The distributed replacement for Sci-Hub

GitHub - ultranymous/stc: Distributed free search engine and AI tools that grant access to knowledge

I believe that knowledge should be free, you should have access to knowledge even if you don't have the money to afford buying it. This uses IPFS.

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Doesn't Anna's Archive already include a full backup of Sci-Hub and distribute it via Torrent and IPFS in addition to their website and the providers and mirrors they usually use for uploading?
- Scihub database stops in 2021. Big win for corporate publishers and wealthy scientists; they've had an edge since then. It's super important to have access to up to date resources. The database here seems to fill the gap - Merry Christmas to me!!
  
  Anna's Archive allows new uploads though. From their website:
  We have the full Sci-Hub collection, as well as new papers.
  https://annas-archive.org/scidb
- I think they stopped endorsing IPFS. I can't find a good source right now. If you wan't to support Anna's Archive, you can help seed their torrents. They don't seem to have that much redundancy.
  
  You're right.
  We’ve decided that IPFS is not yet ready for prime time. We’ll still link to files on IPFS from Anna’s Archive when possible, but we won’t host it ourselves anymore, nor do we recommend others to mirror using IPFS. Please see our Torrents page if you want to help preserve our collection.
  
  I'm seeding around 10TB of Anna's Archive data
- The IPFS backups of that and libgen are dead but the torrents work!
It had me up until 'AI'.
- Yeah the AI thing is stupid, everyone suddenly wants to incorporate AI. Check out the telegram bot though, you can request research papers or books through the bots and someone uploads it in a couple of hours.
- If you do it right, you can have that AI replace all the complicated pirating and downloading process. I think someone already came up with a paper writer AI. You just give it the topic, and it fabricates a whole paper, including nice diagrams and pictures. 😅
  Yeah, but that also made me worry. I wonder how AI and science mix. Supposedly, some researchers use AI. Especially "Retrieval-Augmented Generation" (information retrieval) and such. I'm not a scientist, but I didn't have much luck with AI and factual information. It just makes a lot of stuff up. To the point where I'm better off without.
  
  AI can be good but I'd argue letting an LLM autonomously write a paper is not one of the ways. The risk of it writing factually wrong things is just too great.
  To give you an example from astronomy: AI can help filter out "uninteresting" data, which encompasses a large majority of data coming in. It can also help by removing noise from imaging and by drastically speeding up lengthy physical simulations, at the cost of some accuracy.
  None of those use cases use LLMs though.
  
  If you do it right, you can have that AI replace all the complicated pirating and downloading process.
  How so? I don't see how that would work.
  What are you trying to say about an AI fabricating a whole paper? It must have the same issues all trained statistical text prediction "AI" has: Hallucinations. Even if it's extended with sources, without validating them the paper text claims are useless when you can't be sure the source even exists or says what it claims.
  There are use cases for AI, but if you are looking for papers for reasoned and documented information, AI is the worst you can use. Because it may look correct, but be confidently incorrect, and you are being misled.
  This post is about scientific papers. Not predicted generated text.
Ugh this shit doesnt need AI.
AI slop
Why did I think for a moment the post was about Scilab (Matlab replacement)? I felt confused with Scilab being centralized. It runs on your computer, after all

36 comments