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I would rather see my books get pirated than this

janefriedman.com

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Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#381

Post by kubanczyk »

zen_1 wrote: post #166
nomat wrote: post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

One of the few sentences more depressing (when relevant) than "Stallman was right" is "Ted Kaczynski had a point".

Categorizing useful arguments into boxes with labels like "Ted K" is over-simplification. Worldview is not about chains of arguments, but directed acyclic graphs of arguments. You can even have exactly the same starting assumptions, but arrive at a totally different branch.

It all depends on how well you connect the dots on your way.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#382

Post by kubanczyk »

nomat wrote: post #199
Pxtl wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about digital IDs. I don't see any escape from a hellscape of AI-generated-sludge unless we have a real way to say "somebody has signed their real government-confirmed reputation on this". The paranoid disinfo peddlers are the ones who benefit most from the untraceability of the horsecrap they put online. Otherwise it's all downhill until the singul…

Free speech should only apply to verified humans. We could use the blockchain to assign keys to babies as they are born. Only half kidding, about both statements. Corporations also have rights. How terrible it will be when we have "companies" that are just AI programs. All human weakness, eliminated. South Korea requires you to register with your national id if you want to access the internet there, which sounds like…

> verified humans

Wouldn't it be elegant though if the new trust scheme applied the same to LLMs/bots as humans?

Assuming that LLMs are a polar opposite of humans seems short sighted. Or assuming that humans are sole heroes of the story. It will be a spectrum, soon. For example when you say "all human weakness, eliminated" it's a weird lens to use. Every relative weakness is a challenge, whether its origin is in human ancestral environment or not.

I'm curious whether the entirety of the system (I mean the current civilization) would morph itself into a pipeline disgorging specifically human "happiness". As of today, it's far from obvious!

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#383

Post by Paul_S »

I would rather have your books done this to them (whatever the "this" is) than have a popup jump up at the me after reading 10 lines before I can even figure out what you're complaining about.

And I already have ublock origin enabled so congrats on defeating its filters.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#384

Post by itsoktocry »

smithza wrote: post #175
neilv wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already getting there. Maybe Amazon brands will at least be predictable, but the non-Amazon brands on Amazon will be increasingly counterfeits and noise. (A contributor to the current problem of eroding non-Amazon brands with counterfeits seems to be Amazon's commingling from different marketplace sellers of the "same ASIN". And the current mass-spam search DoS of random-name brands and near-identical products…

Yet I think Amazon brands are setup to eliminate competition due to their insider information in the market place. I wouldn’t put my money in them because they aren’t playing fairly in the market.

>I wouldn’t put my money in them because they aren’t playing fairly in the market.

They identify widely ordered products and source their own version to sell. Why is that a negative? Costco does the same. As long as they vet the quality (my experience with AmazonBasic products has been fine), seems like a win-win?

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#385

Post by red-iron-pine »

nomat wrote: post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

> But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be generated just for you, filled with AI-made reviews and users. The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth. a little matrix-y.

dead internet theory -- the idea that the internet will eventually be mostly or entirely bots talking to bots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#386

Post by [deleted] »

yonaguska wrote: post #224
dangus wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I like how local bookstores go about curation more than Costco. I don't know if we can say that a store with unlabeled aisles can be a source of curation.

it's curation in that the products they do offer are generally trustworthy.

[deleted]

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#387

Post by e12e »

grogenaut wrote: post #172
VincentEvans wrote: post #128

Let me tell you how to buy a kindle book for my kid’s Kindle that is connected via a child account in “Amazon Household” to my Amazon account. (This opening sentence already signals how the rest of this will go). A child’s account can’t buy books - you have to do it for them. 1. I open Amazon app on my iphone and find the book - “This app does not support purchasing of this content”. 2. I open Kindle app on my iphone…

Step 1: go to amazon on a real computer and find book Step 2: click buy Step 3: in the post purchase confirmation it says "Want to start reading right away?" and a dropdown of your devices with a deliver button. It's a kids device they (and you) don't want your kid to be sent 50 shades of gray accidentally. The other flow is buy book. Go to kindle, "sync and check for new items". But again, it's a kids book, don't wa…

> It's a kids device they (and you) don't want your kid to be sent 50 shades of gray accidentally.

It's just a book. I'd hope most parents would rejoice if their kid read well enough to get through that, or Mein Kamp.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#388

Post by carlosjobim »

stevenwliao wrote: post #241
oefnak wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend looking into adblockers! uBlock Origin is the best one.

Most people don't run an adblocker on their phone, and these torrent sites would cease to exist or become malware sites themselves if enough users used adblock. Let's not kid ourselves- these site runners are not Aaron Swartz.

Nobody is getting their books from torrent sites. They get ePubs or PDFs from Anna's Archive or LibGen.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#389

Post by pbhjpbhj »

soerxpso wrote: post #104
labster wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re in a race to the bottom. There’s no way a company selling legitimate products will be able to compete or grow a customer base in the AI future, because we’ll be swimming in garbage.

This assumes that the only ways people have to find companies are search engines and other mediums that are prone to AI takeover. If everyone starts to realize that most of the surface internet is garbage, they would start communicating with humans they know about which places are not garbage. It was possible to find good businesses to interact with before Google existed. Obviously in a world where every online retai…

Even when you take a recommendation from yourself ... ie re-buy a product, it often seems that the company has been captured by VC and the brand has been used to make short term profits and it's no longer any better than whatever white label products you can find on AliExpress.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#390

Post by eropple »

jimhefferon wrote: post #367
eloisant wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have already stopped using Amazon for specialized products. I buy board games on sites that only sell board games. I buy electronics/computer parts on sites that only sell that.

I also try to do that. However, the more sites that hold my information ...

Your information isn't particularly valuable outside of financial data, and most of the ones you're likely to go to store your financial data centralize on a few generally-very-well-behaved providers. And credit card fraud is the bank's problem, not yours.
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