If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive.
Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose books and knowledge I consumed without being able to pay them back.)
This is key for getting epubs to your Kobo.
Come check it out! You can get an API key or MCP in Claude.
financial watchdogs and international treaties make it impossible unless you are perhaps a multi billionaire who can afford to buy people at the political level
Lying about your assets to avoid paying a lawful fine is criminal. Just because they can’t see your money doesn’t mean they can’t prove that you have it, and can’t jail you for hiding it to get out paying a fine.
Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.
We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.
Even if projects like AA didn’t have nation-state-level support, academics would find a way to keep as much of it as possible going. After all, we’re the ones who do all the hard work of scanning from our institutional libraries stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere in digital form.
In such a world, isnt it useful that governments are stupid enough to give adversaries reasons to undermine it? When the government props up a corporate tyranny domestically, and racketeering, should we make a temporary alliance with all its enemies?
(Eg., the provision to AI companies of all corporate secretes and competitive practices via prompts, eventually to be used against their capital interests and their labour interests).
The current situation feels untenable with renting. So many regular people I know have learned about VPN, NAS, etc.
Spotify, Netflix, Amazon etc provided OK value for a while, but now enshitification is biting, this is due a massive comeback.
Cloudflare captchas have made the internet unusable for me, and I'm sure it will only get worse over time. I'd much rather just browse (or even torrent) a copy of archive.is or similar. The latter would be much better for privacy, and hey, I run ad blockers anyway.
Well, there is this little conflict of interest
> Purchase all Library of Congress MARC datasets — $3,000 bounty
> English Wikipedia pages about relevant institutions — up to $100 per new page
> Internet Archive Digital Lending — $5000 per 1 million pdf files
> Text version of our full library — $20,000
...
(a) work out how Google books exposes fragments of books, and see if there's a systematic way of using this to get whole books. For example, a naive approach might be to find any fragment of the book by searching some exact phrase. Then, you can search for an exact phrase from the start or end of the fragment it gave you, hoping it will show you the previous or next part of the book. You can then just loop that to get the whole book.
(b) once you have (a), you need a way of bypassing Google's bot detection/rate limiting. I don't know what current state of the art is, but there may be a solution for sale out there. E.g. you pay to receive a cookie or browser state, and use that to fetch the URLs from (a). Or if you're good/already in the scene, you could do this part yourself.Fundamentally, you can never distill your way to being the teacher, so these approaches will not advance the frontier.
[edit, after thinking about it I think my phrasing is unfair. It's not necessarily that aren't able to do it, but they haven't yet shown that they are willing to do it.]
/s
Not yet.
If there is a need someone will come and fulfill. Personally for me now I do not even want to use top models. Professionally I use AI to help with the coding using Junie agent that comes with IDEs from JetBrains. Junie is told to use Gemini Flash and works fine for what I ("I" being an emphasis here) ask it to do. I tried more advanced models and different vendors only to discover credits going down the toilet without any extra benefit.
This doesn't strike me as a symptom of a bubble - except in so far as the bubble pushes the competitors models forwards and thus they need to invest more to stay competitive.
They all carry political weights, because humans behind defend their interests, and are promoting some social values.
This answer from Claude is so biased that it is ridiculous
China acts like an entire bloc, not as single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.