> Unfortunately, reading books for entertainment is ridiculous. You do not live in a log cabin on the prairie. You have Netflix, you have video games, you have TikTok, you have Twitter (you really spend too much time on Twitter anon). No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform.
That's a hard disagree from me - I'm not a heavy reader but I'll still easily get through a couple of fiction books every month. TV/Movies are far less information dense (ie interesting) that even a light fiction book.
I'll happily watch a show or movie on TV with the family - there's a lot to be said for shared entertainment, but there's a reason for the trope "the book was better than the movie".
The mistake is thinking of entertainment as a fungible resource. Film is its own art form. The novel is its own art form. They serve completely different purposes and each gives the audience a unique experience that can't be replicated in any other medium.
It's sad to me that people think like this. It's a very limited and superficial way to experience the world.
Giving a certain number of hours dedicated to passive entertainment, many more people prefer to watch a terrible tv show on Netflix than to read a masterpiece of literature.
It could be because the tv show is more "entertaining" (which is tautological), a desire for social conformity (people can discuss more easily with others the latest tv show than Anna Karenina), or escaping the cognitive effort required when reading literature, which is almost always greater than the one asked for when watching a movie or tv show, or a tiktok.
It's not even about quality. I consider films like There Will Be Blood or TV shows like Deadwood to be comparable in quality to the greatest works of world literature. I've also gotten a lot of joy and entertainment out of reading crappy books.
My problem is with statements like "paper is an inferior entertainment platform". To me, this is assuming that these different media are fundamentally providing the same kind of experience, which I disagree with.
I see your point about the cognitive effort of reading, though. I guess it depends on how fluently one can read, which depends on how much exposure to books one got as a kid.
The problem is that you are talking about your experience, and not about the distribution of experience of people, which is why I wrote "at the population level".
For the more intellectually sophisticated person (does not mean "better" person, to be clear), "entertainment type" is not fungible (movies as art, advertisement as investigation into the psychology of the masses, etc.) but for the vast majority of people, it is just a way to spend time.
You are referring to critically acclaimed movies and tv shows, but for the majority of people, leisure time in front of the tv is not spent bouncing between Fellini, Von Trier, PTA, Kubrick, et similia, but binge-watching the latest terrible Netflix tv show.
It is the same with food: we like to think that what prevents the masses from enjoying fine dining is the cost of the experience, but in reality, to many (myself included, most of the time), French fries with mayonnaise, a burger, and some ice cream is just a better proposition.
I disagree myself wiht the statement that paper is inferior, entertainment-wise, to tv, games, and tiktok--they all overstimulate me, I feel dirty after being on tiktok for 20 minutes and I feel as clean as a whistle after reading for 3 hours, in addition to the subtle intellectual stimulation I get from reading-- but in terms of choices made by people, books are certainly the losing party.
The comment I am responding to is referring to their own experience, which, at the population level, does not appear to be largely shared, as, at the population level (i.e., people in general, not intellectuls, not academics, all of them), it is evident that people consider tv shows, games, and tiktok superior (i.e. revealed preference) forms of entertainment with respect to books.
How was it not clear? I would prefer to engage with more substantive comments.
What's not clear to me is how aggregate preferences about entertainment media should affect my choice of entertainment media. TFA is worded to suggest that because "nobody" reads fiction, it should be dismissed when considering what to read.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that most people prefer Netflix to Umberto Eco. However, I don't. And that is one reason I reject the analysis in the article.
Sure, I don't think anybody is forcing you or anybody else to watch Netflix or play GTA instead of reading a mystery novel.
I find those types of articles and the comments following them to be starting points for broader conversations. In this case, broader than "I like to read books, and I will continue to do so".
I second that, after more than a decade of all quoted entertainment I started to read books again and that’s really refreshing. Just choose a good book and no bad acting or directing gets in the way. I read sci-fi books and I wondered if I ever could appreciate a movie version of it because they are so hard to get right with all variables that can make a sci-fi movie bad. I can read everywhere, no battery needed or screen pulsing in my eyes.
It’s one of the best form of entertainment because it’s getting the brain engaged with creativity in ways TV or movies can’t.
"The only people who still read books for entertainment are women who prefer their porn to have DIY visuals. The stats back me up on this. If you’re tempted to disagree, go walk the aisles of Barnes & Noble"
And does not make me want to engage with the article neither for entertainment, nor information.
