munificent

The elites like things the masses dislike as a way to signal their social distances from the masses. By designing a building that conforms to their elite taste at the expense of nearly everyone else who has to look at the thing, it reinforces their power and control over the space.

It's the moral equivalent of buying a beachfront property and blasting noise every morning from a giant PA system just so that everyone trying to just relax on the beach knows who is really in charge.

I suspect that says more about me as a music listener than about the overall distribution of time signatures. I'm sure there's newer stuff using 6/8 too, but I don't listen to much pop music these days.

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/12/21/rooms-and-maze...

There is a decent amount of pop music in 6/8. I always joke that it's like a hack to making a song better because 6/8 is rare enough that it makes the song sound interesting but common enough to not alienate the listener. It ends up sounding mostly like a hard swung 4/4 but then fills and some melodic lines are just a little bit more rhythmically spicy.

Some examples:

* The Doors - People are Strange

* T. Rex - Hot Love

* Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop

* Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus

* Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People

* Green Day - Longview

* Oasis - Lyla

* Blur - Parklife

* Living Things - Bom Bom Bom

* Britney Spears - Womanizer

* Goldfrapp - Strict Machine

* Feist - My Moon My Man

* Gotye - Heart's a Mess

* The Black Keys - Gold on the Ceiling

* Paul Kalkbrenner - The Grouch

Great, even less control over the things we use and more power ceded to corporations.

Yes, I do.

The goal is roughly the same: financial security, a good home, as much of a family as one cares to raise.

But for basically my entire life as a middle-aged American, there was a well-lit path to that goal:

1. Do good in high school.

2. Go to a university and get some four year degree. Obviously some degrees are duds, but basically any of them was considered a worthwhile investment.

3. Get a white collar job doing something intellectual. Make a decent salary at a stable company. Change jobs periodically as needed.

Now:

1. Doing well in high school is still important, but it is very easy for kids to get good grades using AI while not actually learning anything and not realizing they are setting themselves up for hardship.

2. College is so expensive now that determining which college and which degree is actually a sound financial investment is very hard. An 18 year-old-kid is being asked to make a financial choice with life-long consequences at a point when they have none of the expertise about their long-term goals to know what to do.

3. AI will very likely eliminate many of these jobs. People will be competing for fewer and fewer jobs and who knows what on your resume will actually help you stand out? Also, most of the blue collar jobs are already gone, either automated away (ag) or moved overseas (manufacturing).

There was also a sense in the US that even if the government wasn't great, it was at least functional and a source of relative stability run by somewhat mature adults. That is clearly no longer the case at the federal level.

People don't all commit suicide for the same reasons. Durkheim's book Suicide which in some ways created the idea of sociology itself categorizes four types of suicide.

I think a big part of the problem is that middle-aged men are at the apex of their expectations to be successful in the eyes of society, and we are living through a period of time where success is very hard to define, much less attain.

There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1]. Émile Durkheim coined it in his book Suicide, written not too long after the Industrial Revolution.

In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.

In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.

I think for a lot of men, it feels like just at the time when we should be able to rest on our laurels a bit after having worked so hard to play the game society told us to, the rules have been ripped out from under us and any sense of security going forward is lost. We feel too old to learn the new rules of the game in time to play well, but not old enough to be able to abstain from playing.

It's a psychologically very difficult time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

* Video files are absolutely huge compared to basically every other domain. Just dealing with media is not trivial in the way that we take for granted in software. It's easy to fill terabytes for a production. Just copying stuff around can be a noticeable logistics problem. People still mail hard drives.

* A lot of people working in video production are there to be artistic creators and are not very technical. They are often extremely skilled at producing beautiful work using specific tools, but they often don't have the computer fundamentals we presume.

* Unlike the software world which increasingly a small number of very large companies who can invest heavily in centralized processes and tools, the video world still has a lot of small companies.

* Margins are very narrow and many of these small businesses are barely scraping. Production gigs can be very feast-or-famine.

Put all that together, and it's not at all surprising that a lot of productions don't have the backup discipline you would expect.

If all you wanted was a reasonable facsimile of a family member, then photography made attaining that object dramatically cheaper. Prior to photography, almost all of images of people are of fabulously wealthy and powerful people because they were the only ones who could afford a skilled painter making their portrait. After photography, most people could afford a daguerreotype.

The impact on fine art is much more complex. I think probably all you can say definitively is that the timeline where photography exists produces very different fine art paintings because the incentive structure and the implications are different in a world with photos. But better or worse? Impossible to say.

This may be true. But people should also be allowed to grieve the loss of important pillars of meaning in their life.

But they are in fact full-fledged human beings living physically in the United States. They are buying groceries, paying rent, getting their haircut.

Once you realize they are fully participating economic actors, it is much less clear whether they are a net positive or negative.

Devine and their partner are very community oriented and socially connected.

