Technology

Tell me more about nuclear steel.

TIL

Bruh, this is literally like scientists scavenging metal from shipwrecks that predate the era of nuclear bomb testing, cause they need steel that isn’t contaminated by nuclear fallout for certain measuring equipment

Except in this case, these scientists are working at a nuclear weapons lab. They need metal that hasn't been contaminated by nuclear bombs so that they can invent better nuclear bombs.

Low background bullshit training data.

A guy I used to know who would go to estate sales looking for blacksmithing equipment once told me the market for old metalworking stuff is disappearing because too much stuff is being bought by companies én masse for this reason.

I don't know if I believe that companies are buying small lot auctions and estate sales for old anvils, but he was sure convinced.

I like to joke I'm sitting on a pile of cash because my anvil isn't radioactive. (it's not a very good joke, but it carries some weight!)

We also have no guarantee these books will be available at a later date in these digitized formats, nor that they won’t be altered to fit certain narratives which is of course trivial to do with digital copies. At a minimum these need public verifiable checksums to be relied upon.

I don’t like this and don’t trust it one bit.

These AI companies already showed their hand in trying to corner the PC component market with an end goal of users no longer being able to own their own PCs. Now they’re potentially trying to do this with all written recorded information.

How long until Altman’s Firemen show up at your door to burn your books?

Reminds me of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, who sketched ancient artifacts in his personal notebook and then destroyed the originals.

Not to defend the AI crowd, but ever go to a Goodwill Outlet store? They usually have at least 1 gaylord box (the giant box on a pallet watermelons come in) full of books. Not sure how often they cycle those out, but I'm guessing pretty regularly. Multiply that by every semi major city Goodwill has a presence in. Add in other thrift sores with a similar quantity of books. You're talking ALOT of books. SO MANY books are thrown out everyday. Including by libraries. I don't really have a problem if some of those get diverted for a bit to be scanned. Yes, it's sad to see books getting destroyed. But there's alot of stuff people just really don't want. And, if you REALLY want a villain, maybe you can blame copyright law? That's part of the reason AI companies destroy the books - it helps to make their scanning efforts more legal. Absent that, they could probably be convinced to spend just a little more for nondestructive scanning, assuming they could find a home for the books they scanned (the sellers of these things couldn't, so good luck).

It's kind of sort of already happening. Emdashes are fragments of it, a token saving strategy introduced by already trained on old books in their data sources. Model collapse is inevitable.

Already happening for years.

Amazon mechanical turk, Outlier.ai, scale ai, are all gig platforms that pay people to produce real human content for LLM training.

At first they were paying people to actually produce content, like worked solutions to maths problems or translations, then they pivoted more to rating LLM output.

And as with every enshittification cycle, wages and work rapidly dried up, so people responded by asking LLMs for the answer just to meet deadlines and get by.

This is already happening.

They are paying people bottom market rates to generate unique written content and people are just having AI write it for them.

I imagine they already burned through literally all of the torrentable books