I became aware of the evil and set reminders in order to spend one hour every Saturday to google-detox. I think I will be completely degoogled in a couple of weeks.
73 karma · joined March 6, 2014
Deaf people?
This randomly reminded me of the time I let my friend use my laptop, only to find out the next morning that he had changed all the colors and styles of my windows xp with a gimmicky "mac skin". So infuriating.
On a second thought, I don´t mean that the controls behave randomly. I understand they affect related parts of the system. If you increase "baldness" on a woman's face, it will obviously increase the "male" factor and the "gray hair" factor. I understand that this faces are being generated from a continuous space. Fascinating.
My point is the following: I was one day on the street and saw a flyer glued onto a wall, it looked kinda funky and hand-drawn, interesting; some DJ's were going to throw a party and spin salsa, funk, latin jazz, cumbia... And I didn't recognize any of the names or the venues, I was mildly shocked because I believed I knew the local scene pretty well.
Almost always I can contextualize a music genre/scene, and see their connections and collaborations. But this random flyer I came across was so obscure! No relations, no known names, and the mix of styles and originality was very interesting! For the first time in many years I felt again what is like to find an underground scene, which I like a lot (like when dancing drum&bass in a basement in Berlin or listening to rap in Mexico).
This is a magic that is sometimes lost in the believed omniscence and omnipresence of online/facebook. I bet people soon will want to have those kind of experience, and the new thing will be to find scenes that people don't even know about online.
And from a foreign language speaker standpoint, I find it even harder to imagine. In Spanish there is not really a consensus about how to pronounce 'Google'. I can't imagine people on the streets speaking Googlish.
On the other hand, everyone googles, for sure, everyone uses search and mobile. I have the feeling that these two interactions -text/type search and mobile- are too hard to improve on. I don't think voice has a chance to become bigger than text.
1) This idea makes me think that the simulation hypothesis is wrong. If some advanced civilization has the power to create simulations, why would they create us, specifically? Why would they bother recreating a primitive world of the past? Wouldn't it be way more interesting to create cooler, crazier worlds? Do you really believe a post-human ultra-intelligent civilization would create something as present-day ISIS? Is someone having fun watching how we experience this world's horrors and pains?
2) Then I think the following: yes, the above scenario is possible, given that organized intelligence is able to realize more possibilities of the universal computational space. With enough computing power, organized intelligence would be able to spawn near-infinite world simulations, and ours is just one of those.
I agree with the sentiment. But from a perceptual perspective, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish what is synthetic and what is organic. The trumpets, strings, and keys you hear on a song you like on the radio? It's very probable that they weren't played by humans: they might have been programmed and the sounds come from a massive, hyper sampled sound bank.
If we did an experiment, and recruited even expert musicians, and we asked them to classify sound clips in 'played/programmed' categories, I bet they wouldn't get them right.
David Cope's experiments showed that: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/11/david-cop...
I was going to recommend Grammarly, it has a Chrome extension, but I think it doesn't support markdown. I use it and I'm happy with it. They have an advanced subscription for 'advanced' linguistic checking and furthermore, the gold service is hiring a human proof-reader. It's interesting.