[HN Gopher] Amazon has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon has taken down the Sad Bastard Cookbook
Author : Kye
Score : 283 points
Date : 2024-01-20 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wandering.shop)
(TXT) w3m dump (wandering.shop)
| wscourge wrote:
| > Reaching a human at Amazon is a Kafkaesque experience that we
| haven't yet managed to do.
|
| It indeed is, I had the same experience. Good idea to asking
| here, you might just find some
| ufocia wrote:
| It is that, most likely by design. The harder to access a
| relatively expensive human, the better the bottom line.
| mikequinlan wrote:
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/retail/2022/09/14/how-t...
| malermeister wrote:
| I'm gonna guess their language police bot took issue with the
| word "bastard".
| wccrawford wrote:
| That, combined with that it appears to be aimed at "depressed,
| disabled, and broke folks" (their words, from that link) and I
| can imagine some people took offense and reported it.
| jayceedenton wrote:
| That can't be it. Their are hundreds of books on Amazon with
| far worse words in the title.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Would you be interested in the paperback version of "Looks Like
| It's Fuck This Shit O'Clock"?
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/1092412743/
| flir wrote:
| There must be a whitelist process though:
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=bastard&i=stripbooks
| las_balas_tres wrote:
| What about the book. "How to take a shit in the woods"
| https://www.amazon.com/How-Shit-Woods-3rd-Environmentally/dp...
| cafard wrote:
| Amazon would love to sell me the novel _Bastard out of
| Carolina_ in paperback or electronic format, or a DVD of the
| movie made from the novel.
| riedel wrote:
| Just checked, interestingly it is still available for on demand
| order via other channels. Wonder if they still print it and only
| delist on their own frontend [0]. Maybe it is a bit of
| compensation if they profit from the Streisand effect.
|
| Regarding Amazon I find it funny that they actually engage quite
| a few people e.g. for tech support of end users. I think they
| know where to optimize..
|
| [0] https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/suggestartikel/A1067374317
| javawizard wrote:
| > interestingly it is still available for on demand order via
| other channels
|
| Where, if you don't mind my asking? This would make an
| _excellent_ birthday gift for a good friend and I 'd prefer to
| get her the print edition, but a quick search is failing to
| turn up anywhere that offers an actual hardcopy besides Amazon.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm trying to remember what service we considered, when an
| organization that wrote a book self-published (I was on the
| committee to write the book).
|
| We ended up actually commissioning normal printing, and
| selling the book, ourselves (it was quite successful, if I
| say so, myself. We made our money back in about a month), but
| we did consider a service that allowed you to sell print-on-
| demand. They ran the store, and the printer. You could also
| move eBooks through them.
|
| This was many years ago, and memory fails me.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Memory jogged. It was Lulu. Looked pretty good, but that
| was many years ago.
| riedel wrote:
| This was just a random German online book seller that are
| connected to a major distribution system. I don't know how it
| is elsewhere in the world, we in Germany have just a fe major
| distributors. I remember when publishing my PhD thesis I
| could chose if I wanted a ISBN and allow global distribution,
| when self publishing on Amazon (was much cheaper than any
| other options that required my to buy a batch). Actually
| small publishers have been living a lot of PhD theses in
| Germany, but nowadays electronic publication is allowed and
| not everyone has boxes of their manuscript in the basement as
| it used to be.
| andirk wrote:
| I understand the obsession with being on Amazon, but can we
| please normalize selling elsewhere? The internet is a vast
| expanse. Why do we think Amazon is the end all be all? I do not
| understand this.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| For consumers, it's easy: Amazon offers a consistent effortless
| experience. They already have all your payment and shipping
| data, so no need to create accounts and passwords at some
| random site with unknown security standards, you know what to
| expect in terms of shipping vs whatever that random shop is
| using, no need to worry if the shop will be around in a year or
| two to honor warranties, no worry about bullshit surrounding
| returns, warranty claims or refunds.
| ufocia wrote:
| How does Amazon handle warranties, especially in a year or
| two? Pray tell.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Amazon is a multibillion dollar company that has a
| _consistent_ track record of prioritizing customer
| satisfaction ever since its inception, as does PayPal -
| admittedly though at the expense of merchants, where we 've
| seen more than enough horror stories on HN about these two
| companies.
|
| Besides: The chances of either of them going belly-up are
| faaaaar lower than for Joe Random's webshop or, heaven
| forbid, physical store.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Amazon is a multibillion dollar company that has a
| consistent track record of prioritizing customer
| satisfaction ever since its inception
|
| A massive issue missing from this statement are the
| problems around fakes which has grown and is unaddressed
| by Amazon. Not such an issue with books though.
| sdoering wrote:
| My experience with warranty at Amazon was nothing but great
| every single time. Okay, I am from Germany with quite
| strong consumer protection.
