sofal

Why is it that we still enjoy music despite not knowing how it was created? Why is it that we still enjoy visual art despite not knowing how it was created?

We can keep throwing counterexamples at each other forever. You can find an endless number of examples wherein the provenance of an activity or piece of work is important to the enjoyment of it, and I can find endless examples where the provenance is unnecessary. What will this prove?

I guess since we're not talking about art anymore, and are instead talking about the veracity of information, we can safely agree. If I read a news story, I do value that information higher to the extent I am convinced it is actually true information. If I read someone's autobiography, I do value that to the extent that I trust them and that it is coming from them. A piece of fiction, however, or music, or visual art, is something that can stand on its own and be appreciated or not without having to assume this context. The context and provenance can certainly color the appreciation, but it is no longer necessary.

Your entire argument hinges on being able to tell the extent to which generative AI was used in the creation of any given piece of art, which capability you will not have. You therefore fall into the category the commenter mentioned in that your perception of the value of a piece of art can be heavily influenced by someone convincing you it was AI generated, regardless of the facts.

I'd question your assumption that the software would be "great". I think we're seeing the volume of software increase faster than before. The average quality of the total volume of software will almost certainly decrease. It's not a contradiction for productivity in that respect to increase while quality decreases.

Well, yeah. I like getting computers to automate things and solve problems. Typing in boilerplate and syntax is just a means to that end, and not even remotely the most interesting part. I don't like managing my own memory garbage collection either, so I prefer to use tools that handle that for me.

I mean, I guess when I was really early in my career I'd get a kick out of writing a clever loop or whatever, and I drank deep from all the low level coding wisdom that was available, but the scope of what I care about these days has long since expanded outward.

I don't think this is why. I listened to a recent podcast with Michael Truell and he made clear they think the TUI is an inferior form factor. This feels more like a reactionary move than a visionary one.

I can't tell whether I'm supposed to be the technical type or the artist type in this analogy. In my music making hobby, I'd like a good AI to help me mix, master, or any number of things under my direction. I'm going to be very particular about every aspect of the beat, but maybe it could suggest some non-boring chord progressions and I'll decide if I like one of them. My goal as an artist is to express myself, and a good AI that can faithfully take directions from me would help.

As a software engineer, I need to solve business problems, and much of this requires code changes, testing, deployments, all that stuff we all know. Again, if a good AI could take on a lot of that work, maybe that means I don't have to sit there in dependency hell and fight arcane missing symbol errors for the rest of my fucking career.

I don't acquire skills and apply them just to be able to apply them. I use them to solve problems and create things. My learned skills for processing audio are for the purpose of getting the audio sounding the way I want it to sound. If an AI can do that for me instead, that's amazing and frees up my time to do other things or do a lot more different audio things. None of this is scary to me or impacts my personal dignity. I'm actually constantly wishing that AI could help me do even more. Honestly I'm not even sure what you mean by AI doing audio editing, can I get some of that? That is some grunt work I don't need more of.

I'm constantly disappointed by how little I'm able to delegate to AI after the unending promises that I'll be able to delegate nearly 100% of what I do now "in the not too distant future". It's tired impatience and merited skepticism that you mistake for fear and coping. Just because people aren't on the hype train with you doesn't mean they're afraid.

Exactly how broke do you think this guy is that taking a career break is a sign of instability?

You can get burned real bad by this if the specific product SKU gets discontinued and the price spikes 10x because now they're called Tide Pods Original.

I mostly agree with you, or at least I think you're providing important pushback that needs to be considered. Porn is largely a weird religious boogeyman, and scary stranger kidnapping stories seem to be a form of lucrative fear porn to attract conspiracy minded types. My access to the internet as a teen fueled my curiosity and computer technology exploration in a way that was crucial for where I've ended up today. I actually installed a keylogger to get the internet password that my parents guarded, and I've never regretted it. Blanket luddite rules for kids seem to me to be lazy at best.

That being said, here are some of the things I worry about:

- The internet is no longer a niche playground for nerds, and much of it has become a mainstream entertainment megahub, very highly cultivated for your bland engagement. When I was growing up, I had to constantly fiddle with and troubleshot several layers of software in order to explore, interact with friends online, and play games. It was almost like a barrier to entry. These days, I'm not entirely sure I would have fiddled with anything and might have just skipped to the gaming & media consumption part. After all, it just works now, and the media is more engaging than ever. There seem to be fewer incentives for learning and creativity.

- I'm more concerned about bad behavior modeling than I am about the moral panic nonsense. I want to make sure that whatever personalities my kids are having a social/parasocial relationship with aren't encouraging trollish and abusive behavior.

- I'm also concerned about misinformation. Most people generally are very bad at gauging the trustworthiness of information online. Ironically even the people who cry the most about how media distorts your worldview tend to have that exact problem. I want to teach my kids critical thinking and how to evaluate information based on several important criteria. This will have to be an involved process, and I want to be able to contextualize heavy sources of misinformation while they're being exposed to it.

None of these problems are well addressed with a luddite approach, but they do need careful attention.

Exactly. Actually funny jokes from amateurs tend to have risen out of an order of magnitude more failed attempts. You can't encourage the funny one without inviting a ton of bad ones.

The idea that politics in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so low is a meme that has been around for many years, so perhaps it's just the first time you heard it?

