Fake Books(lcamtuf.substack.com) |
Fake Books(lcamtuf.substack.com) |
If I am interested in hearing more about you, I will find a way to subscribe to your shit otherwise all you manage to do is to get me frustrated and leave.
This time I couldn't even get to reading, I opened the article and had to answer an IM. By the time I got back I was treated with full screen "Type your email to subscribe" box that couldn't even be dismissed without clicking small "Let me read first" link.
Why is simple blog design such ass these days? Why can't I just read the content without being bombarded with pop ups, pop overs, and other crap that has nothing to do with the actual content?
If your content is worth money you will make money, but most content is definitely not worth even my time.
It's common on HN for submissions to get upvoted before comments come in. It's a good sign, actually, if people aren't rushing to post reflexive things. Good comments are reflective, which means they happen after people have had time to process information—such as by reading an article.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303565
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447
let's see what happens.
It got 7 points and then flagged.
Then again maybe this is a bad test. Perhaps just reposting the above story in a way to dissuade human upvoters would be the right approach.
Then I'd have to withhold it for a couple hours and reveal it later
There isn't really a market for kids doodles, and with the barrier to entry being really low the supply is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand. So the central argument stays.
Not a great start of the article this.
I have certainly heard bitcoin evangelists make such claims, so i really dont think it is a strawman argument.
If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle.
Its quite clear from the first few lines of the article that the author did not intend to debunk some silly claims but to respond to the best ones. Using a definition of scarcity that does not reference demand to write off NFT's entirely shows that the author has no idea what hes talking about.
> If you want to take the metaphor further, there is really no barrier to entry for starting a cryptocurrency and supply of cryptocurrencies in general far outstrip demand. So it is very similar to a kids doodle.
Yes, but people don't want just any cryptocurrency. They want Bitcoin, ethereum, etc whos demand is greater then the supply. So no its actually similar to a kids doodle.
Unless your plan is to require a PhD to publish a book on Amazon on something.
A choice is not justified just because it is a choice. But without an objective criterion of correction, every choice is irrelevant, because the subjective criterion is also a choice. It can be changed to justify each of the choices, however inconsistent and contradictory they may be. To say that everything is valid is to say that fact checking is a farce. The loss of discernment is an unexpected result of the emancipation of reason.
The word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Yes, our language capabilities are just Markov chains - the way engineering is just constrained nonlinear optimization and playing games is just tree traversal.
It’s grammatically correct but has no deeper meaning. And sure, some of the human written crap posted here is also meaningless blogspam.
Well, how about "value is an inherent consequence of scarcity with respect to demand"?
Your generality may often be true in certain contexts, but increasingly, one should operate under the assumption that the seller has a significant informational advantage over the buyer, and this advantage will be used to capture additional value.
Fake sounds very much like reality
I would expect that AI will get good at internally consistent content _first_, so this work would make sense on its own even if it’s nonsense in actuality. Talk about bubbles.
Scarcity in economics refers to when the demand for a resource is greater than the supply of that resource. Your kids doodles aren't scarce because there is no demand for them.
How did the author read 11 books on NFT's and not know this lol? The books must have been all very bad or the article author just skimmed thru them.
Interesting article other than that tho.
Everything is awful online nowadays.
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?
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...
Good catch on the one fake book! But I am surprised it was only one. Maybe the author started from that one and will write about the others later.
I would expect someone writing that to have read the 11 most popular books.
i expect that publishers are able to avoid publishing junk like this and therefore are still able to offer some value. whereas self-publishing authors will have to fight to stand out on their own.
Nice people generally only see the immediate utility of a tool in front of them. It takes a certain mind-set to see the other "weaponised" implications.
Those were simpler times.
Although machine generated content will make the misinformation problem much worse.
But in case you still don't get the joke, no the OP is not written by AI. Instead, it is a common point of view.
A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it grounds out in. On the other hand you have cryptocurrency advocates claiming that all value is arbitrary and/or based entirely on scarcity. In that context, observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument.
(I think one of the things education can accidentally (mis)teach is that short arguments are always worthless and arguments must always be long. This is false. A good grounding in mathematics can help with internalizing this. It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten.)
Value is intrinsically a dynamic process. It grounds out in human desires, which are intrinsically temporal, variable, and fickle, and this makes a lot of people uncomfortable as they seek either a more solid or a more completely ethereal/arbitrary base. However, there is no other sensible way to think about value, however complex and ever-shifting this may be, and it is neither mathematically solid, nor an amorphous vapor of no consequence subject to one strong person's Nietzschian will.
See also the "Gish gallop" [1], a strategy that relies on spewing out a huge number of specious arguments and half-truths that are each individually time-consuming to refute, and to which the correct response is usually just to refuse to engage with the bullshit.
Refuting bad arguments scales better than some think because arguments can be referenced or copied when they come up again and again, whereas the alternative allows BS to stand unchallenged.
Speaking of which, I should copy this for the next time that comes up.