|
| But still. Shopping at Amazon is so damn riskless, why
| would I buy at a small shop I don't know anything about? I
| got burned, family got burned - I just became very, very
| selective with buying elsewhere.
|
| The risk is too damn high.
| farbklang wrote:
| I lost 450$ on amazon.com for a product that never
| arrived. Apparently I complained too late and they 'have
| no shipping info' - might do an ask HN about it and try
| my best at a writeup.
| imgabe wrote:
| Amazon is the store. The manufacturer handles warranties.
| If your Samsung TV breaks you don't complain to Wal-Mart,
| you complain to Samsung.
| tomrod wrote:
| Walmart has return merchandising agreements with
| suppliers.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If your Samsung TV breaks you don't complain to Wal-
| Mart, you complain to Samsung.
|
| WTF, here in Germany (or rather Europe as a whole) it is
| the other way around for the mandatory 2 years - if
| something happens, you return the item where you bought
| it and the seller is completely responsible for dealing
| with everything, and on the hook for delivering you a
| working item.
|
| Only after these two years expire and you have an
| "extended warranty" in place you have to deal with the
| manufacturer.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Britain had and still has compatible laws, so I can link
| to a good summary in English for Americans etc:
|
| https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-
| rights/regulation/consumer-...
| Fnoord wrote:
| In my experience: first 2 or 3 months you can send it back
| np. After 2 years they say your warranty is forfeit. Which
| isn't true if you can reasonably expect the product to last
| longer (if it is an expensive one). In my case the battery
| was damaged due to bogus firmware update and they refused
| to deal with it, citing warranty with seller is exhausted
| (untrue). They said I should go to the manufacturer
| instead. I got "lucky" there: they couldn't repair it and
| replacement would take 3 months so they proposed sending me
| a newer revision for an extra price of a little bit over
| 100 EUR. Result is I will actively buy the product
| elsewhere if it is an expensive one.
| andirk wrote:
| That is so genius: Completely handle all immediate issues
| which probably involve a lot of idiot user error and no
| issue on the hardware, and then completely drop fools
| after 30 days! You only have to deal with the issues that
| aren't actually issues!
| teeray wrote:
| The shipping is huge. I'm so much more inclined to purchase
| something that's FBA rather than wait for some seller to see
| the notification that a sale was made, drive back from the
| lake house because it's the weekend, pack up the item on
| Monday sometime, then finally drive it to the post office on
| Tuesday.
| dageshi wrote:
| All the customers are there and the company has perhaps spent
| more time than any other figuring out how to sell books to
| people. They're better at it than everyone else.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Not all the customers. I actively avoid Amazon since quite a
| few years back. There are literally dozens of us!
| reaperducer wrote:
| I was up early one day getting coffee, and saw that one of
| the book stores in my neighborhood had a line of about 30
| people of all ages outside waiting for it to open.
|
| I figured it was an event, and had nothing else to do, so I
| got in line, too. When the doors opened, they all scattered
| to different parts of the store. So, no author signing or
| music release. Just people who like books.
| sva_ wrote:
| > had nothing else to do, so I got in line, too
|
| Are you British by any chance?
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Well, at least he didn't ask anyone what was the event,
| which is quite proper since they had not been introduced.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Im glad you had a great experience in the bookstore.
| Unfortunately many bookstores had to close down because
| of giants like Amazon. Some will stay open but much fewer
| than before as it becomes a niche rather than a
| widespread phenomena. I fondly remember spending lots of
| time in bookstores in the 2000s, it was my favorite
| pasttime. The experience of browsing books in a bookstore
| cannot be and will never be produced by the likes of
| Amazon.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Unfortunately many bookstores had to close down because
| of giants like Amazon.
|
| At least around where I live, this wasn't a single-step
| process. What happened was that big bookstores (both
| chains and local) started pushing out the mom and pop
| indies. And then they themselves complained as Amazon in
| particular ate their lunch.
|
| I really did like going into town to do various shopping,
| in particular bookstore (new and used) browsing, once or
| twice a month. On the other hand, I can't say I hate
| instant ebook delivery or a physical copy in a day or two
| if that's what I want for some reason.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| So not much authors can do.
|
| As a consumer, I invest time and money to try buy elsewhere
| (and boycott Amazon) when I can, but it's not always easy.
| Also, I'm aware that these kind of Don Quixote boycots
| seldomly have an impact macro economically. Nevertheless, I
| keep trying...
| shever73 wrote:
| I'm the same. I haven't bought anything from Amazon in
| nearly 4 years. The top spot on my "worst companies in the
| world" list is usually tied between Amazon, Meta and
| Nestle.
|
| Macroeconomically, it probably makes precisely zero
| difference, but it makes me feel better to be supporting
| local shops.
