The all you can eat buffet analogy makes way more sense to me, because it speaks to the aspect of it where the customer can take a lot of something without restriction. That's the critical thing with the Anthropic subscription, and the takeout analogy or delivery service don't contain any element of it.
But I didn't really ask "why do some consumers prefer not to make certain unwanted features illegal"? I asked why some consumers are so wildly positive about being forced to adopt features they hate.
Lemme example. In the weed space, I don't think anybody would take this seriously: "well it's illegal and there's nothing we can do about that so it's pointless to discuss dissenting views." Or "it's going to be legalized and there's nothing anybody can do about that, so there is no possibility of debate." People would just laugh at that.
But when it's normal consumer activity, those same arguments seem to cut ice. Why?
If they're not using the book text to train models (keeping the focus on this particular new Kindle feature), where's the room for objection? My device, my content, it's none of the author's business how I read it, in my view.
Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! Lol. In my house we still call owning a license to something that is not likely to be revoked "owning it".
Audiobook publishers require/request this when you sell subsidiary rights. We’ve been able to push back citing accessibility concerns. I find it really annoying when not available for my own reading.
Couldn’t agree more. This is actually a super useful feature. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been reading a book and some minor character resurfaces and I’m like, who the hell is that guy? Now I can know. I can also get information on historical context. Who knows, maybe I can finally read Ulysses without having to have 5 other books.
I wish it was "my device, my content" but it absolutely isn't. If you want that you have to buy from a DRM-free source, and Kindle is the absolute opposite of that.
IMHO you should be able to enjoy your books however you want. If you want to run a local AI against it, more power to you.
But my opinion doesn't matter. Only Amazon's does. That's the point I was making. The premise of "my device, my content" is flawed (because of the DRM Amazon uses) and undermines the argument.
Right, under that argument it's their content, their rules then - making this situation even more of a non issue because they're adding this feature themselves.
I suspect most of the people arguing this way would be in favor of more end user rights if we were talking about anything except the right to use AI.
“Rights good, AI bad” somehow leads to the insane argument that it’s a good thing you don’t have rights over the book you bought.
“You don’t really own the book” is a crazy argument unless the person saying this wants the locked-down DRM world where you can’t own a piece of media.
Amazon is selling digital copies (or licenses, if you like) of the books, which means they need permission from the copyright holders. This permission is likely backed by a contractual agreement that covers some details about how Amazon presents the digital copies to the end users.
(This of course wouldn't be the case if they were reselling physical books.)
Sure. But you knew what this comment was trying to say. It is obviously saying that what happens on the Kindle is between the customer and possibly Amazon, specifically that authors should not be involved. They got their money. That part of the transaction is complete. I know you realize this, it's annoying to read the constant "not your keys not your coins" reframe.
No. The author incorrectly thinks they "own" the "content" like with a physical book, which is the prerequisite for all the discussions following it. I pointed out, factually and correctly, that they don't own anything (other than the license) or have any control over anything.
"Amazon DID NOT answer PubLunch’s questions about “what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature was not answered, nor did they elaborate on the technical details of the service and any protections involved (whether to prevent against hallucinations, or to protect the text from AI training).”
Yeah, the "but what about a human" argument doesn't really work here. Scale of data matters as always. And an Ai for kindle has the scale of 20 years of literature (and more if they just scrape the internet).
> Yeah, the "but what about a human" argument doesn't really work here. Scale of data matters as always. And an Ai for kindle has the scale of 20 years of literature
I haven't seen a convincing argument why not. There's millions of librarians with the knowledge of more than 20 years of literature under their belt. Why can they answer your questions about a book but the robot can't?
Luckily we do not live in an allow-list based society where we need to ask permission for every new thing we invent. The burden is on someone to show that robot answers book questions is somehow bad, to justify outlawing it. And that has not been shown. Bringing up the ontology of humans having human rights has nothing to do with the argument at hand.
Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.
