coffeefirst

Or even 30 second ads that don’t look like shit.

The technology is interesting as an element within the wider process of special effects, animation, and video games. The idea that you’re actually making a movie with the current products—and I’m a former indie filmmaker, I’d have a blast with this if it were real—is a fantasy.

Uh-huh. I have a little boy who just saw his first firetruck, and you can see the wheels turning in his head, because BIG RED TRUCK. He doesn't talk yet, but a seed has been planted.

Some people operate like little boys. They want the BIG RED TRUCK. They haven't considered that's it's really hard to park and gets 5MPG, or that their use cases don't involve fighting fires (for which they are not trained), but they want the big red truck so they can drive the big red truck.

Anyway, if you go the 5000 microservices route, you move all your problems from the application layer into networking and orchestration problems. Best of luck with that.

It’s also circumstantial.

Working remote during COVID sucked and felt unmoored.

Once I had a robust IRL social life and could go see some live music again, it was great.

It also depends if you live in tiny apartment or if you have a house with a dedicated space.

The same person can take to it depending on the circumstances.

Oh yeah. I did this in 2021. I got the list out of 1Pass and just did them in small batches. I hit a few that wouldn’t let you change but nothing important.

I had all the important stuff done in a week.

Yes, I would agree that privacy is important, that anonymity is valuable to the freedom of speech, and that OP is also right about the health of the web.

Which means we have a big problem.

Yeah, I really dislike this “Thing is has its Other Thing Moment.”

For starters, I what the hell does this mean?

But it’s also a style of reporting that treats the attention cycle as the thing that must be covered rather than the thing itself.

This doesn’t surprise me.

Set up whatever online portal or app you want. I’d prefer to just sign in and click a button.

If I’m picking up the phone or sending an email it’s because I have a weird problem and I need to talk to a person.

Well there’s a lot of middle ground between “don’t use AI” and “generate everything, exclusively.”

When the bill for the latter lands with a heavy thud, moderation and common sense start to look like a pretty good idea.

Correct. If they were doing this with Gutenberg/Smithsonian/some library so there's both a public archive and training the language model, it wouldn't have the ick factor.

Thank you. Some days I feel like I’m going crazy.

I use plenty of AI. As best I can tell just believing my own eyes, everything is stagnant except the prices.

Which is fine… but the boosters shout “OMG EVERYTHING IS CHANGED YOU ARE BEHIND AND ALL PREVIOUS STUDIES ARE INVALID NOW” every Tuesday.

Cool! Which ones?

(Replacing overpriced garbageware with something I scraped together in 3 days is my jam. But the specifics matter a lot.)

Oh 100%.

On their own, browser tabs, notifications, and IM at work all make sense on their own and are not evil at all.

Taken together, there are now 8 people trying to talk to me all day every day, constant alerts unless you go out of your way to severely restrict what and who can message you, and you find yourself with 60 tabs across 3 windows doing 7 things at once but also doing nothing because... your brain was not built for this computer.

That's smart. It's also revealing.

It was a choice to make technology that absolutely hammers you with information. It was not the right choice.

I want to build and use stuff that promotes focus. I only have a vague inkling of what this means, but it's quieter, less instantaneous. And it's going to be an uphill battle because everyone else is doing the opposite.

If you think that’s bad casting, I’ve got some bad news: the guy who plays the cyclops has two eyes.

It’s fast but it has just enough rough edges that I always go back to Firefox.

Yeah on second read I realize my comment was unclear; I don’t think this is okay. Fixed.

In the 1960s Campbells Soup got in trouble with the FTC for using marbles to raise the ingredients and make the soup look fuller than it was. This was the real standard for deceptive advertising.

I dont care about simulating furniture placement specifically, but most use of AI in advertising today does not meet that standard.

They serve different jobs.

The tidy todo notebook or lab notebook is to offload working memory or keep records.

The chaos notebook is for disorder.

Unless you were at a couple of obscure film festivals in the early 2010s, definitely not!

We were hobbyists making features and shorts on a shoestring budget with no expectations of “making it.” It was a blast. It’s also an all-consuming hobby that you can’t keep up forever.

The last short film we did before is still online https://vimeo.com/144277181

I’ve been doing this for a decade. I call it the anti project: it’s whatever I feel like writing on that day. It’s not intended to write a novel (I’ve done that) or make a movie (done that too), or solve any useful problem. The purpose is no purpose besides to get away from the screens and spill some ink.

This is the lazy, pointless-TV-watching of writing. And I’d recommend it, but if I tried to explain why that would defeat the purpose of having no purpose.

When people wonder where the anti-AI movement comes from, I want you to look right here.

They said they’d take your jobs, they forced families out of their homes, they gave you the worst electric bills you’ve ever seen, and if you pushed back on any of this they called you “Luddite” or “meat LLM.” And all this, it was said, seems fine.

That pendulum is gonna swing hard.

Better yet, maybe a bulletin board and an email list is all you need?

I have some extremely useful Discords and Signal group chats, but not everything ought to be an always on chatterbox.

I got a Libro.fm sub when my son was born last year and am finding the same.

I actually think this is about quality. Podcasts that take real effort (Hardcore History, Fall of Civilizations, Gastropod) are absolutely worth my time, but they're basically mini-audiobooks in their own right.

Unless it’s all just fanfic, to be relegated to the same junkyard of ideas where the flying cars, airships, and vast underwater cities are kept.

World, yes, as people around you including politicians and businessmen have had their brains pickled.

But I doubt the influence. I’ve been free for years, and I can always spot who’s spends a lot of time in TikTok/Twitter/Instagram—it’s like talking to someone from another planet. It mostly sounds weird and sad, more apt to annoy and alienate their friends than inform or influence them.

These campaigns have historically amplified conflict. They do not care what the conflict is about.

But unlike some of the others, I’m hearing anti-AI sentiment from a wide range of people who don’t even use social media.

Sunk cost fallacy.

These are the same people who performed the largest scale breach of copyright in history on the theory that they could get away with it.

I’m not making any accusations, but we should not underestimate their tolerance for legal and financial risk.

It may be a little paranoid to insist on self hosting based on that, but I’m not so sure that it’s crazy.

Also neuroscience disagrees.

This really isn’t a debate. OP is wrong.

Uh, I am an EM, and you have to treat context switching as the enemy or nothing gets done.

There’s a bunch of different tactics for this. Some people hold office hours. I block off 9am for code review any only do it once per day.

The programs we call agents are nothing like people.