| zilti wrote:
| Maybe in the USA, but over here, many book stores are a lot
| better at selling books (both on- and offline) than Amazon
| dageshi wrote:
| I read a lot of books. It's pretty much my main source of
| entertainment. Nobody else came up with something like
| Kindle Unlimited where you pay a flat fee and read as much
| as you want instantly. There's entire genres that only
| exist on amazon that will never appear in a bookstore.
| felurx wrote:
| You are describing a library. Those have been around for
| quite a while.
|
| Nowadays, many do have online offers where you can
| "borrow" e-books.
|
| Of course, any library's catalogue is probably smaller
| than Amazons, but they usually are quite up-to-date with
| mainstream stuff and have more than you could ever hope
| to read in any case.
|
| Plus you get to have a warm fuzzy feeling for supporting
| an institution that is really good for your local
| community :)
| dageshi wrote:
| I'd frankly rather just support the author directly.
|
| They wrote a book, I'm happy to pay for it in some manner
| and Kindle Unlimited honestly seems like the fairest
| possible solution, I as a reader aren't required to buy
| in advance, I can try it to see if I enjoy it and if I do
| the author gets paid per page read.
| tomrod wrote:
| In my areas we have puli libraries with interlinear loan.
| Being able to read for pleasure is a wonderful luxury!
| Kye wrote:
| I think I would miss PINES if I ever left Georgia. The
| nearest library is tiny, but I can have any of 10 million
| books delivered to it. And if the system doesn't have it,
| they appreciate and respond to requests.
| downut wrote:
| We moved from AZ to suburban Atlanta last year, and were
| familiar with interlibrary loan for rural libraries in
| AZ. But wow! PINES is sensational. We get books and DVDs,
| even some BluRays from all over GA. Been watching The
| Wire again, it's great.
|
| And the inventory isn't censored either. I started a
| reread of Gravity's Rainbow and that came from Carrolton
| (college town). Certain gory/raunchy murder mystery
| series come from the oddest places. Series like Game of
| Thrones. And highbrow academic stuff like Anne Hollander.
|
| Reminds me I got to log on and extend a couple of titles.
|
| But yeah, we still buy dead tree books, occasionally,
| from Amazon, but only if we want to keep them. It turns
| out PINES is great for that, too. Just put it on hold,
| review it in person, and if it's actually good, buy it.
| tomrod wrote:
| We did the same -- Sequoyah regional library has been
| really cool!
| SSLy wrote:
| > _Nobody else came up with something like Kindle
| Unlimited where you pay a flat fee and read as much as
| you want instantly_
|
| https://www.legimi.pl/
| andirk wrote:
| My friend bought a book that was literal gibberish in its
| thousands of pages. Yes he got a refund. The question still
| stands, especially among an open source community, WHY is
| Amazon the defacto? I argue let's stop that
| lwhi wrote:
| I don't think the solution is quite as simple as choosing to
| normalise selling elsewhere.
| imgabe wrote:
| You would have to normalize _buying_ elsewhere for it to make
| any difference.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| When sellers invest time and effort into making it
| comfortable to buy, there is no problem at all getting
| customers to pay on your own website, outside of Amazon or
| other platforms like Booking.com or what have you.
|
| However, most sellers have a hostile attitude towards their
| own customers, whether the seller is a business or
| individual. They won't make a decent webpage, they won't make
| an acceptable and smooth buying experience, and they won't
| match price or give a better price than the platforms. So,
| naturally customers will go to who they trust.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly--as a customer, I would love to buy elsewhere!
| Amazon is such a shitty company and I trust their listings
| so little, that they are the store of last resort for me.
| It would be super awesome if when I wanted a product, I
| could just... go the the manufacturer's web site and buy
| it. And there should be no mark-up because there is no
| middle-men. Instead of that, one of these usually happens:
|
| 1. The manufacturer doesn't sell its own products! This is
| usually the case. Often they will helpfully list "dealers"
| where you can go find it (which all charge more than
| Amazon).
|
| 2. The manufacturer sells the product but their purchase
| and checkout experience is brutal (and/or it doesn't accept
| my desired form of payment) and I drop out of the funnel in
| frustration.
|
| 3. The manufacturer sells the product but it is
| inexplicably 25-50% more than Amazon and 50%-100% more than
| used on eBay.
|
| They might say they dislike Amazon but they seem to be
| doing everything they can to push their customers to them.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If there was another store that had all books amazon had, with
| a Kindle like experience on all possible platforms and
| e-readers, I might consider that.
|
| The only other store that I know of is Rakuten and that's by
| far a worse experience.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| For books, I always go to bookshop.org first. They pass some
| profit along to a local bookstore of your choice.
| andy99 wrote:
| I don't use amazon (although I cheat a bit because my wife
| sometimes does). But for books we use indigo.ca (in Canada)
| which has the same selection and is importantly not Amazon. Is
| there another national US online bookseller?
|
| For other stuff, I just go to the hardware store. The only real
| amazon thing I depend on is a kind of micro-fibre wipes I use
| for my glasses.
|
| It's actually mostly happened organically since amazon got so
| bad, although the last few times I used it I abandoned my cart
| trying to navigate the dark pattern of paying without buying
| prime or getting tricked into shipping fees.
| wojciii wrote:
| I'm doing something similar. Amazon is Russian propaganda
| stupid these days and I don't hate myself enough to use it
| much.
| tomrod wrote:
| ?