Yes, I certainly do! The fact that YouTube still tries to get me to watch Shorts every few weeks is 100% a user-hostile choice. Seems like basically every app these days does that kind of shit. It makes me sad, but it's pretty clearly in the set of things I can't change, so I try to just be mindful of the serenity prayer and accept it.

I've never watched a YouTube short.

My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.

For this incentive to work, you have to only send your partner songs that you have earned through accountability. Otherwise, you can not do the thing, but still send your partner a song.

For the carrot to work, you have not also give yourself unlimited access to carrots. Which means for the most part, it still functions sort of like a stick.

You have to deprive yourself of the privilege of sending your partner a song in order to motivate yourself to earn it back.

This is the general problem with these kinds of gamification schemes. They can work, but they do require the self-discipline to not let yourself acquire the goal without doing the thing.

I think it's a lot less exhausting when it's a skill you use often. The problem is that modern society and technology allow us to solve 99% of our problems alone so those social muscles are deeply atrophied for many people.

It certainly wouldn't hurt! I think a lot about how many people in the US would be willing to be artists barely making ends meet if doing so didn't also mean losing access to healthcare.

> But, maybe those are the only two things you see because you're putting the end goal way too high... as in being a renowned novelist to take one example, instead of someone with some following.

Yeah, I agree that it's important to set your sights lower. You can be a successful novelist without being the next J.K. Rowling.

But power laws and the way word of mouth works iteratively within social media is a merciless popularity engine. The best way to get popular is to be popular. There is a positive feedback loop that consolidates most attention on a small number of winners.

You can still find your niche (my two books did!), but it's hard. And finding a niche small enough to not get dwarfed by the superstars but large enough to be a sustainable source of income is nearly impossible. Almost every creative has a day job these days.

Emile Durkeim's "Suicide" is famous in sociology because it helped kick off the entire field of study. It was, I think, one of the first works to consider how a profound individual action (suicide in this case) might be largely determined by the surrounding social structures.

I don't know what a good introductory book would be.

One semester, I took Intro to Sociology and it was a revelation. I ended up completing all of the courses required to get a minor in sociology within a couple of years. I dropped out before I ever got close to finishing my CS major.

I wish more people knew sociology. It affects our lives more directly and profoundly than possibly any other science, but it's mostly unknown by the masses.

1. The joy of the process itself. If you're a programmer, it's writing code, running it, fixing bugs, making tests pass. If you're a woodworker, it's the feel of wood sliding under your fingers, a deft hand on a chisel.

2. The satisfaction of a completed work. For a programmer, that's an app you can run and click around and see the features up and running. For a woodworker, it's a sanded finished piece of furniture sitting there in the workshop.

3. Seeing the completed work make a difference in someone's life. For a programmer, that's a user telling you how your app helped them achieve a goal. For a woodworker, it's seeing that furniture in a room, watching it accumulate the patina of use.

So much of people talking past each other about AI comes from people who care a lot about 1 and people who never really cared about 1 but care about 2. It turns out there are many programmers who never really liked programming, they just wanted to have made an app. They are delighted about AI because it lets them skip a lot of step 1 and get right to 2.

But what I think is critically missing is that for most people, step 2 is marginal. It's step 3 where most of the real joy is. An app with zero users does not get you up in the morning. A piece of furniture collecting dust in an attic is not a source of meaning.

And the core problem with AI is that it gives you 2 by burning a whole lot of 3. Yes, you can whip up your "exercise tracker for cats" app in a tiny fraction of the time. So can a million other people. Your app is going to drown in a sea of other forgotten apps. Probably none of them will be maintained and none will reach critical mass.

I've done a lot of creative work over the years and time and again, as digital technology has lowered the barrier of entry, I've watched a horde of enthusiastic new people become disillusioned when it turns out they can make things now, but it's harder than ever to actually connect those things to people because everyone else can too.

I remember when DSLRs got a million people excited about being professional photographers, but now almost none are because photos are a mostly worthless commodity. I remember when CD mixers and Serato opened the doors to a million DJs who no longer had to buy expensive vinyl and struggle with beatmatching records. Now DJ mixes are a dime a dozen and it's harder than ever to be a working DJ. Recording an album used to require a room full of very expensive gear. Now anyone with a laptop and a DAW can do it. Publishing a novel required getting one of a small number of publishers to like it enough to print a thousand copies. Now anyone can upload a PDF to Amazon and share it with the world.

What happens when the barrier of entry gets radically lowered is that it requires some other extrinsic attribute to rise above the competition. In practice, that is either being rich and connected already, or getting extremely lucky. Domains where anyone can play have the steepest power law distributions. You have a few stars that everyone wishes they were and a million people doing it in their limited spare time. Unless you're already one of the elites, it's basically a lottery.

Now that's going to happen with software development.

There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1].

In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.

In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.

It's a psychologically difficult time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie