keiferski

Contrarily, this business is already one trend ahead, into the future: fire your AI boss and hire a human one on demand.

https://bossasaservice.com

I meant that the medium doesn’t lock you into how others perceive you and your work. Not that mediums are interchangeable from the creator’s perspective.

I actually really like the term content creator, because it removes the artificial boundaries that come with being a writer, photographer, filmmaker, etc. and just lets you make stuff. The medium doesn't matter if you're a content creator, to a large extent.

The alternative is "art" but that comes with a lot of other baggage that often sounds unintentionally pretentious, especially if you aren't actually creating paintings/sculptures/traditional/contemporary studio art. The word creative used to serve a similar purpose, but nowadays I think it sounds both blasé and pretentious.

Yes, content does come with an expectation that you're creating things for an commercial audience; however, I think content is tied to media, and not merely any sort of created object. And so by extension you are participating in the global media sphere by making content, and not just painting for your own enjoyment.

It’s also worth pointing out that while Michelangelo did think of himself as an artist and a sculptor and painter, those professions were basically tradesmen at the time. The concept of high art, in the purely non-economic way we think of today, didn’t come for centuries after his life.

Yeah I don’t know if it is necessary “wrong,” but I am a little skeptical of the automatic assumption that disrupting tombs and putting them in museums is a good thing.

There is some educational value, of course, but it’s more just a relic of our “analyze everything, respect nothing” era.

If the past is another country, we certainly aren’t respecting the natives’ wishes.

That’s a common idea but I don’t think it holds up to scrutiny.

Putting poetry to music has a long history: see Homer, for example. And I don’t think there is much continuity between people that were writing poetry who later started writing rap. Different worlds, different audiences.

I do agree that some of the cultural desire for complex and creative language-play definitely is met in hip hop and rap, though.

Poetry has fallen out of favor in culture at large, so I think it’s more logical to expand the question to authors more generally.

In that case, I think The Great Gatsby is the most logical equivalent to the Iliad and Odyssey. To me it conveys the essential elements of the American character: obsessed with reinvention via commerce, but inevitably tied to the past. It’s also probably been read by the majority of Americans, or at least the story is well-known. Can’t say the same for Twain, Melville, etc.

For more recent authors though, I think Don DeLillo is the best chronicler of mid-late century America.

yep, and there's no reason why a company with that brand couldn't be selling action cameras, or shoes (Nike), or anything adjacent to extreme sports

Red Bull really ran the marketing playbook that GoPro should have done: become known for athletes doing extreme things. Instead they stayed too technical and product-based and didn't build a brand beyond "we make action cameras."

I think it's probably just a problem with every field. Specifically though, at least for my interests, is traditional theology: God being omnipotent, eternal, etc. causes a lot of philosophical problems, which is what Process Theology aims to address. A lot of this goes back to Plato's idea of forms, which are essentially eternal, unchanging concepts.

I can't seem to find much on the idea that certain languages are more suited to this than others. Theoretically a verb-oriented language would be better.

To me it seems like a giant philosophical project: to create a language that is process-first. It might simply be beyond the capability of humans to actually use such a language in the world, though: which is where AI might be interesting, as it doesn't have the kinds of cognitive limitations on delineations like humans do.

Pretty hard to be convinced by something if you don’t even bother to read it.

Also – you are really suggesting that the entirety of philosophy of technology field is “not very deep” …?

I rest my case.

Trying to summarize a big comment into a small one here:

I think it’s more of a deeper problem with language and reality more generally. To me it seems like species is a noun, like other nouns, but reality is ultimately a process. What is needed is a “verb-based” language for describing reality.

A lot of “process philosophers” like Whitehead, Deleuze, etc. have argued similar things.

So yeah I suppose I agree it’s ultimately a taxonomy problem, but in order to fix that I think you essentially need to reinvent language entirely. So it’s not a quick fix for biologists, it’s a systemic issue that I’m not sure really has a solution from within science itself.

I know this sort of doesn’t engage directly with your comment, but process philosophy is a personal interest and I wanted to link to the SEP, heh.

I’ll check out those books though, thanks.

It’s a debated issue, not a great embarrassment.

This article is a good guide to the topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/

Cambridge, for sure. If you can get a job at Amazon today, you'll easily be able to get it/a better one in 1-2 years with a Cambridge degree.

