Viewing profile — ranprieur

People in this thread are using the phrase "AI slop" as if everything made by AI is automatically slop. If you believe this, fair enough, but then you must support the abolition of…

I still do it. Spotify is good for making playlists but I don't use it for listening. I collect mp3s, bought on Bandcamp or downloaded from Soulseek, and listen on an old Sansa Cli…

Reading is declining because of computers, which are a much more fragile and dependent technology than text on paper.

A supplement called genistein mitigates the risk: https://www.med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/marijuana...

I did this, with a regular chest freezer and a thermostat. It used hardly any energy, but it was hard to clean and died after about five years.

This isn't new to AI. The same kind of thing happens in movie test screenings, or with autotune. If something is intended for a large audience, there's always an incentive to remov…

This is better than nothing, but the big advantage of the UBI is that there is no bureaucracy deciding who gets it and doesn't get it. If there are any conditions on the income, th…

> AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the systems and people who do. Pure dystopia.

I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Examp…

This article fails to mention why the currency circulated so fast. It was depreciating: it was defined as gradually losing value, so hoarding didn't work, and the people with money…

The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing.

Because he's jealous?

A great book on this subject is In The Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander. He argues convincingly that the correct biological metaphor for technological progress is not evolutio…

I agree with the author: Heroes II is my favorite of the series, just for the innocent vibe. Also, Heroes IV is underrated. It got bad reviews because it came out buggy, but the bu…

Because the medical system doesn't.

I like this idea, but my problem is with the word "successful". Setting constraints rather than chasing goals leads to doing interesting things. But there's no guarantee you'll eve…

"Efficiency" is selfishness. It's a word for when people in power want to give less and get more.

Key sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break."

There's some good stuff here, but some of it is just wrong. Sometimes the person with the loudest laugh is laughing the most authentically.

This all makes more sense if you go through the article, and every time you see the word "work", substitute "work for money".

When I was young, every time I got a 20-20 prescription, my eyes got worse. When I stopped going to the optometrist, my eyes stopped getting worse. Now I wear glasses that only cor…

> it’s not a desire but a necessity. Speak for yourself. I love sleep and wish I could sleep more. Sometimes I think the only purpose of being awake is to get food and shelter for …

Nice idea. We need a technology that doesn't just look at mouse movement to help you do nothing, but reads your brainwaves.

Disenchantment was well underway in the 1600s, and arguably peaked in the 1700s, the Age of Reason, before it was partly undone by Romanticism. The disenchantment narrative goes ba…

Yes, it repeats itself so much I kept thinking I had accidentally scrolled up.