Companies like Amazon and Google have some really sticky fingers when it comes to intellectual property and personal data. I think it's worth asking these questions and holding them accountable for exploiting data that doesn't rightly belong to them.
> Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.
That's what I mean by presumptuous. If that's really what they want the answer to, and what they object to, they should ask it plainly instead of alluding to it by asserting that there's some requisite but missing entitlement for the feature to exist on its face.
Either the Clerk would have read it, because they bought it, or borrowed it from the library.
I mean they could have read it on company time as well.
However, let us not use a straw man here. Its not some company clerk, its one of the largest company on earth using other people's copy right to make more money for them selves.
The author also gets a cut of this, no? It is the author's prerogative to sell their books to be read on a Kindle and they get compensated, maybe perhaps unfairly, when I choose to buy the book. Whatever happens after that, other then copying it and sticking it on Anna's archive is basically free game as long as I'm making derivative works and making money off them. Anything short of that, I'm good.
You don’t need any rights to execute the feature. The user owns the book. The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right, and asks questions.
1. The user doesn't own the book, the user has a revocable license to the book. Amazon has no qualms about taking away books that people have bought
2. I doubt the Kindle version of the LLM will run locally. Is Amazon repurposing the author-provided files, or will the users' device upload the text of the book?
You agree that we should own our digital content but it sounds like you don’t want this particular capability because… fuck Amazon.
I can totally understand that sentiment but I don’t think giving up end user capabilities to spite Amazon is logically aligned with wanting ownership of digital media.
> All these weird mental gymnastics to argue that users should have less rights
We probably agree more than not. But users getting more rights isn’t universally good. To finish an argument, one must consider the externalities involved.
Hasn't training been already ruled to be fair use in the recent lawsuits against Meta, Antrhopic? Ruled that works must be legally acquired, yes, but training was fair use.
> Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! Lol. In my house we still call owning a license to something that is not likely to be revoked "owning it".
The amount of people completely - and likely intentionally - missing your point is both frustrating and completely unsurprising.
A quick reminder that this is part of HN's guidelines
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There are LLM's that can process 1 million token context window. Amazon Nova 2 for one, even though it's definitely not the highest quality model. You just put whole book in context and make LLM answer questions about it. And given the fact that domain is pretty limited, you can just store KV cache for most popular books on SSD, eliminating quite a bit of cost.
If you want proper answers, yes. If you want to rely on whatever reddit or tiktok says about the book, then I guess at that point you're fine with hallucinations and others doing the thinking for you anyway. Hence the issues brought up in the article.
I wouldn't trust an LLM for anything more than the most basic questions of it didn't actually have text to cite.
> It's not training on books, but it will answer questions about the book you're reading. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
What do you mean? Presumably the implication is that it will essentially read the book (or search through it) in order to answer questions about it. An LLM can of course summarize text that's not in its training set.
"Reads the book" is the issue, yes. It's possible they aren't training. Vit to be frank, we're long past the BOTD where tech companies aren't going to attempt to traon on every little thing fed into their servers.
In the case of a novel, or even certain text books, the author relies on the reader not jumping ahead. Especially murder mysteries and those kind of genres. There are artistic reasons for that, and it can wreck the work.
In my experience, AI summaries often miss points or misrepresent work. There is a human element to reading a well written novel. An AI will miss some of the subtleties and references.
I agree but for some reason, there are people who enjoy doing that. I think they should be allowed to do as they like.
In any case, Amazon claims this feature is spoiler-free and that would be easy to implement. It likely works by feeding the book into an LLM context, and they could simply feed in the portion you've already read.
Once you've bought that food and it's on your plate, how would you feel about the farmer who grew it coming up and forcing you to eat it with a specific fork or only using approved utensils?
You don't mind having an llm owned by a megacorp lecturing you about the meaning of a book ?
