I'm in the US, I never experience any of the issues people complain about. Just checked and I don't have the setting disabled that that one guy talked about up thread. But I do have all notifications off. Maybe that is why?
Only if you choose to take it that way. All the names were like that to me when I joined years ago, but I just looked them up, or not, as I went and now the discourse is almost always legible. As is usually the case if you want to be part of something interesting on the internet, lurk more is the first step.
They were needlessly inflammatory, but none of that changes the fact that something requiring you to watch a 2-min video to get started does not pass the [non-inflammatory term for non-technical person but you know what I mean]-test.
I'm saying this in a jocular tone, because - otherwise - the reality is too depressing. But I know people like this.
Anyone with a large enough social group will have some people like this. These are people who've engaged in football, boxing or contact sports like rugby. Or, people with severe ADHD. Or have had some kind of traumatic brain injury. These are real users and they're my friends.
I won't switch to using your application if they're going to be left out in the cold.
If a messaging application can't be used by that person, then that's a default fail. I'm not going to expose them to it.
But you will expose them to Discord's nagging popups for random quest thingies, animated emojis, disorganised channels, etc.? It sounds like you've already decided it's a foregone conclusion.
I am not arguing from a particular desire to get your jock friends on Zulip. Like I said in another subthread, I consider Zulip to be mainly for people who want to achieve things together, not just hang out. It's a productivity app. I wouldn't recommend it as a social app. Why I'm replying is because I feel your approach to the discussion is a little... uncharitable?
They're already using discord. It's a single click.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not here to argue particulars. I'm sharing my reality as a user. A user who runs multiple communities. Including one for my friends. And my friend group extends to 2k+ people (my friends, their friends, their friend of friends... It adds up).
It's not fair that the CTE friend uses discord out of the box, but that's the power of network effects. Any competing solution needs to be 10x better to incentivise the switch.
I can setup a new discord server in a click. Versus,
Sponsorship and discounts
Contact sales@zulip.com with any questions.
Community plan eligibility
Open-source projects
Research in an academic setting
Academic conferences and other non-profit events
Many education and non-profit organizations
Communities and personal organizations (clubs, groups of friends, volunteer groups, etc.)
Respectfully, I'm not emailing your sales team to create a movie night server. Or one for class / group notes. Actual use cases. https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted
You don't need to email the sales team unless you have questions about the policy. It should be clear that "groups of friends" are eligible from the text you quoted.
You just need to spend 2 minutes filling out a brief form that's integrated in the server setup process if/when you have more than 10 users on your server. We enjoy hearing the brief notes users provide about how they are using Zulip. Is that too much to ask in exchange for reliably delivering you a service that you use every day?
It takes quite a bit longer to install a self-hosted server or configure an organization for thousands of users than to fill out the form -- I'd expect most people to spend more than 2 minutes creating a VM before they even get to running the installer. I'd expect that nicely configuring a Discord server for 2K people takes hours.
Is there something that we could change in the website that would make it obvious this is not an onerous process? The purpose of the section is to make clear that self-hosting Zulip is free for this sort of non-incorporated community use ... but we do need to have some eligibility process where you describe what you are, or it's free for Amazon too.
Not the original commenter, but I have faced similar friction from people who are not grandmas or quarterbacks. I don't particularly agree with its tone, but I agree with the original commenter's general message.
I won't be so confident to identify what it is, but there is something that causes "end users" to bristle at Zulip.
Where I'm coming from, everyone uses Slack. I spearheaded an effort to switch to Zulip because our Slack server is on a free plan and our messages get sucked into the void after 60 days now. Everyone agrees that this is bad, and that we don't have the money for Slack premium (we're an academic organization, so AFAICT we wouldn't even have to self-host to avoid paying), and yet so many people do not want to switch. Here are some common responses I've gotten:
* I refuse to use another messaging app and Slack is nonnegotiable for some of my collaborators.
* I don't want to learn a new UI.
* I don't want to learn a new UI that isn't basically the same as Slack.
* I will only switch if everyone else switches.
This is half a social problem ("I will only be receptive if everyone is using this"), but I do think there is some legitimate friction in Zulip's UI. I am fairly confident that we could successfully switch to Zulip if the Slack dissenters could be convinced to use Zulip --- or if Zulip could somehow be coerced into being more Slack-like.
As the "agent of change" at my organization, I felt like the resources Zulip provides are lacking in what I really need. Like I know there are technical details on how to move to Slack (https://zulip.com/help/moving-from-slack), but what I really need is help with the above: convincing people to try and acclimate to the UI. And yeah, I kind of agree that a 2 minute video on how to use Zulip is not the resource I need since it presupposes a degree of openness and cooperation that I don't have access to.
