You are spot on about Adobe's products not having adequate alternatives. I see a lot of new artists online saying to use Affinity or Gimp, but they do not compare. Even Blender lovers, myself included, who have embraced the open source alternative would be shocked to see what features they are missing compared to the top tier tools like Maya.
I'm curious why certain categories of software receive little to no competition, while others see a lot. I feel that Silicon Valley's focus on social media oriented smartphone apps has drained a lot of the talent and capital that could have been working on alternatives to Microsoft Office, Adobe's suite, Maya's 3D, etc.
Procreate is an excellent example of a young team coming in and dominating the tablet art tool market. For a measly $12 you own procreate forever, and it is easily the most functional art tool on the iPad. I don't know why we haven't seen similar attempts at Adobe's dominance anywhere else.
Photoshop is, unfortunately, the most comfortable art application out there for a lot of art related workflows. The pattern preview mode allows for painting tiling textures easily (a feature oddly lacking from all competitors--except asperite oddly), the filters are all top notch, the ability to do non-destructive adjustments is insanely useful and not seen anywhere else, and the brush engine is the industry standard. There are a lot of nice things about how Photoshop approaches art that others are missing. The fact that Photoshop can manipulate images as easily as it can create them is what makes it special. Procreate is great for painting, but lacks even 10% of the features Photoshop has. Gimp is a decent photo editor with terrible painting tools.
There is a massive opportunity in the market for Procreate to come out with a desktop version that expands on its functionality, but my theory is that it is probably the #1 iPad selling point for many people and Apple is paying them to keep it iPadOS / iOS only. Some big name Japanese anime studios are now working a big percentage of their workflow on iPads with Procreate.
Walmart also announced they are closing 4 locations in downtown Chicago due to profitability issues related to crime. Choosing not to prosecute criminals and releasing those that are caught immediately only emboldens and worsens crime. This country needs to crack down on crime swiftly and harshly until order returns.
This has been my experience as well at 32. The commercial real estate firm I work at has a 4 days in the office policy, so we have a fairly robust social atmosphere. You can't design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't be replaced digitally.
The young people we're getting are like they're from another planet. They think it's' fine to come in late and leave early every day, they only do the bare minimum of work assigned and show zero engagement to help the firm beyond the scope of their assigned tasks. They're all coming from colleges that were remote or jobs that were work from home. How can you learn as a young professional in a work from home setting? You need to sit in on meetings, phone calls and discussions, you need to absorb the whole office around you, not just sitting alone at your computer.
Moderation is such an interesting art. There is moderation like trimming a bonsai tree... the effort is to keep everything healthy and beautiful, but not to avert the nature of the plant, to embrace its natural growth... then there is moderation like on reddit, which is politically and advertising motivated to force the community into a given shape, like trimming hedgerows. Either step in line or get pruned.
If anything HN feels like it has a lighter touch with moderation than most other places online, and I have never seen them outright censor certain political views or show any sort of favoritism towards any one company or group. I think much of that comes from having a small, passionate community that can manage the task of behaving and debating in good faith.
If someone could figure out the method for crafting communities like HN for other interests... that person would be a treasure to the internet.
I've spent decades exploring online communities (haven't we all?). From forums to 4chan, from Digg to reddit to hacker news. I would say that hacker news has one of the highest quality, most engaged and passionate user bases around... a rare feat. To replicate a place like this for other interests would be a dream.
I think the recipe for a good, interests based community is limited moderation, small scale, and a non-profit orientation. Because even once great communities on reddit have been poisoned by their massive growth and ad driven leadership combined with heavy handed, political moderation.
Oddly enough, I have found /lit/ on 4chan to be one of the best communities for discussing books and writing. They are more grounded and passionate than most of the other Chans and while you'll still find the occasional edgy post or nonsense, the censorship free and open community has some brilliant minds engaging there.
Discord has potential, but the constant flow of information and the reliance on typically heavy handed moderation make it just a faster version of popular writing subreddits.
I wish someone could make a cheap and easy shell to quickly make "hacker news" like clones that people could run for given interests, to create communities like this one geared towards other interests.
I think covid's lasting impact will be one of vastly growing mistrust in the political and scientific organizations that society looks to for guidance.
