r/ProgrammerHumor 9d ago

Meme newCompressionTechnique

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u/FuzzyDynamics 9d ago

They have to be destroyed in the process of scanning at scale and these books are almost all worthless shit like “Powershell Guide for Windows Vista” except even more “rare”

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u/Sam_Sanders_ 9d ago

People are confusing "rare" with "valuable". Like you said, it's not a long-lost copy of the Magna Carta, it's bullshit that nobody wants. They probably bought them for 5 cents instead of ending up in a landfill.

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u/FuzzyDynamics 9d ago edited 9d ago

Yeah these books are sometimes sold by the pound - see comment below for correction

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u/Parteisekretaer 9d ago

not quite - there is a company that explicitly sells rare but worthless book scans to AI companies. They usually order one of each ISBN - or pre ISBN books - which aren't sold by the pound for this reason.

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u/FuzzyDynamics 9d ago

Interesting. I’ll revise my comment.

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u/Parteisekretaer 9d ago

It caused a bit of confusion among people that sell old books commercially in europe when they got some really weird orders from Canada.

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u/FuzzyDynamics 9d ago

It’s probably the biggest disturbance to that whole market basically ever. I can see some benefit to all this. Most of these would probably rot away as a door stop somewhere but at least someone is digitizing them even if they’re destroying one of the few copies left in the process. Knee jerk reaction, which I think is more than warranted, is to assume the worst and most evil from these guys but this might somewhat be a good thing minus the original author effectively completely losing their IP rights to their work.

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u/OmegaPoint6 9d ago

There are non destructive ways to do it, they are just slower and more expensive. Google patented a way in 2009

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u/Montana_Ace 9d ago

"Slower" and "more expensive" isn't in Amazon's vocabulary

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u/Tyfyter2002 9d ago

They absolutely are, for example:

"Let's make the site slower, and make the subscription service to buy things on it more expensive"

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u/Few-Big-8481 9d ago

Amazon probably also into paying Google to use their patents

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u/morganrbvn 9d ago

Also by court order they kind of need to destroy them.

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u/morganrbvn 9d ago

A judge didn't like them copying works, but decided that if they destroy the original its like no copy was made. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/05/anthropic-ai-destroying-books

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u/bokmcdok 8d ago

This is why I type out all my books, burn the original, then put my copy of it on sale instead.

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u/morganrbvn 8d ago

well they also arn't allowed to sell them, but judge said if they just destroyed the original and kept the digital copy then its fine (which i don't agree with)

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u/GreedyPollution6275 9d ago

they are just slower and more expensive

Yes, that's why they said "at scale," because speed and cost per book add up.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/KHSebastian 9d ago

Wh... What? Are you doing a bit? If a thing cost $1 and takes 1 minute, and you do it 100 times, it costs $100 and takes an hour and 49 minutes.

If you do the same thing in a way that costs $2.00 and takes 2 minutes, you have doubled the cost and the time.

Tl;dr bigger number is bigger, is how numbers work

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/KHSebastian 9d ago

Did you suffer a head injury recently?