"Yes this is a good question about 1984 by George Orwell, you could indeed be tempted to compare the events of this book with current authoritarianism and surveillance but I can assure you this book is a pure work of fiction and at best can only be compared to evil states such as China and Russia, rest assured that as a US citizen you are Free"
The seeming paradox reminds me of a simlar flavor one: the fact that if you accidentally knock a hole in your drywall, it's cheaper to cover it with a flat screen TV than to pay someone to fix the hole.
I suppose I don't know what kind of antics you get up to where that's an accident, but in any case you could maybe use those patch things, or you can probably buy a bit of new drywall, cut an even shape around the hole and use that as a template to cut your new drywall, insert it, and use putty to clean up the edges. Still only like $20-30 total.
Respectfully, have you ever actually repaired a hole bigger than a couple of cm, then sanded it and painted it to match the rest of the wall?
Yes,the materials and tools cost less than a TV.
What cost more than the TV are the materials, tools, and time needed to master the proper skills if you don’t already have them.
If you require attendance to graduate, then your degree signals conformity and grit, and thus has some value to show to employers who care about those stats but can't really measure them any other way.
If there's one social transformation I long to see in my life time which seems actually achievable and believable it would be for plant-based eating to become hip and cool, sort of like how smoking or being anti-gay became uncool, among Gen-Z and later. As the article highlights, current sentiment is totally against factory farming, it feels like people just need the right affordances to express that distaste in the marketplace. Right now if you confine yourself to vegan food you're going to get something very bland in the majority of eateries. I think that may be because the previous wave of vegan eaters were doing so for health reasons and so wanted to avoid excess fat and salt. Deep fried, richly seasoned mushrooms on the menu at your local bar and grill soon, god willing!
Hey, as long as the deep fried mushrooms are replacing the deep fried chicken wings as an appetizer, that's the sort of progress I'm talking about. It's better the vibes change such that 50% of people start ordering plant based meals 10% more often than that 1% of us go fully vegan, and feels like a lot more likely and possible.
Why is it that any discussion on the horrors of meat-eating and factory farming inevitably invites this kind of morally nihilistic hedonism. Just because you like doing a thing does not make that thing justifiable. It’s that simple.
> the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online
I don't gamble at all in any form, but I still firmly disagree. Some people enjoy gambling in a way that never hurts them-- I've known countless friends and coworkers who talk about doing a bit of it in Vegas or what have you. You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? They know they're not going net positive on the experience, usually lose some money, and get some entertainment.
There's a saying about this: abusers give vice a bad name. People should be free to gamble if they want to, and certain checks should be put in place for people who choose to gamble so much it is ruinous to themselves.
These services make a relatively smaller piece of their profit from "responsible" people with a lot of self-control. In many cases, the business is probably not viable without problem gamblers. Problem gamblers account for anywhere from 51% of revenue for sports betting apps, to 90% in the case of casinos [1,2] and the numbers seem to be getting worse.
I feel like the goalposts have been shifted massively in this conversation. The original sentiment was "there's no way to responsibly gamble online", and that's all I was ever responding to.
I strongly doubt that the person you were responding to was asserting that "no person, at any time, in any circumstance, can ever gamble online without it being an irresponsible act".
But chances are that the original commenter was really using language in a more colloquial way, the way someone might say "the only responsible choice is not to use drugs". Someone saying that isn't making a statement that "no person ever, under any circumstance, can ever benefit from consuming any drug".
It's not an absolutist statement, but you are choosing to interpret it that way so that you can construct a response based on semantic pedantry.
Goalposts built around strawmen are almost designed to be shifted.
I don’t want to derail the conversation, but I do want to make an analogy. I’m vegan, and I mostly go to non-vegan restaurants. I’m giving my money to businesses that mostly do something I don’t support.
The way I resolve this is “What if everyone did what I did?”. The restaurants would obviously have to change. I figure the type of demand I create is more powerful than how they might use the profit.
I think the same thing applies here. If everyone only gambled responsibly, these companies would all be in the responsible gambling business.
At the same time, I think sports gambling has completely gotten out of control and needs to be more regulated. More advertising regulation seems like a good place to start.
