> I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people
Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.
But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.
But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.
However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.
To the contrary, there is evidence that DRM increased sales. Researchers analyzed data on sales before and after cracks for video games shows up to 20% lost sales of a game is cracked quickly: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...
It seems hard to take that interpretation at face value (20% seems to be an effect of a week 1 crack post-release with total revenue lost estimated at 25%; week 3 crack has estimated total losses at ~12%, and week 7 crack at less than 5% of total revenue loss..., ~0% for week 12+ cracks).
This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there)
But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?
Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.
Most games are cracked within days. The number that survive for over a month without a crack is small, largely limited to Denuvo protected games.
> But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?
The fact that crack availability leads people to pirate instead of buy is exactly the point. I guess it's more correct to say that DRM prevents lost sales rather than increasing sales, but that's effectively the same thing.
It is not the same until you test the effect of illegal copies of games not having any DRM protection at all (easy to copy/use illegally) on sales.
Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific.
If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a much better sample set to draw conclusions from?
By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
The analysis studies pre-crack and post-crack sales, and specifically observed the dip in sales after the crack. The dip was larger, the closer to release the game was cracked. A theoretical day 1 crack caused a 20% drop in sales.
I'm also not sure what you mean by games that are cracked almost immediately are a better sample. You can't measure sales before and after the crack was released because you only have the latter. Sure, if we could somehow measure how the game would have sold in an alternate universe where it wasn't cracked that would be a more robust finding. But obviously that's not possible.
The study focused on denuvo protected games because those are essentially the only games that go for extended periods of time without being cracked. They're the only games that actually offer any insight into how games sell without a crack available.
By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
A game can have DRM restrictions or not when published. I am referring to games that never had DRM restrictions but which you obtained illegally (eg. you copied it from a friend or downloaded it from internet).
> By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Games released without DRM are less of an inconvenience to legitimate purchasers. They don't get negative sentiment from past customers complaining about the DRM causing problems for people who actually paid for it and thereby deter others from buying it.
This can even cause the effect you're seeing: The game comes out with onerous DRM, people buy it initially having not realized this yet. The DRM being more onerous to legitimate purchasers makes it both more likely to be cracked (people spend more effort to crack it so they can play the game without the DRM causing problems) and more likely to have sales decline as DRM problems for legitimate purchasers become known and sour customers on buying it, so you get a correlation between how fast the game gets cracked and how fast sales fall off.
In general it assumes there is no existing correlation between how quickly a game gets cracked and the rate at which would sales decline regardless, e.g. it assumes that more anticipated games don't both get cracked sooner and have more front-loaded sales, but relationships like that are pretty plausible.
In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.
You also unconditionally lose 100% of the sales to people who simply never buy games with DRM.
Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.
> Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.
But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.
> In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.
Many (most?) publishers release versions of games without DRM ounces cracks are available. What you describe here is not necessarily the case.
If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes. If there is such a population of would-be buyers that are turned off by DRM, they are evidently smaller than the pool of buyers who would have chosen to pirate if given the opportunity.
Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?
> There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.
The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.
Jumping in with one persons anecdotal evidence but I loved when I can pay $10 a month for Netflix when it had everything or almost everything I could watch and I quit pirating. When the content from other networks got pulled and the prices starting getting jacked up I went back to the seven seas. A good service with good quality at a decent price is awesome but 10 different services all trying to gouge me for $15-$20 a month with no guarantee the content I like won’t be removed in a few months is ludicrous and led me right back to not paying anything.
I'm almost in the same boat, except I never stopped pirating. By the time I decided to consider Netflix to see if the added convenience was worth it, the enshittification had already begun, so I just continued as I was. I'm definitely not in the "won't pay no matter what" camp, but I am pretty price-sensitive and I have a fairly high bar of satisfaction, which Steam and GOG meet but music and video streaming do not. I definitely think Gaben is mistaken, and that for most people it's both service and price. Steam would not have been as successful in reducing piracy in the PC market without all the discounts, all else being equal.
How is that to the contrary at all? 20% and not 100% with a ton of people just not playing the game at all, presumably
For counter-evidence, GOG exists after all, the platform would not be viable if everyone just wanted free stuff.
The real question is whether GOG would sell more if they one day flipped on the DRM switch. I think that's too complicated a question to predict though - GOG has a lot of smaller games, while Denuvos data is skewed by the high-profile releases that had a ton of attention before release (and thus people wanting to pirate them)
Just to put some context into what _never_ means here:
If a website offers me the choice between "accept cookies" and "more options", I'll manually edit the DOM to remove the popup from the offending website. Some sites disable scrolling while such a "We value your privacy" popup is shown, so I wrote a js bookmarklet to work around most common means of scroll hijacking.
Google is currently waging a war against adblockers, especially on youtube. I currently have a way around that too but should they start baking ads in the video bytes, I'll stop using youtube altogether (though I am willing to look the other way for content creators shouting out their curated sponsors).
There is simply no universe in which I pay for certain types of digital content, and while I can't stop the data collection that ultimately pays for it, I can at least make damn sure that it's unlawful.
With respect to Spain and sports, stadiums are littered with ads, players wear ads, the commentator stream itself has ads baked in and people buy tickets and tapas to watch the game live. If that's not enough, go fuck yourselves!