The "classic goldbug" insists that gold has properties that are good for a currency (does not degrade, can be divided, does not rely on a trusted third party, has scarcity) and it has been used as currency for a long time in civilisation. I take "intrinsic value" for commodities to mean "has use aside from being a currency", for example gold is used in jewelry (does not tarnish, is soft, is pretty?) and electronics. The non-intrinsic value would be its use as a currency. If a goldbug argues all the value of gold is intrinsic, they are confused because the price of gold would probably be much lower if it had no use as a currency.
Bitcoin-bugs make similar claims to gold, plus it can be sent over the internet and is more scarce than gold. As for intrinsic value for Bitcoin, it doesn't really have one I guess. Or maybe you could make an argument about other things built on top of its blockchain like smart contracts or timestamping services?
In summary, I agree that an argument of value from "pure scarcity" is bad, but I don't think it is a common belief!
But I have definitely encountered goldbugs who just know that gold has intrinsic value, if you ask them what that is, it's just like, intrinsic dude, if you ask them what that even means they just sort of get a blank look on their face (metaphorically, since this is the internet).
Gold is super good at storing what value it has... but it is not intrinsically valuable. If society were to collapse to two people, and one had gold and the other had cows, the one with cows would have little reason to trade for the gold. This is not likely to happen, but is a good mathematical sort of way of considering the question. Food and water have much better "intrinsic" value if you really get down to it... where they go wrong as the basis for an economy is all the other attributes we want money to have.
(Personally as one "way closer to a goldbug", I favor things that are actually used. Gold freaks me out a bit because the world still treats it as very valuable even now, but it isn't actually used for much. I feel much better about things that are used because they are the best solution to some problem; see platinum and palladium for catalytic converters, for instance. On the flip side, the reason why gold isn't used much is precisely that it's considered very valuable; if the value did suddenly collapse because the general agreement about its value deteriorated, there are a lot more things we'd use it industrially for, so that might be enough to keep it valuable.)
Might I suggest: bitbugs.
(Also, "Don't let the bitbugs byte")
It doesn’t matter that there’s no logic to it, as long as enough people share the same delusion it becomes self-propagating.
Scarcity is not quantity. Its the relationship between supply and demand. In your scenario, supply (1 kid doodling) meets demand (1 person wants them), so the value doesnt move from 0 (which is how much you would pay for the doodles).
With gold, one can come up with a plausible story for the demand side of the argument that it has intrinsic value: gold’s combination of beauty and scarcity has made it a potent status symbol across many eras and cultures (not to mention its industrial uses).
With crypto, it’s much harder to imagine what the demand side of the story is. There’s a finite supply of Bitcoin, and people demand it because… well, it’s not because they can pay for anything with it. They mostly seem to demand it because they believe someone else will pay them more for it in the future. And what do we call it when an asset has nothing going for it besides that hope?
I’m still waiting for a compelling story about why demand for Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency will persist beyond the current vogue, which is driven by the notion that “it’s gonna be huge in the future”. How long can people keep the faith, and what happens to demand if and when they stop?
This doesn't imply stable prices, though. Far from it!
You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything.
Interesting historical note is that one of Freud's original metaphors for understanding the nature of desire was the unconscious "investor" or "capitalist" who outlays affective charge to the conscious "entrepreneur", who relates to objects. This is known in the literature as Freud's "economic metaphor", which I've found immensely helpful in my own understanding.
I came to a similar conclusion: The sole criterion for the viability of a currency is acceptance in trade.
This simple truism explains every currency that "works" and every one that didn't all at once.
It can be a terrible currency, but if it's generally accepted in trade, too bad. Governments can mandate it, but that won't always save it. Just look at Zimbabwe dollars. They were official. And all but worthless. USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less than even a shitcoin, and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves.
I will add that there seems to be a substantial correlation between people who are made uncomfortable by the reality of socially-constructed value,
and the social construction of many other "foundational" things, such as "truth" and its relationship to natural language,
which flows naturally into self-delusional "originalism" when it comes to interpreting say the Constitution. Or for that matter the Bible.
which in turn are deeply correlated with autocratic-leaning and socially-conservative politics which favor rigid hierarchies and privilege authority and respect for it, over other values (such as equity, compassion, etc.)
I find it remarkable how many people are made uncomfortable even in otherwise well -educated circles by the premise that in natural language meaning is negotiated and collaborative and requires not absolutes of the universe but rather agents who maintain representations and models of one another's states, beliefs, intentions, etc., against which every utterance is measured and its meaning triangulated.
I guess if you got a degree in EECS rather than say CogSci it's possible to never encounter even anemic instrumental models of this in a pragmatic linguistics class... :/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857769
> It's important to note that price, the last traded price, and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. ...
> When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it.
> Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value.
> It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you.
I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value from different perspectives in different situations; I find myself doing so.
That way lies the enablement of massive fraud.
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/03/on-bitcoin-and-ludw...
In general any speculation have been in very weird headspace recent years. Have to see if it continues, but moving forward things might be different.
Is this the regurgitative didactic method I keep hearing about?
There has always been misinformation, but not on this level. Only a few years back, when someone wanted to write a scam book, they still had to actually sit down and write it, no matter how carelessly. Now that this isn't needed anymore, it amazes me that someone would as much as look at - let alone buy and read - books on buzzword topics by random unknown authors. Same goes for the consumption of social media feeds.
