Amazon has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook

I have a feeling that this will be resolved soon.

Frontpage on HN tends to bring results.

I wish the authors luck, and would love to hear the resolution.

For myself, I haven't brought any books on Amazon for a long time, but that's mostly because I dislike the Kindle app, so I get my books through the Apple iBooks store.

Amazon would love to sell me the novel Bastard out of Carolina in paperback or electronic format, or a DVD of the movie made from the novel.

Overly aggressive denials of simple requests ("please use another word") just make me wonder why you are so upset about it? Blacklist/whitelist DO reinforce the notion that black = bad and white = good, so what's the deal with using a different word? I truly don't understand why people would get upset by simple requests like that.

Aren't people en-masse realising that AI, for all its impressive bling, is a stupid blunt instrument? If you've used it for any amount of time you'll know this. Sure, it's a great time-saver, and if you use it wisely it can remove a lot of tedium. But if you're a developer, one thing you'll know is that it cannot replace developers. You still need to structure your whole project yourself, figure out what the data schema needs to look like, and direct the AI tool to do small sections of the work. And you should be ready to sanity check and debug anything it spits out. Similarly with AI image stuff, if you have a bunch of old black & white photos that were taken on a shitty camera in the 1940s, you can get it to upscale, repair, clean and colourize. But if any living person knows any of the subjects in the photographs, be ready for them to laugh their heads off (or get extremely angry) that grandpappy's eyes are not grandpappy's eyes, that they have lost all family resemblance and look more like expertly stuck-on googly eye stickers. Also the colour palettes are wrong for the time, their teeth get magically straightened, their fob-watch chain gets turned into a rope etc. Some of these un-guided AI effects are as bad as their non-AI counterparts, like Affinity Photo's "magic inpainting" that's supposed to let you easily paint out unwanted items in a photo. They look like magic when removing a seagull from a cloudless sky, but they'll make an absolute hames out of anything remotely complex. For example, removing a person from a busy street. Instead of inventing some plausible background to replace them with, it'll just auto-clone their surroundings into the vacuum so you end up with very obviously duplicated features (door handles, street signs etc). This is something that you would never do as a photography professional. So can it save you a bunch of time? Sometimes. Can you rely on it to work without a human in the loop? You're havin' a laugh!

Something that all AI tools need to build in is the ability to override their learned data and to curb their enthusiasm for inventing completely wrong detail that was never there. While AI has gotten impressive, I wouldn't trust it to do anything remotely important without a competent human driving it.

The biggest problem with AI is that companies that adopt it think that they can fire a bunch of staff and let AI tools run amok.

I don't use amazon (although I cheat a bit because my wife sometimes does). But for books we use indigo.ca (in Canada) which has the same selection and is importantly not Amazon. Is there another national US online bookseller?

For other stuff, I just go to the hardware store. The only real amazon thing I depend on is a kind of micro-fibre wipes I use for my glasses.

It's actually mostly happened organically since amazon got so bad, although the last few times I used it I abandoned my cart trying to navigate the dark pattern of paying without buying prime or getting tricked into shipping fees.