Avoiding Fahrenheit 451? (Can you read that book in Florida?)

https://www.bespacific.com/major-publishers-sue-florida-over-banned-school-library-books/

Major Publishers Sue Florida Over Banned School Library Books

“Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks have filed a lawsuit against Florida public officials, challenging sweeping book removal provisions of HB 1069, an education law that restricts books in school libraries. The additional plaintiffs joining the publishers are the Authors Guild, bestselling authors Julia Alvarez, Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Jodi Picoult, and Angie Thomas, two students, and two parents. As a result of HB 1069, hundreds of titles have been banned across the state since the bill went into effect in July 2023. The list of banned books includes classics such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, as well as contemporary novels by bestselling authors such as Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, and Stephen King. Among nonfiction titles, accounts of the Holocaust such as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank have been removed. HB 1069 requires school librarians to remove books that contain anything that can be construed as “sexual conduct,” with no consideration of the educational value of the work as a whole. If “a parent or a resident of the county” objects to a book, the book must be removed within five days and remain unavailable until the objection is resolved. There is no requirement to review a book within a reasonable time frame—or even to return it if it has been found not to violate the statute. If a book is returned to the library, an objector may request a review by a state-appointed special magistrate at the expense of the school district. Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks issued a joint statement: “As publishers dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and the right to read, the rise in book bans across the country continues to demand our collective action. Fighting unconstitutional legislation in Florida and across the country is an urgent priority. We are unwavering in our support for educators, librarians, students, authors, readers—everyone deserves access to books and stories that show different perspectives and viewpoints.”

Perspective. (It looks like this AI thing might be big...)

https://singularityhub.com/2024/08/29/ai-models-scaled-up-10000x-are-possible-by-2030-report-says/

AI Models Scaled Up 10,000x Are Possible by 2030, Report Says

Recent progress in AI largely boils down to one thing: Scale.

Around the beginning of this decade, AI labs noticed that making their algorithms—or models—ever bigger and feeding them more data consistently led to enormous improvements in what they could do and how well they did it. The latest crop of AI models have hundreds of billions to over a trillion internal network connections and learn to write or code like we do by consuming a healthy fraction of the internet.

It takes more computing power to train bigger algorithms. So, to get to this point, the computing dedicated to AI training has been quadrupling every year, according to nonprofit AI research organization, Epoch AI

Should that growth continue through 2030, future AI models would be trained with 10,000 times more compute than today’s state of the art algorithms, like OpenAI’s GPT-4.