----
Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather than a set of values shared by a community.
We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires trust in something other than you.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_sear...
This excellent video [1] from Dan Olson at Folding Ideas is in my opinion a fascinating deep dive in to this whole scam. I don’t want to spoil everything in the video, but Dan does an exceptional job exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually being done by an overworked human who is trying to write an entire novel in three weeks or so on a topic they haven’t had time to properly research.
I don't understand why they don't fix this problem. It's pretty easy to fix and all those sales don't generate a significant amount of revenue for Amazon considering the negative experience for clients.
Such books are pretty easy to spot since the majority of reviews are written by people who have published more than hundreds of reviews.
I took a look through it cause I thought it would actually interesting, and found it to be this type of fake book that looks to be instructional on the surface, but in reality is not actually educational in the least, and in fact dead wrong in many places.
I posted a couple excerpts on Twitter here, 3-tweet thread. https://twitter.com/zefhous/status/1281679975339274241
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 ;-)
> It's been months since I bought the book, "How to scam people online." It still hasn't arrived yet.
https://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-...
Amazon isn't going to read every letter of every book that it sells, so it's hardly their fault either.
I’m wondering if any person on the planet other than the author of the article read this best-selling book in its entirety. Because even the book’s purported author likely didn’t.
(The rise of Blinkist et. al. seems to support the idea that many people value being able to say that they have read a book much more highly than actually reading it.)
Like i totally get people lying about reading Finnegan's wake, but who is impressed by a weird intro to NFT book? Maybe it depends on social circle.
You treat Amazon reviews as credible information?
Wow!
I’m aware of at least one real person who occasionally writes honest reviews of technical books on Amazon: me.
So with enough reviews for a particular one, I’d expect at least some of them to be credible, yes. You can usually tell which ones are not shills or bots.
E.g. in this case, those might be the reviewers who gave a lower rating, and had specific (rather than generic) criticisms.
My surprise here stems from the fact that even they seemed to have skimmed or misread some key sections.
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 here (while somehow "fascinating" just look like the next step of spam/scam evolution to me.
And yes, I see that they are more problematic the "better" they get generated, because more people will think they are genuine works.
Occasionally you could find print versions as well, which were sometimes a deal if you took the cost of toner/paper into consideration.
I would have expected that. Amazon neither has the staff with expertise to investigate claims nor much interest in removing products that earn them a nice share. Knowledge is fungible nowadays, and in these cases of "fake books" its volatile too.
It's the virtual gold rush on the Internet and companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc too) to those "miners" profit from what's going on.
That said, I'm optimistic that we can keep finding solutions to new problems. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to make purchasing decisions closer to the way we used to, by asking our friends what they recommend. That's essentially how appending " reddit" to a google search works today, but even that is vulnerable to manipulation.
I'm hoping that social media of the future builds in better tools for polling our network for recommendations, and for incentivizing us to respond to our friends' queries.
This will import Wikipedia's serious flaws. But I'm hopefully that they can gradually be mitigated.
Seems like the fake review bots are a lot smarter than the anti-measures applied by Amazon. And the fun part is that both parties are probably running on AWS ;)
I think the problem is [left] fake books and [Quote sign] Amazons...
Okay, on the third try I read less and more. Still, it felt ugly.
Of these patients, 44 were treated with HAIC and 20 with sorafenib. HAIC involved cisplatin (50 mg fine powder in 5-10 ml lipiodol) and a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil (FU) (1,500 mg/5 days), which is referred to as new 5-FU and cisplatin therapy (NFP). [1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
It is a great and informative watch.
I can't speak for GPT-3 specifically as I haven't spent enough time with it, but it's open equivalent Bloom is very useful today. Author says it is far from being able to "enrich our lives". I think otherwise. The whole "AI revolution" definitely did enrich my life. It renewed my passion for programming in general. The possibilities are truly endless. From translation, to content summarisation and search. Then it is only a step away from enriching other people's lives with products that make them more productive, help them in execution of mundane tasks etc.
I think AIs like bloom will in not to distant time allow us to fix the Internet to how it was before all the shitty content generation replaced genuine content in Google for example.
Also, there is a huge potential to improve our understanding of what it means to think and understand complex concepts. For the very first time we have something that comes very close to such understanding. Something that doesn't have feelings, it can be cut, modified, transformed and studied in myriad of different ways.
Also, believe me when I say the next AI revolution will be with models like Bloom that will be able to run on the edge. This is currently impossible due to their size, but it is very likely we'll find methods to optimise them significantly.
Then there is potential application of such models to decision making. I bet there is ongoing research in that field right now.
Addressing the negative side, "ability to generate garbage content that looks good". The ability has already existed for advanced adversaries. Hostile nations can simply employ people to "generate content". Smaller players have lots of other (inferior) tools. Their content doesn't have to fool people most of the time. It just has to fool various algorithms. Even without advanced AI models the search engines and social networks have been loosing badly in this fight. Existence of those tools will improve the bad actors capabilities, but it will also give good actors the chance to innovate with something new.
