Well, most platforms operate primarily as an algorithmic scroll based feed, and the actual utilities (like event planning, or marketplace) are related to second class citizens – used mostly as a hook to get you to stay logged in.
I've had a lot of success lately relying exclusively on Partiful as my one social app. I know it's nearly an inevitability though before they will need to monetize and introduce some way to ruin the elegance.
(My proposal for the modern successor to Zawinski's law: Every social media platform attempts to expand until it has a scroll-based algorithmic content feed).
I actually use this line of reasoning to motivate and inspire some of my own art and cultural artifacts. When a far future galactic civilization pauses to ask, “who are we and where did we come from“, they might just look back at the ledger of humanity’s written outputs. In this sense, the entire trace we manage to save to disk could be viewed as a body of work were any of it to survive. Even pieces of work that nobody reads today could have a long line of future audiences and help shape the galaxy’s understanding of its cultural heritage. (These future entities might have far more processing power and bandwidth to spend on the analysis of our work).
Music was already worthless. Here's Deadmau5 giving advice to aspiring producers in 2012:
> You need to make a world. So you have a rollercoaster in your backyard. And it’ll be the hot thing in the neighborhood for about a week. But once everyone’s had a go… they’ll lose interest, go home n play Sega instead. What you need then, is a fuckin’ theme park… and you AND your music are the theme. People come into your theme park…..check out all this shit… buncha rides, no 2 the same, some merch here and there, special events, dolphins through hoops and all that whack shit. You want people to come to your theme park and feel like they’re a part of this world of yours.
Franz Lizst was a rockstar in 1840 because he could write and play the piano really well. But culture and technology has progressed.
A popstar today can usually sing, dance, write, produce, act. They're business people with a marketing vision and gimmicks to go with it. Polymath performers, creators, and multi-instrumentalists. Technology marches forward and the next generation of artists will be those who adapt the tools available.
We're certainly losing something culturally. Just like this guy[1], who spent 1906 lamenting that the mechanical music machine (phonograph) will ruin music, was somewhat right in his prediction that fewer and fewer people would learn instruments and sing well.
"Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? ... When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery? Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression?"
When I was a really young kid, I used to hum to myself with a buzzing sound to try and copy the early EDM sounds I grew up listening to. I went on to do electronic music production myself. (And that love of electronic music was the fuel that kept me interested in learning classical piano, jazz, music history and more, and why I still have a piano next to my desk now).
Personally, I'm excited to see what the next generation art and artists end up looking like.
I got addicted to scrolling content on my phone, so I built a digital pet whose growth and well-being depends on you staying off your phone! This way, if I spend all night scrolling the browser, my pet will get depression.
Unlike similar apps such as Focus Friend or Forest, which use active timers to police screen time, my app is an inversion that works like an idle game; All screen time is tracked all day, (with double the punishments at night), and upon check-in, you get feedback on your device usage.
Project: Hail Mary, a fantasy world where geopolitics are trivially simple and every state in the world collectively agrees how great it would be to cede power and work together. (And therefore enable a genuinely fun and amazing science story which was the actual focus of the book to begin with, 10/10).
Arguing with an LLM is silly because you’re dealing with two adversarial effects at once:
- As the context window grows the LLM will become less intelligent [1]
- Once your conversation takes a bad turn, you have effectively “poisoned” the context window, and are asking an algorithm to predict the likely continuation of text that is itself incorrect [2]. (It emulating the “belligerent side of OSS maintenance” is probably quite true!)
If you detect or suspect misunderstanding from an LLM, it is almost always best to remove the inaccuracies and try again. (You could, for example, ask your question again in a new chat, but include your terminal output + clarifications to get ahead of the misunderstanding, similar to how you might ask a fresh Stack Overflow question).
(It’s also a lot less fun to argue with an LLM, because there’s no audience like there is in the comments section with which to validate your rhetorical superiority!)
Text is an LLMs input and output, but, under the hood, the transformer network is capable of far more than mere re-assembly and remix of text. Transformers can approximate turing completeness as their size scales, and they can encode entire algorithms in their weights. Therefore, I'd argue they can do far more than reassemble and remix. These aren't just Markov models anymore.
(I'd also argue that "understanding" and "functional brain" are unfalsifiable comparisons. What exactly distinguishes a functional brain from a turing machine? Chess once required a functional brain to play, but has now been surpassed by computation. Saying "jobs that require a human brain" is tautological without any further distinction).
Of course, LLMs are definitely missing plenty of brain skills like working in continuous time, with persistent state, with agency, in physical space, etc. But to say that an LLM "never will" is either semantic, (you might call it something other than an LLM when next generation capabilities are integrated), tautological (once it can do a human job, it's no longer a job that requires a human), or anthropocentric hubris.
That said, who knows what the time scale looks like for realizing such improvements – (decades, centuries, millennia).
Perhaps consider that I still think coding by prompting is just another layer of abstraction on top of coding.
I'm my mind, writing the prompt that generates the code is somewhat analogous to writing the code that generates the assembly. (Albeit, more stochastically, the way psychology research might be analogous to biochemistry research).
Different experts are still required at different layers of abstraction, though. I don't find it depressing when people show preference for working at different levels of complexity / tooling, nor excitement about the emergence of new tools that can enable your creativity to build, automate, and research. I think scorn in any direction is vapid.
Technologies: My current favorite stack for building products is with TypeScript, React, (or React Native), PostgreSQL, Vite, Linux (Arch, Debian, or Ubuntu), Bash, and Nginx
Hello! I'm a fullstack app developer. I can build a product or own features from start to finish. I would love to join your team or help out, whether as a contractor or full time hire!