Better Living Through Algorithms (2023)
clarkesworldmagazine.com
clarkesworldmagazine.com
It's extremely believable that the downfall of some public good like Abelique would be primarily sales and marketing getting in and trying to steer it and advertise for profit, and it being otherwise gamed. It's so hard for something to just be good for everybody; somebody always wants to maximize their own benefit, even at the expense of everybody else (relevant example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862865).
People don’t really tend to believe it but when I worked at Facebook inventing features for users, 100% of the time our discussions were based in “how do we improve community and happiness and squash divisiveness and hate?” and never about revenue. Until influencers took over the internet. Then more and more we started being told not to ship things that were fun or socially good because it would break viral loops or undermine the market dominance of Universal Music or some such shit. So I quit.
Please consider a subscription. It's literally 4$/month, super cheap, just reading one fun story a month makes it worth it to me.
https://neil-clarke.com/the-best-science-fiction-of-the-year...
One of his (or, more accurately, the Situationist movement he was a leading figure of) more interesting ideas was that of the dérive. You would do it as a small group or alone, and the idea was to just wander through the city, making choices arbitrarily rather than taking the path of least resistance. The goal is to expose yourself to new things you might not have encountered and meet new people that your respective roles in the spectacle wouldn't have encouraged meeting.
One of my favorite observations to make is that Pokemon Go (funny enough, was mentioned in this story) was an accidental dérive app for a brief moment there in 2016. People walked around the city following pokemon leads rather than the normal visual and psychological cues of the environment, and I know some people who met that way. The end of this story, as well as the way in which the app was a totalitarizing force without being a repressive one, kind of reminded me of that.
A dérive can be done digitally* as well as in person; frex I have found the YouTube bubble to be somewhat like a large ship: on short timescales, it's going to go where it was heading, implacably, but on longer timescales, where it winds up has a lot to do with where, over time (in the case of YT, weeks to months), you have been steering it.
(slightly more tangentially: I wonder if TAD was able to finish TempleOS due to his aleatoric development schedule, which forced him to tackle the parts he didn't like instead of going down rabbit-holes solely in the parts he did like? He would call it divine inspiration; I might call it dérive-driven development)
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If one believes that on beyond the written Torah, and the oral, the natural world is a third component, then, rather than continually selecting ("borer") a narrow subset, periodically opening oneself to the range of its experiences almost becomes a mitzvah. For, in their comments upon Devarim, did not R JefAi say "feed your head" (SP 67), and also R CroStNaYo then add, to "teach your children well" (DV 70)?
(for an intragenerational equivalent, compare a Pioneer House motto: "having learned, teach your buddy")
* is the blessing for the one who studies at night (by the LCD's glow?) to be, during the day, watched over by machines of loving grace?
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/721777202964...
The very first one, is a series of photos take as I walked towards the lion, which tends to very weird things to the background, compressing it.
One day, I'd like to take a Raspberry Pi (or a few of them) and build a 16x16 camera array, so I can get a smoother look.
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_11_15/
There was a time when I was locked in a windowless room for several months and practically the only thing I had was this book (which the above was published in) and almost everything in it is amazing:
https://neil-clarke.com/books/the-best-science-fiction-of-th...
Why would i think abelique was a real app, the story were a non-fantasy? These days so much new AI trickery is popping up, that it starts to amaze less and less. So Abelique and the whole cult around it, including reddit sub, can just as well be real. If the category were tagged non-fiction, I would have believed it.
It wasn't until I saw mention of nominations for a Hugo award that I realized I wasn't reading a (very compelling and surprisingly well written) app review.