cal_dent

I’m sure the unemployed silent movie person cried about their job loss. Sure they probably got other jobs later but later can be a long time. People who strongly claim tech does not lead to job losses do an awful lot of flattening of time which is not reality

Awww cute

every single city you mentioned there also has significant housing issues. So as per the original comment, the actual solution is more complicated than the debate typically tends to acknowledged.

Densifying homes will help, don't get me wrong, but its far from the silver bullet HNs lads like to claim. Now, not densifying jobs and employment centres as much as modern society as done on the other hand....well, now we may be on to something with legs

Social skills. Same as it ever was. That beats talents/smarts every time in a corporate environment

This is great and I wish you all the best. A byproduct of the content abundance age (because that's really what is is) is the expectation that not just growth but fast growth is everything is such a race to lower quality on the whole. It's pretty depressing but ultimately I suspect we will get sick of the lower level far quicker than we probably think.

Everyone needs to revisit William Gibson's the Blue Ant books. Still holds up as the best distillation of our current times culturally.

On Cameron Winter & Geese, i think he and the band are great. But I find it amusing that this weird discourse thinks this wasn't always the way the music industry works. The tools are different but its fundamentally the same playbook

But it completely is different. To you point its why a 5 year old's crayon scribble is more powerful to certain people than Guernica for instance. History is littered with gazillions of scribbles, stray notes, meaningless stuff that just goes straight in the bin. AI will do that. But for something communicates the feeeell of something you need warmth and emotional relatability.

Hole. In. One. I have so little fear of AI replacing true art because its fundamental purpose is to transfer emotions (and its the best way humanity's been able to do this) that can be indescribable in any other way than feelings. AI does not have that and so can never be a true substitute for it. it can be a tool to help someone convey that but it needs humans.

Just do it. And remember the old cycling mantra, it never gets any easier, you just get quicker/stronger

just maths. if they're as a capable as each other then x product cannot be worth multiples above y unless there's a clear USP. Arguably OpenAi's is brand recognition but given Antrhopic's recent growth that's less certain than a quarter ago

An interesting thing about one facet of how society as developed over the past decade and a half, I think, is that a byproduct of more people being conscious of the quest to monetise almost anything is that it has also raised the level of general scepticism on whether something is marketing or real. So you have increasingly more scenarios where an objectively bad thing can happen to someone but any public response is scrutinised and questioned within a hint of its life sometimes rightly sometimes not. I don’t particularly like it but that’s where we are at guess

exactly. frankly its just a bunch of pissy holier than thou engineer thing. He seems to be pretty good at raising capital and selling dreams which his predominantly what Openai seemingly wants to be right now.

New Yorker article less so because its just a standard ceo profile piece that digs out pretty pertinent things for a ceo role

The only relevant lesson is that predictions are likely to be more wrong than right tbh

Sort of agree with this but I do find it amusing that this sort of take on it implicitly discounts that the capital still has to live with all these “useless” people on the same rock, whose numbers will grow to an unignorable amount...The idea that anything will be insulated is for the fairies and seems just as asinine to me

Yeah that's fair point. The closest from that perspective would be the collapse of shipbuilding in places like Sunderland or Hull or maybe textile mills in burnley. But not as significant in terms of global cultural importance i guess

The UK did do that to large swathes of Northern England. Changing times comes for everyone in the end

This is an interesting post (and also a very well written one!). It touches on something that does slightly irk me about the wider friendship/loneliness conversation that it feels we've been having for a decades now.

Its the "we" in "how on earth we get ourselves out of this." The bluntness of the "we" conflates it into a bigger problem than it is. If you walk past many parks & gardens across cities you'll find that same picture of families socialising in the old way without a blackout, but also people glued to their phones too.

People who are intentional of having classic socialising are still doing it, people who choose not to either through their own intention or, i suspect and hope, in a very ambient non-intentional way are the ones who may need to get out of it. Yes there are more of the latter now than before but the former groups are still a huge part of society. And if they can do it even with the same distractions and phones and access to social media etc. why can't others?

