Come over

Memes haven’t been this much fun since that submarine imploded

“Be the Titan Submersible you want to see in the world” -Gandhi

Fun fact: Namath actually tore his ACL in this scene, and his reaction was so moving that they used that take for the live broadcast!

Kinda, yeah.

As I just learned at an AWS conference: people will tolerate waits, they just won’t tolerate unpredictable waits.

s/sure to be a winner/sure to win/

Probably, but they don’t really have to. Exploiting the OS itself is way better.

Why would you want to turn ownership of a country-sized apparatus that acts solely in your interests into something as motionless as cash?

Coming soon: in-app purchases for your surgery.

“Looks like you’ve run out of SleepyBucks! Reload your balance now!”

I can understand that take, but to me the more relevant comparison is the fossil fuel boom.

Like the advent of more powerful creative tools (camera, printing press, etc.), fossil fuels allowed us to do what we were already doing but faster.

Unlike a camera, though… Coal, oil, and gen AI all have to pull raw material from somewhere in order to operate, and produce undesired byproducts as a result of their operation.

In the early days of fossil fuel, it must been impossible to even conceive the thought that there might be limits to how much we could safely extract raw materials or dump hazardous residual crud.

From one person’s perspective, the world seems so impossibly large. But it turns out, there are limits, and we were already well on our way to exceeding them by the time we realized our predicament.

I think we’re sprinting towards discovering similar constraints for our information systems.

It won’t be exactly the same, and much like climate change I don’t think there will be a specific minute of a specific day where everything turns to shit.

But I think there are instructive similarities:

• The most harmful kinds of gen AI, as with fossil fuels, will have the highest ROI.
• There will be safe, responsible ways to use it, but it will be difficult to regulate from the top down and full of perverse incentives to cheat from the bottom up.
• It will probably continue to accelerate even as the problems become more noticeable and disruptive.
• It will be next to impossible to undo the damage at a significant scale.

Edit: Yeah, I’m also not too sympathetic to the death of copyright. It’s long overdue. The original conception of copyright was botched from the start – more about capital and censorship than about anything for the good of all humanity. But still, there are two good things that I see about copyright that I worry about losing in a “post-plagiarism future”:

1. Accurate attribution

I like knowing where an idea came from, whether it’s an artistic concept or formal information. It’s nice to know where I should go to continue the conversation and see more thoughts that came from a similar source.

2. Faithful replication

I think it’s important that ideas keep their same general shape when they’re copied around, at least when the copier isn’t deliberately intending to modify them. Things like satire can easily be mistaken for earnest content if you tilt your head 5 degrees to the side. I don’t want the discrete bits and bobs of that kind of content to get sucked up and recycled to make arguments for the very thing the original author was arguing against.

If you dislike vapid slop that’s designed to maximize adherence to opaque and fickle metrics, you might wanna reconsider whether gen AI is fine and unrelated to the problem.

We’re seeing the genesis of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome here. Toxic promotion algorithms are quaint, comparatively.

What’s the “bigger problem”?

Occassionnaly

I like how Michigan’s upper peninsula is just blank.

hussy

My brain has been so badly poisoned by the internet that I initially failed to read that as the actual word.

Super gross conclusions/recommendations from the marketing firm in the article.

I imagine that if the finding was “gamers spend more time watching friends play”, they’d suggest monetizing the couch cushions.

I’d say that’s pretty typical. Nobody wants to pester or to leave someone hanging, but that timeframe is different for every relationship.

Yeah no, it’s a totally fair question and I get the spirit of it, but it’s still interesting to reflect on the way that video games have a pretty strange concept of genre or “format” vs. other media like video or print.

Maybe it’s cuz games are so heavily influenced by their associated hardware.

I mean, I guess everything is, right? Early printing press is mostly pamphlets not books (aside from the bible), and you don’t get TV shows without TVs.

Especially if they were born January 1st.

December 31st throws the whole thing off though.

It’s kind of like asking for the best video.

It wouldn’t make sense to compare TV shows, movies, Youtube videos, TikToks, sporting events, commercials, journalistic footage, etc. all as a single category.

Idk. So do you ask for “best RPG” or something like that instead? Seems overly specific now.