From the CDC's ever changing guidelines, the liability-free, fast tracked vaccine that doesn't actually mitigate transmission, the labeling of media pushed medical hypothesis as "science" and any debate as heresy, the effortless militarization of common citizens to socially pressure and attack their neighbors into compliance, and the coordinated "fact checking" campaigns of powerful organizations that have turned out to be complete lies. It's all done lasting damage to societal trust... from our own families and neighbors, to the heights of academic and governmental leadership.
People are rightfully asking many questions. Are the FDA, CDC, and the WHO corrupted by big Pharma companies and political groups that care more about saving face and profit than the truth? Is academia similarly corrupted to create research that supports the chosen narrative? Is "trusting the experts" really the embodiment of science... or one of religious zealotry?
They're a perfect example of how in America we have these public services that get overloaded and degraded in quality (because they are public), so the rich go and make their own private luxury versions to enjoy a more selective and high quality experience.
Reddit will be the future ghetto of the internet while the elite hang out in private discords!
Content, info, arguments, etc. are all propagated online based on their deliciousness. Is it dramatic? Easy to digest? Shocking? Emotionally powerful? Bright and alluring? Sexy or disgusting? These are the elements that push information to the top. Reality, truth and logic can't compete.
Advertisers figured this out in the middle of the 20th century. Prior to Edward Bernays' (Sigmund Freud's relative) revolution of advertising, products were marketed based on their functional qualities: how effective they were, how efficient, etc. Bernays realized from war propaganda and Freud's ideas of the unconscious, that selling with emotional coercion and sex was far more effective. In fact, you could make people buy things they didn't really want or need, by making them unhappy without them. He was able to convince women to smoke cigarettes by having trendy, independent women smoke openly at a parade, followed by a branding campaign calling them "torches of freedom". This concept of emotional manipulation trumping factual data is how our entire society now operates.
If we want a skeptical and thoughtful populace, our entire education system must be restructured and information dieting will have to become an innate part of the online experience.
The end result of all this fakery is a growing doubt and distrust of the world and the information presented to us. Bots on twitter, corporate reddit moderators pruning discourse, astroturfed discussions, deepfakes, AI generated news articles, AI art, it all waters down the assumption that what we see before us is real. Leading us to doubt everything we read, see and hear. Much of this bot driven noise online is only possible in large, public online communities.
I think we will see a shift towards much smaller walled gardens of community online. It's already happening with the mass exodus to discord and smaller chatrooms. I think we can all safely assume that our 30 discord friends are real people... for now.
The country club exists for the wealthy to enjoy the pleasantries of community and pastime without interruption by the masses. I think the internet will move to mirror the real world as we segregate apart into the places we most enjoy... or have the connections and money to afford. Authentic and vibrant human communities with novel content curation will be a luxury, while the "public pool" for the masses will be an internet of data pollution and grime.
That is a beautiful quote, I had never read it. Novelty and ever growing detail of artistic creation have their limits and their downsides. Video games are an excellent example of this. Take early 3D games like Thief, a steampunk thief simulator game with blocky, polygonal graphics. In the game, you navigate fairly simple geometric environments looking for loot, avoiding guards and exploring the world. In this simplistic setting, interactive objects are clearly visible: a key, or a pile of gold, or a golden goblet. These are all visible as objects in the world. You see a key on a table and you pick it up. The simplicity of graphics allows for extremely clear visual communication and a highly immersive experience. You explore the world with your eyes and ears and wits alone.
Fast forward to today's AAA games, dense in extremely complex and detailed graphics. The player can no longer spot the key on the table or the pile of gold coins, there is too much noise, too much novelty, too much density... so now games have glowing icons showing you where to look and what to pick up. Minimaps to keep you oriented in the level. But what happens? The player is no longer immersed in the world, seeking loot with their own eyes, they are simply following the glowing icons, sleepwalking through the game world. All the detail and artwork glazed over and ignored. The game no longer succeeds at visual communication, because it is too dense, and in its quest for realism has actually lost immersion.
Why do so many people love Monet's impressionistic art when other artists have painted far more realistic flowers and fields? Why is it that some of the greatest art of all time came from limitations? Why do people love movies with practical effects more than those with the most impossible and incredibly detailed CGI effects? I think your quote really captures the truth that AI and ever growing ease and detail of artistic creation can never replace the raw beauty of humans doing their best with limited tools.
