I'm a great lover of going to places with no real plan and just wandering the streets finding stuff. Hong Kong is a great city for this. Have a general plan, e.g. visit the memorial to the walled city, but get distracted along the way.
Also watch Ghost in the Shell which is vaguely set in Hong Kong then feel the vibe when you're there.
There’s power dynamics that come into play when you’re a C level executive. You’re allowed to ask questions. For entry level employees, asking questions almost always comes with a judgement of lower skills/experience. This is often what senior and experienced folk forget, there’s a certain amount of assumed competence when you asked questions, that doesn’t get assigned to newer people.
My favorite CTO/CIO acronym is "PFM". Such as, "and then we run through the PFM process, and it comes out and does..."
PFM - Pure Fucking Magic
I've only once ever had anyone actually ask what it means... essentially it's used as an abstraction for a complex process that would be excessive to explain in context.
It’s a classic issue that you give access to superpowers to the general population and most will use them in the most boring ways.
The internet is an amazing technology, yet its biggest consumption is a mix of ads, porn and brain rot.
We all have cameras in our pockets yet most people use them for selfies.
But if you look closely enough, the incredible value that comes from these examples more than makes up for all the people using them in a “boring” way.
As someone who occasionally writes a bit of music, I've had trouble putting into words exactly my feeling around AI generated art. One of the best takes I've seen on it which perfectly captured my feelings was by the Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art
The Oatmeal gave it away in the first 10%. If you like it until you find out it's AI, then it's not about the art, it's about the viewer, their judgement, preference, and opinion, not something intrinsic to the piece.
That's fine, but every attempt to then justify that judgement, preference, or opinion, in a way that does reflect an intrinsic aspect of the piece is a lie, a post hoc rationalization that cannot withstand the simple fact that it was liked as a thing in itself before it's story of creation was known.
Let's say I introduce you to a friend of mine. You chat for a little while, and everything seems to be going well, you like them. Then, I tell you that my friend loves kicking puppies and infants. Really hard too, like he's kicking a field goal.
All of a sudden, you start acting like he's a "bad guy," who should "burn in hell." You liked him just fine before I gave you that info, so clearly that's just a post hoc rationalization that cannot withstand the simple fact that he was liked as a person before his interests were known.
What are you talking about? Knowing a person and knowing a painting are nothing alike. You're the first person I've ever met that has ever suggested similarity.
Person or painting is not relevant in this argument by analogy. It's the commonality of "more than meets the eye", or "don't judge a book by its cover", or "appearances can be deceiving" between the two situations. There's dozens of idioms for this situation because it's so common.
I could just as easily make a painting analogy. You go to an art gallery and a piece immediately catches your eye. The composition, colors, you even think you can see a rosy meaning behind it all.
Then the curator comes by and explains that it was painted by David Duke, grand wizard of the KKK, and that the piece represents his deeply racist hatred of black people and his desire to murder innocents.
What you feel after having that explained is not "post hoc rationalization" - you're just recontextualizing your previous feelings towards the piece now that you have new information. That is the argument.
You could explicitly declare a separate judgment of quality apart from whatever else that was context-dependent.
If an artwork references something outside of itself, like making social commentary, then you need to understand that context to judge the quality of that reference: like whether the commentary of the artwork is astute or not.
The quality you can judge independently of context basically has to do with esthetics and craftsmanship, complexity, detail, consistency with itself and the like.
And in real life that's not what I see. I see people making comprehensive judgements about a piece that change when it's revealed that AI created the peice. When people rewrite their opinions, it doesn't come across as honest or authentic.
This is because people are using the artwork as a proxy to praise or criticize the creator.
When they say that the work is intricate, showing great skill and perseverence (to pick some quality judgments), they mean that the artist has skill and perseverence. When that turns out to be an algorithm that is mashing up information from the training data, then people take that back; there is no artist there with skill and perseverence. The artwork itself doesn't contain skill or perseverence; it's just potential evidence that skill and perseverence were involved in its creation, which is not confirmed when it's an algorithm.
Nobody actually cares about the art; it's always about the person.
People idolize the arists, while pretending to be idolizing their works.
That's why an artist can commit "career suicide" with a neo-nazi rant, or possession of child porn, or whatever; it was never about the actual artistic artifacts.
