I love ebook readers. I just don't put any DRM'd books on them. But I also buy all that stuff used. No more money to Bezos, and it saves the landfill, too.
If there's a way to read the book, the book can and will be copied. It doesn't matter if it's DRM protected with 84 bazillion bit encryption, if there are dead trees involved, or anything else. You can make it harder to copy, but copied it will be.
Mass piracy will continue full steam ahead at current rates.
Most of these sites allow you to read on a computer screen and those can be captured and OCR'd. And if they don't allow that, you can take a photo of your device and OCR that. And if you can't do that, you can manually type in the book. There's always a way, and it will always happen to any books that publishers are making any kind of profit on.
LLMs have felt to me like they excel in one particular skill (being able to make connections across vast amounts of knowledge) and are basically average, otherwise. If I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results.
I used Claude a lot for planning my current fun project. Good rubber duck. It liked all the suggestions I pitched for the design, but I only went with the last one after discarding the others.
The others were all fine and would have worked, but they weren't the best that I found.
Back to the point, if we're getting average guidance from the AI and we're just offloading our thinking process at that level, then I could sure see it panning out like TFA says.
I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.
I think the value we're losing is where people are bad at things, which is often where new ideas/approaches come from, but this is a macro metric, so it's a hard sell to the person struggling when there's an easy button available.
> I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.
That's pretty much the definition of "average" (as most commonly used, to refer to "mean" rather than median or much less commonly mode), isn't it?
Agreed. The test I run is "Can it simplify a concept I know in a matter of sentences/words, better than I can?" on a subject area that requires a lot of nuance.
And to my disappointment, the LLMs never come close. They dump paragraphs upon paragraphs. I actually want to see the LLMs surprise me. But they disappoint me for what Im specifically looking for.
> Summarize a technique for type erasure as is done in C++. Assume that your audience is familiar with all of C++'s features, but not with the technique of type erasure. The briefer the summary, the better, but don't omit any essential pieces or use vague language.
ChatGPT Plus generated a lot of text and code. Then I said:
> Now please summarize using only a few sentences.
and it replied:
> Type erasure wraps any concrete type `T` in a uniform container that stores a `void*` to the object plus a pointer to a type-specific static table of function pointers (the “vtable”). Each `T` provides its own table implementing required operations (destroy, copy/move, and any interface methods), and the container dispatches all behavior through that table. This lets unrelated types share a runtime interface without a common base class, with lifetime and semantics fully defined by the per-type table.
> I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results.
Industrial scale dunning kruger/gell man amnesia. We're ~5 years in to the meme of "wow, every white collar profession other than MINE is doomed. But yeah, mine requires really specific domain knowledge, taste, and problem solving, so I'm not super worried about it but it's a very helpful tool"
It’s like a children or a puppy. People get impressed and go “how cute” at anything it does.
I see designers and PMs vibe coding shit that they would complain for days if it was delivered by a developer. I see C-Levels delivering reports that would make them eviscerate some intern.
I had some sites that used it years ago ca. 2006. $500/mo at peak. Then one month it suddenly halved for no apparent reason. And it kept dropping. After a while or just wasn't with the ugliness. And I learned to never count on Google.
Since then I've become anti-ad and haven't had any for years. I am sorry for my embarrassing lapse in judgment. :)
This is pointing out something that seems to be deeply human, it's not intended as a personal dig, because I think I'd be in the same boat:
It's interesting, not unexpected and not un-understandable, that your opinion started changing as the dollar value decreased. I greatly dislike what this says about the effect of money on the human psyche. It's as old as time, but this hack hasn't been patched and I don't think it can be: Humans will sell their souls for a price.
I forgive you for your lapse in judgement. You are human after all - not intended as an insult ;)
I "don't forgive you" for considering this a lapse in judgment, because you still have some things to learn. (I'm kidding of course. All of this framing is rather silly.)
beej was doing what was best for them at the time. There were no victims. beej sold a service to an enterprise until it didn't make sense anymore.
Moralizing something that happened 20 years ago is wild. It literally does not matter. beej didn't kill anyone, didn't ruin their self esteem, didn't steal. This is not "soul selling".
Money isn't evil. Working for money and selling for money are not evil. You're going to have to do a whole lot more to meet that threshold for most people.
We should stop casting stones at people unless they're really assholes. This is nothing.
My favorite piece of man trivia is from the source of the tunefs BSD man page, which contains:
.\" Take this out and a Unix Daemon will dog your steps from now until
.\" the time_t's wrap around.
.Pp
You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish.
There was also the record You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish by REO Speedwagon, I had assumed that's what the tunefs man page was referencing as that was a best-selling record at around the time Unix was being developed.
The door is really opening for programmers who like getting stuff made, and really closing for those who like making stuff at a low level.
No need to get out the chisel to carve those intricate designs in your chair back. We can just get that made by pressing "1". Sorry, those of you who took pride in chiseling.
I'm definitely in the latter group. I can and do use AI to build things, but it's pretty dull for me.
I've spent hours and hours putting together a TUI window system by hand recently (on my own time) that Claude could have made in minutes. I rewrote it a number of times, learning new things each time. There's a dual goal there: learn things and make a thing.
Times change, certainly. Glad to be in semi-retirement where I still get to hand carve software.
I suspect if you disallow arrests based on these tests and require a lab followup, the tests will cease to be used entirely.
The police know the false positive rate and they'll stop wasting their time and rely on their training and instincts, instead.
There's an implication of automation bias here, too. "It came back blue, so I can just make an arrest knowing that the blue bag told me I should. Not my fault if it's wrong."
Pushing farther, if the law said that if there was a false positive, the arresting officer would have to spend one day in jail per day the suspect was jailed, no cop would ever dare use this test. That demonstrates the amount of trust they actually have in it.
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