Agree. I wouldn't change a thing. There are so, so many unscrambling words games. If someone just wants to casually unscramble words, they can find something more to their taste.
As implemented: There is a clear "game over". You did as well as you could; try again tomorrow. That's great. The length/difficulty gets harder as you go on, so getting to 18 is a true challenge. Also great. The letters are in the order they are in, no reshuffling. This is also great. You can't just spam reshuffle until you see it; you have to make do with what you got.
Heh, joke's on the author. I've built both a flashcard app and a notes app using AI, and I've learned more Polish in 6 months than other languages I've studied for years. Jury still out on the notes app.
But of course he's not really wrong. I've been a heavy user of Anki and a heavy reader of certain schools of academic literature on second language acquisition and knew exactly what I wanted and why and how it differed from existing tools.
The lesson I take is that you need a specific problem that you truly understand, whether it's your own problem or not.
Same here for the flash card app! I literally built this for myself after reading about spaced repetition from this amazing web comic: https://ncase.me/remember/
Then… I wanted to apply this to (beginner level) language learning. And yep you have to be disciplined to go through the cards daily, but it works.
My app is 100% free so my trick was to have users write what they need, the app generates a prompt to give to any AI provider, which in turn gives you back a JSON that will be converted into a deck.
Nothing truly ground breaking, but again it works for beginner level concepts :-)
Seriously. My experience with 15 years of home ownership is probably more like 3% per year. I don't think I've ever had even a single year where 1% was accurate.
This is a pretty niche problem compared to the every-ticket-of-every-big-show scalper problem. This affects <1% of ticket buyers. Scalpers currently affect 100%. Seems like a pretty reasonable trade-off.
Also, solvable. Everyone needs an ID that matches ticket or to be accompanied by someone with an ID that matches a ticket purchased in the same transaction (cap number of non-ID tickets per ID ticket, don't let people appearing over 30 in on a non-ID ticket). Then, when buying tickets, allow specifying a named alternate for each ID ticket in case the person can't make it.
Heck no. The world would be a way better place with no personal automobiles. Trains, yes. Even trucks and buses, sure. Cars, nooooooooooo. Cars are among the most clearly net-negative inventions to come out of industrialization. They should be criticized and fought until finally defeated. Self-driving cars are a massive waste of human and physical resources to provide a solution that is still strictly worse than proper urbanism and transportation network design.
I'm somewhere on the pro-AI spectrum (great tool, let's use it *where we've evaluated it and it's the best tool for the job*), but... 100% agree. AI is a tool and outcomes should speak for themselves. I'm not impressed by what tools you used building your thing, and "AI" is not a feature or a benefit on its own.
Indeed. "AI-enabled pointer" is misdirection. This isn't an AI-enabled pointer; it's sending screen to AI, which yes, includes pointer position. The AI doesn't live in the pointer. The AI lives, apparently, so thoroughly in the system that it can see and do anything, and the pointer is just a way of giving it context.
Facebook has a real name policy and is a prime example of internet-fueled insanity. Why does deanonymization not help Facebook be a more positive place?
To tie it to my own view, I don’t think deanonymization has any effect if the name is meaningless to 99.9% of the community. For every person fired for posts, there are 10000 others who are not.
If companies really wanted to fire people for posts, they would start with firing people for vaguely anti-capital sentiment. Not saying racist things or whatever.
We need to be careful what we ask for. Who is effectively doing the censorship matters. Powerful people are probably not going to be censoring based on 'good morals' - because they themselves do not have good morals.
> Ablation (Latin: ablatio – removal) is the removal or destruction of something from an object by vaporization, chipping, erosive processes, or by other means. Examples of ablative materials[clarification needed] are described below, including spacecraft material for ascent and atmospheric reentry, ice and snow in glaciology, biological tissues in medicine and passive fire protection materials.
The poster is saying that a case can wear out and be replaced without damage to the phone. You can let the case take all the damage, then get a new one. But if you let a phone take all the damage (even if it's a tougher phone), you can't remove that damage.
The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
Thoughts by someone who doesn’t make a living by songs?
I’m guessing you’d want to restrict lyrics to encourage more plays of the song by people who are motivated to understand them. Along with the artist’s appreciation of that experience of extracting what you’re fascinated by. Burdensome processes generate love and connection to things.
Not everything is a functional commodity to be used and discarded at whim.
One amusing part of lyrics on Spotify to me is how they don't seem to track which songs are instrumentals or not and use that to skip the message about them not knowing the lyrics. An instrumental will pop up and it will say something like "Sorry, we don't have the lyrics to this one yet".
Interesting, especially that it's a probability rather than a boolean! The line can be blurry sometimes (like in the example I mentioned), so it makes sense that it might not be possible to come up with a consistent way of classifying them that everyone would agree with.