The most valuable thing online in the next few decades will be authenticity. Authenticity is really the new luxury. The beauty of the early internet was its pure, passion driven authenticity. Websites sprouting up for every interest, built only because someone was driven to share their thoughts on a given subject. Forums, filled with techies chatting about their interests. Video games exploring interactive media and forming a new art. The rise of memes from places like 4chan, that have come to dominate digital expression.
All of these beautiful things have been degraded by the inauthentic, focus-group, advertising data harvesting machines of mega-corporate greed. Unique websites and blogs are drowned out into oblivion, unprofitable and hidden by the SEO Gods of Google, funneling you into their own products and advertising pathways. Forums bled out into Reddit, which is now an astroturfed corporate dream world where advertisers can masquerade as real users and corporate appointed moderators funnel all conversation into the optimum advertising framework--deleting anything that could harm reddit's shareholder pool of giant corporations and governments. Video games went from novel, artistic experiments, to hyper-optimized addiction machines built to drain the time, money, and drive from their young audience. Even memes, with all their raw vulgarity and juvenile silliness, have been coopted by corporations trying to bend this new form of expression to their advertising goals.
First, content online was authentic and human. Then, big tech started trimming and censoring and funneling and optimizing it into something less real... less human, but far more ripe for advertising revenue and data collection. Now, we are entering the stage of AI-generated content. Articles written by algorithm, art created by machine, bots filling up the whole internet with noise. The level of distrust, paranoia and questioning of reality that users will experience online in the coming years will be unparalleled. Is this image real? Is this person I'm talking to a bot? Is this artwork human made?
Which brings me back to my main point. Authenticity will be the new luxury. And the builders of tomorrow who figure out how to curate authentic online communities and experiences will be the winners in this content war.
I disagree that the 1031 exchange laws are detrimental to society. In fact, I would argue that their existence boosts the rate of development and increases housing supply in the US.
Firstly, why does the government deserve to tax these transactions at all? These landlords are already taxed on their income from their jobs, pay property taxes, pay taxes on all the products they buy. The government is extracting plenty of wealth from its citizens, why on earth would we demand more of people just for being successful in real estate? Will the government put their money to better use than these people spending it themselves on products and services? I think anyone who engages with public sector projects and services knows that the government does not efficiently spend money.
Let's imagine a world where 1031 exchanges are banned. What happens? Wealthy investors no longer sell properties at the same rate. What's the point? If my apartment building is cash flowing every year, and I'm stuck paying a huge capital gain tax on the sale, I'll just hold it for life and enjoy the cash flow. The rate of real estate transactions would collapse overnight, killing all of the jobs connected to it from appraisers, to brokers, to investment firms and wealth advisors. Now, not only does the government get less tax revenue because overall real estate transactions and taxable events are diminishing, but there is less incentive to build new projects.
The appetite of 1031 exchange buyers is one of the driving factors in development of new commercial real estate projects in the market! The profit motive spurs growth. Look at the Opportunity Zone legislation of 2017, a once in a lifetime chance to defer and eliminate capital gains as long as you are investing those gain dollars into real estate development in blighted areas. This tax incentive alone has generated hundreds of thousands of new residential units on the market that would never have been built without the tax incentive. Taxing real estate more would only slow growth, if we want people to take the time, effort and risk to build more housing units in the US, we need to incentivize them with less taxes.. not more.
Online artists, particularly those gunning for a big twitter following, have to hit it with a specific niche to make it big. I've seen people blow up for drawing really great knights, or sexy sea monsters, or for making really cool space ships. The big artists typically have an area of focus that goes viral. Or they are the highest professionals who work on Disney, Pixar, Video games etc.
I have a story of watching someone go big on twitter with their art. I met a girl from New Zealand with incredible talent on discord. She painted amazing humans and wonderful creatures. She would paint daily and really struggled with getting a following.
One day she posted a cute Pokemon girl with some busty cleavage... the post took off. She got thousands of likes and a flood of followers. She said she didn't want to resort to sexy smut to get a following, but the attention was too powerful. 6 months later she has 30,000 twitter followers and a whole community oriented around her work of drawing sexy Pokemon characters and anime girls with increasingly skimpy outfits.
While not the path she hoped for, she found her niche and as such she's made it into the limelight on twitter. So I think the moral of this story is that there is a path for artists to flourish online, but you need to find and target a specific area or interest... or draw lewd babes...