Here's the abstract:
""" Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities—such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands—are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of “Souls” can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc)—a co-determined sociality, where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences, at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms—such as quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores—that reward trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew today’s hyper-financialization in favor of a more transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across social distance. """
Here's the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
The "NFTs for Dummies" book is presumably not nonsense, or at least no more so than the subject matter demands.
If I had to read any of these books, there's a good chance that the for dummies one is the least bad of the 12, but odds are you are better off reading 0 of these books.
I'd argue Wiley already did that themselves. They sell the Dummies brand to any company with a large checkbook. See:
- https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/programmable...
- https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-erp-for-dumm...
Of course major publishers may be duped into unintentionally publishing AI generated or part AI generated content by bad authors, but if it's good enough to get through their editing processes, it will hopefully be non-nonsense.
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.
I bought an electric leaf blower off amazon a couple years ago - the reviews seemed authentic and it seemed like the obvious one to buy. The thing had the power of like two hair dryers - I took the time to write a negative review but by then the product no longer seemed to be listed.
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 proof. this crap slips through the cracks.
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.
I think it is somewhat scary that these things can't just be instantly pulled from wherever they're marketed. They're just "tools-of-the-trade" for scammers. They serve no honest purpose.
An ocean is "basically water" but the experience of being alone in the middle of the ocean is fundamentally different from standing in a puddle.
Release crap books nobody will read, or fill Soundcloud with bad music?
If so, long time no see. Hope all is well.
This has already led to the EU starting to fall apart - the UK is out of the EU, Hungary and Poland no longer meet the criteria for having backslid into totalitarianism or at the very least, no longer having a division between the legal and executive branches of law. And it's causing lines to be drawn in the US as well, with calls for secession rising. But the US has been an "us vs them" type of "democracy" for a while now, it probably didn't take much to entrench the sides more deeply.
Anyway, that's online discourse, I'm sure it extends to books too, just less obviously.
It's not even a democratisation of bullshit, non-state actors also don't need GPT-3 to spam nonsense. PR and advertising is all about that and has a history of hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe the new thing here is that people now realise lying is easy.
The article literally says
> My first theory was that the writing must have been outsourced to a content farm, where multiple individuals worked on portions of the text without caring to understand the context. But the explanation had a flaw: there’s nothing you can find on the internet if you search for “NFP chemotherapy” or “NTF Strategic Development Group”. The text didn’t merely describe a garbled version of our reality; it invented its own.
Yes, and the parent literally generalizes this one-off observation, puts it in context, and gives examples and even a source with a deep dive on the issue.
Of these patients, 44 were treated with HAIC and 20 with sorafenib. HAIC involved cisplatin (50 mg fine powder in 5-10 ml lipiodol) and a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil (FU) (1,500 mg/5 days), which is referred to as new 5-FU and cisplatin therapy (NFP).How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?
An important feature of these scams is to frame success and failure as being entirely in your hands: it’s not the system’s fault that you didn’t achieve success, it’s yours and yours alone, you didn’t want it bad enough. Someone who falls in that hole is bound to do it again, this time for a different grift which looks easier. They’ll do as much as it takes until they strike gold, go bankrupt, or finally understand it’s all a scam. That last one can take a long time to come.
In sum, money making courses don’t need an infinite supply of new chumps when they can keep reeling in the same ones. Offer some discounts and rewards for bringing in new members, and you’ve gone full MLM².
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
This reminds me of an episode of Reply All. They ordered some cheap Rolex rip off, it was even worse than they expected. They found out they were all being sold on shopify and that if you sign up for a new account on shopify you'll fairly quickly start getting spam emails helping you setup a shop of all this crap. Then they'd try to sell you on lessons on how to make it more successful. I forgot if the rabbit hole went deeper.
There's a company engaging in MLM sales paying some news agencies to promote its scheme every day during the news (a subtle sponsor, so to speak; it's on regular TV so SponsorBlock won't help). As my family watched the news from this channel often, I would recognize how it works. It would promote an online course along the lines of "Make Money with a Smartphone" and advertised the course it claimed to cost $249.99 at $2.49 (price may vary, depending on who is the presenter, though the course are the exact same).
The news program is careful not to show the names of the ultimate company offering it, only presenting that this person will be teaching. Sharp-eyed viewer, however, can notice that those adverts intend to direct the prospective "client" to an MLM.
Second, money making courses, don't work. So people tend to buy another and another, to get to the mythical "good" one...
Actually they get $250 for 25,000. The $2500 is what they should get.
I have to write 10,000 words overnight occasionally in my role.
If it’s $2500 for 10k words, maybe I should be ghostwriting…
That said, there's a few books in my library / to-read list that are great content cover to cover. Timeless classics, etc.
Outsourcing to a content farm might very well result in lots of the text being rendered by GPT-3 and similar generative AIs. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive.
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil2.webp
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/fadeout.webp
https://www.marginalia.nu/shitty-book/pencil.webp
Appears they're printing these on demand on essentially bleached office-grade paper. The orange tint is from the white balance being off.
Seems to be related to the system of third party sellers. Every shop I'm aware of that uses this model has problems with this type of bait-and-switch bullshit.
