kombookcha

I know there are communities of people dedicated to doing this with old VHS-tapes and DVDs, so I am guessing somebody is likely chipping away at CD's like this in some capacity. It would be wonderful it it could grow into something like what you're suggesting.

A major surface area for this sort of work is oddly enough on youtube - you can find truly obscure demo tapes and records digitized and uploaded there. You'd think the copyright demons would eat these videos alive, but it seems like they don't.

It's really cocky of them to do this immediately after deleting everyone's purchased movies from their accounts. Nobody should have any illusions about what "buying" a game means when they can do this at will.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/

Yeah, I think this is an unfortunate casualty of the AI age. Instead of discovering a weird fast food employee orientation CD or somebody's niche garage album from 1996 that was semi-accidentally uploaded by whoever happens to own it now, you're just getting thousands of fake songs made by bots.

It contextualizes all the strange Metaverse and VR-goggles stuff quite well. It always seemed like a weirdly forced product without any particular market fit - who is clamoring for a version of Teams where you need a bulky helmet, and can theoretically buy pretend digital land in order to have a... less useful corporate website? Who is interested in buying dorky goggles that instantly mark you as a weird creep who is probably recording everything you see?

Owning A Platform being the point instead of any actual use-case tracks perfectly with all these weird, forced pitches. These are all products for nobody.

This is an interesting angle. I had not considered how fundamentally exposed Meta is, should Apple and Google decide to break omerta.

Are they paying for the AI music, or for the human music on the platform that is now being thinned out with the AI music?

They're fine with it now, but at what does the bread taste more like sawdust than flour to these same customers? 20%? 40%? Half? 70%?

You can only deteriorate your core product so much before people start going somewhere else.

It's continually evolving, but a gold standard tell is being very punchy and listy without any semantic content whatsoever. I don't think you can really fix that without heavier human involvement, which undercuts a lot of the slop use-cases. You have to know what you want to say, or the robot will just spin its wheels - and having something to say and a way to say it is kind of the part that requires the most work, so that's not attractive if you're running a bot farm.

After many years on audible, I left because there was a deluge of AI generated works or AI voice 'readings' of (especially public domain) works on there. It's especially galling because they make up fake names for their AI voice and force me to trawl IMDB to figure out if this is a real guy who just randomly has really inappropriate tone and tempo for the passage I just heard, or if I have been scammed. Regardless, it's a clear and unacceptable deterioration of my product quality as a subscriber, so I'm off.

I don't know exactly how the incentives work for uploading shitloads of different slop readings of old novels on there, but it seemed to show no sign of slowing down.

If it wasn't worth writing for the author, it won't be worth reading for you and I. If you have a point to make, putting it into words is part of how you structure and understand it yourself. I would much rather read a point imperfectly made by a person, than a bunch of algo-noise around the fuzzy outline of a point that nobody has thought through.

If you value your finite human time and attention you have to somehow sift through the deluge of slop and the simplest, most effective filter is to immediately ditch anything that fails the slop sniff test. You are not owed readers.

'These tools will become dangerously powerful, which is why nobody should be allowed to have them except through buying them from specifically me' seems a lot like motivated reasoning to me.

It was in part this, and that when contrasting with the more common tradition of oral transmission and memorization, ancient teachers lamented that their students were not only failing to learn things by heart because they knew they could look them up in the book or notes later, but also as a consequence failing to learn the important life skill of really good memorization and contextual recall. I think this too aligns with modern education theory in that it's not just about students learning the material, but also the meta-skills they are acquiring while doing so.

It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!

As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

I used to have a coworker who could get by using her Office programs fine, but would freeze completely the moment something unexpected happened or there was an error message. She didn't really know how to find stuff independently or navigate the menus, but she had carefully memorized all the little paths and procedures she would need. She did good work with it, but any time there was an update that reshuffled some buttons she would be very distressed about it.

In hindsight I suspect she was dyslexic and having this mental map was her workaround for reading a bunch of buttons with unfamiliar words without clear contexts.

People are very good at figuring out ways to get by in their day to day and get around various personal challenges and limitations. Sometimes so good, you don't even realize they're doing it!

I recently started reading Anna Karenina, and even for me as an adult, there's a lot of people with a lot of interconnected relationships to keep track of. But I am surprised by how moving I find it - I guess I expected it to be more distant somehow, but the people really spring to life. If I'd read it as a kid, I imagine I would be relating differently to all of these very adult concerns.

