Bjorkbat

Reminds me of Paul Skallas (LindyMan) and his thoughts on refinement culture.

https://twitter.com/paulskallas/status/1546563161587089408 https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96...

Best way way I can think of to provide a tl;dr is that we live in a society where convergence towards the optimum is the goal. We have all this data to help us make these informed decisions. Companies (and people) feel a need, implicit or otherwise, to target the largest audience possible, which is just another way of saying that they're trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

My personal favorite example of this is how recently remodeled homes, particularly the ones that are trying to be sold, all have the same sort of grayish "trendy" minimalist interior. Odds are, they were advised to make their home look this way because it's the most broadly-appealing home interior that exists out there, supported by "the data". If you make your home look like this then you'll have more buyers, or so the logic goes.

Once you know about it though, you see it everywhere.

It's actually disillusioned me quite a bit when it comes to tech.

I feel like software developers are some of the most empowered people on the planet, and yet we continue to push and enable the dumbest crap and make the most overhyped predictions about it. I don't understand how we can be so self-deluded to look at a chatbot that has mastered the art of bullshitting and act like this is some consequential, state-of-the-art thing. To make such ridiculous predictions about the future based on the ability of this thing to sound convincing.

I genuinely hope our delusions and complete ignorance of the wider world completely destroys the illusion we've built in the public imagination. I hope this is the end of "tech" as it's widely perceived. I hope the rest of the world sees our "world" as the joke it really is. Hell, I think it's already started.

Not just toxic sites. Wildfires can really do a number on your lungs. As bad as Delhi's air pollution is, for a brief moment the air quality was worse in Portland Oregon due to a nearby wildfire.

Much as I love living out West, this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

I wouldn't be surprised if every person in Europe and every person in the Americas with European ancestry was descended from Mark Antony.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/2...

One thing I'm still struggling to predict is just how far AI art will really penetrate into society.

Namely, if you've shown this stuff off to "normal" people, you've probably noticed that their reactions are kind of mixed, most being fairly dismissive. Some might even be confused because they just sort of thought that this is how art was made on a computer in the first place. Personally, I don't think a hypothetical DALL-E 3 or even DALL-E 4 will change their minds. At a certain point a sophisticated AI art tool becomes indistinguishable from Google Search.

Indeed, part of me wonders if where this is all heading. Google Search for things that don't actually exist. Infinite Pinterest. Indeed, I think this is the most serious scenario.

I mean, think about it. Imagine what it would be like if Google search rolled out a new search engine where you paid to search for images, but you could use whatever images you found for whatever. Search for a dragon sitting on a pile of gold and you'll find a heap of dragons sitting on piles of gold in any style you could imagine which you. Download it and use it in whatever you want. Its yours now (or so they claim, you can't help but wonder if its too good to be true). That really is essentially what AI art is.

And when you put it that way, it sounds pretty underwhelming. If you're a creative director /marketer on a budget, its infinite stock photos at a price just slightly cheaper than what you were paying anyway. If you're a creative on a budget who can't draw good, it's a good-enough source of creative imagery (so many damn NFTs). If you're a small business owner, you might be able to find a logo you like after enough digging, though you might feel that you're limited by your ability to ask for what you want.

At the end of the day though, it amazes me how the smartest people in the room consistently fail to comprehend how unreliable spoken and written language are as a form of communication. It's a very slow way of communicating versus pictures and imagery. Honestly, this whole infatuation with AI makes me think that these people are trying to invent yesterday's future, the future of the 60s, one where you could talk to an "artificial brain" but the idea of a computer as a creative canvas was absolutely absurd. It feels like a strange step back. It feels very backwards to suggest that "prompt engineer" will be a future career.

I think that's why the real future of AI art probably isn't machines that make the art for you, but "magic paintbrushes".

Just because some trend feels inevitable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t oppose it. We shouldn’t be beholden to the march of technology like it’s some force of nature that we are powerless to resist.

And digital artists aren't still pretty low on your ranking?

I don't know, after all the predictions about self-driving cars, I'm cautious. Especially considering that back then, it almost seemed obvious that we'd have self-driving cars by now. Cars were certainly capable of driving themselves back in 2016, it just seemed like we needed to iron out a few kinks. How long could that possibly take?

Now, I have no idea when it'll happen.

I'm not necessarily saying that it'll take AI forever to do what humans can do. Rather, I think its very hard to make good predictions with all the hype slightly deceptive marketing.

I wouldn't discount something simply because the underlying technology has been around for decades. People said the same thing about Slack being nothing more than IRC. Didn't stop people from talking about how it was the future of work, or whatever.

For that reason, and many others, we really shouldn't ignore the amount of innovation in software and web that is largely design-oriented rather than engineering-oriented. A lot of venture-funded darlings out there are built on decades old technology, the key difference mostly being the design decisions that went into the product.

I wouldn't count on that. Sure, you can see increased productivity through farm automation, but that assumes that the farmer can afford said tools. Those that can might be able to grow more crops on less land, but they might be too preoccupied with paying the farm loan to go around buying-out their neighbors.