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Cut out the words "Russian propaganda" and the post
| you're replying to makes perfect sense.
| rolph wrote:
| i think its an attempt at ad hoc adjectivism. perjorative
| yes, maybe vaguely humourous. Russian propaganda, isnt
| exactly the most thought out attempt toward manipulating
| people. it attempts to muddy the waters, and make
| everything look like a ridiculous choice.
| wojciii wrote:
| Russian propaganda is currently the most stupid thing
| that I know of. I feel more and more stupid each time I
| read something on X written by Russians (official Kremlin
| stuff).
| vcg3rd wrote:
| >Is there another national US online bookseller?
|
| Barnes and Noble. Their Nook isn't as good, but it's an
| alternative. I also will buy books [1] direct from
| publishers, and there are still more narrowly focused sites
| like History Book Club and Christian Book Distributers.
|
| [1] I dislike using qualifiers (physical books, postal mail)
| which turn centuries-old words into phrases. If I mean e, I
| say/write e, otherwise I mean what the words always meant.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I buy my ebooks (lots of them) from the Apple iTunes book
| store.
|
| However, Apple is almost as controversial (with this
| crowd), as Amazon.
| wut42 wrote:
| Is there any good alternatives to Amazon print-on-demand ?
| perihelions wrote:
| Also available here,
|
| https://nightbeatseu.ca/works/the-sad-bastard-cookbook/
|
| https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook
|
| - _" We made it legal with Creative Commons (4.0 attribution non-
| commercial), but if you get a thrill from breaking the law, you
| can pretend it's not."_
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| I love the copyright description. Is this book full of humor
| like this?
| leetrout wrote:
| Yes. They note things like being reliably informed salt makes
| (most) things better.
| borlanco wrote:
| I would say yes. They try hard to make cooks laugh.
|
| This is one of their recipes: APOCALYPSE
| RAMEN This is basically like regular ramen soup
| but with three critical differences: - It is
| intensely chaotic, which is to say that you can pretty much
| toss anything into it and say you did it on purpose. -
| It's slightly healthier, if your depression has lifted enough
| that you want to eat something other than delicious,
| delicious chemicals. - It involves a mason jar, so you
| can feel like you're riding out the end of days in true
| hipster style. Core Ingredients & Supplies:
| - Mason jar or other heatproof receptacle. - Boiling
| water. - The only requirement here is rice noodles.
| Why? Because they cook fast. Preparation:
| - Put all ingredients in the jar. - Boil some water.
| - Pour into jar to cover ingredients. - Shake it up a
| bit (not right away, otherwise you'll burn your hands and get
| more depressed). - Let it sit for a few minutes.
| - Enjoy??? Variations: - Remember
| those takeout packets of hot sauce and soy sauce? This is a
| good time to use them. - Frozen or fresh vegetables.
| Wilted is absolutely fine here. International readers may
| call them "wilty" vegetables. Reader, you are now bilingual.
| - Any kind of spices. We particularly suggest garlic or
| ginger powder, but seriously, anything will work. - If
| you have tofu or some other protein to use, go for it.
| fsckboy wrote:
| put boiling water in a jar and then shake it up? Ouch! when
| you agitate hot water, it evaporates a lot faster, bringing
| the pressure in the jar to great heights. If your seal is
| not good, or if you open the jar scalding water can come
| shooting out onto your hands.
|
| a similar thing happens when you put boiling water in a
| blender and turn the blender on (your blender seal is not
| good) explosive results.
| digitalsin wrote:
| Please note the name of the recipe.
| dotancohen wrote:
| A playfully dangerous sounding name is no excuse for a
| recipe that could literally scald your face for life.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's a mason jar. If it's cool enough for you to hold,
| it's not going to permanently disfigure you. Plenty of
| camping recipes involve putting boiling water in pouches
| and then squeezing and shaking them.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The recipe literally says to wait until the water is no
| longer boiling hot though. Anyone can harm themselves
| cooking if they don't follow the actual recipe steps.
| cdrini wrote:
| My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content
| detector. Amazon has been flooded with low quality AI generated
| books in the past ~year, and has been removing a lot of it. My
| guess would be they're still tweaking their algorithms as folks
| generating books change their tactics. Hopefully a human will
| respond soon!
