So nobody has a gambling addiction? They just fritter away all of their money, lose their houses and cars and possessions because they're fully in control?

This is true. I used to be on social media, and then about two years ago, I deleted my accounts.

I lost touch with a few hundred "friends".

But I've kept in better touch with my actual friends then before. We text, we email, we meet for lunch or coffee or whatever, and we socialize. And nobody feels compelled to take pictures to prove it actually happened.

So yes. Friend count down by 90%. Friend interaction quality up by 300%.

Nothing. That's the whole point. It's a void that does not need filling.

We managed to survive without social media before. We'll manage it again.

Your examples are physical objects, whose texts are widely-available in less-rare printings. If someone shreds a rare first-edition Lord of the Rings, they have not deprived society of the cultural heritage of the text.

I'm talking about a rare book whose contents are not available in other printings.

Honestly, the best outcome from my POV would be the bankrupting of Meta and the end of all of its products and services. Meta is a net negative for humanity.

Sadly, this is very unlikely to happen given the lobbying power of Meta and the reluctance of courts to impose a corporate death sentence.

First of all, a rare book is likely to be old and therefore out of copyright.

Secondly, there are non-destructive ways to scan books. And then if the book is out of copyright and has cultural value, Amazon can donate it to anyone who thinks it's worth preserving, or at least digitize it and give the results to the Internet Archive.

If the book is still in copyright, but LLM training is considered "fair use", then Amazon can still sell or give away the book after it has been scanned.

What part of cultural heritage was unclear?

I guess all of it.

Well, for one thing, I cancelled my Amazon account a year and a half ago, so at least I'm not helping to fund this wanton vandalism.

For another, I patronize museums and other cultural institutions, part of whose mandate is cultural preservation.

What are you doing?

Some of us think that certain things, such as preserving cultural heritage, are more important than profit.

I understand this is a foreign concept for many Americans, but there you have it.

Deleted my Amazon account two years ago. Don't miss it at all.

Nah, I think it's mutually-beneficial. If Spotify didn't have an Apple app, their revenues would decrease. And I'm only saying that free apps that get a lot of downloads should be billed extra... like maybe 200K downloads per month or so.

There's an easy fix for that. If someone distributes a free app and that app receives more than a certain (high) number of downloads per month, then charge them a fair fee for hosting the download, where that fee reflects the actual costs of hosting that app plus a small markup for Apple to get some profit.

This is defensible because Apple is recovering actual costs here. Not just piggybacking on someone's subscription service.

Look at the sales of romance novels. A lot of those are quite explicitly erotic. I think women might be more interested in reading erotic stories and men might be more interested in visuals. But there's probably a fair amount of overlap.

Mark Zuckerberg

We need AI to handle the increased volume of calls caused by more extreme weather events caused by massive energy consumption caused by AI data centers...