Your summary of this phenomenon resonates with my experiences navigating the internet all these years. I find reddit to be the most perfect example of watching something authentic, human, and real... devolve into a manufactured, astroturfed facsimile of a forum community.
Years ago, reddit was filled with interesting discussions and analysis. Beautiful debates would rage on /r/news about current events, with equal showing of opposing viewpoints. Deep discussions on cinema in /r/movies. Excited chatter about the next video game and people's past favorites in /r/games. It was a place to talk shop for any interest.
Today, reddit is a vastly different place. /r/news is a perfect example of how ad companies and political groups pulled it off. Around the height of Trumps office, the left was able to strongly rally around hatred for the man and therefore hatred for any conservative. During this time of high emotion, the /r/news subreddit had a mod overhaul which completely aligned the political framing to 100% progressive, with a search and destroy mentality to all right wing thought. Only certain "power users" with ties to established media companies and left wing political groups would post articles there and any competing user or troublesome commenter would be banned. After only a few months of this, anyone with a centrist or right wing opinion was banned or just left, and today /r/news is now a perfect echo chamber for progressive politics. If a newbie were to go visit /r/news on reddit today they would have to believe that surely everyone must think this way, and surely /r/news is a reflection of reality, but it is not, it is a curated and controlled echo chamber.
The power inherent in falsifying organic communities and engagement in propagandizing and selling things to people is incredible. Our society is increasingly distrusting of traditional media, news, talking heads and the like, and have turned to the authenticity of social media strangers to get a better idea of the real discourse around current events. When those pools of discussion get poisoned, manipulated, and falsified, it further breaks down our ability to understand each other or feel connected.
On the advertising front,/r/movies and /r/television are merely a constant stream of Movie/TV ads and celebrity gossip. /r/games might as well be the front page of a games industry magazine. The organic discussions are few and far between, and the marketing pushes from content creators are ever more apparent. You will see movies get odd posts by some rabid fan who just saw the newest release and can't wait to share how wonderful it was! Several comments agree that this new movie is a joy, great fun! Then you watch it and it's awful, true garbage, and if you search around you'll find out most real people agree... and you realize you were tricked, no human ever liked this dull film, some social media intern wrote that reddit post and paid for flair to pop it up. You start to realize that from mainstream reviews... to reddit posts.. everything online is bought and paid for. What can you believe?
This is the reality of the modern online social media space. Users are cattle to be herded towards products and worldviews and mindsets. Governments and companies alike prod and seduce us towards their desired result, and we're meant to believe that everything we're experiencing is authentic... but it isn't.
The question now is... what's next? We know that people feel more alone and disconnected than ever before, and that authenticity seems to be in dwindling supply... how can we take back the internet? How can real discussion and community build up again? Maybe it's discord, maybe it's web3.0. Who can say... but we cannot accept that this beautiful cyberspace of human knowledge is becoming the worlds largest marketing ploy.
The cleanest and easiest use case I see for crypto is just optimizing the whole securities issuance and fund management legacy system. For my business in alternative investments if I want to raise money for a project with a Regulation D offering I need to spend a lot of time and money jumping through hoops and dealing with numerous financial institutions.
The typical flow of information, effort and money goes like this: the sponsor (me) creates the investment opportunity under Regulation D of the SEC ruleset with the help of some securities attorneys, a managing broker dealer (SEC compliance) signs off on it and circulates it to broker-dealers via selling agreements, then, wealth advisors who are registered with those broker-dealers can sell our offering to their clients, those clients then fill out a subscription agreement and send their money to a third party called a transfer agent, the transfer agent takes in the agreements and cash, logs all the details about the investor and manages the payment of distributions with a mixture of direct deposit and paper checks, and generates tax documents via mail, these distributions and tax documents then go to the financial custodian of the asset for each investor.
This process involves 8 to 10 different parties, multiple financial institutions and reams of paperwork. The cost of capital is approximately 11% using this method.
I dream of the day that I can offer a tokenized security on the blockchain, that is held by the investors themselves in their wallet, with distributions paid with USDC directly to their wallets. The reduction in cost would be incredible--all we need is the legal framework to allow it.