Either way, no. Reading a book stimulates one own fantasy and imagination in a way no movie can - you have to create the pictures, sounds and sensations of the story by yourself.
Text -> 3D picture
All in the mind, I find that entertaining in a way no movie can, if the text is good.
Certainly one of the few podcasts that I've stuck with. I think I started about 15+ years ago, and I know it was running for a while before that. Can't say every episode is great (not a fan of the live shows) or every segment is great (what's that noisy), but you can't beat it for it's consistency and general interest.
Not AI related, but the (hard sci-fi) book Blind Sight by Peter Watts explores this from a different angle. He posits that consciousness is expensive and some species may evolve to just "fake it".
Also from the country that pissed on the request of its population to curb immigration decade after decade, for cheap labor force, political gains, and globalist ideology...
> Colonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical.
Yes they are. Everyone everywhere has invaded or otherwise traded their way into power in other countries (or pre-country equivalents). It's extremely foolish to bucket the world into Britain and not-Britain if one isn't entirely ignorant of history.
The vast majority in any given colonial nation neither partook nor benefited much if at all.
For the vast crimes of leopold and subsequently to lesser extent the belgian state in congo the biggest chunk of money got invested in the brazilian rail network to make one family very rich for example. My great grandparents being subsistence farmers didn't see shit and you'd punish not just them but me for it.
Typically the people moving in are from countries which given fair comparison are similarly not owed an opinion given their sins of the father and many a nation is not allowed it's borders likely also yours lest you live in Buthan or so.
They are entitled to that argument by virtue of having guns and borders. I would rather be hypocritical than have my government expend resources on other countries altruistically
Did the people suffering the consequences of illegal immigration today performed that colonialism?
Not even their ancestors at colonial times benefitted much from it: the industrial working class of Britain was in dire position despite Britain being a colonial Empire. That money and power went to the ruling classes and their middle class bootlickers.
No, but they benefitted from the colonialism and fight efforts to return those benefits to the colonized. We're not talking about something that happened thousands of years ago here.
>We're not talking about something that happened thousands of years ago here.
I'm not talking about that happened thousands of years ago either. I'm talking about the conditions of the working and poor classes when Britain was a colonial superpower, like througout the 19th century. Hell, even post WWII most of Britain working classes were living very modestly, in wretched wretched council houses, and with low means.
Generalize this line of thought. "A thief stole an iphone and dropped it on my doorstep. I kept it, despite knowing it was stolen, because I did not ask the thief to steal it for me".
It's very silly on the small scale. It's no less silly on the large scale, you are simply more accustomed to the cultural understanding the colonialism is not something you have any responsibility for.
That's not a generalization. That's a totally separate argument. Making someone whole for the loss of a phone does not require you to provide them housing (which is significantly more valuable than the phone was.) It probably means returning the phone -- and if you gained some money from the use of that phone, perhaps some portion of that as well.
Taking that example back to colonialism, it means probably returning stolen wealth and some portion of capital earned on the back of that stolen wealth.
But it literally isn't something I have responsibility for. I hate this white guilt fetish and think it's dumb and unproductive I actively use my money to reduce inequality through things such as the lebanese red cross and national conservation foundations.- Whilst not feeling guilty for the circumstances I was born into because logically I had no control over it.
It has nothing to do with "white guilt" or fetishism. It's not a race thing at all.
It's a "my nation recently and currently systematically exploited people. I would like my nation to try to make those people whole" thing. It happens to be the case that many targets of exploitation were non-white, but the concern is the exploitation not the race of the exploited. We systematically exploited plenty of poor white people too, we should make them whole too.
Redlining in my city "ended" officially in 1968, but in practice it was probably another two decades before it really was removed from standard operation. And in my city, plenty of white people were considered undesirable and redlined. I guarantee you there are people directly impacted by this policy who are still alive, this isn't some far away past long since forgotten by time.
As an example, the city should be considering whether reduced interest rate loans, subsidized housing, rent freezes, or other benefits can be passed on to families directly impacted by redlining policies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Just because it's been 40 years doesn't mean the city should just give up trying to make people whole.
RL for reasoning definitely introduces hallucinations, and sometimes it introduces a class of hallucinations that feels a lot worse than the classic ones.