It’s essentially legal, and I think it’s not that scammy honestly. People want these books on paper, nobody prints them anymore or has the texts.
edit: I also saw some people selling the OCR from these books, which is far worse. You need to guess the original, especially if it has some latin/german inside English.
Because they act as a platform an the platform makes a living by its transactions and not by the quality of the content.
I really hope Amazon's sea of garbage devours Amazon before it destroys the remaining un-Amazon-ified online retailers through unfair competition.
Does Jeff Bezos change direction and drop the "everything store" strategy by realizing that most of everything is trash and he is destroying the Amazon brand?
To misquote him: your garbage is my opportunity.
He enables competition to use brands as a strategy: we make sure everything we sell is the best. If you shop at our place, you will not be wasting your time.
Amazon pays users who publish hundreds of reviews. It gives Amazon credibility to other users.
Tools on amazon have same problem, so many fakes, they get reported and company just pops up with different name.
As a seller of magic electric recycling heaters who you just bankrupted, let me repay you in kind: everyone, you can easily DIY this "quantum heating" thing: it's just an automated pipeline of GPT-3 to LeanPub and purchasing ads that show up in Quanta Magazine (hence "quantum"), where you run GPT-3 locally so you can keep your home warm with the heat generated by your PC.
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?
Because the "energy crisis" is actually a political crisis, i.e. the failure of governments to build enough alternate generators, like solar and wind power during the last decade or two.
> You sure they couldn't be talking about a heat pump [...]
I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking a small electrical heater after telling you that "a student" or "an engineer" developed this glorious device in their spare time, ... And last but not least because we built our house with a heat pump and heat exchanging ventilation[*] more than a decade ago, so I'm aware of the concepts.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_heat_exchanger
Edit: complete a sentence.
Trust me, you should take a serious look at this. A lot of what may sound like gobbledegook to you, such as "zero-knowledge proofs", is definitely not gobbledegook and is likely to be very important as time moves on. If you don't have the background to understand what the authors are talking about, it will sound like GPT-3 nonsense. Get the knowledge if you are in the internet industry.
[Update: I see that even this is being voted down. Well, I guess the downvoters just have more of a track record and more experience in the industry than me, and more knowledge about blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, etc., so I should forget all about this stuff. Not. I'm trying to help out here. Don't downvote what you don't understand. If it isn't what you expect to hear, that's when you have a chance to learn something. If you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well, tell us all about it, I'm all ears.]
Cherry picking examples of your past predictions that may have turned out to be correct as a way of defending something in question today is obviously fallacious - hopefully I don't have to explain why that proves absolutely nothing.
> Trust me, you should take a serious look at this... get the knowledge if you are in the internet industry.
Trust isn't necessary when something is actually useful. Explain how the technology is actually useful rather than demeaning the supposed lack of knowledge in others.
> Well, I guess the downvoters just have more of a track record and more experience in the industry than me
Sarcastically appealing to your own authority while claiming your critics just don't understand is another bad faith rhetorical tactic that is often used by cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
> if you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well, tell us all about it, I'm all ears
I read the paper, understood it, and responded with a clear critique to you in a different comment, your response was "Couldn't disagree more. I'm not going to argue about it here though". So what I'm getting from you is "I'm a tech expert, if you disagree you don't understand, I also don't have to prove anything or defend my position, just trust me". Sounds like the typical cryptocurrency grift...
hyper-nancialization -> hyper-financialization
Maybe more. Did cut and paste do this?
[Update: I fixed the ones I could find.]
At least, I hope it is, I haven’t actually started that strategy.
However it is beyond me to translate that into the blockchain specifically. This seems like yet another case where in the phrase "distributed ledger", the "ledger" is doing all the work and the "distributed" isn't doing much. And there isn't much work being done either; most of our "culture" isn't in ledgers. Even if you take the broad view that I do that a lot of things like our technology are actually embedded in human relationships ("Hmmm, I remember Bob knows how to solve this problem... ah yes, I bet Sally knows the solution to this... I bet Ramash could hook me up with the right part for this problem...") and things beyond just formal transfer mechanisms like "books" and "classes", ledgers still aren't carrying much of that water.
- to human beings (subject), food (object) has "intrinsic" value
- to Americans, US dollars have "intrinsic" value
- to Redditors, karma has "intrinsic" value
etc
Interesting aside -- this is also how falling in love works (overvaluation of the object via the subject's projection of value).
Of course, all of this is about price, not value.
The symbols < and > are being used as substitutes for the English words "less" and "more", which is not conventional at all, but is related enough to the actual meaning of the symbols that given context and a lot of effort, you can get there. I wouldn't recommend copying the notation; it conflicts pretty badly with the ordinary use of < and >.
Making available rare out of print books is a noble goal.
For the most part, it's low-effort manipulations that very occasionally take hold---I can remember the anti-nuclear protests against the deployment of the Pershing II missiles in Europe---but the internet and social media have dropped the bar for "low-effort".
If you could find a book that broke their machine, sort of a Legends of Stuxnet, then you’d get somewhere.
Or if you figured out their business and determined if they sold so many they placed a bulk order for a printing, then place that many orders, they place the bulk order, you stop buying, and then do the mass return.
