Decades ago, my partner used Google Voice for texting -- really handy, texts just showed up in the gmail inbox, and could be replied to from there. She didn't like cellphones, but usually carried one of the old "Kindle Keyboard" models with unlimited 3G data. The Kindle had simple web browser that could load the low-spec gmail interface, so in essence she had a fully functional SMS device, with no monthly charges.
Notification of incoming texts was the only problem. I jailbroke the thing and started trying to schedule network requests, thinking I'd add some kind of new message counter on the home screen. This proved hard. But it occurred to me that the best place for the counter would be right next to the Kindle's device name, at the top of the screen. And the device name could be updated from her Amazon account.
So I automated a web browser on the home server to log into Amazon and update the device name to "My Kindle (x)" where x was the number of unread Google Voice texts. The Kindle would update the name on the home screen in less than a minute. This worked for years!
(Eventually that Kindle was stolen. I wanted to update its name to something foul but the device disappeared from her account too quickly.)
The AT&T bill (IIRC it was all under a single account) for the 3G Kindles was eye-watering. I recall a few byte-shavings yielding something like a million dollars of savings.
I was at Amazon in a Kindle adjacent team (the lockscreen ads) starting in 2012, and I can second this sentiment. For the first couple years, there were multiple tweaks made to minimize enormous roaming bills for customers taking their US region "global unlimited free 3g" kindles to really remote parts of the world. Things like not enqueuing push downloads of books/ads if they were roaming.
How profitable was this behavior and its paid removal?
I have always felt that the default display of ads on Lock Screen cheapened the devices—-even the flagship oasis model required an additional purchase to remove the ads.
That seemed completely at odds with the premium pricing and marketing.
Also, it seemed like there was always some way to call Amazon support and make claims about location or some other detail that would make support disable the ads for free. Are you aware of those requests and manual handling?
It's been several years since I left Amazon, and nearly a decade since I worked on anything relevant to those questions, but I'll answer what I remember.
The ads were profitable enough that customers buying devices without the ads for an extra $20 didn't quite make up for it. When they started selling the smart covers for the Paperwhite (IIRC the covers launched at $50) those made them more profit than they lost from reduced ad interactions on the lockscreen. I never knew the exact number though, and could be remembering wrong on some of that. Obviously I have no idea what the numbers would be today though.
There was a backend service with an endpoint which could un-enroll a device in ads, and I know that some customers were able to get ads disabled by just complaining. You can also, even today, just pay that same $20 for removal after you already have the device (I just checked on my own device here https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices, I go into the device and there's a button that says "Remove offers").
Also, I'm not sure I quite agree with the ads being at odds with the premium pricing. I could have easily turned off ads on my personal kindles (using the aforementioned backend services) and I never bothered because I really just don't find them all that intrusive. The lockscreens you get when ads are disabled are also really boring, so I kept the ads. Recently the tradeoff has shifted slightly, with some of the garbage AI covers I've seen, so I'm not positive what decision I'd make if it were still free (to me), but it's still definitely not worth $20 to me.
I had a kindle with the unlimited roaming and it was great. I bought it at a time when I was overseas for 9 months a year, they must have eaten so many roaming fees on my behalf.
My next kindle had the ads, and I did indeed call customer service and have them remove it for no charge.
I’m very anti ad, and when my current kindle kicks the bucket, I’ll certainly be going with something else. They aren’t intrusive, but the principle is that I want to control when my time is commercialized.
Aside from all that, Amazon retail has gotten horrible logistics where I am in a medium sized Canadian town (50k people, 1.5 hours from the nearest international container port, 5 minutes from the nearest international airport). The delivery times have gotten so long over the past year that AliExpress is pretty consistently the fastest shipping.
Amazon has gone from being the first place I go shopping to the last.
