Learning is such an incredibly interesting topic for me. The concept behind something like machine learning is easy enough to understand- especially since you can implement everything by yourself and know exactly how it works. 'Human learning' is just so spectacularly abstracted from these models that it leaves me wondering how the heck we actually learn anything. Some examples like your piano playing and muscle memory are some of the more straightforward ones, where we figure something out like 'oh, this section is easier to play with this fingering'. But, like, you're not consciously drawing on all your previous conversations whenever you talk with someone and you don't think 'that conversation went well, time to add this to my corpus of conversations and retrain my "how to speak" module.'
I think it's beautiful that we'll never figure out exactly how learning works.
I can only speak to my opinion on this matter, but I hate the idea of using 'manufactured'--for lack of a better term--fanart and memes as mediums of advertising. Just looking at the meme, I immediately think "someone loved this game so much they took the time to create something about it". The thought of a company 'manufacturing' memes to try and advertise for something just seems like it's taking such a cool form of expression and commodifying it.
As an example, Wendy's Twitter account has become pretty popular for all their pop culture references and crazy projects like a Dating Simulator and a Tabletop RPG--but at the end of the day, they're advertisements. Personally, it's hard to recognize the time and effort that went into these projects because they were only made to sell fast food; Wendy's isn't releasing these projects because they think they're cool, but because they have a bottom line they want to bring up.
I use an ad-blocker. I haven't seen a television ad in forever. However, I'm sure that this isn't the first time that memes and social media have been used as advertising. It's antithetical to what I've said previously, but I guess the most effective uses of memes as advertising are so good that you can't tell they're ads. Ultimately, if it's funny and not forced, then it's going to spread. And weirdly, I'm okay with it.
I just can't bring myself away from the comparison to how stuff becomes unpopular as soon as your parents start doing it. Facebook became ~uncool~ when our parents started using it, and I don't want to see memes become less of a cultural touchstone because of corporations starting to abuse them.
I feel it, man. I'm financially stable at the job I was aiming for in college, but now it feels like I'm just going through the motions every day. Not interested in love and not able to dedicate the amount of time and effort to my hobbies that I would need to be great at them. It just seems so pointless. HMU if you ever want someone to talk with though.
This will forever be my White Whale, but I could have sworn that there was an old version of the Youtube Music app that had a radio/autoplay feature with a slider from 'very similar' to 'wildly different'. I totally overlooked it at the time but now I can't seem to find anything online about it. Such a shame because I love finding weird songs.