They're doing everything they can to avoid it, but it's supposed to be tHe FuTuRe
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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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 π΅βπ«π΅βπ«
Great analogy for the shit we're currently saturating our digital world with
Tell me more about nuclear steel.
Itβs actually the low radiation stuff from before the first nuclear bombs were detonated that we want. Turns out those kinds of bombs spread fallout and now literally everything on the planet has a trace amount
nice
TIL
Bruh, this is literally like scientists scavenging metal from shipwrecks that predate the era of nuclear bomb testing, cause they need steel that isnβt 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 Γ©n 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!)
According to Wikipedia, while a market for old, low-background steel was real phenomenon for a few decades, that's pretty much over.
World anthropogenic background radiation ... began to fall in 1963 ... and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels.[9] This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature.
So you may consider your friend's estate-sale theory in light of that time-line.
but it carries some weight
Did you know about !dadjokes@lemmy.world?
If a big company needed a lot of something specific, they'd probably pay a pretty penny and let people going to small lot auctions accumulate a sizeable amount and then buy it from them.
It's not impossible to buy stuff from small lots at scale, as long as you're willing to pay a premium
My brother in law actually tried to hook me up at the car place he worked at, and my job would have been to go to auctions and estate sales looking for nice cars for the dealership to buy. It would essentially have been a couple things they want me to go to per week, but then I'd have to be looking myself for things like Craigslist, marketplace, and paper listings.
Didn't end up going for the job, due to the owners being shit head MAGAts, but it would have been interesting for a few months.
That's what I imagine any place that NEEDS pre-40s metal would do. Have a person who just goes to places that have blacksmithing tools advertised and buy them. Probably big auctions though, I imagine smallest ate sales wouldn't get much attention.
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Damn AI ruined AI.
Hee hee.
Modern book burning
Anna's Archive: ...uh, well okay, then.
The worst part is that they are destroying the books afterwards.
Reminds me of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, who sketched ancient artifacts in his personal notebook and then destroyed the originals.
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Destroying the books too :(
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).
If the AI companies were simply picking up books that were already going to a landfill, I don't think that would bother anybody. That isn't what we're talking about here, though. These books are coming from booksellers, so it's fair to guess that most of them are at least a notch or two above what you'd find in a Goodwill bargain bin.
Bibles. There are so many fucking bibles. When I worked for a church we probably had 20 people a year buy a while new set of new bibles for the church. Like - we already had like 3,000 bibles with a weekly attendance of about 500. We didn't need new bibles, but people just kept giving them to us.
It's the most-printed book of all time, and they just don't stop making them. It's insane.
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You can only stave off model collapse so long.
Itβs only a matter of time before most of the data going in to LLMs came out of one too.
Like Iβm not even good at math or anything, much less computer science, but that seems obvious and inevitable to me.
Maybe someone smarter than me can chime in.
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.
Idk. Prose books generally have tons of em dashes.
Yes exactly the point being made in the link. AI picks up unintended behaviours already, it's not too hard to imagine that the general direction is towards model collapse.
I'm waiting for the day when desperate LLM companies start paying people to post real human content, only for those people to just ask ChatGPT to do it.
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.
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Nice that they're actually buying them this time instead of just downloading torrents of book collections again.
I imagine they already burned through literally all of the torrentable books
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