I'm so glad someone else is mentioning this. Last week, on what was Wednesday July 3, I needed to order a new suitcase and I obviously went to Amazon. I'm a Prime subscriber and not a single suitable suitcase (no pun intended) could be delivered prior to the following Monday - which was too late for me, as it'd be too close a call for my trip. That had never happened to me, ever, with Amazon. They were going to be unable to deliver on any day from Wednesday to Sunday, even though I was literally in the middle of Los Angeles rather than some remote location. For the first time, I am seriously reconsidering renewing Prime. I wonder what's happening behind the scenes.
On a commercial prime account, I frequently find items that are listed as next day delivery only to get them in my cart, go through the checkout process and on the final page find that shipping will actually be 7 business days.
Every time it comes up, I am now attempting to get our company to close its Amazon account. It's not convenient or useful if I have to spend an hour navigating through constant lies in order to find the 1 product that actually ships when it says it will. I can go to a department store or office supply store and buy the things for the same cost in less time.
What I wonder is: is this by design? ie: Amazon choosing to stop subsidizing certain types of shipments etc? Or is this still, in 2024, a result of pandemic-era supply chain strain and so forth?
I think its by design. I can't imagine any other reason for Amazon to show me "Will arrive tomorrow via prime shipping" on the item page and then, only when it is in the cart showing me actual delivery being 4+ days.
I am guessing that since it is such a hassle to go back to the cart, pull the item with the false shipping dates, and then find another similar item with good shipping dates, add to cart, go through checkout, find out that shipping is actually 4+ days, rinse and repeat until you either get lucky or give up, they're probably not going to fix it because it makes them more money to keep you frustrated.
I literally said I could go and buy them from a local store for the same price and get the items faster.
The problem is, the local stores don't have net 30 terms and we don't have corporate / business accounts with them, and it would be a huge hassle to add them.
Sure. But my point is that I only want to be shown those suggestions when I choose to go to the built in, unremovable book store app on my kindle. Not when I set my device down for 10 minutes to go make a coffee, and it decides that I have been away long enough to needlessly replace the content I paid Amazon for with content that someone else is paying Amazon to show me.
Isn't it enough that I bought their device, and that I fill it with content from their store that "makes suggestions" (shows ads) when I visit it?
I still have my Kindle 3g. I love it. The battery on mine is toast right now so it's not operable. I was going to buy a new Kindle but the prime day preview in Canada doesn't show any Kindles on sale and I was hoping Amazon was going to release an oasis v2 with USB-c before I replaced this.
I might just pay $30 for another battery and stick with this Kindle keyboard.
Was wondering if anyone was going to chime in about still having this old Kindle. I still have mine and use it daily. Battery lasts 3 weeks as long as the wifi is off and the free 3G still works too. Purchased it in July 2011. I also want a new e-reader but I also want to see how long I can keep this thing going.
I have a keyboard 3G on v3.4.3 and the cell connectivity does not work anymore. It does still mention in the device info that it has 3G capability but if you try to do anything requiring a network connection it prompts you to connect to wifi. (Interestingly it also has the cell-style right triangle with five bars to indicate signal strength.)
I recall Amazon announcing a few years back that it would stop working; not sure if they pushed a firmware update, stopped paying the bill, or if 3G just isn't available anymore.
I dont think any of the providers around me still have 3g networks for it to connect to, and I know in the US amazon said they would lose connectivity in the US 2021
Yes, the connectivity should still work, but it might be limited depending on the model and the network you're trying to connect to. Some older Kindle models may have issues with newer Wi-Fi standards. It's worth giving it a try, though! You might also want to check if there are any firmware updates available for your device.
it being discontinued was exactly why I was hoping that meant a v2 coming out, with a more modern usb port. I looked at picking up an oasis but everything else I own is usb-c more or less, and I don't want to deal with a microusb port.
I think the kindle keyboard (3rd generation) was great. physical buttons for page turning. internet. a keyboard! was way ahead of its time.
I loaned my kindle keyboard to a coworker for a trip and it was stolen from them in mexico. The joke was at the time it was probably the oldest working kindle possible, so I assume the thief just took whatever was in the bag.
