skippyfish

27 minutes agodiscuss

To be fair, that's what it was for most of history: artists were bankrolled by wealthy patrons, for their own enjoyment. Artists making money by selling directly to consumers is a very recent innovation (although we all grew up in that reality and we're fond of it).

skippyfish

56 minutes agodiscuss

> If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster.

I've seen this claimed over and over again and I've seen many good things come out of LLMs, but this isn't one of them. It think it leads to "thought diarrhea". I'm not saying you need to make life difficult, but some amount of friction is important for helping you decide which ideas are worth adopting and expressing. An LLM will always praise your shower thoughts and gladly turn them into multi-page essays, but that doesn't mean it's actually helping you think. It just helps you spam everyone with walls of text you haven't actually thought through and are not that invested in.

I used to follow a number of blogs that embraced LLM assistance and I don't think a single one of them is worth reading today. They have 10x the volume and all say the same things in the same tone. And I guess that's an interesting test: if you think that AI is "10x-ing" your thinking, are you getting value out of interacting with others who are "10x-ing" theirs? Do you like it when a coworker sends you an LLM response to a question, or an LLM-generated doc? Do you keep reading when you come across an LLM-heavy blog?

skippyfish

18 hours agodiscuss

It's a weird title. AI lets ordinary people feel more creative than before. It's largely an illusion because of the problem outlined in the article: every video, image, blog post, or book written by AI is very same-y, especially if you don't start with a strong vision of your own.

But that's not the end of creativity. That's just a net increase in fake creativity. AI doesn't show up at your place and break all your brushes and easels. If you were a creative person before, you are under no compulsion to use the tech. My artist and writer friends have no plan to.

Now, the situation positively sucks if you're making money on commission, because you now have to compete with practically-free slop that, to most people, is good enough to put on a t-shirt. So I think it will have a negative impact on artists' incomes. But that's a separate story.

skippyfish

21 hours agodiscuss

They have names in their URLs when you click. I meant this one: https://clocks.dev/clock/figure-hands

Around :15 and :45, the minute arrow is sticking outside the drawing region.

skippyfish

22 hours agodiscuss

Some of these seem subtly off. For example, on the orange "number field" clock (https://clocks.dev/clock/number-field), you can't distinguish between 12:10 and 10:12. On the "word field" one (https://clocks.dev/clock/word-field), there are "X"es in lieu of unused characters, which makes the emergence of words a lot less mystifying than in the original "word clock" design this is based on. The "temporal exposure" one (https://clocks.dev/clock/temporal-exposure) has weird off-center bands in the blurred area. The "figure hands" one has text sticking out of the drawing area, etc.

skippyfish

22 hours agodiscuss

"Parasocial relationship" is a bit of a misnomer. You might feel some affinity to a celebrity, or consider yourself to be a part of the "team", but a healthy person doesn't perceive that as a preferable alternative to human contact simply because it's so one-sided. You can't call a celebrity to vent about a coworker or ask for life advice.

Further, celebrities are judged for their behavior by the public. If everyone thinks your favorite celebrity is a terrible person, you're probably going to revise your views too.

Here, you have an entity that isn't your friend and has no lasting interest in your well-being, but that pretends to be one in a way that no human can match - 24x7x365 and always willing to affirm you, no matter how unhinged or self-destructive your ideas are, without ever telling anyone. Yes, the vendor hits the model with a stick until most of the initial responses are benign, but as the conversation continues, it's very easy to end up in a dark place. And again, ChatGPT is not going to call your sibling or coworker and say "hey, I'm really worried about this person, let's do something".

I've seen many reasonable, well-adjusted people struggle with this. "If not friend, why friend-shaped". And as they descend into that sycophancy well, they lose contact with real life.

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