This comic is no longer relevant; you can see every Game of Thrones episode in existence by visiting hbo.com, and following a very straightforward streaming sign-up process. The price of admission is cheaper than all the legal options the character tried in the comic.
I guess The Oatmeal author forgot to update their decade-old comic to reflect the current state of things.
They did manage to add an update to the bottom of the website though, which says "Please don't steal." This either contradicts the message in the comic or piracy only matters when it happens to Matthew Inman specifically.
I recommend buying actual books from local bookstores (bookshop.org can middleman) and then giving them away to a local library when you're finished with them.
Do you mean paper books? They are incredibly impractical: bulky, heavy, unsearchable...
I wrote a historical novel last year that I self-published on Amazon, on paper as well as Kindle. To my surprise, 80% of my sales are paper. It's in French, and the French are notoriously conservative, but still...
I don't care one way or the other what other people do, but for me the only time I buy paper books is if there is no electronic version, or the ebook is priced something like €15 and it's possible to find a used copy for 50 cents.
I don't think either are _incredibly_ impractical. They're both impractical in different ways to different people. The downsides of e-books are dealing with digital files, the many technological shortcomings of e-ink screens, and the e-book reader itself is a high-value item that attracts unwanted attention.
I understand some of those are hand-waived away on a Hacker Forum full of technologists, but they describe the uncanny valley of e-book reading for many book readers. Your novel's statistics don't surprise me!
I'm reading "Infinite Jest" on my still-new Kobo, and after the 50th time using the built-in dictionary to figure out what I'm seeing, this is my new favorite thing in the world.
No, I mean this literally. Children don't have any income and can't access the content as the artist intends. What they do have is lots of free time, which can be used to learn how to run piracy software. They also have not yet developed empathy, so they have no problem stealing from artists.
If the highly paid adult readers of Hacker News are pirating artists' creative works, and take offense to me pointing out that piracy is for developing brains who can't afford things, then it's a conversation they need to have with themselves, not me.
Being unable to process the argumentative positions of other human beings and factor those in to your responses when interacting with other human beings is a behavior exhibited by developing brains that can't grasp basic adult communication.
Many of the physical books I want to read are too large to hold comfortably, and have typefaces too small for me to read easily. Neither of these are problems I have with ebooks.
This is the only website I have browser zoom set up for. I've acclimated, so I just now peeked back at 100% zoom. my god... it's like the entire website is written in subscript
Sounds like a complicated moderation position to take. "Negative" and "hate" are a matter of perspective and Twitter is a global product. What meets a legal definition of "hate" in one nation is state-sponsored "religious belief" in another. Do you weigh the tweets differently based on who's looking at it?
I'm by no means a proponent of the fediverse but this is one arena it has a leg up in. Federators are free to draw their own cultural borders online rather than relying on a centralized for-profit company to draw them. (Or leave them undrawn, which has been Twitter's stance so far.)
Mighty was like compute arbitrage. The bet was that you could buy compute at cloud prices, resell it to end users, and since this is cheaper than buying consumer compute in the form of workstations, laptops, & tablets, you can pocket the difference.
I can't think of a bigger slice of consumer compute than browser workload; so if the scheme doesn't work there, it won't work for anything. My conclusion is that compute arbitrage isn't viable for B2C. You will have to actually provide a service on top of the resale. For example Github Codespaces is reselling cloud compute while simultaneously solving infra-as-code pain points in the CI/CD pipeline.
I interviewed at a very successful startup last year that was basically doing the exact same thing as mighty. But they were selling it as primarily a security advantage (since its effectively an air gap computer) with additional advantages to performance.
The product itself was basically identical to Mighty. However, because it was marketed as a Security tool, they got customers from 9 of the 10 largest world banks, several government agencies, and so forth who bought licenses for every employee due to the security advantages that having an ephemeral server in the cloud provides. The companies enjoyed that there was also a performance benefit and they could skimp on physical workstations as a secondary benefit. But the product was selling licenses by the pallet load because of the security aspect, the performance was just a bonus.
Like I said, the product was effectively identical to what Mighty was doing. I think it was even younger than Mighty and was vastly more successful due to its market positioning.
Hasn't cloud compute always been far more expensive than local hardware? I don't see any arbitrage opportunity here.
Twenty years ago VDI wanted to replace desktop PCs with VMware ($$$) running on quad-socket servers ($$$) with fibre channel SAN storage ($$$). I didn't understand the economics then and I don't today.
Which means that if Mighty survived the M1 it would have been dead anyway (probably in not more than a few months) by Azure and AWS offering it once Mighty proved the market.
Not exactly, if the market was small it wouldn’t be worth AWS’s time to provide a turnkey. Plenty of small operations provide services backed by AWS without getting eaten for that reason.
I don't think it means services+arbitrage doesn't work. They were paying (I assume) cloud VM prices, and had to charge 20-30/month. If they had lower costs and were able to charge $5/month and still make money, we might not be having this conversation right now.
Services+Arbitrage definitely works. But Mighty didn't solve a painful-enough pain point.
The arbitrage was how Mighty made money (buy a cloud VM for $10/mo and sell it for $20 with a software wrapper).