The content industries should have been the ones to invent LLMs, but their head is so stuck in the past and in regressive thinking about how they protect their revenue streams that they're incapable of innovating. Publishing houses should have been the ones to have researchers looking into how to computationally leverage their enormous corpus of data. But instead, they put zero dollars into actual research and development and paid the lawyers instead. And so it leads to attitudes like this.
The only people seeing themselves as "content creators" are people giving social media stuff so their users get something they can doom scroll. Other people see themselves as artists, entertainers, musicians, authors, etc.
> The content industries should have been the ones to invent LLMs
While exclusively-controlled LLMs would be mildly useful to them, the technology existing is dangerous to them, and they already have a surplus supply of content at low cost that they monetize by controlling discovery, gatekeeping, and promotion, so I don't think it makes sense for them to put energy into LLMs even if they had the technical acumen to recognize the possibilities (much the same way that Google, despite leading in developing the underlying technology, had vvery little incentive to productize it since it was disruptive to their established business, until someone else already did and the choice was to compete on that or lose entirely.)
You have to get ahead of the disruption that will destroy you. At least, if you care about longevity of your company. I realize this isn't always the case.
Streaming had to compete with digital music piracy. As a result, Spotify is impossibly cheap compared to buying individual albums or singles in the past. So musicians hardly receive any money from recorded music anymore. Nowadays they basically have only concerts left as a means to earn money.
I'm pretty sure you could even have lyrics with a separate copyright from the composition itself. For example, you can clearly have lyrics without the music and you can have the composition alone in the case that it is performed as an instrumental cover or something.
I know nuance takes the fun out of most online discussions, but there's a qualitative difference between a bunch of college kids downloading mp3's on a torrent site and a $500 billion company who's goal among other things is to become the primary access point to all things digital.
Should young adults be allowed to violate copyright and no one else? The damages caused seem far worse than an LLM being able to reproduce song lyrics.
Is it simply "we like college kids" and "we hate OpenAI"? that dictates this?
A young adult who pirates, is also more likely to make purchases in that industry, and has an impact that is limited.
A corporation who pirates, is more likely to pirate en masse everything that they can get their hands on, in an ongoing manner, and throw everything they can at contesting their right to do so in court.
I think the perceived lack-of-value for them is related to how easy it is to write lyrics down, compared to any other aspect of the music. Anyone can do it within the time of the song, usually first try. Any other aspect of the song cant't just be written down from ear (yes, including the sheet music, which isn't nearly expressive enough to reproduce a performance*).
*There are some funny "play from sheet music without knowing the song" type videos out there, with funny results. YouTube/google search is no longe usable, so I can't find any.
3) Some types of data are more ethical to train on than others.
Training on Wikipedia? Cool! Training on pirated copies of books? Not cool! Training on lyrics? IMO that's on the "cool" side of the line, because the "product" is not the words, it's the composition and mastered song.
Very true. Just the other day, another “copyright is bad” post on the front page. Today its copyright is good because otherwise people might get some use of material in LLMs.
Considering this is hacker news, it seems to be such an odd dichotomy. Sometimes it feels like anti-hacker news. The halcyon days of 2010 after long gone. Now we need to apparently be angry at all tech.
LLMs are amazing and I wish they could train on anything and everything. LLMs are the smartphone to the fax machines of Google search.
> Very true. Just the other day, another “copyright is bad” post on the front page. Today its copyright is good because otherwise people might get some use of material in LLMs.
>
> Considering this is hacker news, it seems to be such an odd dichotomy. Sometimes it feels like anti-hacker news. The halcyon days of 2010 after long gone. Now we need to apparently be angry at all tech.
>
> LLMs are amazing and I wish they could train on anything and everything. LLMs are the smartphone to the fax machines of Google search.
Sorry this such a (purposefully?) naive take. In reality the thoughts are much more nuanced. For one open source/free software doesn't exist without copyright. Then there is the whole issue that these companies use vast amount of copyrighted material to train their models, arguing that all this is fair use. But on the other hand they lock their models behind walls, disallow training on them, keep the training methods and data selection secret...
This tends to be what people disagree with. It feels very much different rules for thee and me. Just imagine how outraged Sam Altman would act if someone leaked the code for Gpt5 and all the training scripts.
If we agree that copyright does not apply to llms, then it should also not apply to llms and they should be required to release all their models and the way of training them.
I think that opens several other cans of worms, but in principle I would support a solution that allows using copyrighted materials if it is for the common good (I.e the results are released fully open, means not just weights but everything else).
As a side note i am definitely not strong into IP rights, but I can see the benefits of copyright much more clearly than patents.
My point wasn't supposed to be that copyright is bad (or that it's good), just that the business logic of fighting the sharing of lyrics is incomprehensible to me.
That aside, I think there's a lot more complexity than you're presenting. The issue is who gets to benefit from what work.
As hackers, we build cool things. And our ability to build cool things comes in large part from standing on the shoulders of giants. Free and open sharing of ideas is a powerful force for human progress.
But people also have to eat. Which means even as hackers focused on building cool things, we need to get paid. We need to capture for ourselves some of the economic value of what we produce. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for what you create.
