sidkhanooja

on reflection, i would appreciate average slop more than the occasional heinous slop people say when they are opinionated..

Comics! I recently finished Wanted (which made for a shitty movie, but a decent comic) and Watchmen (I despair I hadn't gotten around to it sooner).

Now I'm planning to read V for Vendetta, The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, and some more. I've finally come around to comics as an art form, and I couldn't be happier!

For this year, mine was Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

TL;DR - the book explains how humans are predictably irrational and how seeming cognitive ease in decisioning is simply laziness in action since the brain will substitute a tough decision for a similar but easy one! It has made me reflect upon why I think the way I do, helped me to remove most bias from my actions, and also has a great suggestion that you should ask others to check you if you sound stupid, which is not great for your ego but is necessary nonetheless.

Writing is one field that I think won't be able to achieve the 'human' touch anytime soon. Art? Sure, as we have already seen with DALL-E and the like. Music? Doubtful (look up Kandrake-Z for an example), but not sure if it will expand beyond plunderphonics and noise. But writing? Meh.

I don't know if anyone even uses content-generating AIs like this for writing - but I'd be glad to change my mind by seeing some hard numbers. I mean, except for incomprehensible content-generated articles that pop up on searches only because of PageRank's flaws.

There's no need of putting this as a separate post - you can paste the same text in your profile, your Keybase and HN accounts will get linked perfectly fine.

Most ads on Spotify are not even intrusive - they are (in)famously bad for advertising Spotify's own premium service (try premium for free!).

This is just ridiculous. If you're annoyed by the ads, get a subscription then.

Tangential, but I've recently noticed that due to huge fragmentation in the streaming industry (Netflix, PrimeVideo, Hulu, Disney+ et al.), I'm only using two - Netflix and PrimeVideo, and a third torrent streaming service (PopcornTime) when I can't find a specific movie/TV series.

I prefer to use the third option as few as possible, but I find myself having to use it more and more often as the years go by - geolocked content, huge swathes of content being removed on the whims of providers (The Office comes to mind), and 'originals' that are beyond even the so-bad-it's-good category that cannot even begin to fill the void left by the good content leaving.

I cannot ever see myself subscribing to a plethora of services - the best case is subscribing to a service when it's absolutely necessary (HBO/Hotstar) and then unsubscribing when you're done, which is not at all conducive to fulfilling long-term revenue plans of such services.

So what is the endgame of such services? Is it simply to build a huge catalog of content that you'll mindlessly devour whenever you're bored? Or something else?

Was thinking on the same lines, thanks for the confirmation.

Goodreads is the most flagrant violator of most, if not all, of these rules. Searching for a book, author or a user is a PITA, and has been that way for a long, long time.

The best autocompletion I've seen is on Wikipedia - no frills, and extremely accurate. If only all services were like this.

Personal anecdote, but it's nice to see the growing maturity of the Indian audience - no one in my circle of friends and family is complaining that big names such as Linkin Park, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay et al. and rock/metal biggies (Slipknot/Dream Theater/Pantera et al.) are missing. Growing tastes, perhaps?

And it's amazing to see Spotify grow so quickly. Almost all of the people I know (I'm guilty of the same) used a US free-tier account, and sideloaded modded applications to listen to Spotify. I used to think that was piracy as usual, but now all of us are on 1-year subscriptions. The price sensitivity ($9.99/month in US vs $1.68/month in India) does obviously make a difference.