leviathant

그저께discuss

There is an Ikea in south Philadelphia not far from the Old Swedes Church, but they do not do anything to promote the Swedish history there, however brief.

The colors of the flag is Philadelphia pay homage to this Swedish heritage.

leviathant

9일 전discuss

And now automate and scale that with Claude/OpenAI/Gemini/whatever. It's insidious and terrible.

leviathant

9일 전discuss

What I do love is that when you're a mod, that post history isn't necessarily hidden.

leviathant

10일 전discuss

I cannot emphasize strongly enough just how deeply pervasive the spam is at Reddit. I'm a mod at the ecommerce subreddit, and I've only caught some of the AI-powered marketing operations because in one particular campaign that was making fictional claims about things I had direct knowledge about. Once I looked into the post history, and started to untangle the web of accounts that formed a self-supporting community of posters and commenters, just subtle enough to get genuine engagement, but specific enough to make the kind of posts that the LLMs will siphon up and regurgitate.

It's not just shady little operations. I'm speaking specifically about the SCAYLE ecommerce platform, in my example. They've got Zalando money to play with, and as a German platform that's trying to break into the North American market, it appears they've made a bet on indirectly spamming the LLMs with fictional tales of commerce replatforming horror stories. At first, they're some of the more interesting topics in a sea of really useless posts, with contributions from people who seem to have some real experience with enterprise ecommerce. I was a little suspicious, but these interaction campaigns were spread out enough that I didn't put the pieces together for months. Of course, to go back on what I said at the top of the paragraph, maybe SCAYLE is shady, and I'm giving them too much credit.

The good news is, some of the AI powered tools that mods have access to are getting better at surfacing suspicious patterns of behavior. However, I still find I have to manually address these campaigns.

In the cat-and-mouse game with these marketing jerks, I'm always reluctant to surface what's working and what isn't. This is an interesting post, but it's going to make things worse. Ah well.

leviathant

2개월 전discuss

What is better? My colonoscopy came with a dose of propofol that made me understand why Michael Jackson went out the way he did. Best sleep I've ever had.

leviathant

2개월 전discuss

I did a colonoscopy at 38, because I saw something in the toilet that looked like the lingonberries at Ikea. Everyone was like "Man that seems early" but when I woke up, the doctor expressed some surprise when he told me they removed a couple of polyps.

A week or two later, I got a bill for several thousand dollars, and I just had to roll with it. I believe that in the US, there is a certain age, after which, they're covered.

leviathant

2개월 전discuss

I'm paying $16/mo for Photoshop and Lightroom.

I have to imagine that the majority of people who post to HN can afford $16/mo.

I'm not a professional photographer, but it's an excellent hobby, and just the other week, a neighbor stopped me to tell me how much they love the pictures I post to our neighborhood Facebook group - so that's something I guess!

leviathant

2개월 전discuss

I really enjoyed Photosynth. I remember coming across an account from a guy in Tehran, and there was something really moving about sitting in Pennsylvania and being able to explore his house ("Hang on, does that box say Barf?"), local parks, memorials, and other buildings, while thinking about how unlikely it was that I might ever see these things in person.

leviathant

2개월 전discuss

I learned a long time ago that people who talk about IQ don't usually have anything intelligent to say.

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

I still pay for Flickr Pro, for a couple of reasons: the API still works, and I basically use it as a DAM for my wife's website. She's a composer, and it's super handy to have her upload into a Flickr Album and pull back different image sizes for her catalog.

Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...

Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.

It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

What I am hearing is that while you like to read, you do not feel like authors bring enough value to the table for you to actually reward them for their work.

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

I was exposed to a lot of really interesting music from Trent's what.cd profile back in the day.

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

NIN had a messy breakup with their original manager about 15 years into things. Once Trent Reznor emerged as more or less a free agent, he embraced radical approaches to distributing music and other media.

The instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV" was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and the music went everywhere - and you can draw a line directly from that choice to the Oscar for the score for The Social Network.

Concert photos, wallpapers, and other photos are still up on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nineinchnails/albums

And the NIN camp utilized Vimeo alongside YouTube: https://vimeo.com/ninofficial

Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay, because he didn't like the audio quality of the rips that were already floating around. There are three compilations that appeared, with custom artwork, including at least one exclusive version of a track that hasn't appeared anywhere else.

(p.s. wot up volk)

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

Please respond to what's linked, rather than make assumptions based on the headline.

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

Yes! I regularly share a link to Mike's talk - I was about to post it myself before scanning the comments.

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

I have no doubt that those numbers have been inflated by AI powered marketing tools, dead internet theory style.

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

>People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly.

lol, lmao even.

In America at least, people pay for branding, and to give the impression that they're of a higher standing than they are - whether or not what they're buying is quality. Whether that's someone deeply in debt sporting Luis Vuitton, or a US President putting gold-painted foam ornamentation on the walls of the oval office.

When it comes to the arts, or boutique fashion, or small scale manufacturing, people also pay for parasocial reasons - a variation on the branding angle. Storytelling about the founder, or the people doing the work, pictures of the space where a thing is being made, will give potential buyers a sense that they're paying for authenticity. That's why there are so many garbage ads on social media of a twenty-something talking about the old "one weird trick" that changed their routine... just so they can dropship you some garbage from Aliexpress with a 300% markup.

leviathant

3개월 전discuss

>I am on the side of humanity here, but people don't pay for art.

Man, maybe you don't hang out with enough artists. It's true, people typically don't make the equivalent of a tech salary for art, but people absolutely pay for art, and artists are able to not only survive, but have the capacity to thrive.

I get what you're saying, and for ad agencies, game studios, etc. that's always been the case (I remember when office supply stores sold CD-ROMs full of Clip Art) All of the sound effects in Doom were from commercially available sample libraries. And this isn't even touching on "gallery scene and art auctions as money laundering facilities" side of things.

I get the impression that most of the people who post about this topic in tech circles are general consumers, already primed for slop by mass manufacture and pop culture. But even through that lens, "people don't pay for art" falls flat - looking at what people pay for Star Trek prop replicas, or buying into the now very diverse Disney ecosystem. Now, a lot of those kinds of folks might be more prone to slurping AI slop (Hey Gemini turn me into a Funko Pop!) but there are still tons of people who value artists and their artistry. I suspect you're just not among those people.

leviathant

4개월 전discuss

As someone in the process of building a niche museum about hyperlocal archaeology and history in my Philadelphia neighborhood, the timeliness of this post is excellent.

Speaking of, The Amsterdam Pipe Museum is fantastic. On the surface, it seems like some kind of stoner side show, but the people running it are very, very experienced archaeologists, and we ended up buying multiple books from them on the topic of pipes. Trained archaeologists in Philadelphia will look at a clay pipe and say "That's Dutch" but these guys are like "That's from Gouda, and was probably owned by a farmer"

leviathant

4개월 전discuss

Once or twice, I've clicked through on a link in an email that was convincing enough to fool me, and what saved me both times was that I run NoScript.

It's so frustrating just standing by and watching as we descend into a low-trust society.