It probably hardly takes 8 hours a day. More like 3-4 or even 2. 8 hours for 1000 words is for much higher quality 1000 words...
It isn't a currency, it has no obvious potential to be a currency and if you own it you are either a government or insulted. At best, only speculative value could be a factor of these 3, and I don't think the serious money that sets the price is speculating - and gold is a terrible market to speculate in, so they probably aren't setting the price as much as going broke.
The value of gold is set by how hard/easy it is to mine.
Plenty of things are hard to mine yet don't have much value, so nobody tries to mine them. The difficulty/ease of mining can provide a cap on value, but it does not provide a floor. It is not the reason something is expensive.
https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-searc...
If the book attributes its content to Wikipedia, it’s perfectly legal. The issue then becomes "should Amazon remove low-quality products from their website?" (and the underlying issue is "what does 'low-quality' mean?"), and the response is no because they want to act as a platform.
Sure, but I remember seeing books which didn't attribute their source. I only noted the "similarity" while searching for info on certain topics. Sorry, I didn't document them, because I just thought, ok, the next scam.
The comment you are criticizing above was not meant for you. It was to give a counterpoint to your dismissal so that other people wouldn't lose their chance to learn about this just because a few naysayers on HN think they know better.
My pointing out some of my past experiences with naysayers was not offered as proof of being right, since you are correct that it isn't. I was partly offering my personal experience that naysayers shouldn't be assumed to be right. They may be, but shouldn't be assumed to be. Prominent examples include famous dismissals on HN of the original iPod and of DropBox.
In fact, in my experience, the greatest opportunities are when the naysayers are rampant in response. It's related to the famous saying from Howard Aitken: "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
Also, I do have a track record (not remotely as cherry-picked as you might want to assume it to be—in act I could give more supporting examples and I don't have many misses at this level). While it's not proof, it is evidence that some people (not you) might want to consider in judging whether they want to spend their time reading a paper like this, instead of rejecting it only because of comments from people who do not display any kind of relevant track records or any other basis for assuming their comments should be seriously considered.
I understand that you think you know better, and that's fine. I would have bet a substantial sum of money that my comment would have no influence on your dismissal. Still, as I said in my earlier response, I did learn something from your comment in terms of how some people might react to certain approaches, so, thank you.
I won't have any other comments in response to you in this thread, period. Life's too short.
The negotiated final price is the value.
> When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative
The value of the futures is different than the value of the oil itself. Besides, the end result of a future is taking delivery. Most futures contract buyers have no intention of taking delivery, and have no way to take delivery. That explains the negative value of those futures.
> I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value from different perspectives in different situations
That doesn't change at all the fact that the value is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. That value is different for different people, as you say.
You're free to define value to always be price, it's a matter of opinion and by my own logic it's a valid thing to do, but separating the two concepts makes things much clearer when market effects distort the price of something who's value doesn't seem to have changed.
> market effects distort the price of something who's value doesn't seem to have changed.
This is still making the mistake that value is independent of what people are freely willing to pay for it.
The full faith and credit of the the United States government is pretty solid.
> and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves.
That's how debt works
Aha, I see. A bit late for that now though, so now it's an energy crisis. I wish it were seen as a political crisis but pretty much everyone here just blames Russia and there aren't many (if any in some countries) consequences...
> I'm really sure, because the videos show people unpacking a small electrical heater after telling you that "a student" or "an engineer" developed this glorious device in their spare time, ...
Amazing that this shit is legal...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/fran...
Regarding the "return on investment" nuclear power is way more expensive than other forms of energy, if you add the (hidden) cost of storage and disposal of nuclear waste. Which could have been known for a long time, cf.
The Hidden Costs of Nuclear Power (RICHARD W. ENGLAND, 1979) https://www.jstor.org/stable/40719811
The High and Hidden Costs of Nuclear Power -- An industry hooked on subsidies from governments (Henry Sokolski, 2010) https://www.hoover.org/research/high-and-hidden-costs-nuclea...
Maybe it could create a new genre of literature that is tailored to the reader's interests.
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.
Think about it - the best niche GPT-3 has is generating plausible spam. If you just need a lot of text, but you don't care about what it says[0], you're going to write it using the cheapest possible tool. OpenAI's training corpus is sourced through web crawls, so all of that spam is destined to get recycled back into the next generation of GPT.
[0] For example, if you want to be able to post a bunch of political spam that looks like genuine comments on a web forum. See GPT-4chan[1] as a practical example of this.
[1] A tweaked version of GPT-3 using 4chan's politics board as training corpus.
Unfortunately, generation of garbage information can still far outpace such a system with few nodes...