I'm not convinced of the meme despite its cleverness or the many blog articles discussing it. I don't think it would get less politically intense if the stakes were raised.

How about: I'd like to know what's happening during an active shooter event at my son's school. Is there a loudspeaker for that?

This actually happened to me, and guess where all of the official police updates were posted.

So the tradeoffs are proven, but not necessary?

Do you think the tradeoffs discussed in that article are unproven?

If I see someone with a little shrine to kids movies, I think, "I have different tastes than this person." If I see someone write a comment like this, extrapolating that to some sort of general societal ill wherein children don't adequately suffer, I think, "this person might be very difficult to get along with."

I don't think anyone actually does counting like that, or at least if they did I agree it would be silly. If I have my eye on a character I'd like to get to, I usually just 'f' + character and then ';' if necessary until I'm in the right place.

The only time I use numbers to specifically target a location is when jumping to a line. I have relative line numbers turned on (line numbers are relative to the cursor) so I always know the exact number I need to type to move to the line I'm looking at.

There's no evidence for that whatsoever, it's just bullshit conjecture stemming from hope and a tenuous idea that third party app users are "power users" and therefore must be eminently important.

Being a good moderator is a lot of work. There will be no lack of people that would line up to have moderating powers in a large enough subreddit.

Would you demand the same amount of reverence if the people who were murdered by their fellow citizens were not "devout, pious Christians" and were instead "people who are serious about practicing witchcraft"?

Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them.

I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”. They use the term “woke” as an insult and as something that is obviously bad on its face and by definition. They have a huge amount of political power, and may soon have an iron grip on political power in the US. I grew up among these people and was one of them for a long time. They believe:

* Gay relationships are an abomination, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics and should be banned from schools.

* Women have specific child rearing and housekeeping roles ordained by God, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics

* Christianity (or their brand of it) is meant to be respected at all times, and should be a core value of government

* Racism has been over since [slavery ended|civil rights era] and it’s high time for those communities to get over it and stop bothering those poor brave police officers and smashing those storefront windows all the time. Any form of education on the topic should be banned from schools.

It has been my experience that the people I grew up with who I know believe all the above are constantly wrapping their views in generic complaints about “woke-ism”. It is been my experience with people online that if you dive deeper into specifics or look at comment history of posters who actively and constantly decry “woke politics”, you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies that tend to ship in the same container. I think it’s always important to talk specifics, because I guarantee you that when e.g. my dad tells you that a show’s “woke-ism” is ruining it (and he definitely will tell you that), it’s because he finds gay behavior to be deeply disgusting and immoral.

That being said, thank you for some of those specifics. I’d really like to be shown otherwise, even if it’s one person at a time.

So your WoT example intrigues me. That’s the only show I’ve seen among those, but I do want to see Arcane (it’s on my list). I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining, and maybe it comes down to whether you ascribe the boringness of the relationships or the Aes Sedai partners to be inherently caused by the fact that the roles are non-traditional in terms of genders. Where you see forced woke-ism causing boringness, I’d probably see as just plain old boring (which, eh, it’s entertaining enough for me, but not the best; it’s been such a long time since I read those books and I’m not sure I’d be as into the original source material nowadays anyway). The fact that the roles are non-traditional is at the very least novel when compared to the massive amount of history and media that has and continues to be the exact opposite. I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.

The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.

Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill. For me, I’m all for seeing LGBT representation and awareness of the experience of minorities, etc. There is a moral aspect of that that I appreciate. I also appreciate good writing, pacing, storyline, cinematography, etc. I don’t think the former inherently poisons or guarantees the latter.

I think it's because most of the time the "politics" that are objected to tend to be things like having an LGBT character in a show. While it's probably not true that everyone who complains about "politics" on TV these days are objecting to LGBT people, it is almost certainly true that everyone who watches TV and gets disgusted by seeing an LGBT character will code their disgust in terms of "being tired of politics" shoved down their throat, etc.

Thus it tends to be very likely that the person complaining about "politics" is simply masking a disgust of others' identities, but doesn't want to get into specifics because it would be a bad look. Therefore the question asking for specifics is interpreted as a way to pick a fight, because they know what might ensue if they actually got into specifics.

It's also not necessarily competing with meatspace. It's competing with other technologies that connect remote people together where there is no meatspace option. And it's all going to serve the purpose of selling influence over the users.

Very telling that the first two proposed ideas in response to your comment are: memes are valid news sources, and we should stop public education entirely.

You have it exactly backwards, and I think it gets to the core of why people get so unnecessarily confused about git. The underlying data model is both much simpler than the interface and crucial to understand. If you treat git as a collection of memorized command recipes the same way you did with SVN or CVS, you're going to have a bad time. The underlying DAG needs to be top of mind when interacting with git, as it best represents the inherent complexity of the problem that code repositories are meant to solve.

Do you also think we are past the point where treating people like pathologically gullible buffoons by peddling wild and easily debunkable conspiracy theories in order to get votes could succeed on a national scale?

And my view is: if you're not paying attention to what is going on around you, you will be taken advantage of.

There is a balance here.

I'm curious about how portable your setup is. Currently at home I have a giant dynamic mic (EV RE20) on a boom arm, but that's not going to be something I can use at the actual office when I hop into a little enclosed pod for a Zoom meeting or something. Does your setup work for that kind of thing?