| jruohonen wrote:
| That would be my guess too. A few months back they announced a
| ML model to clean up the reviews, but I'd argue that it is a
| lost battle; there is so much human-made and now AI-made
| garbage already. A solution might be a full deletion and then a
| real identity verification for reviewers.
| wil421 wrote:
| Sometimes the merchant will switch a product with reviews
| with a different product. So it looks like it has 1,000
| reviews but in reality most reviews are for something else.
| jruohonen wrote:
| And then you have the ugly stuff; I remember reading a
| paper (cannot find it now, though) about fraud rigs through
| which people can buy fraudsters to promote their products
| and trash their competitors' products. With AI, that kind
| of stuff will surely accelerate.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> With AI, that kind of stuff will surely accelerate._
|
| It'll become another war of attrition, like other forms
| of spam & anti-spam.
| fny wrote:
| People need to purchase products to leave reviews, so I
| doubt AI will run rampant any time soon for reviews.
| gambiting wrote:
| On Amazon? That's not true - at least on Amazon UK it
| definitely isn't, just tried and it lets me write a
| review for a product I never bought without any problem.
| fny wrote:
| These reviews don't contribute to the overall rating and
| in some cases are shadow banned.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Aren't people en-masse realising that AI, for all its
| impressive bling, is a stupid blunt instrument? If you've used
| it for any amount of time you'll know this. Sure, it's a great
| time-saver, and if you use it wisely it can remove a lot of
| tedium. But if you're a developer, one thing you'll know is
| that it cannot replace developers. You still need to structure
| your whole project yourself, figure out what the data schema
| needs to look like, and direct the AI tool to do small sections
| of the work. And you should be ready to sanity check and debug
| anything it spits out. Similarly with AI image stuff, if you
| have a bunch of old black & white photos that were taken on a
| shitty camera in the 1940s, you can get it to upscale, repair,
| clean and colourize. But if any living person knows any of the
| subjects in the photographs, be ready for them to laugh their
| heads off (or get extremely angry) that grandpappy's eyes _are
| not grandpappy 's eyes_, that they have lost all family
| resemblance and look more like expertly stuck-on _googly eye
| stickers_. Also the colour palettes are wrong for the time,
| their teeth get magically straightened, their fob-watch chain
| gets turned into a rope etc. Some of these un-guided AI effects
| are as bad as their non-AI counterparts, like Affinity Photo 's
| "magic inpainting" that's supposed to let you easily paint out
| unwanted items in a photo. They look like magic when removing a
| seagull from a cloudless sky, but they'll make an absolute
| hames out of anything remotely complex. For example, removing a
| person from a busy street. Instead of inventing some plausible
| background to replace them with, it'll just auto-clone their
| surroundings into the vacuum so you end up with very obviously
| duplicated features (door handles, street signs etc). This is
| something that you would _never_ do as a photography
| professional. So can it save you a bunch of time? Sometimes.
| Can you rely on it to work without a human in the loop? You 're
| havin' a laugh!
|
| Something that _all_ AI tools need to build in is the ability
| to override their learned data and to curb their enthusiasm for
| inventing completely _wrong_ detail that was never there. While
| AI has gotten impressive, I wouldn 't trust it to do anything
| remotely important without a competent human driving it.
|
| The biggest problem with AI is that companies that adopt it
| think that they can fire a bunch of staff and let AI tools run
| amok.
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| It's blunt if youre using it for dumb shit in the same way
| that a hammer is a blunt instrument if used to break peoples
| stuff. If you are using it for highly domain specific
| knowledge its very good, whether that's protien folding,
| teaching you some arcane programming language macro, etc.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| If we have to use an analogy I think a better analogy is
| that it's blunt like a dull knife. From a ways back it
| might look sharp but zoom in and it's not. The only way any
| of the current ai appears competent in any domain is if the
| user themselves it not.
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| I think its totally the other way around actually. It
| looks blunt from afar, but when you use it on specific
| fiddly things, it does a great job. Domain experts get
| the most out of it. The average person really can't use
| it well.
|
| I do agree with you that output on non domain specific
| tasks does not stand up to scrutiny. However, I often
| have to remind people that gpt4, and chatgpt in
| particular are not really llm's functioning at peak
| performance. gpt3 was amazing before rlhf. i assume the
| ungimped gpt4 was even better. Its unfortunate because it
| has damaged the reputation of what would otherwise be
| superhuman ai, so now everyone thinks ai is just a shitty
| ghost writer for corporate safe spam.
|
| Don't get tricked.
| Hasu wrote:
| > Domain experts get the most out of it. The average
| person really can't use it well.
|
| This is the exact opposite of what research has shown so
| far. Top performers show productivity _decreases_ with
| LLM assistance, lower performers and less experienced
| users show a modest improvement. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w31161
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I reckon the midwit meme applies here.
|
| Noobs think AI is amazing.