I noticed OpenAI's models picked up a tendency to hold strong convictions on completely unknowable things.
"<suggests possible optimization> Implement this change and it will result in a 4.5% uplift in performance"
"<provides code> I ran the updated script 10 times and it completes 30.5 seconds faster than before on average"
It's bad it enough it convinces itself it did things it can't do, but then it goes further and hallucinates insights from the tasks it hallucinated itself doing in the first places!
I feel like lay people aren't ready for that. Normal hallucinations felt passive, like a slip up. To the unprepared, this becomes more like someone actively trying to sell their slip ups.
I'm not sure if it's a form of RL hacking making it through to the final model or what, but even OpenAI seems to have noticed it in testing based on their model cards.
Personally nothing - a one off payment for software is fine.
Subscription based software - it's what I do for a day job but I'm not interested in any more monthly money drains than the bare minimum - ie mortgage, rates and utilities.
Same, I even have a "pay as you go" phone deal which means I have a working mobile phone that can receive calls for €5 every 6 months (If I pay less than that it will be disconnected)
> This firm doesn’t care a whit about the impact on users - they are just too cheap to follow the rules.
I'm old enough to remember when one of great things about the web was the low barrier to entry.
Not every site has a large company with deep pockets behind it. Some of the websites I've run, I've run at a loss because I was interested in the subject and thought it provided real value for other people. Probably the income from these sites was in the hundreds of dollars a year range, the cost in time and effort waaay beyond that.
I don't know the actual compliance costs here - I know the cost of a UK lawyer just to review obligations and liabilities is probably going to be a few hundred quid, if not substantially more. I don't know of many non-professional, or FOSS sites that could afford that.
Your curt dismissal of this huge chunk of the internet saying they shouldn't be operating at all is mind boggling
To be clear, I think a huge chunk of the tech giants also should not be operating! They need to be regulated heavily with algorithic feeds banned, anyone under 18 banned and better compensation for content creators.
The wild west of the internet was largely a mistake and created massive social disruption for the benefit of a tiny few and was caused by regulators being asleep at the switch. It is good they are finally catching up.
I have no idea why we need to require site operators to verify users ages? Just force the mobile phone companies do it. It would be pretty trivial for apple, with a front facing camera, face detection, and then just read everything on the screen. If something bad or offensive is shown, the phone is disabled and a notification is sent to the parents and the police.
The western internet as we knew it is dead. Privacy is dead, we already live in a post-Snowden panopticon. With multiple always-on microphones in every public room and often in private rooms too. HD cameras are everywhere. If you live in any major city, hundreds to thousands of hours of footage, which might contain you, is being uploaded for public view and AI training daily.
There have been other open source deathblow laws passed in the EU like the Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive which have been repeatedly dismissed by other commenters on hn. Earlier stuff like the GDPR was dismissed too as only affecting big companies. The arguments in support of these laws have basically been you are small so you don't need to follow them. That seems like lot of disrespect for the EU's legal system but maybe it's well deserved.
It's only a matter of time until ID verification will be mandated even to make a post like this one on sites like hn. Western companies assisted authoritarian prison states in monitoring, censoring and controlling their citizens, when they should have been doing the exact opposite. Now it's really hard to argue that it isn't possible here.
I was pretty late to the AWS bandwagon (maybe 2019ish) but I had no idea there was a point when your resources were directly addressable by other customers.
I'm surprised they got anyone signing up at all - though I suppose back then having just about everything directly connect to the internet was much more of the norm
It was unironically pretty convenient. You had to manually set up NAT in a VPC for a long time (until they made NAT gateways) and some other early quirks were a pain in the ass. EC2 "classic" still had security groups and it was pretty effortless otherwise for a small deployment since it's connected to the internet from the start.
If you want to read more, it was called "EC2 Classic" (well, it wasn't called that before VPCs were launched!). There was a discussion about it being retired on HN here: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=27988964
My recollection is that for a period of time, as a part of the internal “Move to AWS” (MAWS) campaign, the entire retail business ran within a single VPC. A lot has changed!
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That's a hard disagree from me - I'm not a heavy reader but I'll still easily get through a couple of fiction books every month. TV/Movies are far less information dense (ie interesting) that even a light fiction book.
I'll happily watch a show or movie on TV with the family - there's a lot to be said for shared entertainment, but there's a reason for the trope "the book was better than the movie".
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