies?

- you're on HN, so you have an opportunity to tell us the name of the thing - marketing

- perhaps consider your marketing budget to be the area you need to invest in now, and indirectly how that budget can actually generate a little revenue and exercise the engine - e.g. do you have packages you can ship through your service to announce it to others? Use your marketing budget to do it and collect your marketplace fees - marketing again. Nothing says I believe in my product like using it for real (IMHO).

- a bold and risky move (?) - most would say fake it till you make it - but I for one tire of this tactic. How about approaching this with honesty and reward the first adopters? "We're brand new but you can be the first to help us prove out this model?".

- your marketplace is a network. Search for an opening that has viral properties. Try to tap into something that has a network effect, go to where your customer is and see how you can target/advertise strategically and respectfully - become a trusted partner to one or more communities (e.g. thinking out loud, eBay sellers maybe?). This could include finding the right partner(s) who have a problem and are willing to give you a shot in an existing network.

On the last point - as an example of the viral thing - I worked on a real estate tool a while back. We found a viral hook - there were for sure properties that needed to be processed and worked through the tool - we email invited the parties involved in the transaction to invite them to work on the property in the secure tool, and we gave them the ability to invite others working the same transaction to the tool, and we focused everything on polishing that workflow and experience.

This way, as soon as one person used the tool they could invite others to use it legitimately to work in the tool and that was the viral aspect.

This points to, replace real estate tool and house with "package" and invite... and can you achieve something viral that spreads itself... like, when someone ships with your tool, it emails the recipient with the link to your site for status tracking and a call to action to make them want to ship using your platform.

This to me is a lot of marketing and product strategy around incentivizing the network effect.

Disclaimer: I never made millions of dollars off a marketplace. But I did help stand up the real estate mechanism I mentioned and that business reliably brought in 5-10 grand a month with no marketing effort and just that one mechanism, and it also helped us find a few key network partners. That's what drives my feedback.

Anyone up for a rousing game of Pole Position?