I got curious and validated your source [1], to pull the exact quote:
"The proportion of Connecticut gambling revenue from the 1.8% of people with gambling problems ranges from 12.4% for lottery products to 51.0% for sports betting, and is 21.5% for all legalized gambling."
Without going into details, I do have some ability to check if these numbers actually "make sense" against real operator data. Will try to sense-check if the data I have access to, roughly aligns with this or not.
- the "1.8% of people" being problem gamblers does seem roughly correct, per my own experience
- but those same 1.8% being responsible for 51% of sportsbook revenue, does not align with my intuition (which could be wrong! hence why I want to check further...)
- it is absolutely true that sportsbooks have whales/VIPs/whatever-you-call-them, and the general business model is indeed one of those shapes where <10% of the customers account for >50% of the revenue (using very round imprecise numbers), but I still don't think you can attribute 51% to purely the "problem gamblers" (unless you're using a non-standard definition of problem-gambler maybe?)
I'm sure nobody cares, but the data I can check shows a couple interesting observations (won't call them conclusions, that's too strong):
- Yes, you can find certain slices of 1.8% of customers, that would represent 50%+ of revenue... But this is usually pretty close to simply listing out the top 1.8% of all accounts by spend
- Therefore, to support the original claim, one would essentially have to definitionally accept that nearly all of the top revenue accounts are "problem gamblers" and almost no one else is... But this doesn't pass a basic smell test, because population wise there are more "poor" problem-gamblers than there are "rich" ones, because there are a lot more poor people in general than rich ones, so it's very unlikely that nearly all of the 1.8% of total population problem gamblers also happen to overlap so much with the top 1.8% customer accounts by revenue.
Those people will still gamble if gambling is illegal. Gambling did not start in the 1970s and the primary motivation for making it legal wasn’t revenue it was shutting down revenue streams for organized crime.
It’s not whales, it’s compulsives. The stories are horrific. People have moved to non-gambling states, and the casinos send them nice letters saying, “We miss you! Here’s a coupon for a free flight to our state, you don’t even have to promise you’ll gamble, just come and have a steak dinner in us”
> You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me?
A person can be generally responsible while still making decisions that are irresponsible. Gambling has a negative expected value, and so is generally considered to be irresponsible. Gamblers will often counter that they expect to lose their money and consider it to be a form of entertainment, but the whole of the entertainment is in believing that you might get lucky; this is indistinguishable from the motivation of a gambling addict. You don’t see these people taking out $500 in 1s and setting them on fire for fun, even though this is the aggregate outcome of habitual gambling.
Some might protest that all forms of entertainment are like this: You take the $500, take it to a movie theater, and 16 hours later your money is gone and you’ve seen 10 movies. So far as I know, the identification of casual gambling with vice dates back to the Victorian Period. I suspect (but cannot confirm) that the reason gambling was identified as a vice where other forms of comparatively frivolous entertainment were not is due to gambling’s (false) promise of providing money for nothing.
Even more so are restaurants exploiting the public with over priced food compared to cooking at home. Food that is so good that it is addictive.
Restaurants are immoral too since think of the negative health consequences they cause exploiting this situation with their addictive substances. They even put more butter than necessary in the food to make it more addictive.
The wait staff treated literally like servants.
"We should ban everything besides things I personally find enjoyable"
Gambling has unbounded loss potential. That factor is being shamelessly exploited by providers. Restaurants and Netflix have upper bounds on how much financial harm they can inflict upon you, should you compulsively pay for them.
The problem is this: the house always wins. Casinos, online sports books, the lottery, all of it is designed such that all but quite literally a lucky few will lose money. If you understand this properly, then, yes, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it being a form of entertainment, but that means you need to go in thinking about cost per hour instead of any notion of leaving with more than you began with.
This is why I have a huge problem with the recent development of online gambling outlets that you can access via your smartphone. In the past you had to go somewhere to gamble, it was a physical act that provided a barrier to entry. Now? You don't even need to think about it, your bank account is already linked, just spend away!