The end of the social networking era as we know it.

Many of the big giants from the 2000s - 2010s have pretty much peaked by now. TikTok is the thing everyone wants to be, but arguably its not a social networking app so much as a social entertainment app. You don't really connect with friends on it so much as with strangers. An endless stream of entertaining strangers. It's a lot more akin to YouTube than Instagram when you think about it.

That being said, I don't think the social networking era is completely over, its just that the focus is going to shift. After big social networking platforms come smaller communities that are probably isolated from the platform on Discord or some forum somewhere, or perhaps something new in the future. The platforms themselves won't go away, but more-and-more the dialogue will shift towards niche interests and community discovery.

Problem with these communities is that there's a very real risk that they could be "unmoored" from reality, especially if the user demographic leans towards loners. Prime example is 4chan. A lesser example would be someone on Twitter who exclusively uses it politically. I think this will only get worse over time, and possibly accelerate once AI gets involved. Using, I don't know, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, you can create a seemingly thriving "community" filled with "people" who make hilarious memes and generate thought-provoking content, culminating in whatever world you want to live in. Possibly a very hateful one.

On a positive note, I think that the internet will become a somewhat more decentralized place again. I think that with the end of the social networking era we'll also see the end of the so called "walled garden" era of the internet. Making weird websites might just become cool again. VC money will still flow into "tech", but it'll mostly be towards AI or things that are more physical such as energy, climate, biotech, space, or maybe just physical consumer goods. The race to dominate the attention of the internet will be over.

Finally, there's "the metaverse". I think a lot of companies are going to try, and fail, to build VR Disneyland when what people really want to experience is a virtual city far larger than any real world city, with public squares to meet new people at and private, intimate worlds to share with your friends. Just seems far more likely that we'll instead wind up the internet all over again, only, you know, in VR, so just the internet really. If anything, I think a company might stake its claim in this future not by trying to build a platform, but by building tools.

Mind you, this is all still a long ways off I think, but in the present there are a lot of companies building 2D metaverses, which are basically community spaces.

https://sprout.place/ https://www.gather.town/

Kind of wild to think that we have all these cities next to the Great Lakes and we're just sort of letting them decay.

This actually makes me pretty sad. For all of Facebook's ills, it did at least do a good job of keeping me connected with friends before it got weird. Same with Instagram. Twitter is fantastic because it helps me discover new people, new interests, new worlds, in a way.

TikTok doesn't feel social at all. It feels entirely too performative. Everything on there is a performance. Everything is an act. Everything is simply an effort of some kind or another. Sounds more exhausting than fun.

Really wish there was a thriving ecosystem of small online communities that had some sort of financial structure that could collectively create as much money as these larger companies do.

Instead, well, here we are.

I'm less worried about fatality and more worried about long-term health consequences.

COVID worries me, but not because it might kill me. I'm more worried about long-term brain fog and respiratory problems. I'm more worried about being permanently disabled. I'm worried about having to life a kind of life where I feel like I'm substantially less than I once was.

But back to the point, I'm curious what the odds are of getting monkeypox and never quite fully recovering from it.

He was also a very generous patron of Albuquerque's game developer community. We had some great parties at his studio downtown.

Well, if it truly is tied to cancer, I'll be sure to let Hacker News know.

Back in college I was paid $50 to wear a backpack sprayer loaded with the stuff and go nuclear on a guy's weed-infested garden. Backpack sprayers leak, so I got glyphosate all over my skin, my back in particular.

It's been a little more than 10 years, so nothing, but then again, I'm also only 32, live a fairly healthy lifestyle, and have no family history of cancer, so maybe it just sort of cancels itself out.

Incidentally my first "true indie" game was SpaceChem. I'm tempted to play it again, maybe try and beat it this time. It's a very fun game, and cheap too, if you want to play along.

Glad they got to go out on their own terms. They're such a niche game studio that I was really worried that they closing their doors because of market apathy or dissatisfaction with the status quo. This is a good ending.

I’ve been thinking of that a lot as well. What’s the point of being able to read fast if you miss the fine details? What’s the point if you read so fast that you just sort of forget everything?

One of the many issues I have with contemporary literate culture, another being those who insist on reading a large volume of books, on being “well read”, rather than focusing on quality.

To elaborate on what I mean. I think that someone will train an AI on racist literature, statistics, and rhetoric, and create an AI that is not only very racist, but very good at convincing other people to be racist. I think this will happen well before the government and institutions can preempt such a thing from happening.

This does bring up a bigger issue. What are the risks of creating AIs that could convince people on any subject one could think of?

Maybe. One prediction I have is that AI will likely find its earliest widespread use in "content" generation, and this content will be geared towards clicks and engagement rather than creating something, well, creative.

I think eventually there will be a backlash against this content because of how much it stunts human potential. It keeps you hooked, but people will also deride it for being empty, for being exceptionally "mid". People will question why such content appeals to the widest possible demographic and come up with disturbing answers, like that the AIs unintentionally discovered a lot of unsettling psychological hooks. True or not, it'll freak people out.

