I hope there’s a future where people learn about this and say “WTF they were profiling children?!”
356 karma · joined April 13, 2024
Eg. I’m glad AI built my startups landing page in (almost) one prompt, because it’s allowed me to do the hard things that matter and I enjoy.
People make simple text websites → Google comes along and indexes all websites → People can freely and easily find information! → Google slowly perverts the incentives with ads → Websites replace simple text with complex UIs and paywalls → People can no longer easily find information → OpenAI indexes all these complex websites and turns them into simple text answers → People can freely and easily find information again! → OpenAI perverts the incentives with ads → OpenAI replaces simple text with complex UIs and paywalls → People can no longer easily find information.
And so on…
Can’t believe how many of my band crushes from my iPod days were Canadian!
(For anyone that saw my comment on a similar thread, I found it!).
And also a South African indie band called The Bang, who never did much, but had such a good MySpace release of an album called Shiny.
—————— Comment from the other thread: > The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.
My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.
The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.
(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)
I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.
I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.
I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.
Affiliates, data brokers, dodgy media inventory, credit bureaus, specialised CRMs (known to be leading edge on segmentation and ROI prediction) etc. etc.
———————————————
On-Topic: “Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.”
Off-Topic: “Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.”
Rule of thumb: “If they’d cover it on TV news, it’s probably off-topic.”
Will definitely be interesting to see if this holds.
We know Cambridge Analytica weren’t afraid to subvert the core principle of democracy like that because we have documents from their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago to do the same thing, presenting not voting as an act of youth rebellion with the aim of reducing turnout among young Black Trinidadians.
(Discouraging black people from voting seems to be a theme)
Sure, as Mark says, anyone with the voter data and capital could likely create that audience and run those ads, but anyone with integrity wouldn’t. The story is not about unbelievable sophistication, it’s about using the tools Facebook provided to subvert democracy.
Mark is right that they’re nothing special. But that doesn’t dismiss them, the fact that they’re nothing special is the scary part.
Would be fun to get a midi clock going and play some chords on my piano and have my synth start jamming along with the bass and my keyboard doing some performance. Or any combination of the above.
2. Happiness is only ever available now.
3. You were never broken; that was a thought.
4. Your gut is a lifetime of data arriving before the argument.
5. Say no to almost everything; freedom lives in the unscheduled hour.
6. If your peace requires the world’s cooperation, you don’t have peace.
7. Alone time is where the self returns to itself.
8. The news is a slot machine for outrage. Unplug it.
9. Compare yourself to no one; envy is drinking poison and waiting.
10. Money won’t make you happy, but it retires the problems that made you miserable.
Also…
1. A man with no wants is already dead. He just hasn’t noticed.
2. Everything valuable in life compounds; the present is just where you make deposits.
3. Settling for yourself is the most polite form of giving up.
4. Feelings are evolution’s suggestions, not commands.
5. You can’t meditate your way out of a life that needs fixing.
6. Say yes until you’re interesting. No one regrets the adventures.
7. A brilliant life with no witnesses is a rough draft no one reads.
8. Ignorance isn’t peace, it’s just peace on credit.
9. Rivals are free personal trainers for the soul.
10. Every hour sold for money is bought from a life you don’t get back.
I don’t think it’s BSS unless there are EPs from before what’s on Spotify. It was more punk rock than BSS, I think.
From the other comment TLDR… Male singer; Something like Blockparty/ TV on The Radio, song lyric was (maybe) something about throwing away your newspaper / no bad news today
Anyway, here’s my shot: Male singer + (from other comment) It was pretty alt-grungy (something like TV on The Radio or Blockparty at the time). Lyric I remember is from a song starting with something along the lines of: throw away your newspaper/ no more bad news today.
My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.
The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.
(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)
I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.
I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.
I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.
Last year, my mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. My family largely agrees with this article: treatment was a mistake and likely worse than the disease (bar palliative care and a stent).
The headline we used in cancer education is about 38% of cancer cases are likely caused and perhaps preventable by modifiable lifestyle factors: Tabbaco, infections, alcohol, UV.
Widespread vaccination (HPV, Hep B/C etc) and precision prevention (genetic counseling and preventative interventions) add another layer of preventative opportunity, and could significantly move the needle inclusive of and beyond/above lifestyle factors.
This leaves a lot of room for change, but requires a changing of economic incentives and cultural factors: which are incredibly slow moving ships.
The next layer is early detection (pre-cancer and early cancer); and technology advancements look promising - multi-cancer blood tests like Galleri and whole-body MRI (Prenuvo, Neko, Midjourney) are scientifically and economically promising, but all commercially ahead of their time.
These two additional pots potentially provide another significant opportunity to reduce the burden where the cost-benefit on personal suffering makes sense.
I’d add as the last personal suffering cost-benefit promising intervention layer targeted immunotherapy (and perhaps to a lesser extent ADCs/smart-bombs), where many patients enjoy results without bearing equal or exceeding suffering. Though with smart bombs, the maths isn’t as convincing, and with both you’re heading into lower odds bets.
Ofcourse, many people are helped by classical chemo, but much of the time (and especially in later stages) you’re hoping to be the exception, and at this point, the population wide experience is in many cancer types net negative.
Many people pin there hopes on this last, narrow category of intervention for breakthroughs; and hopefully they come; but likely this hope, attention and capital is misplaced.
I’d highly suggest installing Dumb Phone (dp) from App Store to simplify your home into a monochromatic list, to top off this excellent guide.
My guess is that coffee shops fall into one of two categories:
1. Those in high foot traffic areas, where a no-laptop policy helps maintain turnover, or
2. Those in low foot traffic areas, where it makes sense to do everything possible to fill seats and cultivate an appealing, vibrant environment.
Most people, avoid phone calls if possible.
If I get a call and it’s an AI, I, like everybody else, is putting down.
If I’m picking up the phone to call a company, it’s because I can’t achieve what I want to on their website.
These AI phone calls are as or more limited than the website.
There is a use-case for voice AI - most of these demoes really miss the mark with “we’re going to replace your call center”.
If founders had any idea how much performance matters in a call center, and how hard it is to achieve, they’d focus on a use case better served by voice AI.
“I followed up by asking GPT-4o to draw “Explain who the enemy is”, and it generated an image with nothing except the word “SELF” in bold letters on a beige background. Odd.”
While this might have just been 4o guessing what the user wants given the prior thread obsessed with self… “Self” as the enemy is a beautiful idea common in eastern philosophy and the unexpected and odd way it’s delivered is like an allegory of a Zen master’s sudden lesson to a student.