Later I found another kindle keyboard for $20 in a flea market but it only worked for 6 months before the battery died. I still have the body around - I wonder how much it would cost to get a replacement battery.
Oh that 'free' 3g was amazing! I was able to hobble through gmail through the browser, and even wrote a kindle-friendly Zork website so one could play text games on it allowing you to choose from a bunch of zmachine roms. Had some traction getting mentioned on a few news websites.
Oh my god! I did this too!!! I didn't have the clever Kindle name change integration but I did use a keyboard Kindle with infinite 3G to text for a while.
I still use Google Voice for texting, but only from their dedicated web page. I never heard about being able to text from Gmail. I assume this feature is gone?
Google Voice still supports texting from their web page, but the feature to text directly from Gmail was discontinued a few years ago. It was a convenient feature, but now you have to use the Google Voice app or web page for texting.
Or just maybe, 1.5 decades and "decades" are compatible when parsed by a human. Calling a story fake for that is a bit much, people just get details wrong, and that's okay
I grew up with rotary phones, and dialing (on a physical dial) really was fun.
Disassembling my first junk phone and playing with the rotary relay was even more fun.
But the best was learning to dial numbers by manually pulsing the switch on the handset cradle. Timing was tricky but luckily there was some leeway. (And it helped that phone numbers were shorter then.)
Dialing by tapping the cradle switch to produce your own pulses was very useful once upon a time - it allowed you to bypass the dial lock that some places fitted to allow incoming calls only. Some people who shall remain anonymous got quite good at it.
I guess it's time to stop searching from the url bar (sorry, "awesomebar") and create a local html file as the startup and new tab page, with search boxes for all your fav engines. Just like the good old days.
I was able to set a local file for new windows, but it looks like there's no built-in way to set a custom URL for new pages, not even in about:config (v125.0.3, Fedora). :/
I may have to simply use the URL bar with data collection opted-out, as I'd rather not bother with vetting and installing a custom open source extension to override the new tab behavior.
I found that upgrading mine with a full keypad -- including the ABCD column on the right -- did wonders for my rep. And of course a switch to toggle oscillators, so I could send red box tones.
Just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant.
The opposite process also happens, though... not just a 3- and 4-story residential buildings demolished for large residential towers (plenty of that in NYC) but single-family brownstones carved up into smaller dwelling units.
The map caption "Conversions Have Erased Some Gains in NYC's Housing Stock" would make a less deceptive headline. The map shows data from a defined timespan ("between 2010 and 2021") and shows that there's not a single community district that hasn't added housing units. The headline, meanwhile, refers to a vague "70-plus years" timeframe. That's long enough that you could probably find hundreds of buildings that have bounced between single- and multi-family several times.
And in fact the underlying research characterizes any building that was ever recorded as multifamily and currently isn't as a "loss." I fear it risks romanticizing the 20th century's cramped tenements.
(And again, just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant.)
Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here that is being lost. The second paragraph says:
"Take for example 34 E. 68th St. in Manhattan: The 1879 row house, located in the Upper East Side Historic District, once housed 17 separate apartments, according to property records. Now, it is a 9,600-square-foot single-family mansion after changing hands for $11.5 million in 2011 and a subsequent gut renovation."
1879 and an average of 565 sqft each. I don't think what those apartments were is what we want today.
As a single person living in 55 m^2 bedroon + decent kitchen + small bathroom(including waching machine) + large living room. I don't see much issue with that floor space. Probably could be even enough for two people.
It is reasonable trade to live affordably in a city.
Brian Eno developed tape-delay audio tech, released a few mobile apps, is a founder of the Long Now Foundation... not a scientist but definitely a bit science-y.
Eventually, I imagine a new licensing concept will emerge, similar to the idea of music synchronization rights -- maybe call it "training rights." It won't matter whether the text was purchased or pirated -- just like it doesn't matter now if an audio track was purchased or pirated, when it's mixed into in a movie soundtrack.