I haven't even scratched the surface of my worries when it comes to the unintended consequences of content AI. I for one look forward to the day someone manages to create "the world's smartest racist".

I'm tempted to say plastics, but I'm also actually kind of optimistic that either we'll engineer fungi / bacteria to decompose it, or said fungi / bacteria will evolve on its own to decompose it. We're already seeing signs of the latter.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...

For that reason my vote is on processed foods as well as foods grown "industrially", for the simple fact that we can't really support 8+ billion people without them. On an individual level, sure, you can eat whole foods and grow your own in rich soil that yields nutritionally dense vegetables if you have the means, but on a systemic level I'm not sure you can undo all the changes in our "food system" without also causing a global famine. Besides, are you really going too miss-out on a night with friends at a restaurant because they use seed oils? Is that same restaurant willing to increase their prices in order to cover the cost of using good ingredients?

So yeah, I think for now we're going to have to contend with nutritionally-poor vegetables, pesticides, herbicides, novel zoonotic diseases from animals living in cramped and unhygenic virus factories (the next pandemic is more likely to come from a pig or a chicken than a bat or a pangolin), and plant-based meat which a complex list of ingredients that most people are too lazy to personally vet.

AI/ML is a bit of a wildcard for me.

On the one hand, I’m certain many companies will be eager cut costs through automation. On the other, investors will likely grow cold if the results just can’t live up to the hype fast enough.

Albuquerque, NM is kind of rural.

It's weird, since at 500,000 people we definitely meet the definition of a big city, but culturally people behave like it's a small town. Additionally, it's feasible to live in the mountains and still live less than an hour away, or to live in one of the nearby villages (Corrales, Placitas, Tijeras) and essentially enjoy the same lifestyle as someone living in rural New Mexico despite Albuquerque being very close by.

And yeah, we have ample numbers of people who work in tech, albeit most of them are connected to the federal government in some capacity, so it's not the "trendy" kind of tech. For that reason, and perhaps also because of the age and general conservative nature of people who work for the federal government, the tech community here might come across as having less energy than a place that's a fraction the size of Albuquerque. You're more likely to find a fellow programmer through a outdoor group than a tech meetup.

I can't help but feel like this could really make a mess of things.

What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.

There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers, but for me the more pressing concern is preserving my mental health and disengaging entirely from the political conversation. Doesn't matter what side of the aisle they're on, Twitter pundits are unhinged and I want to stay out of the twisted world they inhabit. Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow. There are some powerful ideas if you know where to look.

Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.

I think a more convincing theory for me is that society abounds with "IQ shredders". Sure, we're now living in an era of abundant information, but we're also living in an era of abundant distractions and hazards.

This actually looks really interesting. I was worried that the positive reviews might be due to a right-leaning echo-chamber, but it seems like the praise crosses political lines. I'll have to check it out.

Also, so this isn't just about politics, I think astrology is...interesting.

I mean, rationally, it's hard to take it seriously. So, what, you mean to tell me that the planets, which are an unfathomable distance away from us, somehow impact human personality and how we behave? Doesn't exactly help things that the stars over our head are not the same stars as the one's over the heads of the ancient Babylonians.

And yet, once I took the time to actually look at my full star chart, I found that it described who I am to uncanny levels of accuracy.

Rationally, probably just a coincidence that my personality actually happens to align to what my personality "should" be, astrologically speaking. My alternative theory is that when enough people believe in something, that something becomes, well, "real-ish". So even if astrology is a bunch of made-up nonsense, it becomes real-enough simply because a lot of people believe in astrology.

I have to admit I didn't vote at all during that election, half because of how unlikable both candidates were.

But the other half of the reason was that I kind of figured Hilary had it in the bag. She was simply better resourced in terms of money and in terms of the groups and individuals who were supporting her. How could she not win? Especially against Trump? Sure, she made some mistakes along the way, but Trump also mocked a disabled reporter during one of his campaign appearances. One could argue that he made just as many mistakes, if not more.

I don't really think Trump had any unfair advantages one could consider substantial (if anything he had a lot of disadvantages) nor do I believe that Hilary made any mistakes that were really damaging to her campaign. Its nuts, but the most convincing explanation I can think of is the weirdest and most esoteric one.

Just can't ignore those spooky synchronicities.

And so there's still definitely a part of me that realizes that, yeah, rationally, you can't just ignore the influence of Russian interference or the flaws in modern polling. Looking back, it's obvious that we underestimated how politically motivated working-class white voters could be.

The thing about meme magic though is that there's so many spooky "synchronicities" woven throughout that I can't help but take it seriously.

Since the pandemic started I've found myself believing less-and-less in mundane, worldly explanations for things.

My favorite example is the 2016 presidential election. While there are many who would like to believe that Trump won due to Russian interference, I actually believe he won due to meme magic. A bunch of social misfits got together, sharing frog memes, while listening to Shadilay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadilay), and memed their candidate into office.

I just think that objective, material reality is less objective and less material than I thought all along.

It's my favorite way to unwind at the end of the week. Each episode feels like storytelling as it ought to be.