Why was Bob Ross, the painter, regarded as kitch? In large part because he used tricks to create detail without deliberation; almost like an algorithm. You use this kind of brush, dip it lightly into white, dab it it a few times this way on the cavas and that way and, hey look, it's an ocean spray above the rocks: "anyone" can do it if they follow along. It's thew same thing: the dabbing thing and whatnot were like his AI; he just "prompted" the brush, make me a realistic spray and the brush did it with a trick.
Art has to be confirmed evidence of Hard and Deliberate Effort having taken place, using Skills that took Years of Practice combined with Talent to acquire; that's just the way it is.
Art fans are basically sports fans; art is a kind of sport, where any kind of shortcuts are like steroids, hidden motors and course cutting; those who retract their judgments believe that they have all of Honesty and Authenticity entirely on their side, because it's never about the Work by itself, but only circumstances of its creation.
>People idolize the arists, while pretending to be idolizing their works.
100% in agreement. No judgement for idolizing or at least appreciating hard work, talent, or skill. Just don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. Be honest about that reasoning otherwise it sounds like lies because that's what it is.
Suno music is the modern equivalent of sample packs that are like Lego blocks, to allow people to quickly throw together cliches.
It can pass for OK music and good musicians sometimes use stuff like that, too.
But it's much closer to these soulless "London Authentic Jungle" loop sample packs or to "Dance eJay" than to a musical instrument.
I also feel it's not very similar to generative electronic music, which is about control and experimentation in a very different way (generating cliches with generative synths is hard, apart from some ambient drones or meditative arpeggios).
Suno and similar tools are designed to generate cliches from... text.
It doesn't matter that it incorporates AI and does stuff that was thought impossible a couple of years ago.
It's still a pastiche of cliches and not a musical instrument.
And the comic is nice!
Others mentioned sampling and synthesizers here, and I can't think of a comparison that I'd consider more misplaced.
Good sampling is really creative.
And bad sampling is the same as a bland, commercial cover version of a song. Many people don't bother to differentiate, but sampling and cover versions are very different things, and it's rare for both to appear together in one good song.
It will undoubtedly get enshittifed in its own way, probably higher prices, but at least it will be reliable when booked. Ubers seem to be a crap shoot these days if they're actually going to come and get you.
I can't guarantee that Waymo won't be enshittified, but one fundamental difference with Uber is that Waymo doesn't need to compete in the labor market for drivers. When the low end of the labor market got red hot in 2023-24, that's when Uber prices climbed rapidly because drivers had other options; Waymo won't have this problem. It won't be affected by other things like ever-rising health care costs or local regulations guaranteeing driver wage floors either.
> If you wanted to play a multiplayer game on the internet, either you needed to have explicit host & port information, or you needed to use an online multiplayer gaming service.
Technically true, although tools like Kali existed which could simulate IPX style networks over the internet. I know this because I played a substantial amount of Mechwarrior 2 online when it designed only for local network play!
Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find.
Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach.
Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
>Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find.
The taxation level that maximizes revenue or minimizes harmful noncompliance never satisfies the moralizing people who wanted the thing you're discussing (whatever it is) punitively taxed in the first place.
Have a look at the earlier discussion. Plenty of people have moral motivations, hence the call for banning, rather than taxing. Moral in this case means: "I know better what's good for poor people than they do".
I also experience this. We were lucky enough to do a three week holiday around Japan, which felt very long. Three weeks of getting up, going to work, and while I enjoy what I do, it flashes by.
I think the driver for me is routine. The more routine, the faster everything seems to fly by.
Yep routine is the opposite of novelty. I'm curious what it would be like to work while travelling, if time would continue to feel stretched. I'd love to try the digital nomad lifestyle for a bit.
Haha, now that's DEFINITELY true. The amount of machines some people own, especially machines that revolve entirely around sampling, but amount to being essentially 500 dollar toys is astonishing....
People just want their quirky single purpose gadgets back. Tech got kind of boring after a laptop and phone do everything.
I kind of want the device in the OP, assuming it's cheap enough. Not because I think it will be more productive, but because it would be fun to pull out a Nintendo DS shaped device to note tasks down.
Also watch Ghost in the Shell which is vaguely set in Hong Kong then feel the vibe when you're there.
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