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Fake Books

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Re: Fake Books

#81

Post by jcynix »

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 fixed in the upcoming years.

Generating books instead of spam emails looks more professional so gullible people, who meanwhile (hopefully) did learn that the Nigerian prince isn't a prince, will buy such books (it's written in a book, and book writing is real work you know, so it must be true) to learn about all those fancy new concepts they hear about.

It's actually not that different from all these ads you see, especially if you actually watch recent youtube ads. Due to the current "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, 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.

BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)

Re: Fake Books

#82

Post by patrakov »

M4v3R wrote: post #7

We knew it was coming once GPT-3 was released, but I personally didn’t think it will come so fast in a form of printed books. I wonder how hard would it be to train a model that given a longer passage of text could tell with a high certainty that it’s machine generated?

We knew it was coming once "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" was published back in 2005 (!!!) as a proof that peer review in certain "scientific" conferences and journals does not really exist. This article is a machine-generated nonsense generated by SCIgen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen for more details.

Edit: Russian wikipedia article on that article contains references to even earlier, pre-computer, cases, as early as 1965, when meaningless texts or talks got published in scientific journals or conference proceedings. See https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Корчеватель_(статья) and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...

Re: Fake Books

#83

Post by Joker_vD »

hex4def6 wrote: post #80
derefr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems. How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?

What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren’t they literally creating their own competitors in this space by revealing their secret? I’m sure the argument is something like “the market is so vast, that helping others do the same won’t affect my income stream”, but that suggests The correct answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with com…

The argument can also be that it actually benefits them by making other people richer and therefore, increasing the amount of their own customers (and the amount of money those customers are willing to spend).

insert a random comment about how "market economy is not a zero-sum game"

Re: Fake Books

#85

Post by michaelt »

sjamaan wrote: post #60

Isn't the "For Dummies" series some sort of trademark? I'm amazed they didn't get sued for using the name. Crap like this devalues the rest of the "for dummies" books.

Although the author shows the covers of 11 books, only one of them - "NFT for Beginners" - is full of GPT-3-looking nonsense.

The "NFTs for Dummies" book is presumably not nonsense, or at least no more so than the subject matter demands.

Re: Fake Books

#86

Post by TaylorAlexander »

hex4def6 wrote: post #80
derefr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems. How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?

What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren’t they literally creating their own competitors in this space by revealing their secret? I’m sure the argument is something like “the market is so vast, that helping others do the same won’t affect my income stream”, but that suggests The correct answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with com…

Yes. It turns out that there’s a whole lot of aspects of their scheme that would turn off any informed rational person. But there’s enough people who fail that test to keep a constant flow of new customers buying in to their scheme.

Re: Fake Books

#88

Post by masklinn »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #86
hex4def6 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren’t they literally creating their own competitors in this space by revealing their secret? I’m sure the argument is something like “the market is so vast, that helping others do the same won’t affect my income stream”, but that suggests The correct answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with com…

Yes. It turns out that there’s a whole lot of aspects of their scheme that would turn off any informed rational person. But there’s enough people who fail that test to keep a constant flow of new customers buying in to their scheme.

In fact much as with “obvious” scams, this becomes a feature: non-marks deselect themselves from the pool at no cost to the scammer, which means the scammer has a much higher average “prospect quality” than a random sampling would give.

Re: Fake Books

#89

Post by narag »

hex4def6 wrote: post #80
derefr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems. How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?

What gets me is; if this was a money making opportunity, and it truly is as simple as they make it out to be, aren’t they literally creating their own competitors in this space by revealing their secret? I’m sure the argument is something like “the market is so vast, that helping others do the same won’t affect my income stream”, but that suggests The correct answer is to scale up, not populate the landscape with com…

Well, it's only logical: what they propose is barely legal and sooner or later, more sooner than later, the scheme will be burnt, so it's better to teach others to make a quick buck than staying in the same place for too long.

Re: Fake Books

#90

Post by kwhitefoot »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #23

Off topic: Why is everything posted here all of a sudden begging for my email? It feels like every article I click after reading few sentences I get a box begging to sign up for some stupid ass mailing list as if after spending 10 seconds reading their words I had become a fan and absolutely needed more of their bullshit in my life. If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way to subscribe to your…

Have JavaScript off by default in uBlock. Substack is quite readable without JS; and no popups.
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