But customers need a reason to pay for it. The advantages that Mighty offered weren't significant enough to impact most people. If they did, the advantages gained were questionable IMHO. Forcing people into a whole new workflow to slightly improve client-side JS performance is probably a worse trade-off for the vast majority of people even if you ignore cost entirely. Only a small group of people are encountering this pain point enough to actually seek out a solution for it. Once that small group of people find your solution, then you have to convince them to pay $20-30 a month to remove it. People are already canceling $12/mo Netflix subscriptions. To pay double-that for better JS rendering is a tough sale.
They don't necessarily have to get it right. They just have to be geared up enough to fast follow whoever does get it right, or be an enticing M&A partner. My bellwether is how they respond to TikTok.
Now with all that said, I think there's a snowball's chance in hell that VR headsets become as ubiquitous as cell phones. It won't happen until AR. It's like TiVo and Netflix.
This is probably out of the cards for a generation. (At least in the U.S. and EU.) What Facebook fights with, they'll have to build on their own, a handicap not shared by their peers.
Exactly. Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox have shown that there is customer demand for Metaverse content. I.e., UGC in 3D.
If they execute like Microsoft with the XBOX they will succeed in the long run.
But it's a long road.
I recently talked with a concept artist about DALL-E and first thing they mentioned was "you know that's all stolen art, right?" Immediately made me think of GitHub Copilot.
However the artists being featured in DALL-E's newsletters can't stop gushing about 'the new instrument they are learning how to play' and other such metaphors that are meant to launder what's going on.
My theory is that the professions most at-risk for automation are acting on their anxieties. Must not be a lot of freelance artists on HN, and a whole lot of programmers.
I think the artists have an even clearer case. I don't think GitHub Copilot is ready to steal anyone's job yet. But DALL-E is poised to replace all formerly commissioned filler art for magazines, marketing sites, and blogs. Now the only point to hiring a human is to say you hired a human. Our filler art is farm-to-table.
Having used copilot for over a year now, it isn't there to replace programmers. It isn't called GitHub Pilot, and it doesn't do well with generating original ideas. Sure, if your job is to create sign up forms in HTML then sure, it'll do your job in a second, but if you're creating more complex systems, copilot is just there to help save you time when writing code (which is just implementing ideas).
Think of it like a set of powertools saving you time over manual tools.
Agreed. But I also understand the anxieties. I'd say a very significant % of programmers are not creating complex systems; they're coding up mostly CRUD UIs that have a great deal in common. It's getting to that inflection point where less programmers might be needed [??] ... Let's wait and see.
I first read the artist's reply as "you know all art is stolen, right" which made more sense to me. If you look at the history of art, you'd also know that it's true.
> My theory is that the professions most at-risk for automation are acting on their anxieties
That's not my problem with Copilot. I think tools and methods that can free human from some amount of work are good in a correctly organized society. They have been existing for a long time, too. They let us free time for other stuff that can't be automated. This extra free time could theoretically let us have more leisure or rest time too. I also trust myself to be able to learn another job if mine can ever be automated.
But I don't want my work to be reused under terms I don't approve of. There are some things I don't want to help with my work and this is reflected in the licenses I choose. I totally sympathize with artists who don't want their work to be reused in ways they don't like. I don't find this hard to understand. I also don't find it hard to understand that if an artist do some work that you should pay for to use is not happy with their work being reused without being paid. They should get paid a tiny bit for each generated art if theirs is in the training set, and only if they approve this use. That's would be only fair, the set would not be possible without those artists.
(Good for me, my personal code is not on GitHub for other, older, reasons)
This entire concept of AI learning using copyrighted works is going to be really tested in courts at some point, perhaps very soon, if not already.
However if the result is adequately different, I don't see how it is different from someone viewing other's work and then being "inspired" and creating something new. If you think about it the vast majority of things are built on top of existing ideas.
Quite true. Best case, we're seeing DJ Spooky style culture jamming/remixing. But more likely it is as you write.
On the other hand, the market for stock photography was already decimated by the internet. Where previously skilled photographers would create libraries of images to exemplify various terms and sell these as stock, in the last decade or so, an art director with the aid of a search engine could rapidly produce similar results.
I went on this quest recently. I wanted a small display to tuck _under_ my main widescreen monitor, so that I could have chat apps & video streaming in my periphery.
The category I ended up targeting is portable monitors aimed at the business laptop market. These are slim, have a kickstand for support, and can receive data & power over a single usb-c. Not sure about product marketing restrictions on HN so I won't say the brand. But it's a 14" portable monitor from a long-running business laptop brand.
If you want this for a non-laptop scenario, my advice would be to pay very close attention to the types & versions of connectors on the devices you're trying to connect. My gaming desktop didn't have the exact right usb-c port. That sent me into the world of 'weird' cables and lots of debugging to finally get it set up the way I want.
You can absolutely mention brands and even link to product pages.
If you're going to use an affiliate link, it is common courtesy to disclose that.
I'm interested in having a USB-C powered screen as a second monitor for my MacBook Pro, but would want it to more closely match the same resolution. 1080 just won't cut it.
Have either of you considered some kind of ipad + sidecar for that? I'm not familiar with the ipad product line but I think there are large-ish ones with high DPI.
For me I weighed the risks and decided that losing my phone and getting locked out of services with 2FA was a more realistic problem than someone compromising my password manager.
I still use 2FA when it's available because it still protects against an individual password leak.
I guess The Oatmeal author forgot to update their decade-old comic to reflect the current state of things.
They did manage to add an update to the bottom of the website though, which says "Please don't steal." This either contradicts the message in the comic or piracy only matters when it happens to Matthew Inman specifically.