Talent agencies will negotiate training rights fees in bulk for popular content creators, who will get a small trickle of income from LLM providers, paid by a fee line-itemed into the API cost. Indie creators' training rights will be violated willy-nilly, as they are now. Large for-profit LLMs suspected or proven as training rights violators will be shamed and/or sued. Indie LLMs will go under the radar.
Is it all that different from indexing for search? That does not seem to require a license from the copyright holder under U.S. law (but other countries may treat as a separate exploitation right). If indexing for search is acceptable, then something that is intended to be more transformative should be legal as well.
(Personally, I think that even indexing for search should require permission from the copyright holder.)
>> Talent agencies will negotiate training rights fees in bulk for popular content creators
AFAICT there is no legal recognition of "training rights" or anything similar. First sale right is a thing, but even textbooks don't get extra rights for their training or educational value.
Many legal concepts used by courts has no legal recognition in the law texts. Much of legal practice are just precedents, policies, customs, and doctrines.
Parent comment mention music synchronization rights, and this concept does not exist in copyright. Court do occasionally mention it, and lawyers talks about it, but in terms of the legal recognition there is basically only the law text that define derivative work and fair use. One way to interpret it is that court has precedents to treat music synchronization as a derivative work that do not fall under fair use.
Using textbooks in training/education is not as black and white that one may assume. Take this Berkeley (https://teaching.berkeley.edu/resources/course-design/using-...). Copying in this context include using pages for slides and during lectures (which is a slightly large scope than making physical copies on physical paper). In obvious case the answer is likely obvious, but in others it will be more complex.
This is why jmkb referenced synchronization rights, which (as I recall) were invented when they seemed useful. jmkb is suggesting a new right might be created, not claiming that they already exist.
(even if it wasn’t sync rights, there was something else musically related that was created in response to technological development. wikipedia will have plenty on it)
I suspect the opposite outcome also being plausible: the LLM is viewed analogously to a blog author. The blogger/LLM may consume a book, subsequently produce "derived" output (generated text), and thus generate revenue for the blogger/LLM's employer. Consequently, the blogger/LLM's output -- while "derived" in some sense -- differs enough to be considered original work, rather than "derivative work" (like a book's film adaptation). Auditing how the blogger/LLM consumed relevant material is thus absurd.
Of course, this line of reasoning hinges on the legitimacy of an "LLM agent <-> blogger agent" type of analogy. I suspect the equivalence will become more natural as these AI agents continue to rapidly gain human-like qualities. How acceptable that perspective would be now, I have no idea.
In contrast, if the output of a blogger is legally distinct from an AI's, the consequences quickly become painful.
* A contract agency hires Anne to practice play recitals verbally with a client. Does the agency/Anne owe royalties for the material they choose? What if the agency was duped, and Anne used -- or was -- a private AI which did everything?
* How does a court determine if a black box AI contains royalty-requiring training material? Even if the primary sources of an AI's training were recorded and kosher, a sufficiently large collection of small quotes could be reconstructed into an author's story.
* What about AIs which inherit (weights, or training data generated) from other AIs of unknown training provenance? Or which were earlier trained on some materials with licenses that later changed? Or AIs that recursively trained their successors using copyrighted works which it AI reconstructed from legal sources? When do AIs become infected with illegal data?
The business of regulating learning differently depending on whether the agent uses neurons or transistors seems...fraught. Perhaps there's a robust solution for policing knowledge w.r.t silicon agents. If you have an idea, please share!
i don't understand why a new licensing regime would be necessary, the model is clearly a fair use derivative work. it does exactly what a human does -- observes information, distills it into symbolic systems of meaning, and produces novel content that exists in the same semantic universe as its experiences.
Just to be clear: this is an individual user's "diary" (blog) hosted at openstreetmap.org, not in any way an official statement from the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
And I agree with the author that the design of Bing Map Builder looks problematic. The biggest problem being that it's segregating its contributors from the general OSM population in the name of "privacy."
