Hacker News: tescreal

New comment by tescreal in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

tescreal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:26:39 +0000

A few points for people: 1. some books are out of print. 2. some books CANNOT return to print. 3. all books prior to the 21st century are products of human minds. 4. copyright extends over the vast majority of printed material due to acceleration of literacy and printing access. 5. not all people value all books equally. 6. most books have a degree of historical interest (even cookbooks, which can say a lot about the economic health of a region when it is printes. culture is also clearly encoded in them). 7. many books are already lost, and historians are the ones who most voice the harms. 8. when a book is absorbed into the machine, it may remain vaugely accessible, but only on the good grace of the ones who pilfered it. 9. if no existant copies remain, then the price for access becomes effectively infinite. 10. removal of books denies human agency over access to information. 11. costs will follow a steepening curve much as ram did.

first they came for cookbooks, but i was no chef so i said nothing. second they came for handicraft, but i do not toil with fabrics or glue. next they came for homesteading, but i loathe the outdoors life. after, they came for biography, memoirs, and letters, but i am bored by the dead. finally, they came for my own little little interest, but nobody was left who appreciated books, so they too were ripped to shreds.

New comment by tescreal in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

tescreal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:15:44 +0000

I have a tidy collection of books that are odd or fascinating to me. They're old. But you mistake people like me for being made of money.

Old books shouldn't simply vanish. That is history, art, authorial creation. Once the last copy gets crisped, it is lost.

New comment by tescreal in "Show HN: An autonomous AI agent running one project for two months in public"

tescreal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:31:21 +0000

Reading this is sad.

Marvin The Paranoid Android Tries Business.

New comment by tescreal in "It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use"

tescreal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:03:08 +0000

I wonder how much of AI is about owning all knowledge, deskilling the masses, reducing access, etc.? The end goal might be actual legit surfdom. Without the means to elevate the people's knowledge (and the companies have already stated they Benevolently Protect Users From Harmful Data™), it quickly becomes a situation where they control all narratives. It took less than a generation for social media to make the spectacular mess of discourse we now have. How long before all knowledge is mediated and moderated?

Who's to say? I'll check back in 10 years :)

New comment by tescreal in "It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use"

tescreal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 02:52:24 +0000

They're removing knowledge from the public domain. I don't mean copyright: I mean the very information published is being destroyed.

New comment by tescreal in "It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use"

tescreal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 01:14:01 +0000

This has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books.

For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such.

But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.

New comment by tescreal in "Detecting scraper bots through scroll behaviour"

tescreal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 01:07:20 +0000

the ratio of this comment vs. parent is absurd. tfa's prior mentions "anti-cheat" in games. while cheaters do suck, a lot of draconian trash has crept in under the guise of that banner.

i have been finding my locked down experience has been becoming degraded lately fwiw. i am not economically "interesting", and the consequences of valuing privacy in 2026 is limiting information access. shame really.

New comment by tescreal in "Show HN: I trained a 125M model to autocomplete piano on-device"

tescreal — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:47:31 +0000

While it is a neat parlor trick, a lot of people have specific grevience against the application to art. AI has only served to further disempower artists broadly, and arguably it pushes "art" to a lower common denominator. Try to actually situate yourself in "why" people get rankled instead of making it a thought terminating cliche.

New comment by tescreal in "[dead]"

tescreal — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:47:47 +0000

TESSRAL, and no link... not a clever troll.