Right now, there is a great deal of hacker output the economic value of which is being captured almost exclusively by LLM vendors. And sure, the LLM is more amazing than whatever code or post or book or lyric it was trained on. And sure, the LLM value comes from the sum of the parts of its source material instead of the value of any individual source. But fundamentally the LLM couldn't exist without the source material, and yet the LLM vendor is the one who gets to eat.
The balance between free and open exchange of ideas and paying value creators a portion of the value they create is not an easy question, and it's not anti-hacker to raise it. There are places where patents and other forms of exclusive rights seem to be criminally mismanaged, stifling progress. But there's also "some random person in Nebraska" who has produced billions of dollars in value and will never see a penny of it. Choosing progress alone as the goal will systematically deprive and ultimately drive away the very people whose contributions are enabling the progress. (And of course choosing "fair" repayment alone as the goal will shut down progress and allow less "fair" players to take over... that's why this isn't easy.)
Sounds like it was never about copyright as a principle, only symbolic politics (ie. copyrights benefit megacorps? copyright needs to be weaker! copyright hurts megacorps? copyright needs to be stronger!)
It's a good decision because it must be an incredible minority of people who only listen to music when the lyrics can be displayed. I'd imagine most people aren't even looking at the music playing app while listening to music. Regardless, they are copyrighted and they get license fees from parties that do license them and they make money that way. Likely much more money than they would make from the streams they are losing from you.
I think it depends on the music. Most people will have a greatly improved experience when listening to opera if they have access to (translated) lyrics. Even if you know the language of an opera, it can be extremely difficult for a lot of people to understand the lyrics due to all the ornamentation.
I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that.
Plus, from TFA,
"GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with OpenAI on how copyright holders can be remunerated."
> I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them.
Reproducing lyrics in text form is, in fact, a problem, independent of AI. The music industry has historically been aggressively litigious in going after websites which post unlicensed song lyrics[0]. There are many arcane and bizarre copyright rules around lyrics. e.g. If you've ever watched a TV show with subtitles where there's a musical number but none of the lyrics are subtitled, you might think it was just laziness, but it's more likely the subtitlers didn't have permission to translate&subtitle the lyrics. And many songs on Spotify which you'd assume would have lyrics available, just don't, because they don't have the rights to publish them.
I'm not one of the downvoters, but it may be this: "Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them."
Record companies have in fact, for decades, been going after sites for showing lyrics. If you play guitar, for example, it's almost impossible to find chords/tabs that include the lyrics because sites get shut down for doing that.
Hmm, alright. I actually do play guitar and used to find chords/tabs with lyrics easily. I haven't been doing that for maybe 10-15 years. Anyway, maybe those sites were paying for a license and I just never considered it
> Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion?
While I do not agree with your take, FWIW I found your comment substantive and constructive.
You seem to be making two points that are both controversial:
The first is that generative AI makes the availability of lyrics more problematic, given new kinds of reuse and transformation it enables. The second is that AI companies owe something (legally or morally) to lyric rights holders, and that it is better to have some mechanism for compensation, even if the details are not ideal.
I personally do not believe that AI training is meaningfully different from traditional data analysis, which has long been accepted and rarely problematized.
While I understand that reproducing original lyrics raises copyright issues, this should only be a concern in terms of reproduction, not analysis. Example: Even if you do no data analysis at all and your random character generator publishes the lyrics of a famous Beatles song (or other forbidden numbers) by sheer coincidence, it would still be a copyright issue.
I also do not believe in selective compensation schemes driven by legal events. If a legitimate mechanism for rights holders cannot be constructed in general, it is poor policy craftsmanship to privilege the music industry specifically.
Doing so relieves the pressure to find a universal solution once powerful stakeholders are satisfied. While this might be seen as setting a useful precedent by small-scale creators, I doubt it will help them.
It's like saying that movie studios haven't gone after Netflix over movies, so what's the issue with hosting pirated movies on your own site. The reason movie studios don't go after Netflix is that they have a license to show it.
Maybe, but it's also possible to get an AI to produce a song with the exact same lyrics. And a human copying lyrics would also be a copyright issue in any case.
But anyway it seems I misinterpreted the issue and record companies have always been against reproduction of lyrics whether an AI or human is doing it
Likely because you're a "luddite" which in the current atmosphere of HN and other tech spaces, mean you have a problem with a "research institution" which has a separate for-profit enterprise face that it wears when it feels like it having free and open access to the collected works of humanity so it can create a plagiarism machine that it can then charge for people to access.
I don't respect this opinion but it is unfortunately infesting tech spaces right now.
As implemented: There is a clear "game over". You did as well as you could; try again tomorrow. That's great. The length/difficulty gets harder as you go on, so getting to 18 is a true challenge. Also great. The letters are in the order they are in, no reshuffling. This is also great. You can't just spam reshuffle until you see it; you have to make do with what you got.