11,167 karma · joined September 11, 2011
We decimated recordings as a revenue stream (and literal decimation might be wildly generous, given that stream payouts frequently never add up to a single sale for many artists). We let people peddle the lie that artists can just find some other revenue source like merchandising or another job or anything else rather than paying for the thing people ostensibly value.
Minor league success was never an easy proposition but we had a chance to give it better margins. And we let Spotify and others eat those, and let too many people tell comforting lies to consumers along the way.
And without a major cultural shift, we will do the same thing for everyone eventually.
There's lots of value in amateur engineering. What if we deprofessionalized engineering via making it difficult for anyone to make a living doing it? Some people would no doubt still continue to do it, to scratch their itches and exercise their minds. But they would spend less time doing it, less time sudying how to do it, more time doing whatever it takes to pay the bills and claw out some semblance of security. We certainly wouldn't fall into technical poverty immediately, and maybe we wouldn't miss what we don't quite invent / develop, but both the people who actually love it enough to pay attention and the professionals would know the difference between what isn't getting done.
(And in fact, the US is standing on the precipice of a FAFO event with research here, having just made it more difficult to make a living focusing on it.)
What happens to a field that can only be engaged as a dilettante, never as a committed investor?
Fair point. I wonder if this is connected to the way that YouTube seems to rely more on presenting an array of suggestions than flowing linearly through a stream. In any case, I turn off autoplay and am trying to rely as much on search, follows, and curation as algorithmic recommendations, so the hit and miss quality of the recommendations doesn't bother me much personally, I could see how it might not be a great set-and-forget music replacement (for which I already have plenty of options going back into terrestrial radio origins).
Content is uninterrupted without having to engage in the arms race. Music selection is great. Random movies are available.
Turns out AI could put us in a chinese room.
But not aconscious.
I am more amateur/hobbyist than pro, but this is the primary reason I’m on macOS and I wouldn’t mind reasons to try Linux again (Ubuntu Studio ~8 years ago was my last foray).
Don't worry, if we keep it up, we can do this to everyone, all humanity, and finish our centuries long work of making a world that's hard on humans and good for our superorganisms -- business, capital organizations, churches and states that we started on centuries ago. Our technical creations can help us accelerate and complete the process by which we have chosen to make our only possible significance and value in how much we can scramble to control of these, crushing every other human endeavor and the suffering we create and potential joys we torch in meanwhile nothing but the meaningless price of progress.
* AI fulfills a prompt. "Write me a story" or "write me an article" or "write me song lyrics" will get you a story or an article or song lyrics and that in itself is pretty amazing in itself, but as someone who has tried all of these things at various levels of sophistication, it's pretty clear to me that there's often something missing from these results, and of course there is, because you have to put whatever "something" is in the prompt to have good chances "something" will show up. Do you know what that something is when you conceive the story / article / song lyrics? You might... but you might not, the art might be half in the process you work through to figure out what "something" is, hand in hand with the work of giving it form. I can see how AI can help and have already used it this way, but I've already seen how it will often fail or produce Content™ rather than something that fulfills the full profile implied in the impulse to make the thing.
* "a fraction of the cost" is ... speculative to put it charitably. Users aren't exposed to anything remotely like the costs involved right now, the tech is only available at the moment by burning a huge amount of venture / research funding (on top the huge uncompensated labor heists that torching enlightenment copyright bargains represents). The true economics are pretty opaque before you even get deeper questions of like the implications of introducing an external dependency that may not be truly fungible and may represent unknown influences into the thought-level substrate of human culture / experience.
some charity is due here, because this is the culture, and also because for any software tool of sufficient complexity, there is always more to think about than attention to give. But the culture could use more improvement and reflection here.
But more importantly — chances are VERY strong that Berry transcends most of the categories you’re familiar with and a few that you aren’t. He’s an outstanding voice, and a worthy thinker for anyone to sharpen their own mind with or against. Though even where I part ways with him — for example, I was always going to buy a computer (and more computers) — I usually discover that there was a tradeoff and value worth defending on the other side of my choice.
Also, the overlap between his standards for technology and open source values is pretty high.
One question I've been asking myself lately: are single to maybe double digit price optimizations on books such a dominant concern that I should prioritize them over other values?
For an activity I have to do daily, maybe. That order of savings on meals adds up fast enough to be a triple digit number in a month.
Book purchases are weekly to monthly events, any savings on the order that amazon can give me tends toward a rounding error in a monthly budget. Or if my budget shrinks to the point they're not and I need to conserve funds that badly, I will use a library system.
Speed is nice but it's rarely crucial (and these days publishers themselves can get it in your hands pretty quickly).
Lots of us software engineers know "premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- when you overoptimize early, you commit resources in particular attention towards optimizations you may not know serve your ultimate goals.
Maybe your goals begin and end with getting the book in your hand at the lowest price in the shortest time period.
Maybe your goals include what kinds of businesses, activity, people and therefore society you support economically.
I recently went to a relatively new Barnes & Noble in a growing flyover state city, and was very surprised at the way this location felt like Borders or B&N 20+ years ago.
No substantial sign of the bookstore -> big giftshop with books trend I felt like I'd seen everywhere over the last decade. Very substantial selection of books, pretty sure I saw an Asimov title and some Manning.
This was in an area with a lot of growth (and tech expansion specifically), but chances are slim you've even heard of the city unless you've lived in this state (one not even in the top half of populous states in the US).
It's especially interesting considering that B&N owns their stores (no franchisee/indie optimism in play here).
Not sure if it's a trend, but it was a good experience!
where nothing is searchable, linkable, or otherwise legible. That's a tradeoff. It has some upsides, but downsides as well.
(granted search has been struggling to not suck in general lately, facebook among others has joined the campaign against legible links, so losses are taking place in web environments anyway)
I remember when this was called "Lists", and I carefully gathered acquaintances into lists. When I wanted to check in with particular list, I clicked on the list.
Then the lists sidebar disappeared (but you could still get the functionality if you knew the URL / argument structure).
Then the functionality disappeared.
I'm sure some product/UX staff did career making things on a metric somewhere.
> The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.
Why post when there's no guarantee who/anyone will see it amongst a firehose of bait-y and often angry stuff?
This is part of the anti-flywheel which draws towards doomscroll.
> group chats
Group chats have the baseline virtue of knowing who your audience is.
They're missing other virtues, but that's probably another conversation.
For example, when you need sleep, you can't eat enough to make you not tired, but you may well pound a lot of caffeine and sugar.
If true, this would accomodate the simultaneous truths that:
(a) users accurately report their preference chronological friend connection when they come to a social feed
(b) users spend more time engaging with a social feed when the need they come to fill has irregularly payoffs
That you can get more engagement by not giving them what they want/need (or giving them what they need irregularly) wouldn't mean that they are lying to you, it would simply mean that engagement and social payoff curves aren't the same, and the incentives to drive one might not optimize the other.
That’s an interesting correlation. Do you have any ideas about the dynamics associated with it?
I do seem to remember experiencing my tradition as less manipulative when I was young, but have never been sure if that was me not seeing it. And if true, I’m not sure whether to attribute it to size, or the internet, or political influence, or something else.