For Movies, I find that Ebert aligns a lot with my taste. If he says it's good, it's really good. I mean, that doesn't help with recent movies, but there's more than enough of the old good stuff. (There's a lot to be said for consuming old media; it gives it time for critical opinion to stabilize. )
I mean, of course, all of these methods will leave out a lot of really good stuff. But... that's kind of the point; there's way more media than I can consume. There are professional reviewers that can give you more really good media than you could consume in a reasonable lifetime. I'm not quite halfway through the 'Pulitzer prizes awarded in my lifetime' list, and I've started a few years back. (I mean, I was 40 or so by the time I started, and so I had read a few of the books just 'cause they were popular books that people recommend. McCarthy's "The Road" is exactly the sort of thing I like, so I read it before on another person's recommendation. But still, like, you see some really great work outside your genre; I'm not normally a romance novel kinda guy, but Lurie's "Foreign Affairs" was absolutely beautiful, and absolutely not a thing I would have read without this project.)
I haven't completely solved the problem for technical books, just 'cause people who have good up to date knowledge of an area have often built up that knowledge over time. they read some books but those books are long out of date, they've brought their skills up to date with mailing lists, which they then vet based on their knowledge of the reputation of the person posting.
I mean, I think it's pretty easy for the non-perishables, "The C Programming Language" is a thing you should read if you work with computers. But which tomb on docker is up to date enough and pretty good? that can be a difficult question to answer, and is often answered based on the author's reputation for other technical work they do, which usually tells me something about the accuracy of the book, but doesn't tell me if it's well written or if it's up to date enough. (On the other hand, if you are well known for writing a big part of the subsystem I wanna learn, eh, I don't feel too bad about giving you money for a book even if I later decide that the book is not written in a way I find engaging, like, you earned it and I'll buy another book.) And... I dunno. often you can get sample chapters, and that gets you a pretty good idea of how engaging the writing is.
I mean, one way to address it is to start at the base... "go read the gang of four design patterns books, and then use your knowledge of object orientedness to make sense of modern object-oriented configuration management systems" - which does make some sense. But still, I should spend the time to find the tech book awards that match up with my taste.
By the time I hear about something, it's too late.
I'm fortunate that this was a small amount relative to my net worth to count as a fun "experiment" and not a significant chunk of the money I need to survive.
Based on this N=1 experiment, I now feel justified in suggesting more profitable and environmentally friendly endeavors, such as lighting half your money on fire.
Whether bitcoin is just a pyramid scheme or not, only time will tell. I don't believe so, but I'm not an economist, so who am I to say :).
A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're different than everything you've tried before - the point being is that the number of people who fall for these scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over and over again. Just probably not from the same person selling it.
It's the same as any kind of cult messaging. It's not surprising that the size of a cult designed to exploit people has an upper limit, but it is shocking that the same people will join multiple cults time after time.
(I do know at least two real exampless of this meta-approach to scamming: 1. there are meta content-farms, which hire people and train them to run seemingly-independent content-farm YouTube / TikTok / etc channels; and 2. there are serial Kickstarter/IndieGogo scammers, that follow a loop of forming a new shell company, hiring a new actor to pitch a fake idea, steal people's money for it, and disappearing.)
And, while they're at it, why not constantly seek to acquire the pitch+content from smaller, nascent money-making course creators, and run their content through your existing business engine? Why not be the EA of scams?
Because that entails hard work.
The fact that the commenter proceeded to generalize, show a link, etc is not responsive to that. A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
But that's not the form of the comment. It begins with "I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm"!
The video I linked is extraordinary in its level of research and quality, and interesting on its own merits. If someone is not fully aware of the extent to which content farms squeeze out content, it’s easy to assume some weird prose is GPT-3. I felt the articles dismissal of the idea of a content farm was too quick, and perhaps they or the readers might not be familiar with how they operate. And so I provided a summary as well as a link to this very high quality investigative source.
That is precisely what the original commenter did:
> (…) exploring how this ghost writing works, and why it produces the kind of nonsense writing that looks like GPT-3 but is actually (…)
>A responsive answer would be along the lines of "well, a content farm might fabricate too because _____."
A responsive answer doesn't need to have a particular formula, much less that one. It just needs to be relevant to the issue and provide more information and/or the commentor's own take (could be just their feelings about the issue too).
It takes capital, time, and work to become “the EA of scams”, at which point you’re inviting further scrutiny on yourself, meaning even more work (and staff, who you’ll have to trust) to not be in hot water with the law.
Scammers, like the people they scam, are mostly after a quick easy buck. You’re posing “why not” questions as if there’re straightforward to accomplish. They’re not. They take effort and risk without a guarantee of success. Most scammers don’t become “the EA of scams” for the same reasons most game companies don’t become EA.
It's not that they care about much fidelity to the subject or going deep anyway.
And half of the work or more is rewritting (sometimes not even that) other sources, like online articles and such
I think the point here was that the ghostwriting is of really low quality. Overnight 10k reports are never groundbreaking or enlightening additions to human knowledge, but they need to be 90%+ accurate and polished enough to inform.
I know from experience (of on-line commenting; don't judge) this word count is entirely possible to achieve, but I can't imagine sustaining it long-term, as a part of a job.
If these examples are too abstract for your taste, there are many other examples. No one pays for volunteer work (by definition), but there's lots of volunteer work that, if people stopped doing it, our society would grind to a halt. One example is open source software; most of the work which goes into it is unpaid, yet our industry cannot function without it. Another is parenting; most people aren't compensated for having & raising children - indeed, it costs them huge amounts of money - but there is no economy without people performing this function.