Personally, I'd rather states loosen laws and allow physical casinos be built and properly regulated than be in the current situation we have with these poorly regulated online money-siphons.
The house does not always win in online sports books. I personally know some quant minded people that have been banned or backed off from a dozen or more online sports books because they are crushed by any nontrivial understanding of price/probability and arbitrage. They do make a lot of money from people who bet for fun or based on their perceived knowledge of the particular sport.
Not at all. First, yes, people should be free to make their own choices. But that means making free choices. Just as we don’t allow advertising for cigarettes, we shouldn’t allow advertising for gambling.
Second, there’s a world of difference between “hey, let’s go have a crazy weekend in Vegas” and “I have a blackjack dealer live on my phone 24x7.”
‘Responsible’ gambling is still morally irresponsible. People are walking adverts for their hobbies whether they like it or not, so people who engage with gambling will be indirectly encouraging other people to take up the hobby, many of which will ruin their lives. (Also some fraction of their losses will fund advertising that will similarly attract problem gamblers.) The low stakes recreational gamblers keep the system looking friendly and approachable. This is also almost certainly by design.
He is saying the reponsible reasonable choice is not to gamble. These people are making unreasonable choices.
It was you who brought "degenerate" into it, as if throwing an insult or not made difference in facts.
Also, yes, gamblers hide their addiction. That is normal for gambler and you wont know it. They can be likable people and calling them "degenerate" just makes seeking help harder.
You can't let society keep inventing new vices for profit in an uninhibited way.
It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
Weed isn't just weed anymore, it's fruity pebbles flavored.
Porn isn't just porn anymore, it tries to talk like a person and build a parasocial relationship.
Video games aren't just video games anymore, they start embedding gambling mechanics and spending 2 years designing the "End of Match" screen in a way that funnels you into the next game or lootbox pull.
You need to stop somewhere. Tech + profit motives create an asymmetric war for people's attention and money that results in new forms of old vices that are superficially the same, but realistically much much worse.
Gambling specifically online might just be giving tech companies too many knobs that are too easy to tune under the umbrella of engagement and retention.
> You can't let society keep inventing new vices for profit in an uninhibited way.
I agree, but:
> It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
There's a wide gap in beliefs of the people who "know how the sausage is made" which is why I'm guessing you didn't ascribe a certain view to them.
Realistically, I think it breaks down into three camps:
1. They agree with the other end of the curve, and think the potential harm is too great.
2. They're in on profiting from it.
3. They are open to people being free to make decisions, but think there needs to be regulations on outright predatory behavior and active enforcement of them
I don't have a problem with anybody choosing to safely engage with recreational drugs, pornography, gambling, alcohol, and a number of other vices - humans have sought these activities out for an extremely long time, and outright banning them simply (as we have seen time and time again) leads to unregulated black markets that are more harmful to society as a whole. But it feels like we've done a complete 180 and now we have barely any regulation where it's needed, late-stage capitalism at its finest.
So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.
I'm ascribing the same level of sentiment to both ends, that's what a bell curve is.
They have different reasons for their disdain, but neither side tends to love it.
In general the more people learn about the process, the more they dislike the current system. There's outliers, but that's why the last decade has mostly been a decline in general sentiment around big tech, and even in the last year AI doomerism is going increasingly mainstream.
Even the people who make these experiences don't do it beliving they're making something enriching. And they're definitely are not clamoring for their own families to grow up on this stuff.
> So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.
That's driven by politicians pandering to the naive side of the bell curve, why are you surprised it's not consistent with what's best for the people?.
Their actions are driven mostly by what looks good at the polls and doesn't hurt their own bottom line too badly.
States are raking in billions of dollars in taxes from gambling, so it's not going to get that treatment.
It's a net negative for society but we can't simply get rid of it because of the side effect of doing so, particularly since it's so easy to brew alcohol.
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