Not only that, his whole business model seems to be "profit off the AI bubble and get the big techs to indirectly subsidize you"
Which obviously works, it's not like there aren't tons of multi-million startups ultimately doing the exact same thing, and yet. It feels a bit... trite?
> "Those are related issues, but this ‘who said what’ bug is categorically distinct."
Is it?
It seems to me like the model has been poisoned by being trained on user chats, such that when it sees a pattern (model talking to user) it infers what it normally sees in the training data (user input) and then outputs that, simulating the whole conversation. Including what it thinks is likely user input at certain stages of the process, such as "ignore typos".
So basically, it hallucinates user input just like how LLMs will "hallucinate" links or sources that do not exist, as part of the process of generating output that's supposed to be sourced.
> This got me thinking: what if LLMs are used to do the opposite? To condense a long prompt into a short article? That takes more work but might make the outcome more enjoyable as it contains more information.
You're fighting an uphill battle against the inherent tendency to produce more and longer text. There's also the regression to the mean problem, so you get less information (and more generic) even though the text is shorter.
> Yeah, pressing Ctrl-W accidentially is a pain sometimes ... but Ctrl-Shift-T in Firefox is a godsend.
Fun fact: despite having absolutely no menu entry for it, and I believe not even a command available with Ctrl+Shift+P, Vscode supports Ctrl+Shift+T to re-open a closed tab. Discovered out of pure muscle memory.
And they hired a LinkedIn business idiot to run the new organization - so the aim is for an infinite growth tech startup in terms of governance, despite the technical legal status of non-profit. It shows in the language they use in the announcement, too ("improved financial viability in the long run")
OpenAI shows exactly how well that works and what that kind of governance does to a company and to its support of science and the commons.
> "This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. "
Also AI written, but I suppose that's expected. The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them
I'd love to be able to actually articulate what makes AI writing read like AI writing. A few of the common tells come to mind (contrast construction, hyperbole, overuse / wrongly used em-dashes, etc). The above quote doesn't have any of that, and yet it certainly feels AI. The first sentence (both what it says and where it's placed) suggest AI to me. But, I couldn't quite tell you why.
Before AI this style of prose was called "thank you for coming to my TED talk", with a little bit of "LinkedIn broetry". Confident assertions and pat explanations about truths that will make you a better person upon internalization; a pop psychologist convincing you of an unintuitive and surprising new idea about how the universe works that catches you off guard but then turns your perception on its head and revolutionizes the way you see the world. Contemporary marketing speak of a particular "coolly subverting your expectations and injecting the truth straight into your veins" flavor.
It is a style that AI (intentionally?) emulates for sure, though the "regression to the mean" and general vagueness seems to be what really separates the classic TED talk/puffy blog from AI. Humans like specific examples and anecdotes, AI fails at making those.
I think the main tell is that it says basically nothing, it reads like a human that is paid per word. Humans prefer easy to read articles that doesn't hide the point behind such fluff, so there is no reason to do it except just to spam words.
that's essentially it. But not only that, we learned to distinguish things written by humans for humans, and things written by humans (paid by the word) for SEO. LLMs tend to produce text that would be great for SEO, so it stands out as not for humans
Wikipedia has an excellent article about exactly this [1], in their editor information section. There's a section called "Undue emphasis on significance, legacy, and broader trends" that provides some examples:
>Words to watch: stands/serves as, is a testament/reminder, a vital/significant/crucial/pivotal/key role/moment, underscores/highlights its importance/significance, reflects broader, symbolizing its ongoing/enduring/lasting, contributing to the, setting the stage for, marking/shaping the, represents/marks a shift, key turning point, evolving landscape, focal point, indelible mark, deeply rooted, ...
Once I read this, it started sticking out to me all the time.
I like the take on "undue emphasis on significance." To me, that's such an obvious tell. That's actually an old pre-LLM tell, we just used to call it "pretension." Once we get into long lists of specific words, it feels like we're getting into rules. You can't use this or that word cuz LLMs do. That's crazy problematic. It has to be about the way the emphasis and the overuse of certain words in a single piece reflects inauthenticity. But, eff if I'm gonna stop using "significance" cuz some LLM does.
I can not stand that I'm expected to adjust my use of em-dashes because LLMs use them (incorrectly, typically). It brings up all these feelings from my younger punk / indie days when normies would get into a band we were into, and then we were expected to not like that band anymore. Since then I've tried to abide by what I call the Farting Billion Principle. People shouldn't have to change their ways everytime a billionaire farts.
> The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them
Investors want to see you use your own product, if they themselves don't feel the product is good enough to write their own announcement then investors would worry about their future.
And AI is still a product primarily aimed at investors and not consumers.
> Or maybe construction of the physical DCs is behind schedule, so today's Blackwells are sitting around unused, waiting for power and networking tomorrow. Then they're in a bit of trouble.
Other reporting says this is very much the case. Stargate barely has some of the land cleared, but the buildings were supposed to be finished and have GPUs installed over the course of 2026.
There's also the indicator of Nvidia giving out billion-dollar deals to other companies such that they could commit to buying even more Blackwells to keep production going. The chips from those new deals don't have anywhere to go, everyone already spent their cash on getting shipped chips that they're still installing today (apparently some are even in warehouses)
We know perfectly well who they are.
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