Bandcamp? Direct sales on their website?

I can understand the piracy argument 25 years ago, when these didn't exist. But at this point, I think there are plenty of ways to directly support artists.

It’s always really bizarre to me how pirates justify stealing creative works as some sort of culture.

The record companies were/are awful, for sure, but the solution is to support musicians directly then, not come up with elaborate justifications for your theft. I imagine most of this is done by people with secure professions that don’t worry about getting paid for their work.

When it comes to music and other art forms, the primary concern should be the creator. Not people that want to get stuff for free. And I can assure you: musicians would like to get paid for their work, and they don’t think it’s cool or fun that people just steal their stuff. The occasional super-successful artist being pro-piracy is not representative.

One of the most salient examples of this attitude is how the sub-field of the philosophy of technology is basically ignored by all technologists.

“Why should doers care what thinkers think,” you might wonder? Well, because they might have important insights that you, as a practitioner, aren’t immediately aware of.

The medical profession pays a lot of attention to bioethics and cares what philosophers think about issues like abortion, patient end-of-life rights, etc. Scientists care about the ethics of using test subjects. And so on.

But when it comes to technology and business, the attitude is just, “not my problem - there’s too much money and cool stuff to make.”

At the end of the day, there is just too much money, power, and knowledge at stake for people to stop and think seriously about the tech they’re building.

There’s a very low cost to buying bad bread: you throw it away and don’t go there again.

Connecting your business to a SaaS is very different and comes with much higher costs if you pick a bad solution.

This is only relevant at the lower end, when you don’t really care about the company you’re paying, as long as it fixes your issue.

At the high end, big companies are loathe to trust new AI-coded-looking startups. Relationships and meetings are a lot more important at that level.

I work for a SaaS and we recently had an interesting situation where we lost some smaller customers but are in the process of getting dramatically larger ones at the same time. As in, we lost some customers that were roughly 20-people companies, but gained some customers that are 100+-people companies. The ones we lost seem to have just built our solution in-house, presumably with AI helping.

Conventional wisdom would suggest the opposite: the big companies with more resources will obviously just decide to create their own internal version, whereas the small companies don’t have the time or resources to do that.

What actually seems to happen is that IMO if a team is nimble enough to copy a SaaS product internally, and doesn’t want to pay the $100-$1000 a month for your services, they’ll likely build it in house with AI.

However if the company is large enough, it’s coalesced into different departments with specific resources and plans, and ergo no one wants to give themselves a ton of new work when they can just outsource it to a SaaS and get corporate to pay for it.

Most of the new series have nothing to do with the original one, and are original stories.

A few months ago I spent an entire Saturday reading a long book (Underworld by Don DeLillo) deliberately with my phone off. I walked around, went to a restaurant, sat on a bench in the park, all with just the book. It was one of the most “grounded” days I’ve had in years, and I felt like I noticed dozens of things about the place I live that I hadn’t noticed before.

Ironically it was the exact day that the recent Iran war started. But I didn’t find out about it until late at night, when I turned my phone back on.

Technically we don’t know what Socrates actually said, we just know what Plato has him saying. Very plausible that Socrates was rambling in person, and Plato cleaned up his thoughts in the process of writing them.

Museums always have cheap postcards for sale.

I don’t think the post says this at all. It’s mostly just common sense, like “don’t tell the interviewer you just want the job for the money and the ability to live abroad.” Instead be interested in whatever the company is doing.

This seems pretty straightforward, but I guess people like OP are exposed to a lot of bad interviewees by nature of their job.

Not really. No one wants a Rolex or Omega with ChatGPT in it.

Basically anything that is a luxury good is probably safe from AI. If people are buying it for status or high performance reasons, they aren’t going to pick the low end AI slop version.

Berlin isn’t the alpha economic city in Germany though. There isn’t really one, but it’s more like Frankfurt.

Berlin has a lot of English speakers because it’s been a cool place for young people to move to from across Europe for the last few decades.

Still an “architect” though.

Philosophy undergrad here and yeah I’d say law school was the typical next step. A few medical school as well.

Aha, continental philosophy is definitely worth learning as well. I don’t share the disdain many analytic people have for continentals.

However I don’t think it’ll make you better at writing clearly, unfortunately…