One of the best gifts I ever got was when my dad plopped down a big box full of old classical adventure novels (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, King Solomon's Mines, Captains Courageous, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo type of stuff) and I devoured all of them over the course of the next year or so. I'm sure I would appreciate a lot of different things about them if I read them now, but they certainly held up in terms of being engaging in spite of them all being 100+ years old by the time I got my hands on them.

I was a precocious reading kid too, and I sometimes wonder how much I understood of all the stuff I read. I feel like I remember it decently enough, but there must have been a lot going over my head.

I believe this is common to attempt when dealing with very cold water drownings. Obviously this is a very extreme case, but I believe you'd generally be instructed on the phone to start CPR but not try to heat them up until the ambulance arrives. Just in case.

The case below had a person conscious in the water for 40 minutes (with an air pocket under the ice) before going into circulatory arrest, and then spent another 40 minutes clinically dead in under water. The combined 80 minutes in the water lowered her body temperature very dramatically, and played a large part in her almost complete recovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm

That's really interesting, thank you - do you know how this was done, like in a practical sense?

Weird! I wonder if there is some exponential complexity going on. More neural pathways leaving more stuff that can potentially break from an uneven freeze/thaw? Or is it literally that the freezing and thawing can't happen evenly when you're too big? A brief transistional period with unfrozen outsides and frozen solid insides is probably not great for you.

I always have a strong hunch that it would be vastly more efficient if they just sent me whatever the prompt was, rather than the output. If you blow 2-3 sentences of intentional information up into a verbose e-mail, you're needlessly wasting both your and my time. Just send me the 2-3 sentences of actual stuff!

Frankly it's unfair that I should bear the hangover of Past Me's drinking. I feel terrible now, and it's all that other guy's fault!

Maybe I should get some takeout, Future Me can burn it off at the gym.

JertLinc3522: the mistake was from AI agent not from Human, since it was the agent I should have refund

Expensive way to learn this lesson.

God, I had that entire Dress To Kill show loaded up on my old timey mp3-player along with Definite Article, Glorious and Sexie. Barely any room for music, but I was giggling my way through every day trying not to look too insane in public.

Izzard probably rewired my brain more than any other single comedian.

You bastards, you never told me 200 miles. 200 miles in this day and age! I don't even know where I live now!

That's my approach as well. When I try to mentally compare the cost of the subscription to the performance, I think it's extremely dubious at best.

I am convinced the people who swear by them either have very different work tasks from me, or they have very different ideas about what a job well done looks like.

I feel like everything I apply these things to sends me up a much messier and long winded route to a useable result, when compared to just doing it myself from the jump. Even the things they're ostensibly good at like sorting data comes out so messy it's practically net zero by the time you're done with quality control.

MyHouse.WAD is a genuine work of art. Anybody who is even tangentially interested in video games as an artistic medium should look into it, because it really is astounding.

The system measures other currents too, as detailed in the article. The coast of Oregon was just one of the places mentioned.

I'm guessing you need permission to go deploy a bunch of buoys off the coast of Oregon, and that permission may be difficult to obtain for foreign research projects in the current US political climate.

There is a similar app called ScreenZen that can be set up with a timer like this, or small math problems. It's exceedingly effective at breaking the loop by forcing you to do a tiny task first - you're not impeded from doing anything important, but the mindless loops get broken up.

Hey, you're right, I don't think mentats get the conditioning as part of their training. I must have misremembered Thufir having the diamond tattoo.

Young Amish typically venture out into wider society for a while to try it out for a while before returning to their community and settling into adulthood. Presumably the Amish returning now will have encountered LLMs or their output in one form or another during their journey. They're supposed to satisfy their curiosity and try a bunch of stuff, so they can make an informed choice about letting it go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa

This is a flattening of Herbert's angle - it is explicitly stated in the quoted section in the article that part of the reason for the ban is that the people who control thinking machines would exert outsized control on those who depend on them. This is a recurring theme in Dune, as we see with anxieties about dependency on mentats and Bene Gesserit truthsayers (the latter of which are in fact exerting hidden influence from their positions of trust).

Suk doctors are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh. This is a central problem in Dune: Whatever you depend on will gain power over you (or whoever controls the thing you depend on). Dependency on spice, on truthsayers, on mentats, or on thinking machines - even specific relationships. All of these are systemic vulnerabilities and therefore potential attack vectors in Dune.

(Edit: Suk Doctors get imperial conditioning, not mentats)