61–70 of 152 posts
The advice from the guys making garbage books, which they quite obviously put into practice, is to apply for genres with low book counts to more easily get a best seller badge for that category. Which makes Amazon a war to get miscategorised.
Sadly the technology for these scams is also very useful for legitimate new self-published authors. How much gatekeeping do we really want? I would think the review system would weed out the junk. So here is a recent example of modern publishing: I've been reading things on r/hfy.. which I don't think anyone would argue is high quality literature, but the stories are fun and the premiss of the entire genre works as b…
I took a glance at that “Nature of Predators” book, but couldn’t get past the first sentence. Did the author really mean “sapience,” or “sentience?”
Stick to checking out books from your library / Libby. You'll save money and might end up making discoveries you otherwise wouldn't.
Not just e-books, garbage print too! Link below. The kid likes brain teasers, so I'll grab a book here and there. The last one I ordered was seemingly AI generated. The wording was off, the answers were either completely incorrect, or theoretically correct but not matching the question or parameters asked. I can't quite remember the last time I became as infuriated at a...book. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CQQPPQ…
One of the reviews says to look at the sample, but it looks like the sample isn't available any more. Might just be a regional thing that the sample isn't available but maybe they removed it intentionally lol
> A seller has some quantity of floor with him. The seller offered his customer that if he/she buys half of the floor he has, he will give half kg of floor as a discount. The first customer accepted his offer and he purchased half of the floor and got half kg as extra. After selling the floor to the first customer he again makes the same offer for the second customer, and so on. The seller left with no quantity of floor after he made the fifth transaction. The initial quantity of floor the seller had?
It's a solvable math puzzle, but has some obvious issues.
One of the later puzzles is pretty funny:
> There are three people (Deepak, Avinash, Prateek ), one is a robot, one is a missile, one of them is a Gun, the robot can either lie or tell the trust, and the Gun always tells the truth, the missile always lies, and the robot can do both he can either lie or he can tell the truth.
> Statements :
> Deepak: Prateek is a missile."
> Avinash: "Deepak is a Gun."
> prateek : "I am the robot."
> Find out the Gun, the missile, and the robot?
The typos and weird formatting from the original.
The final puzzle in the sample is just sort of an incoherent mess:
> You have twenty white and thirteen black balls in a bag. You pull out two balls one after another. If the balls are of identical color, you then definitely replace them with a white ball - however, if they're of various colors, you update them with a black ball. Once you are taking out the balls, you do now no longer place them returned back in the bag - so the balls keep reducing. What will be the color of the final ball remaining in the bag?
The biggest issue is how Amazon fails to police its genre categorisations. The advice from the guys making garbage books, which they quite obviously put into practice, is to apply for genres with low book counts to more easily get a best seller badge for that category. Which makes Amazon a war to get miscategorised.
The focus of the article is on charlatans selling courses, but I think Amazon deserves more scrutiny. They enable this entire ecosystem of fake books and fake products. I have to imagine that with the amount of data Amazon collects, they could do a lot more to counter the epidemic of fakes.
Full stop, no need to specify e-books.
I've moved my purchasing dollars elsewhere at this point with the exception of some very specific categories. Amazon is just too unreliable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His other long form videos are also a great combination of research and comedy. Worth your time in my opinion.
Highlights include: - "In Search of a Flat Earth" (2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 - "Line Goes Up" (2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g - "The Future is a Dead Mall" (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q
The focus of the article is on charlatans selling courses, but I think Amazon deserves more scrutiny. They enable this entire ecosystem of fake books and fake products. I have to imagine that with the amount of data Amazon collects, they could do a lot more to counter the epidemic of fakes.
Amazon's 'solution' has been to limit self published authors to 3 new books a day. What a joke. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restric...
The focus of the article is on charlatans selling courses, but I think Amazon deserves more scrutiny. They enable this entire ecosystem of fake books and fake products. I have to imagine that with the amount of data Amazon collects, they could do a lot more to counter the epidemic of fakes.
How about this account for a "polymath" who manages to churn out a "book" almost every week on topics from AI to installing cabinets and a whole bunch of pseudo science woo woo: https://www.amazon.ca/stores/D.R.-T-Stephens/author/B0CC62LX... They buy a lot of ads so I guess Amazon likes them.
The text screams ChatGPT.
Amazon has given up on AI.