I agree with where you're coming from. I think its the continuing rise of individualism to a degree; sports team mentality politics/the internet/phones/social media have likely accelerated it but feels to me we'd been moving that way even prior to that. There's probably something there, too, about how more wealth gives people an out to not have to engage with broader society in a way where lower wealth or less unequal distribution of wealth doesn't.

Margaret Thatcher got quite a lot of stick for her quote about how there is no society and its just individual people that look out for themselves first and foremost before anything. But I'd say there's more truth to that than I'd want to believe. What stops that from being true to my mind is people being very intentional about creating a society by engaging with others.

I'm always interested in people's stories about adult friendships or loneliness crisis etc. and what I tend to see is that when people start being intentional about engaging, it usually ends up with them finding new friends. It's just easy to sleepwalk, with everything going on, into not engaging. Newish parents are very apt example of this

Until housing is solved the wealth divide will continue to grow whether ai lives up to expectations or not. Higher wealth taxing funding UBI etc. will be largely ineffective without solving housing.

All this new fangled talk about ABUNDANCE yadda yadda I find quite silly. We already live in abundance, most jobs for instance already pay very livable wages for example. It's just not livable because of mainly housing (& more broadly renting & land prices)

My thoughts exactly. I do think people tend to frame things in a developed economies sort of way when the worst fears of ai is actually more akin to a developing/emerging economy framework. And that says when where there's lump of labour available, most aren't earning that within trades.

I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?

Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?

The last thing someone having an argument with anyone is something incredibly knowledgeable (or at least with access to knowledge) that is inclined to agree with you.

Yes, it can be good but I suspect for many people it'd more likely lead to retrenchment rather that any real progress/compromise. Might be my own cynicism I guess.

Cloudhiker.net has been doing this for a while too. Great to see more grassroot-ish attempt at expanding the web (or i guess more accurately returning it to its purpose)

everyone is vulnerable to it. i think the idea that certain generations are better equipped is more a by product of exposure rather than some sense of immunisation. GenX/Xennials are just more likely to have other things to do than going on social media at the same rate as other cohorts - whether its still busy working or kids or hobbies etc. Intense exposure and the reinforcement that brings is the problem. Its why the problems became even more pronounced through covid years

Wider society spends an awful long time talking about the effects of social media on young people. I personally think that is somewhat blinkered because its an everybody issue. What do old people and kids have in common, lots and lots of free time. That's it. Same with unemployed, under employed people, people with no real interest or hobbies.

If there's a hole you need to fit and you do nothing with it, social media is the easy way out, and given that it does have addictive tendencies, we end up where we are.

Something I was told, very luckily I now believe, early in life is that for the most part we are all as smartish as each other, the only real difference is how much attention & time you're willing to pay to a particular thing(s). Yes, it's glib but I continue to believe it holds more truth than many of us would like to believe

And people wonder why society failed to embed the idea of being a blessing to say "I don't know" in llms....

That alone would save so much trouble. We, particularly bad workplaces, have a real fear of not knowing so much so that being confidently wrong is a better position in the whole game.

Yes! Amazing show, one of my favourite shows of the last decade or two. I think what really does it for me is that they really bring the audience into the world itself. I think that's partly because there's no need to always be pushing the plot forward, which I think is a bugbear of mine of newer shows now. There's something to letting things just breathe and tales from the loop really excels at that.

The Phillip Glass soundtrack particularly elevates it too.

the comment on the blog recommending "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is also an excellent shout. One of the more original titles I've read in recent years that gives that feeling

I tend to agree. I've always thought it would work well as a TV show in the more heady days of streaming (let's say 2012 - 2020) when networks and studios where it still felt like they had some room to take more risk. It's more towards the end of the last TV "golden age" but an adaptation like something like Apple's take on "Tales from the Loop". Not brash or loud or too formulaic but somehow still got made