Hacker News Reader

Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

I heard this argument 15 years ago when a photographer was making his photos nicer (nothing heavy) and another person objected to it. He said "it was always done just not with digital tools". But it does feel different because the advertised possibilities make it so easy to create on paper a photo of something impressive. I worry about it because it can create unrealistic expectations of what is possible - how does a person wo wants do dunk a basketball, but can't, feel if everyone posts their dunking photos that are fake? On the flip side if everyone does it, it might devalue the whole wow effect, making it less impressive and less important.

Then again, it's always true that the world we'll die in will be different than the world we were born in, and we might not like it. Maybe that's how it goes.

View on HN

> Then again, it's always true that the world we'll die in will be different than the world we were born in, and we might not like it. Maybe that's how it goes.

I don't think it's been true throughout history, things usually didn't change that much over the span of a single lifetime before the industrial revolution. The scale is dramatically different now, and we're kind of addicted to it.

There’s very few places in history that remained constant for more than a single generation. Technology-wise, things obviously move faster today than a thousand years ago, but if you take in consideration the constant cultural shifts, wars, plagues that lasted a decade etc, and life might feel like that since the dawn of man

I doubt this.

After the war, people would go back to tilling land with the same oxen and plough and go fishing in the same kinds of boats their parents and grandparents did.

The meals didn’t change, the beer didn’t change, the routine didn’t change. They didn’t get better ploughs or better boats, or better oxen. It was still about an acre per day before a war and after a war. Medicines and cures remained constant.

That’s not to say occasional improvements didn’t happen, they did, but there were long breaks between improvements.

It really depends on the pocket of people you choose to analyze, and their geographic location. That’s all true even today

Not with the same oxen, not with the same wheat.

We’ve only been domesticating animals and plants for maybe 25,000 years, and that’s if you assume Gobleki Tepe means we have missed the actual cradle of civilization this whole time.

There are certainly going to be times when transportation improvements accelerate this process, from ships to Roman roads to steam power, but every generation will be different, and most of our livestock have fairly short childhoods. For a single human to witness twenty generations of goat or pig is not unreasonable. Or fifty generations of grains. Add in all of their neighbors, and the odds of seeing something special in their lifetime jump considerably. You would probably see several.

Fifty generations of grains from 0AD to 50AD would have been an indiscernible difference. Those genetics were changing, mostly at random, by tiny percentage points. I don't think they'd have been able to tell without scientific equipment that the average yield per acre had gone up by 0.1% in their lifetime.

But today, over my lifetime, genetically modified crops are everywhere. Yields are up by ~25% and pesticide use is down by 33%. Had exponential growth been happening at that rate for a thousand generations, then if our paleolithic ancestors got 1 bushel of grain, we'd harvest something like 10^18 times the mass of the entire observable universe.

Technology accelerates the rate of change. That rate is not consistent.

It feels like you are assuming that plant domestication was a process of collecting new gene mutations, instead of aggregating existing ones. You can do a lot with selective breeding, but whether you’re creating something new or something that has been done fifty times before depends on where you are in history.

We don’t have a monopoly on innovation and the history of it is not uniformly distributed.

We talk about innovation in terms of evolutionary versus revolutionary, but quality of life changes from a friendlier pig or a better hunting dog affect individual lives quite a bit. And if those are quiet lives, those changes may matter as much as the things historians tell us are important. If you weren’t there for the rise of Julius Caesar or the Fall of Rome then whether your son marries the neighbor girl and the family farm thereby gets access to a better water source, matters a lot more than what Galileo has been up to in his lab.

Yes, introduction of corn and cassava to Africa had massive impacts to world politics and especially human rights (for the worse). But those same crops already revolutionized South America millennia before that.

An innovation in Wolvehamton would not be experienced in even Marathon and vice versa. Sometimes trade did import improvements, but it was not usually experienced by the majority of people. Things were expensive for 95% of the pop. In most instances change would have been slow. Occasionally you had major changes like a crossbow, or paper making. I think those changes were not the norm. Now, across the world, if you followed spots, you could retrospectively see changes, sure. But for a single person, no, not so much.

Technologu obviously accelerates change, but you might be overcycling on it and underestimating how much society changed all the time, especially compared to today’s standards. There’s big swaths of the world where you quite literally see a new empire taking over every few decades, from different peoples, different customs, different everything

Couple that to the average lifetime being much shorter and you get the feeling that everything is always changing

aboriginal people of austraila stayed pretty much unchanged for over 50 _thousand_ years until quite recently.

There is a bit of a margin in-between my "didn't change that much" and your "remained constant"

>how does a person wo wants do dunk a basketball, but can't, feel if everyone posts their dunking photos that are fake? On the flip side if everyone does it, it might devalue the whole wow effect, making it less impressive and less important.

reminds me of a meme I saw yesterday - "Before Auto-Tune there was talent", with a picture of Steve Perry back in the Journey days.

We only know that Auto-Tune exists because T-Pain and Cher's sound engineer set it to "snap to grid" mode as a deliberate artistic choice. This pretty much mirrors @locallost's story in the audio domain. Shaving off cents here and there to make someone's singing voice prettier does not hurt anyone.

Pretty much so.

For some people music is an art form to express themselves, the skill/talent part is just an obstacle.

