are you comfortable with a single corporation having control over this sort of service?

Honestly? A tiny bit more than a single country. I have at least some miniscule control over the corporation through voting and local regulations that international corporations must follow, whereas I have absolutely no formal influence on US govt.

Which govt? I’m not comfortable with the idea of the current US govt having control over this sort of service.

This is mainly why I signed it. I honestly don’t care about new games, and the whole narrative around the campaign is frankly infantile, but it should at the very least be a start towards fighting such practices in general.

I never said editing registry files is “common sense”, but in the grand scheme of things it’s very simple and, yes, quite idiot-proof (go here and here, create file this and that, set value to 1). That may count as pro to some but I’m pretty sure it’s not enough to actually work with Linux (which one of my family members uses so I see it in practice).

Besides, considering this comment

Most of those registry keys are not documented, and it’s very hard to be completely sure about what you are touching.

Maybe it’s precisely the fact that I’m brazenly tinkering with registry files that renders me not-as-pro as some might think.

I’ve no idea what that means but ok

By default, LibreWolf deletes the user’s cookies and history when the browser is closed,

I’m not sure if these devs have the same priorities as me D:

Until the next re-bloating update where your settings get reverted

As a Windows user, I’ve had this problem with Firefox browser a number of times, and never with Widows.

I didn’t know I’m already a computer pro by following a couple of idiot-proof steps I found by googling.

“some” = the one that’s the basis of and technically closely tied to the one you’re using right now

Yeah, usually they’re just sourced from public-domain book collections such as Google Books (who scan older books which can end up visually messy), and I’m pretty sure some of those that are offered on Amazon were straight-up based on pirated PDFs.

because you’re paying

Well no, it’s the buyer who is paying. Which they might find off-putting, if the final price is too high, so you get fewer buyers and less profit.

As for the quality, there’s literally no reason that a book that is printed on demand has to be low quality or use low quality materials.

Except that in practice they simply are of lower quality. I’ve seen quite enough of such books. Maybe higher quality materials could be used, but that would raise the price for the end-user even more, and possibly slow down the production.

and the proof is the fact that Amazon is filled with AI generated garbage books

One has to wonder how much money they actually make, though. I saw some YT videos about the topic, IIRC it’s really difficult. Their mere presence doesn’t prove their profitability but only the belief by many people that they could be profitable.

It’s easy to start a business, sure. But you didn’t explain the rest of the process and don’t seem to actually know a lot about the particulars of book publishing (neither do I, but whatever I do know doesn’t agree with your imagined “solution”).

I guess, but print on demand is also more expensive than printing in bulk, when looking per unit, and of lower quality (paper and binding). I’m not too familiar with the details of book publishing but I wouldn’t expect that people are not using this route simply because they failed to notice its benefits.

I tried to read about “just-in-time economy” but I really don’t see how it would apply to book market?

Large AI companies themselves want people to be ignorant of how AI works, though. They want uncritical acceptance of the tech as they force it everywhere, creating a radical counterreaction from people. The reaction might be uncritical too, I’d prefer to say it’s merely unjustified in specific cases or overly emotional, but it doesn’t come from nowhere or from sheer stupidity. We have been hearing about people treating their chatbots as sentient beings since like 2022 (remember that guy from Google?), bombarded with doomer (or, from AI companies’ point of view, very desirable) projections about AI replacing most jobs and wreaking havoc on world economy - how are ordinary people supposed to remain calm and balanced when hearing such stuff all the time?

Oh man…

That is the point, to show how AI image generators easily fail to produce something that rarely occurs out there in reality (i.e. is absent from training data), even though intuitively (from the viewpoint of human intelligence) it seems like it should be trivial to portray.

Yeah, I don’t think that would fly.

“Your honour, I was just hoarding that terabyte of Hollywood films, I haven’t actually watched them.”

Bro are you a robot yourself? Does that look like a glass full of wine?

AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does,

If it’s in the same way, then why do you need the quotation marks? Even you understand that they’re not the same.

And either way, machine learning is different from human learning in so many ways it’s ridiculous to even discuss the topic.

AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from

That depends on the model and the amount of data it has been trained on. I remember the first public model of ChatGPT producing a sentence that was just one word different from what I found by googling the text (from some scientific article summary, so not a trivial sentence that could line up accidentally). More recently, there was a widely reported-on study of AI-generated poetry where the model was requested to produce a poem in the style of Chaucer, and then produced a letter-for-letter reproduction of the well-known opening of the Canterbury Tales. It hasn’t been trained on enough Middle English poetry and thus can’t generate any of it, so it defaulted to copying a text that probably occurred dozens of times in its training data.

Facebook (Meta) torrented TBs from Libgen, and their internal chats leaked so we know about that, and IIRC they’ve been sued. Maybe you’re thinking of that case?

(you know who I’m talking about)

(I don’t)