|
| Midwits who never bothered to try to leverage it or can't
| evaluate it or just regurgitate what they hear think it's
| shit. I wager these people don't create much so they
| don't have a domain to really apply it, so they rely on
| others to report how good/bad/useful/shit it is.
|
| Then there are creators or tinkerers who've leveraged AI
| to do obviously time-saving or amazing things understand
| its power/potential and they have the receipts.
| Kye wrote:
| LLM output reminds me of the essays I had to write in
| college. They tick all the boxes in a curriculum and
| demonstrate a basic grasp on syntax, but they're hot
| garbage. Your first encounter with an editor as a
| professional or advanced hobbyist burns that away and
| reveals the foundation of your true form as a writer.
|
| LLMs are in desperate need of something that bridges that
| gap if they're to do anything more than help people cheat
| in college and annoy editors. At least for the purpose of
| producing writing for use. They're great when I want to
| scrape a web page and its links for archiving and need a
| quick wget command line.
| ghaff wrote:
| As an often writer, what I find LLMs useful for is
| creating an editable basis for
| subtopics/intro/explanatory text for something I'm
| reasonably familiar with and _could_ write certainly with
| the help of some Googling around but might take me an
| hour between various distractions. It doesn 't really
| work to structure an article for me or to create novel
| explanations/insights from e.g. data. But it does a
| decent job a lot of the time with respect to various
| necessary fleshing out.
| lupire wrote:
| You are oversimplified PP's vague language.
|
| That paper shows that AI didn't help people who already
| had the knowledge that then AI had.
|
| High skill Experts (not customer service reps) use AI to
| extend their knowledge, like using a new API.
| refulgentis wrote:
| To be fair the guy is speculating (n.b. suggest breaking that
| first chunk up, it's about a page and half in a single
| paragraph)
| rolph wrote:
| what is being called AI is nothing special its just another
| script,just like cloud is just storage on another computer.
|
| there was this mentalist act,[kreskin] as many are, the act
| was a mind reading, clarivoyant number, backed by the same
| thing "AI" does, i.e. statistical analysis, and ordering, of
| information gained while evesdropping.
| tetris11 wrote:
| > Hopefully a human will respond soon
|
| I wonder how quick the transition of HITL (Human in the loop)
| to HOOTL will be.
| michaelt wrote:
| There will always be a 'request manual review' button.
|
| It'll go to a call centre in the third world where workers
| are expected to perform a review every 5 seconds.
| jasode wrote:
| _> My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated
| content detector. _
|
| Maybe not. If you go by the screenshot of the email from Amazon
| in the Mastodon link, the book was removed for violating _"
| Community Guidelines"_ instead of the actual content of the
| book itself.
|
| This is the _" Community Guidelines"_ url in that email:
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
|
| So taking Amazon's reason at face value, it means Amazon thinks
| the author (or author's friends) manipulated the "community"
| ... i.e. such as creating fake reviews, 5 stars ratings, etc.
|
| An example of tripping the Amazon "community guidelines"
| algorithm would be something like a suspicious # of reviews
| coming from different Amazon customers but they're all from the
| same ip address.
|
| As an example of "inadvertently" setting off Amazon's community
| guidelines detector... if you're going to ask friends & family
| to leave positive reviews for your book, make sure they don't
| do it while they're all there at your house for Thanksgiving
| dinner.
|
| In the email, the author offered to take down his reviews in
| hopes that Amazon would reverse its decision.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Seems like a nice way of killing a competitor's products.
| DennisP wrote:
| Here is Amazon's policy on AI-generated content:
|
| > We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text,
| images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make
| edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-
| generated images include cover and interior images and artwork.
| You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content.
|
| https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390
|
| I personally know someone who published about a dozen AI-
| generated Kindle books before being notified of this policy,
| and none of it has been removed.
| ghaff wrote:
| That policy still seems clear as mud if you're using, say,
| generative AI within Photoshop to help design components of a
| cover design. I'm also not sure how that's really different
| from using CC or public domain imagery as part of a design.
|
| "AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text,
| images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you
| used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether
| text, images, or translations), it is considered "AI-
| generated," even if you applied substantial edits
| afterwards."
|
| My reading of that is that, if you use AI to create any image
| even in part, that's AI generated.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| WTF is the difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted.
| Seems like a very murky distinction.
| atlantic wrote:
| As we're beginning to discover in our generation, censorship is
| largely down to the individual censor, and if you're looking for
| some kind of underlying rationale, you're wasting your time.
| Censors too are sad bastards, and the one ray of dark sunshine in
| their little lives is to make others miserable.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have a feeling that this will be resolved soon.
|
| Frontpage on HN tends to bring results.
|
| I wish the authors luck, and would love to hear the resolution.
