This is a fascinating view to me. What exactly do you think it's cheating? The physical experience is different maybe, but take a 100 people reading and they'll have a different physical experience in the process of reading. Are some of them cheating?
If you consider a book as an information delivery system or "experience" delivery system, the information and experience is delivered in both formats?
What are you ranking a book on that audiobooks "cheat"?
(This is a genuine question, this topic fascinates me and I'm interested in people's views on it. I've been an audiobook reader a long time, but find the idea that "audiobooks are the same as reading" just as weird as the idea "audiobooks are a lesser / invalid reading".)
>Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.
There's a good planet money episode about the economy of gyms. Many really want members, not users. But members who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for a slice of pizza...
If there's nothing on netflix people will cancel netflix. So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much.
There were people who only had HBO subscriptions to watch the new season of Westworld. Given they merged with Cinemax I’m not sure if that worked out for them. But there were also Apple+ subscriptions just to watch Ted Lasso. And I begrudgingly got Prime to watch the Expanse.
But when I bought the full seasons it was from Apple. I’m sure Bezos still ended up with most of that money but at least some of it went to Apple instead.
> So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much.
No, that's not what the strategy is and they're quite open about it - the strategy is to maximize user consumption for every user, because that keeps them subscribed. I think a lot of people think that they use sophisticated analytics and machine learning etc to decide what to greenlight, but they don't. They use the judgment (and politics, and egos) of Hollywood studio executives (and often the same Hollywood execs that a few years ago were employed in "legacy" media). Although I will grant that they've been innovative in producing/distributing international content, this is really just globalization and labor arbitrage (it is cheaper produce content not in Hollywood, that's not news - they just spend the extra $$$ localizing international content to different global target distribution markets but again, this flow has happened forever, it's just typically been Hollywood -> localization -> foreign market rather than foreign production -> localization -> Anglophone market).
Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time - that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic - that's why strange and seemingly random media become big hits on Netflix while being largely ignored by the commentariat, and vice versa, why series with dedicated fanbases don't get renewed (the analytics tell you that, despite the apparent success, further investment will not improve user engagement with the platform by enough to be worth the spend).
> Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time […]
Except they don't. Only Netflix has a vague reminiscence of ML/analytics-driven recommendations. The rest of streaming platforms offer anything but personalisation, which is particularly bewildering considering the financial and engineering resources available to the streaming behemoths. I do not have subscriptions for each streaming platform out there, but out of the several ones I do, Disney+ and especially Prime are the worst offenders that throw random trash either into the home screen or into the «personalisation» section, e.g. «because you have watched The Expanse, we thought you would like an NBA season / rugby World Cup» and stuff like that. You would think that obsessively clicking the «Like» button after watching something you actually liked would influence the personalisation, except it does not. Disney+, again, fills up the home screen with garbage I would never fathom could even exist.
The thing is that with the currently available technology, building a capable (it does not have to be perfect) recommendation is not that hard. At work, we almost daily design and build solutions that employ semantic similarity search / something, and with the current crop of multimodal LLM's that can generate vector embeddings with ease, it is relatively easy to build out a recommendation engine or algorithm tailored for the needs of a specific streaming platform.
Granted, specific optimisations are required and there will be unique new challenges in there; however, crafting such a solution is well within the realm of possibility. And the amount of money required is not even that high considering that many building blocks are available as mature, managed services, or creating a bespoke and tailored in-house solution does not require starting off from the clean slate by leveraging the prior art. That was not the case, say, back in 2018, but in 2025 it is a reality. For a bizarre reason that is beyond my comprehension, almost no streaming platforms do that.
> […] that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic […]
That is the aspiration and the high ideal; however, something else is going on, and it is not entirely inconceivable that the marketing department is complicit in the foul play.
To be clear, I was talking about Netflix, not Disney+. That's a completely different company with a different model and conflating the two is your mistake, not mine.
Makes sense; it's definitely the case for me. I first started my Netflix subscription many years ago, because they had Star Trek shows (and in particular, they were to have the about-to-come TNG remaster). Since then, I've seen pretty much all that I wanted there, but I keep the subscription running... because of Star Trek. If they ever drop those shows, I'll cancel.
For some reason I thought they had already dropped Star Trek when it all moved to Paramount+. That's how I watch Star Trek these days anyway. If all you watch is Star Trek it's probably worth switching, because Paramount+ is cheaper than Netflix.
Many people including doctors and health professionals apply restrictions to their diet including avoiding complex carbs or proteins, or reducing their salt or sugar intake while talking about balance diets. No complaints.
But when I decide to reduce all foods by at least 10%, lower my protein and carbs by 25%, pledge I'll remove at least 30% of metals from my diet and will be doing a 4 day fast twice a week in order to become an olympic level athlete by next year, people say I don't know what I'm doing!
How can people possibly be against nuanced thoughtful dieting yet be against my sudden do it all at once approach? It's totally inconsistent, what idiots everyone else is.
I'm not sure how a system would work that didn't auto issue the absolute maximum number of tickets possible. Random lottery to auto discard tickets? A max quota leading to a lawless time in the late evening?
But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
> But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
The plate is registered to the victim whose plate was cloned. The identity of the perpetrator who cloned the plate isn't known, so how do you issue them a citation?
> To begin with, the group that knew the story was AI-generated had a much more negative assessment of the work, rating it more harshly on dimensions like predictability, authenticity and how evocative it is. [...]
> Nonetheless, participants were ready to spend the same amount of money and time to finish reading the story whether or not it was labeled as AI.
Have they previously shown that participants willingness to spend money is actually related to "dimensions like predictability, authenticity and how evocative it is" though?
As someone who will usually finish a bad film or book just because I want to know what happens, I'd probably 'pay' to finish even if I wasn't really enjoying it. Getting bored would make me stop, but made-for-tv-christmas-movies are incredibly predictable and I'll usually end up sucked into watching one or two of those over the holidays.
onmicrosoft is "on microsoft" and is used behind the 365 company workspace. I have a onmicrosoft email for a 365 developer account, and anyone who connects to our company via teams seems to get a "{original_email}@{company}.onmicrosoft.com" ID setup, so I assume they're probably using it for things behind the scenes which also needs to void DKIM or something.
Feels like just adding a direct "don't send as paypal, apple etc" rules would probably work though.
I have a few Google home mini's and an Alexa. All have deteriorated since I bought them, becoming worse at both what they offer, and how well they understand or do what they still can.
My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead.
Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up.
Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean?
They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean?
And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong.
I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless.
But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did.
Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.
Absolute the same experience with my google home. A large majority of my interactions with it now are repeating myself to get it to understand, or yelling at it in frustration when it "doesnt know but heres what comes up in search"
As mentioned in the post FOIA tends to only include existing records/information, it doesn't extend to producing new work. So producing a new report would be considered too much work. (But fighting a lawsuit to not reveal the schema is fine )
DMY is the most common format internationally. There's a growing move (and ISO standard) for YMD but its a slow change, I think it's only North America that uses MDY.
If you consider a book as an information delivery system or "experience" delivery system, the information and experience is delivered in both formats?
What are you ranking a book on that audiobooks "cheat"?
(This is a genuine question, this topic fascinates me and I'm interested in people's views on it. I've been an audiobook reader a long time, but find the idea that "audiobooks are the same as reading" just as weird as the idea "audiobooks are a lesser / invalid reading".)
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