nonbirithm

Recently I've tended to look at mid-2000s Web 2.0 as a source of nostalgia. It was back in the day when twttr felt like people were optimistic about building a new community for the future and the possibilities were still unexplored. Poring through all the dense skeumorphic design trends of the era is like unearthing a time capsule.

I think of it like: The only reason humans still drive cars is we have yet to find a good enough way of replacing ourselves with something more effective. It's merely an implementation detail of "getting from A to B" that would be disrupted if a true autonomous solution was discovered. Many would want to optimize away drunk drivers and road rage if it were possible in some faraway future. So something like a steering wheel could be seen like a compromise of sorts, until the next big thing makes them obsolete.

That, and the state of missing a technology in a period of time is irreplaceable once it's been discovered. Nobody can live in an era without social media anymore, barring a global-scale catastrophic reset. So I believe it's important to consider what technology is not yet totally pervasive, for example by realizing there is still a steering wheel for you to grip in your car.

And in my mind, the sinister feeling stems from the fact that all it takes to irreversibly shift society like that is enough smart people with honest intentions but little foresight of what will happen in a few decades as a result of proliferating all this. The problems that result stop being in anyone's control, "throwing it over the wall" so to speak, and instead become yet another fact of life that could weigh us down (mostly I think of the ubiquity of social media and how it has changed human interaction). And it all stems from just a few engineering type people getting overexcited about cool possibilities they can grasp at, not considering there are billions of people unlike them who may have other ideas.

This is really clever. "Football Jesus" is "Tebow", so I am now happily exploring the Tebowverse. There is even a robot incarnation named "Tebot".

It's sort of the same thing with "all regulations are written in blood", right? For example, many of the current set of laws, regulations and best practices that prevent people on planes from dying were only enacted after people in the past died from scenarios that were either unknown unknowns or had never been observed in practice before. And that I think applies to many types of regulations besides just aviation.

I get mixed feelings when reading this comment while remembering the many people gushing about how they formed lifelong friendships through what.cd.

> But that doesn't mean that there is any remotely moral case for undoing the green revolution and allowing billions to starve.

A question is, is it possible to advance technology to fulfill the green revolution without changing the value of human creativity due to the creation/advancement of genAI? Or past a certain point, the results of discovering improved health and ecological outcomes will become inextricably linked with discovering new technologies that cause conflict? What actually drives such a process?

I think more people might become interested on why we end up here talking about new possibilities conflicting with stability again and again, similar to how the negative effects of the invention of smartphones are being talked about now.

Maybe someone who doesn't like Sourcehut or Drew for some reason.

And this time it's not only driven by larger media organizations, but also by random people who now have a chance to propagate their views from decreased barriers to entry.

I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier.

My feelings about the rise of streaming video are also conflicted. It has given us high-quality longform content on topics that hadn't been covered before, but all those other people's passions and hobbies take up way too much time if you as a consumer become deeply invested in them (not even counting the conspiracy genre and its implications). It's easy to do partially because YouTube facilitates that, but I think in the end people want to consume all this information in the end, for some definition of "want". And dozens of 6-hour streams of the latest game or another will keep being uploaded every day.

And there's this other thing that I keep coming back to. Someone I know was really into this engineer creating fake Apple product boxes that recorded thieves stealing them and being glitterbombed. They found it hilarious, but I was sort of confounded. It was the conversion of a few people's bad choices into entertainment and ad revenue, coated over with the intellectual sheen of detailed makerspace engineering diagrams and wit mixed with a moral high ground. Though what the thieves did was not right, there was something smug and passive aggressive about the entire thing that rubbed me the wrong way. And this was presented as just a humble guy with engineering experience creating his content and getting people interested in STEM. Anyone has the capability to do this sort of thing now, not just a media machine with questionable motives. It's just regular, driven people with questionable motives now.

Reminds me, I played Genshin Impact once and I was struck by how brief the opening cutscenes were. Given it was a fantasy epic I sort of expected a bit more introduction to the characters in the first 30 minutes. But I think that was because of my conditioning on console games.

It makes logical sense. The longer the intro cutscene took, the more people would just exit out before the action could take place, the more money they lost on IAPs. So fast-tracking the player to beating things up within 2-4 minutes is critical. The longer story cutscenes can take over later. There are probably hard metrics to back this up somewhere.

I think this is the main problem that will increasingly come into focus.

OpenAI has one of the fastest-growing software releases in history. It's kind of insane how after a year this is already starting to alter people's communication styles. Technologists will have to start asking "why do people still insist on doing this", even with all the discussion about incorrect information coming up. Well, because they wanted to, they could, and nobody has told them "no" yet.

I hope the consequences of such a large-scale software rollout are considered next time. If you have to stop and stay "we should educate people about the misuses of this," then some proportion of the population won't be educated or reject being educated outright and do what they want. In my view, the only thing preventing people from throwing around ChatGPT suggestions in inappropriate contexts is... not giving them ChatGPT. To remain naive to the possibilities lest they get excited and unwittingly unleash them on everyone, regardless of true their intentions - as had been the status quo up until a few years ago. Draconian legislation outlawing GPUs or LLMs are more divisive a solution than the general public just not being aware of the possibilities of LLMs.

I know this is unrealistic, however. "Time for people to embrace the tech and move on" has become a thought-terminating cliche. As a programmer, I'm lost as to what to say or do about this.

I've seen accusations and suspicion of HN commentators giving ChatGPT responses. Accusing someone of using ChatGPT here has become something more nuanced than an insult, but still sows discord. If it's coming to this, I think it is worth examining for what purpose we build the things we do.