|
| For myself, I haven't brought any books on Amazon for a long
| time, but that's mostly because I dislike the Kindle app, so I
| get my books through the Apple iBooks store.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I forgot why I had a pdf of your cookbook, have you at some point
| gave this out for free?
| felurx wrote:
| It is and afaik always has been available for free
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Oh got it. Thanks!
| philistine wrote:
| For years I made book versions of the articles on my website.
| When came time to make the third volume, Amazon threw a
| massive fit that my books were reusing content!
|
| I ended up abandoning their bookmaking service for Lulu. My
| books are still for sale on Amazon, but I'm not letting them
| do anything with the printing.
| ghaff wrote:
| I ran into this with my first book on Amazon maybe a decade
| ago. I reused/refined a lot of my blog content as well as
| some material I published elsewhere. But I sent a bunch of
| links to show that it was my byline and didn't have any
| issue going forward.
| hiyer wrote:
| It's still free on itch.io
| FumblingBear wrote:
| It also made front page on HN a while back, maybe 6 months ago?
| zillanovikov wrote:
| Zilla here (one of the Sad Bastard Cookbook authors). Thanks so
| much for your support ... I'm lowkey dropping "front page of
| Hacker News" when I talk to Amazon Service reps now, in the vague
| hope they have any power to actually help me. I think I've
| reached at least one real person, but in the days of AI voice
| chat, who can tell?
|
| Many of you asked why we use Amazon as the exclusive
| printer/distributor of the print edition. Variations of this
| happened to basically every self-pub author I've met, so why
| didn't I use another platform?
|
| 1) Reach. As Ma8ee pointed out, there's literally dozens of
| people buying books online but not on Amazon. If I want readers
| to find it, I need to be on Amazon. Bonus, one of the most
| important controlling factors in new people finding your book is
| whether the Amazon promo algorithim suggests the book to them, so
| any sale off Amazon doesn't contribute to building an avalanche.
| The game's rigged, but it's the only game in town.
|
| 2) Money/quality. Last time I checked (few years back, things
| might have changed), Draft2Digital print books were bad quality.
| Ingram print books are decent quality but their calculation for
| printing fees and royalties means they usually don't pay out at
| nearly the same rate. I've not compared directly for the
| Cookbook, but for Instant Classic, it's the difference between
| making a couple dollars or a couple cents. We did it for Instant
| Classic as a service for people who despise Amazon, but the
| royalties from the Cookbook are a substantial factor in "eating"
| and "making rent" for one of the Cookbook team, so there's a
| limit to how much I want to give away the print edition of the
| Cookbook. Especially if "giving it away" involves the reader
| paying Ingram, just not us. If anyone knows a print-on-demand
| distributor who pays out enough in royalties for authors to make
| money, please respond to this.
|
| 3) Distribution. We're small fry self-pub, without a big
| publishing house behind us. I've looked around for places which
| will take us on self-pub books and distribute them, and the
| options are pretty limited. I'm convinced we'd sell in brick-and-
| mortar stores, but that's typically not an option for self-pub
| unless you approach the owner of an independent bookshop on an
| individual basis. (We approached a couple proper distributors who
| accept query letters from non-traditionally published books, but
| they focused on specific genres and we weren't the right fit.)
| Basically, if you're not traditionally published, you're looking
| at Amazon, Ingram, or Draft2Digital to print and distribute your
| books. If anyone knows of other printer/distributors which take
| self-pub books, PLEASE tell me.
|
| ETA: people are informing me that Ingram can make money, and that
| Lulu exists. I am investigating.
| wishfish wrote:
| I've had good luck with Lulu. My experience was short-runs. I
| sometimes like to make custom notebooks for myself and friends.
| But the quality was good. Lulu will print spiral fold flat
| editions. Might come in handy for a cookbook.
|
| I've also had good luck with Blurb. They do high quality
| photobooks. Which isn't what you're selling, but I'm mentioning
| them because they will offer your book for sale, print-on-
| demand, via their site. And wouldn't be surprised if they have
| a way of selling via Amazon. They wouldn't be a bad choice if
| you wanted to sell a $50+ coffee table edition of your
| cookbook. Or a bit lower for a paperback edition.
| zillanovikov wrote:
| Oh thank you, I'll look into that!
| ghaff wrote:
| I'll second both LuLu and Blurb for photo books though it's
| been quite a while since I used either. (I've usually used
| Blurb but I did go with LuLu once or twice for reasons I
| forget.)
| ilamont wrote:
| Indie publisher here. Sorry to hear about this. Among the
| numerous frustrations that publishers and sellers report when
| dealing with Amazon, automated lockouts are near the top of the
| list. Inability to get a clear explanation or knowledgeable
| human support are close behind.