I submit there are more things in the economy than are dreamt of in this philosophy.
I contribute every day to Open Source software. The "pay" I get is not in terms of salary, there are many other benefits.
Is this a fantasy that few if any people will ever utilize? Sure.
Is it also super cool? I think so.
I think the main demand of bitcoin is "money that isn't subject to federal reserve policy". No fiat currency in the world is effectively accomplishing that today.
(Note: I had to stop using brainwallets three bubbles ago because I had recurring nightmares of getting a brain injury and losing access to my funds. Don't recommend it.)
This is an absolute farce. Maybe talk to us when there are no longer reports of being able to easily scam someone out of all of their money with a non-reversable transaction just by sending them an image with a script in it.
Bitcoin is subject to federal policy as much as anything is: as much as secret Swiss bank accounts.
You imply evasion works. But that certainly doesn't mean it is federally legal, legal with the IRS, or legal for whatever other reasons. You have the risk of serious consequences if you are caught breaking the laws that apply to you.
Your argument implies that you can break the law without getting caught, but we already have surprising crypto counterexamples against that.
Also, the market is slowly being split into legitimate trading (via centralised platforms with KYC rules) and illegitimate trading (for stolen bitcoins, or bitcoins tainted by tumbling with illegal bitcoins). As that plays out, it seems likely to become more difficult to actually trade your crypto without some laundering costs and risks.
Keeping a number in your head or hiding some gold in your secret location are the same thing.
I suspect a lot of more of the 0.1% have gold hidden than many would expect. I've met two eccentric 100 millionaires that advocated for hiding gold as a wealth preservation mechanism. I think this is becoming the primary non-trading use case for Bitcoin - met both of those individuals through conversations about crypto.
* Note: I am speaking regarding the markets I know; I cannot say anything regarding economies suffering rapid inflation or which lack access to banking
If I put $100 into Monero and hold it, I’m betting that Monero is still worth something in the future. That’s a risky bet. For example, the Treasury department could sanction Monero. Or the next great mixer could come along and supplant Monero, making my old Monero mostly useless.
can't a comment not reiterate in its opening statement what the author already said (to e.g. show the commentor's aggrement)?
this is too formulaic and pedantic a response
But I imagine that abusing SEO to ensure search results don't show people the results they actually want to see (or maybe "need to see", but that's quite the can of worms to open) is a legitimate tactic in any propaganda machine.
Just choose the templates and fill in your names and numbers.
And now with the competition basically no one who bought their course can actually make money
insert a random comment about how "market economy is not a zero-sum game"
Most get-rich-quick schemes are really either “make a few pennies here or there, a few $/€/£ if you are lucky, a few 100 if very lucky” or “make-a-bit-slowly-with-lots-of-effort” or both. The rest not included in that “most” are even more completely bunkum, you'll never make anything unless maybe you join the pyramid and resell the scheme.
There is more easy money to be made selling make-money-easily schemes to those that lack critical thinking, than there is to be made via the schemes themselves. Even if no one you sell the scheme to makes anything, even if they all make a loss in the grand scheme of things, the scheme seller still has some revenue.
A scheme seeming illegal/immoral/both might make some marks easier to catch, as they think they are being clever by knowing that crime does in fact sometimes pay so their guard is further lowered due to confirmation bias on this matter.
I might point to a dozen other parts of the situation as "barely legal scam", but why that part?
Someone could make a service with delayed settlement that is denominated with Bitcoin, and it would work just the same.
If you pay someone with a $100 bill, your only recourse is to ask for them to return it: the same as Bitcoin.
Does this mean that the US dollar is a terrible currency? No. If another currency meets the same stability criterion, it can (and probably is) used as a short-to-medium term value store.
I don't really see any crypto-currency work well, they're thinly traded, so there's a lot of inherent volatility in the pricing. It is also getting increasingly harder to exchange crypto-currencies for more traditional currencies.
Come again? The international currency market doesn’t really close overnight, and the people who store value in USD are generally Americans or other people or entities who generally store value as USD.
And that latter part is the whole point. When you save up for retirement, or plan your business, or prepare a balance sheet, or plan for a college education, everything is denominated in dollars (or your local currency).
If you want to store money for any future use, you want an asset that has a somewhat predictable return relative to the dollar. If you are a drug dealer who collected $1M (in USD or its equivalent in Bitcoin, Monero, casino chips, whatever), you may well launder or mix it through something else, but your goal is to end up with approximately $1M for when you want to buy more wholesale drugs, pay employees, buy a fancy yacht, etc. Storing $1M as Monero is making a huge bet that it will still be worth $1M when it’s needed.
I do know that 'store of value' is the term I used, but it is in reference to the people who hold Bitcoins in expectation of rising price, and the fact that they would claim it 'stores value' while being extremely volitile is indicative of their lack of understanding or their lack of honesty in representing their motives.
People who shelter their dollars overnight are most likely not expecting a return on it.
Tell that to anyone who saves money for any purpose. They may not literally hold USD in their private Fed account or as cash under a pillow, but they are nonetheless storing dollars (as bonds, money markets, savings accounts, etc).