These are somewhat disorganized thoughts, but happy to expand upon anything if you're interested. I really do want to successfully move our org to Zulip since I'm tired of our messages disappearing.
It's not required. It's just there if you want it. Zulip is easy enough to jump into, especially if you have friends who actually care to onboard you into a community.
Adminning a Zulip for a small community group, I've actually found I have better tools to help with this. E.g. in Slack, we had constant nags to "please reply in the thread!" In Zulip, I can just move messages where they belong, and either leave the automated notes there to show where the messages went, or DM the person to let them know what I did.
The all you can eat buffet analogy makes way more sense to me, because it speaks to the aspect of it where the customer can take a lot of something without restriction. That's the critical thing with the Anthropic subscription, and the takeout analogy or delivery service don't contain any element of it.
But I didn't really ask "why do some consumers prefer not to make certain unwanted features illegal"? I asked why some consumers are so wildly positive about being forced to adopt features they hate.
Lemme example. In the weed space, I don't think anybody would take this seriously: "well it's illegal and there's nothing we can do about that so it's pointless to discuss dissenting views." Or "it's going to be legalized and there's nothing anybody can do about that, so there is no possibility of debate." People would just laugh at that.
But when it's normal consumer activity, those same arguments seem to cut ice. Why?
If they're not using the book text to train models (keeping the focus on this particular new Kindle feature), where's the room for objection? My device, my content, it's none of the author's business how I read it, in my view.
Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! Lol. In my house we still call owning a license to something that is not likely to be revoked "owning it".
Audiobook publishers require/request this when you sell subsidiary rights. We’ve been able to push back citing accessibility concerns. I find it really annoying when not available for my own reading.
Couldn’t agree more. This is actually a super useful feature. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been reading a book and some minor character resurfaces and I’m like, who the hell is that guy? Now I can know. I can also get information on historical context. Who knows, maybe I can finally read Ulysses without having to have 5 other books.
I wish it was "my device, my content" but it absolutely isn't. If you want that you have to buy from a DRM-free source, and Kindle is the absolute opposite of that.
IMHO you should be able to enjoy your books however you want. If you want to run a local AI against it, more power to you.
But my opinion doesn't matter. Only Amazon's does. That's the point I was making. The premise of "my device, my content" is flawed (because of the DRM Amazon uses) and undermines the argument.
Right, under that argument it's their content, their rules then - making this situation even more of a non issue because they're adding this feature themselves.
I suspect most of the people arguing this way would be in favor of more end user rights if we were talking about anything except the right to use AI.
“Rights good, AI bad” somehow leads to the insane argument that it’s a good thing you don’t have rights over the book you bought.
“You don’t really own the book” is a crazy argument unless the person saying this wants the locked-down DRM world where you can’t own a piece of media.
Amazon is selling digital copies (or licenses, if you like) of the books, which means they need permission from the copyright holders. This permission is likely backed by a contractual agreement that covers some details about how Amazon presents the digital copies to the end users.
(This of course wouldn't be the case if they were reselling physical books.)
Sure. But you knew what this comment was trying to say. It is obviously saying that what happens on the Kindle is between the customer and possibly Amazon, specifically that authors should not be involved. They got their money. That part of the transaction is complete. I know you realize this, it's annoying to read the constant "not your keys not your coins" reframe.
No. The author incorrectly thinks they "own" the "content" like with a physical book, which is the prerequisite for all the discussions following it. I pointed out, factually and correctly, that they don't own anything (other than the license) or have any control over anything.
"Amazon DID NOT answer PubLunch’s questions about “what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature was not answered, nor did they elaborate on the technical details of the service and any protections involved (whether to prevent against hallucinations, or to protect the text from AI training).”
Yeah, the "but what about a human" argument doesn't really work here. Scale of data matters as always. And an Ai for kindle has the scale of 20 years of literature (and more if they just scrape the internet).
> Yeah, the "but what about a human" argument doesn't really work here. Scale of data matters as always. And an Ai for kindle has the scale of 20 years of literature
I haven't seen a convincing argument why not. There's millions of librarians with the knowledge of more than 20 years of literature under their belt. Why can they answer your questions about a book but the robot can't?
Luckily we do not live in an allow-list based society where we need to ask permission for every new thing we invent. The burden is on someone to show that robot answers book questions is somehow bad, to justify outlawing it. And that has not been shown. Bringing up the ontology of humans having human rights has nothing to do with the argument at hand.
Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.
Companies like Amazon and Google have some really sticky fingers when it comes to intellectual property and personal data. I think it's worth asking these questions and holding them accountable for exploiting data that doesn't rightly belong to them.
> Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.
That's what I mean by presumptuous. If that's really what they want the answer to, and what they object to, they should ask it plainly instead of alluding to it by asserting that there's some requisite but missing entitlement for the feature to exist on its face.
Either the Clerk would have read it, because they bought it, or borrowed it from the library.
I mean they could have read it on company time as well.
However, let us not use a straw man here. Its not some company clerk, its one of the largest company on earth using other people's copy right to make more money for them selves.
The author also gets a cut of this, no? It is the author's prerogative to sell their books to be read on a Kindle and they get compensated, maybe perhaps unfairly, when I choose to buy the book. Whatever happens after that, other then copying it and sticking it on Anna's archive is basically free game as long as I'm making derivative works and making money off them. Anything short of that, I'm good.
You don’t need any rights to execute the feature. The user owns the book. The app lets the user feed the book into an LLM, as is absolutely their right, and asks questions.
1. The user doesn't own the book, the user has a revocable license to the book. Amazon has no qualms about taking away books that people have bought
2. I doubt the Kindle version of the LLM will run locally. Is Amazon repurposing the author-provided files, or will the users' device upload the text of the book?
You agree that we should own our digital content but it sounds like you don’t want this particular capability because… fuck Amazon.
I can totally understand that sentiment but I don’t think giving up end user capabilities to spite Amazon is logically aligned with wanting ownership of digital media.
> All these weird mental gymnastics to argue that users should have less rights
We probably agree more than not. But users getting more rights isn’t universally good. To finish an argument, one must consider the externalities involved.
Hasn't training been already ruled to be fair use in the recent lawsuits against Meta, Antrhopic? Ruled that works must be legally acquired, yes, but training was fair use.
> Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! Lol. In my house we still call owning a license to something that is not likely to be revoked "owning it".
The amount of people completely - and likely intentionally - missing your point is both frustrating and completely unsurprising.
A quick reminder that this is part of HN's guidelines
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There are LLM's that can process 1 million token context window. Amazon Nova 2 for one, even though it's definitely not the highest quality model. You just put whole book in context and make LLM answer questions about it. And given the fact that domain is pretty limited, you can just store KV cache for most popular books on SSD, eliminating quite a bit of cost.
If you want proper answers, yes. If you want to rely on whatever reddit or tiktok says about the book, then I guess at that point you're fine with hallucinations and others doing the thinking for you anyway. Hence the issues brought up in the article.
I wouldn't trust an LLM for anything more than the most basic questions of it didn't actually have text to cite.
> It's not training on books, but it will answer questions about the book you're reading. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
What do you mean? Presumably the implication is that it will essentially read the book (or search through it) in order to answer questions about it. An LLM can of course summarize text that's not in its training set.
"Reads the book" is the issue, yes. It's possible they aren't training. Vit to be frank, we're long past the BOTD where tech companies aren't going to attempt to traon on every little thing fed into their servers.
In the case of a novel, or even certain text books, the author relies on the reader not jumping ahead. Especially murder mysteries and those kind of genres. There are artistic reasons for that, and it can wreck the work.
In my experience, AI summaries often miss points or misrepresent work. There is a human element to reading a well written novel. An AI will miss some of the subtleties and references.
I agree but for some reason, there are people who enjoy doing that. I think they should be allowed to do as they like.
In any case, Amazon claims this feature is spoiler-free and that would be easy to implement. It likely works by feeding the book into an LLM context, and they could simply feed in the portion you've already read.
Once you've bought that food and it's on your plate, how would you feel about the farmer who grew it coming up and forcing you to eat it with a specific fork or only using approved utensils?
You don't mind having an llm owned by a megacorp lecturing you about the meaning of a book ?
"Yes this is a good question about 1984 by George Orwell, you could indeed be tempted to compare the events of this book with current authoritarianism and surveillance but I can assure you this book is a pure work of fiction and at best can only be compared to evil states such as China and Russia, rest assured that as a US citizen you are Free"
The seeming paradox reminds me of a simlar flavor one: the fact that if you accidentally knock a hole in your drywall, it's cheaper to cover it with a flat screen TV than to pay someone to fix the hole.
I suppose I don't know what kind of antics you get up to where that's an accident, but in any case you could maybe use those patch things, or you can probably buy a bit of new drywall, cut an even shape around the hole and use that as a template to cut your new drywall, insert it, and use putty to clean up the edges. Still only like $20-30 total.
Respectfully, have you ever actually repaired a hole bigger than a couple of cm, then sanded it and painted it to match the rest of the wall?
Yes,the materials and tools cost less than a TV.
What cost more than the TV are the materials, tools, and time needed to master the proper skills if you don’t already have them.
reply