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Fake Books

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191–200 of 371 posts

Re: Fake Books

#191

Post by olalonde »

pelasaco wrote: post #153
jbverschoor wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So fake sellers are selling fake books, reviewed by fake reviewers, and they get fake crypto moneys, with which they can buy fake food, and live a fake life. Fake sounds very much like reality

exactly, sad reality. I'm so happy that I didn't jump in this bandwagon. I used to write a lot of bitcoin code, worked in some pools, fpga code, etc, etc.. always loved while it was some revolutionary stuff, but I gave up from that literally when I saw people that used to sell carpet, being announced as "Crypto experts".. from that moment, I knew that it was scam.

The web attracted a lot of scammers and grifters during the dot-com bubble as well. The web was nonetheless revolutionary.

Re: Fake Books

#192

Post by fl0id »

gzer0 wrote: post #10

This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do. ---- Pos…

From a culture perspective, I don't think the author worries about nation states. They could always do that. But with GPT etc alsmost everybody can do that.

Re: Fake Books

#195

Post by guerrilla »

jcynix wrote: post #81

It's virtual evolution at work, i.e. spam evolution. It's the Internet Gold Rush (i.e. "make money fast" at work), which we have watched getting "more professional" in the last ten to twenty years. And because those companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but also hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc) to those "virtual miners" profit from what's going on, we won't see that fix…

> "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter,

Why do you put that in quotes?

> I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.

You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump which does have "above 100%" efficiency in a sense?

Re: Fake Books

#196

Post by sybercecurity »

femto wrote: post #52
jcynix wrote: post #35

Every so often in the last n years I stumbled over "books" which simply contain regurgitated wikipedia content. And, of course, all those web pages collecting amazon reviews which simulate product review pages. Or, before that, just link farms to products so people could collect referer compensation. All this is some form of spam, which simply uses search engines to spread instead of email. So the "books" reported he…

I wrote one of those books. That is, a Wikipedia article I largely wrote was plagiarised and published in a book by a scammer. Some time later my words on Wikipedia were tagged as having been plagiarised from the scammer's book. It was clear from wiki timestamps and publication dates what really happened, so it got fixed, but it's irritating that one needs to waste time on things like that (and as far as I know the b…

Similar things happened in the past as well. At conferences or trade shows you could find booths selling CDs/DVDs of online content like IETF RFC's, government publications, etc. I could see it as useful for people that had infrequent/spotty network connectivity, but mostly it was preying on people who were unaware of how to obtain these documents on their own.

Occasionally you could find print versions as well, which were sometimes a deal if you took the cost of toner/paper into consideration.

Re: Fake Books

#197

Post by NikolaNovak »

cowtools wrote: post #24
gzer0 wrote: post #10

This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do. ---- Pos…

I don't think it's that scary. I mean it's basically spam isn't it? The only thing new is the volume in which you can produce surface-level-indistinguishable spam. It is now cheaper to produce lots of flowery, meaningless text that is full of definitions. I suspect that the future of literature is more concise and externally-meaningful writing. Amazon is a terrible marketplace insofar as the rating system isn't sybil…

I have not yet hacked a good way to search around it though. It presents a massive time sink for me (not to mention frustration) and is probably multiplied across the population. More and more, when I search for advice, review, explanation, solution, or description, I virtually exclusively get articles/websites/books/sources that at first glance (certainly as far as Google and Bing can tell) are exactly what I am looking for. It then takes several minutes of reading to realize the author (human or not, irrelevant) does not know more about topic than I do. Then I go down the next one on the list, etc.

Quantity CAN make a difference. When there were few such sources, avoiding them was annoying but easy. Today, it's HARD. Tomorrow, it may be impossible with today's tools, and I don't know that we can win such a race.

Re: Fake Books

#199

Post by Eisenstein »

colonwqbang wrote: post #147
fullstackchris wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for now. But what will these models look like in something like 5-10 more years?

Well, what does it matter? What if a market develops for autogenerated junk literature. People can buy and read what they like best. Today a lot of literature is published that I might consider to be "junk". But there are people buying and reading it and enjoying it and that's fine. Maybe it could create a new genre of literature that is tailored to the reader's interests.

But that 'junk' literature you are describing that people like isn't inherently designed to be deceitful in the sense that people who want something else are its target.

When you replace 'catering to a certain audience by being good at doing something they want' with 'catering to a certain audience by being good at selling them something they don't want' then you have created a system in which supply and demand is no longer operating properly.

Re: Fake Books

#200

Post by Tade0 »

This is nothing new really.

The Bogdanoff brothers, before their time as rulers of France and the crypto world with a fair, but iron fist gained notoriety by publishing works which were largely gibberish:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

NFTs and the like were especially fascinating because it was a game of rock-paper-scissors in terms of cunning, meaning someone could be so cunning that they appeared gullible to those ostensibly one level of craftiness higher, so you never knew if someone was shilling something because they were that gullible or that cunning.

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