If all these companies were doing was burning star wars tie-in novels and harry potter sequels nobody would care. That's not their goal because they already have those in their training set. The whole point here is to find rare or underappreciated books from the pre-digital era which nobody ever made publicly available in a digital format.

BTW destroying them isn't even necessary for scanning. It's the easiest way because removing the binding and turning it into a flat stack of papers solves many problems but there are actually dedicated book scanners designed to hold open the book while its photographed, and un-curling pages in post-processing was already a solved problem long before people were using AI to correct images.

Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed?

>Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.

When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.

I struggle to see how this could possibly be useful unless there's some sort of psy-op going on to trick people into uncritically accepting anything lacking a watermark as not being AI-generated.

If the Manhattan project could build a fat man in 4 years your state university's physics department has somebody who could reproduce that given the necessary resources. It might take them longer than four years given that they are not staffed with the modern equivalents of Oppenheimer, teller, et al but they could do it within a human lifetime if they actually wanted to cause a mass-casualty event and weren't afraid of the aforementioned JDAM.

On a similar note I keep thinking that having your "content" used as training material for a model ought to entitle you to a proportional stake.

Yes, it's fairly axiomic that he was "just at the right place at the right time" because there are dozens of modern "boomer shooters" on steam that are not nearly as successful as DOOM or Quake. You might counterargue that its always harder to do something thats never been done before but that would only be a tacit admission that coding actually was the easy part in that case.

It's arguably fraudulent to even refer to it as "advertising" at this point, clearly that's just a cover to give them an excuse to sell data to silicon valley corporations that are unironically named after fictional devices used by sci-fi/fantasy villains to manipulate people.

Backdoors and spying are also a problem in theory except at this point you can't even trust "legitimate" companies on that front so it's a moot point.

My favorite example is in the old testament when God sends a couple angels to Lot and a large mob of sodomites (people from the city of sodom, although they probably satisfy both definitions of the word) converge upon him and demand to rape the angels. Lot immediately attempts to negotiate by offering to let the mob to rape his own daughters in lieu of the angels. The mob denies this generous offer so the angels drive them away under their own power, thus calling into question why Lot felt the need to offer his daughter's unto a large mob of literal sodomites.

The angels tell him to leave because God is planning to destroy the entire city, and somehow Lot is actually being spared since he is somehow the only righteous man in Sodom. He is warned not to look back at the city as he departs, but his wife foolishly disobey this instruction and is immediately transformed into a pillar of salt as one would expect.

Then later they're out in the wilderness where there are no men and the two daughters are getting hot and bothered so they drug the recently-widowed Lot and rape him, becoming impregnatedin the process.

In all fairness I think the implication behind that last plot development was a sort of abramhic version of karma since Lot is an extremely unsympathetic character despite somehow also being righteous enough to merit being spared the fires of sodom. However given what I know about how incest usually works in the modern world i can't help but wonder if (assuming this is at least partially based on true events) we're actually just getting Lot's side of the story after he inexplicably emerges from the wilderness with two grandchildren and no other sources of paternity.

Anyways the bronze age is one helluva drug.

EDIT: also, in the very likely case that the packet is not addressed to the satellite itself, routing comes into play. In the best-case scenario where the satellite is somehow able to transmit the packet directly to its destination the distance it travels is actually doubled. If the packet instead gets transmitted from the satellite to a base-station which then routes it through fiber-optics then there's no point in trying to argue that the satellite connection is the faster of the two even if that is true.

LMAO what are you even talking about? MKULTRA is a historical fact. The CIA even admits it was real. You can't just handwave something away by calling it "discredited".

There have been congressional hearings and documents produced from it. The only reason it's poorly documented is because the CIA illegally destroyed its own documentation. The little documentation we do have was produced after the CIA said it had already destroyed all of its own documentation to prevent its employees from ever complying with congressional subpoena. They have lied at every step, and even if they were telling the truth they would still be violating the law with an aim towards covering it up.

>in reality, facebooks effects on its users has at least a decade of academic and independent research both commissioned by facebook and in spite of them.

thats my point. For at least a decade they have been doing the same sort of thing MKULTRA was doing. I explicitly said in my first post that there's no hard evidence that there was a relation between the two but the similarity is striking, especially since it is well documented that Facebook regularly colludes with the United States federal government. If you aren't open to even considering that it's not a coincidence then you're either a shill, an LLM, or an idiot.