This is true, it’s the need for consistency that drives up costs.

Photography is harder than most people think. You need to get to the places where you are doing your job, there is tons of communication involved, then there is editing and proper archival stuff you need to do, accounting is also completely different from that of an uber driver’s, and it’s not just the camera that costs more than 5K (looking at you BRIESE and any basic lens set – telephoto, normal, wide angle, zoom, low light will quickly exceed the 15K mark if you care about professional standards). It’s really a whole thing.

No, even this is a very bad idea. Ideally, no books are destroyed. A close relative of mine works as an archivist. They have tons of examples of how digitising and then destroying can create extra burdens. The data on hard drives or flash devices is too fragile.

I know that in disciplines such as math there are very often have books with less than 50 copies in circulation. The LLM companies buy maybe 2 of a given book which are subsequently destroyed with no backup data. You’re now at 48 in circulation, that is a significant reduction. Rinse and repeat a couple of million times and this starts to have a major influence on knowledge.

What’s perverse about it is that the data from the books is stored extremely badly within the models. So not only are you destroying sources, you are also necessarily falsifying them.

Pretty sure information that is hard to come by on the internet includes rare books.

I never bought into quantum immortality. Isn’t it obvious to everyone that this is just circular reasoning?