|
| I always tell other publishers that Amazon's seller tech is
| like a rickety roller coaster with lots of kludged together
| components - built to go fast, but with lots of loose bits that
| rattle and sometimes cause the system to fail. Technology
| glitches, bad UI design, poor communication, and complex policy
| requirements lead to a huge support burden. Even if you can get
| a good Amazon support agent, they are not always able to
| diagnose certain problems, let alone provide a fix.
|
| The parts of the company facing small publishers and third-
| party sellers is extremely siloed, which makes things even
| worse for sellers trying to get through complex issues touching
| multiple services. Reporting something like "I can't get Amazon
| Advertising to connect with my KDP account" can lead to
| runarounds that require multiple tickets or are never solved.
|
| Regarding distribution: I don't use a distributor owing to the
| lead time required and the huge commissions involved, but a few
| I know work with IPG (https://www.ipgbook.com/). If you have a
| track record of sales, that can open the door to distribution
| and potentially help get through the Amazon problems you are
| experiencing as they have direct contacts with back-end Amazon
| staff.
| Aloha wrote:
| Had I known bout this book before it got removed, I would have
| bought a copy.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Reaching a human at Amazon is a Kafkaesque experience
|
| Material for their next book!
| ArtemZ wrote:
| Ok how do I order the book now? Why there is no website to buy it
| directly?
| juunpp wrote:
| They should re-publish is as The Sad Motherfucker's Cookbook.
| There are a lot of sad motherfuckers out there who could use some
| skill.
| OJFord wrote:
| > Amazon in all its wisdom has taken down the Sad Bastard
| Cookbook. They won't tell us why.
|
| I mean.. I assume it's right there in the title?
|
| Not that there isn't other stuff available with such words, but
| there's not _much_ , and the bar/automation might be higher for
| self-published or other 'indie' stuff? (If anyone's interested in
| jars of 300 F's to give or not, by the way...)
| ao98 wrote:
| If your first thought was "what is The Sad Bastard Cookbook",
| here's an except (and yes, totally worth fighting for :)
|
| "Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can
| manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating--picking a meal,
| making it, putting it into your facehole--can feel like an
| insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our
| coping strategies. It has recipes to make when you've worked a
| 16-hour day, when you can't stop crying and you don't know why,
| when you accidentally woke up an Eldritch abomination at the
| bottom of the ocean. But most of all, this cookbook exists to
| help Sad Bastards like us feel a little less alone at mealtimes.
|
| The Sad Bastard Cookbook is funny, realistic, and kind. It's
| vegetarian/vegan. It's a community-built project. And the e-book
| is free. It's hard to survive late capitalism and we want to
| help."
| dotancohen wrote:
| Interesting correlation, by the time I got to "when you can't
| stop crying and you don't know why" I thought to myself the
| cookbook had better be vegetarian. Is there a known correlation
| between emotional distress and vegetarianism or veganism?
| ao98 wrote:
| That's a good question (and I don't know the answer). As a
| practical matter, if you're strapped for time, having fresh
| meats on the ready isn't practical. And canned/frozen aren't
| great options.
|
| The opposite holds true for many veggies because they are
| seasonal - for big portions of the year, canned or frozen are
| the best you can get. Beans/lentils, dried or canned, etc.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > As a practical matter, if you're strapped for time,
| having fresh meats on the ready isn't practical
|
| I usually have some form of pastrami in a well sealed
| container in the refrigerator, this is one of my
| ingredients for a need-a-quick-to-prepare-meal. They last
| for weeks if properly sealed.
|
| But my point wasn't really about the fitness of the
| specific ingredients, rather, why would I associate those
| with emotional distress with vegetarians? My wife and
| daughter are vegetarians and I have no negative
| associations with that lifestyle. But looking back, many
| emotionally distressed people that I've met have been
| vegetarians I think, thought I do not imply that the
| association also goes the other way.
|
| I wonder if there have been studies on correlations - I
| should not have been able to predict that.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > As a practical matter, if you're strapped for time,
| having fresh meats on the ready isn't practical. And
| canned/frozen aren't great options.
|
| At least where I live, you can get excellent quality canned
| soup with meat, like goulash or chicken noodle soup.
|
| Also, cured meats like salami or prosciutto have long shelf
| life in the fridge and are excellent for throwing together
| quick pasta recipes. Cook pasta, slice a little salami, fry
| salami in the pan with some oil, maybe add some chili
| flakes or garlic or fennel seeds, put the al dente pasta
| and a splash of pasta water in the frying pan, cook for two
| minutes more, done.
|
| Also raw eggs last more than a month in the fridge. Hard
| cheese lasts indefinitely if packaged well. Dry cured slab
| bacon is good for at least a month. And so on.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Is there a known correlation between emotional distress
| and vegetarianism or veganism?_
|
| Apparently yes [1][2].
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36045075/
|
| [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63910-y
| dotancohen wrote:
| That is amazing, I thought that I should not be able to
| predict that. Thank you.
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