There is still much work to do on the rest of the song writing and production.

Auto-tune has done to singing what photography did to painting - if anybody can be in tune, then being tuneful is no longer impressive. So other qualities become important, such as timbre and authenticity.

Also created entire new genres of music, and enabled artists that don’t have a good voice but can do cool music. I don’t know why anyone sees it as a bad thing

I dont think anyone sees it as a "bad thing" per se. They just get mad when someone says X is better singer than Y, when X clearly uses auto-tune and Y doesn't (or at least not in the same amount).

Taste is an opinion though. Getting mad about it doesn't help anyone, especially not yourself.

Taste is an opinion but whether or not a singer can hit certain notes on cue is objective.

Not using computers to assist with your artistic creations is largely foolish but measurable things aren't opinions. Somebody can be a better artist but also a worse singer.

Most of all it enabled artists who can't hold a tune to save their life but look good on TV.

They appeared before software support was available, the technique is called "someone else is singing".

I think that was mainly a film phenomenon, and the playback singers were credited.

It's really damning when you look back how technically good 80s pop singers were, compared to 90s. Even artists obviously promoted by the music industry as eye candy for teenagers - think Samantha Fox and Morten Harket - had really solid vocal skills. The Spice Girls, not so much...

Well, I only have one international example (and some local ones), so I agree that this wasn't a widely applied practice: https://www.biography.com/musicians/milli-vanilli-lip-sync-s...

It's kind of famous for being a scandal, and also for their technical difficulties in faking live shows. It's kind of the waterline: they tried to do something a lot of later acts succeeded at with technology, but the technology wasn't there yet and it led to embarrassment.

"Milli Vanilli"

Painting never aimed to be photorealistic. Paintings always present a fictional unrealistic visual that tricks the mind into perceiving it as "real".

That is the true measure of an artist's skill - to make the unreal seem real.

Some painting were aimed to be photorealistic though (but not all painting were)

> Painting never aimed to be photorealistic

Untrue.

You might be looking back at this as someone who lived in a era when photography was for documentaries and painting was for art.

Are you autistic? I do not mean to be offensive. I'm an aspie.

Painting was always first and foremost for spiritual and religious purposes, not for documenting things.

Secular painting became a thing only very recently, two or three hundred years ago. And even then, it was always used to whitewash or vilify something or someone. Bias was (and is!) its primary purpose.

> Painting was always first and foremost for spiritual and religious purposes, not for documenting things.

There was a time (most of human history) when painting was the most realistic way we had of conveying images.

Technically true, but irrelevant - practically nobody used painting for that purpose throughout history. (People didn't care about "realism" at all, that is a recent 20th century fixation.)

Ha! They should do it with Lucille Ball too :)

https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/68426/

To be very honest, this is already happening to me in my own experience, I'm always joining that I need a camera team to verify my actions..

Most people mock the Metaverse, but at the end of the day, our entire humanity is prepared for the Metaverse. Everyone will spin their own universes in which they are the emperor and they will create stories in that Metaverse. You can visit someone's Metaverse if it's interesting or popular.

Your avatar is your personality, appearance. We are close to simulating all our experiences.

The only thing real will be a climate-controlled-with-plumbing 20 x 20 room and the food we eat. (We still haven't digitized taste, smell and some forms of touch).

Given this scenario, Reality is over-rated. Why do you need "truth" anyway?

Who cares if someone believes the earth is flat? or Trump is still the President or some esoteric grammar rules? As long as there is one another person (or even an AI assistant) who believes the story that's all that matters for our social well-being

> our entire humanity is prepared for the Metaverse

Come on. 2B people don't have access to basic hygiene, a third of the world population has food insecurity.

Isn't that a reality check.

Well, a lot of progress we've made is based on science, which is based on rejecting the stories we tell ourselves. Our senses lie to us all the time in the real world too, so the stories you will tell yourself in the metaverse will be just stories. I think it matters, you can't build a rocket to outside the solar system if you think the Earth is flat. Will you be happy? Maybe, but the world we live in now has never been more connected yet people have never felt so disconnected. But like I originally said, the world you die in is always different. Maybe people get used to it and it's all they will know.

People who believe earth is flat wouldn't have gone to build rockets even if they didn't believe so.

Flat Earthers absolutely do build rockets. And historically, everyone for whom the shape of the earth was of any importance, knew it was round. Everyone else didn't care either way.

> Flat Earthers absolutely do build rockets

I mean ones that would matter for the society.

In recent years it's probably more accurate to state that some people that crowd source funds for the rockets they enjoy building say that they are flat earthers.

That says more about the marketing power of controversy than it does about actual core beliefs of backyard engineers.

You can't even build a working GNSS if you think the world is flat

Knowing there's people out there following incorrect grammar rules and not being able to correct them sounds like the opposite of societal well-being!

We are _in_ the Metaverse. Algorithms generate personalised recommendations - your own universe - that the person right next to you may never see. You can live a full life online in your curated simulation, experiencing a completely difference perspective on what's hot and what's not. You have no shared cultural bond - just flashes where your algorithmic content briefly overlaps with another, before the borders shift again.

> We are close to simulating all our experiences.

I think you’re having a hysterical episode.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com