A childhood friend of mine developed schizophrenia at 25, so I am surely convinced of the existence of true mental illness. To me a mental illness is defined as a clear defect in the workings of the brain, such that you have uncontrollable hallucinations and mania. I am not as familiar with bipolar disorder, but my overall argument is not that mental illness is non-existent, it's that depression is either vastly over-diagnosed or should not be categorized in the same group as schizophrenia and the like. Where is the line between "I've abused my brain with the comforts and overstimulation of modernity and now I am not happy" with "I was born to be sad because I'm genetically broken"?
In the end psychology is just too political and too lacking in scientific rigor to handle these questions. the DSM is essentially a politically motivated group of academics voting on what is or isn't a mental illness. At one point homosexuality was a mental illness, seen as a deviance in brain function leading to the end of reproduction. But the political tides changed and now it is no longer classified that way. How can we drug people for a lifetime based on the changing tide of academic bureaucrats who vote on what is or isn't normal? Is it too cynical to believe that the pharmaceutical companies making massive profit off of the mental health drug industry are not backing the psychologists making DSM decisions?
A kid comes in saying he's depressed all the time. They ask him what's wrong, why he is unhappy? He complains about feeling sad all the time without reason. They give him anti-depressants. But what about the fact that he plays video games all day, watches porn constantly, is on booze and weed and stimulants, is constantly browsing novel media on his smartphone, constantly entertained with netflix, he's blasted with supernormal stimuli 24/7 and then wonder's why his brain chemistry is out of whack... yet the mental health industry would rather see him drugged up on profit making anti-depressants rather than struggle through the years of effort and therapy to change his lifestyle.
A city breaking the law for decades by paying the school district illegally and no one doing anything about it out of fear of getting bad PR for their election campaign... or mishandling property assessments for 8 years are all pretty huge examples of incompetence and are not something I expect in a first world country.
It's the exact opposite of the system working. It's people being given power because of their party rather than their qualification and it indicates a greater sickness in politics in which we have become binary sports fans rooting for our team no matter the cost or quality of the candidate.
To be fair I have no clue how broken property taxes are in Europe or Japan or other first world places, but this ordeal was eye opening to me having grown up assuming our local governments were held to a higher standard.
There is so much incompetence and political game playing regarding property taxes. I work in commercial real estate development. We negotiated a TIF district in a small midwestern town to help redevelop their vacant mall. In theory, if we could redevelop the mall and fill it with new stores, the sales taxes and property taxes from this growth would greatly benefit the city over the long term and help finance this risky project.
First we came into battle with the school district. They would not allow us to build apartments on the mall site because "renters don't contribute to property taxes for the school", even though the citizens of this town need rentals because not everyone can afford a home. It then came to light that the city had been paying the school district out of their operating budget... which is illegal, schools can only be funded by property taxes. But would any politician want to go to war with the school district because they had accidentally been paying them illegally with taxpayer dollars? No way, they'd be voted out for attacking schools. So the school district continues draining the operating budget from the city to this day, while also getting their share of property taxes.
Enter the county assessor. We went back through all the assessment records and discovered that the county assessor had not re-assessed the commercial properties in the area for 8 years... meanwhile jacking taxes up on single family homes annually. Essentially they were giving businesses a freeze on property taxes while shifting the burden onto homeowners. If the county wasn't reassessing commercial real estate, than our TIF development couldn't demonstrate growth as the taxes would not change! So we tried to shake the hornets nest and let the county and city know that their taxpayers were being taken advantage of...
What was the end result? Why had they not been reassessing commercial properties? Incompetence, the assessor was some idiot who was voted in because he had the "D" next to his name and did not know anything about assessing property taxes and argued that he was simply "too understaffed" to assess commercial properties for the last 10 years.
Now imagine a whole country where massive, expensive errors like this can play out without anyone noticing for nearly a decade... it's frightening how broken, corrupt, or incompetent our government is in the United States.
I'm curious why certain categories of software receive little to no competition, while others see a lot. I feel that Silicon Valley's focus on social media oriented smartphone apps has drained a lot of the talent and capital that could have been working on alternatives to Microsoft Office, Adobe's suite, Maya's 3D, etc.
Procreate is an excellent example of a young team coming in and dominating the tablet art tool market. For a measly $12 you own procreate forever, and it is easily the most functional art tool on the iPad. I don't know why we haven't seen similar attempts at Adobe's dominance anywhere else.