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Knitting bullshit

katedaviesdesigns.com

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Re: Knitting bullshit

#91

Post by telesilla »

I can absolutely recommend the book On Bullshit, it's a tiny read and makes an excellent gift. Kate's article summarizes it very well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

This reddit comment puts it perfectly:

"What’s it about? Frankfurt tries (successfully) to define bullshit (rather academically). In short, a bullshit artist is solely focused on persuasion and making an impression, not caring about truth. Paradoxically, bullshit can be true.

What makes it bullshit is how it is created - shoddily, hastily and without regard for fine work. A gifted liar does their thing carefully so that the truth cannot be found out. A bullshit artist just flings it out, overwhelming skepticism with sheer volume, until something sticks with the audience."

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pidpb2/on_bullshit_...

An 1980s take on something that has taken over our 2020s digital airwaves, indeed.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#93

Post by ipsento606 »

Increasingly, my reaction to AI-generated content of basically all types is simply a deep, resonant sadness.

The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb - there is an initial shock of sadness, an initial dose of loss, an initial sense of what has been taken away.

But then for months and years afterwards, the daily occurrence of some other little humdrum experience, and only at the moment of the encounter does one think, "Ah yes, this too is forever changed."

Like sounding the depths of a dark well, where every day you lower the rope a little further, but every day there is nothing to feel but a pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#94

Post by dzink »

The economist in me immediately asks: Where is the financial incentive to do this? Just the same way the programmer would ask what the stack is. Some possibilities:

1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue.

2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend sell ads as well.

3) Attempt to dominate the niche for sale of knitting products. Or to pretend to dominate it so they can sell their the business later at a larger multiple.

4) Test the waters of a much bigger engine for doing 1-3 above in an innocuous hidden subject, before they do it with elections or some other more profitable field. Regulatory waters as well - seeing what they can get away with.

Feel free to brainstorm more incentives for making something like this.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#95

Post by Michelangelo11 »

tlb wrote: post #81

I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay. It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.

Yes, I noticed and appreciated the sloporific (great word!) quality, too :) I stopped midway for a sec to try and figure out an image, then eventually realized they were just getting more nonsensical on purpose.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#96

Post by hasteg »

lesuorac wrote: post #90
frereubu wrote: post #13

I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

I really doubt it's going to die out. I think a lot of the value in these AI Podcasts is just the self-validation of the listener. It really doesn't matter to the listener if there's nothing between Egyptian socks and Revelry because the point was to feel good not to learn. But also because I've had a long standing pet peeve with news articles that include random ass stock footage in articles. If humans can get away…

[dead]

Re: Knitting bullshit

#97

Post by shagie »

kombookcha wrote: post #57
latexr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.

It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of re…

https://youtu.be/M0S3a32RzEo with David Tennant as Crowley.

It's a well done scene that is properly faithful to the original.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#98

Post by Maken »

globular-toast wrote: post #82
kombookcha wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of re…

Whoever decided adding silly audio effects to an operating system is surely one of these lesser devils. Just think of how many people have been aggravated by a colleague's laptop when it "wakes up" every day, or an inappropriate notification sound during a presentation or something. On any desktop PC I interact with I do my bit by disabling all sound effects before I continue.

The real genius was whoever decided to add fake typing sounds to virtual keyboards on touch screens.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#99

Post by getpokedagain »

roxolotl wrote: post #62

Wow I’d never have expected Kate Davies to show up on Hacker News. I think it’s important to understand her background a bit when she talks about knitting as a matter of life and death. She was a scholar of 18th century literature before she suffered a stroke young[0]. She focused on knitting as a means of recovery and never looked back. She built a business and a community and attributes a lot of her physical and me…

Wild. This kind of empowerment and long lived effort is the type of story we should be sharing.

I'm concerned that we've taken an amazing character like this and turned the world against her for frankly a bet against human intellectual development.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#100

Post by afandian »

xnorswap wrote: post #89
afandian wrote: post #49

It's scandalous that no-one has yet posted Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon "Bullknitters". https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/ (or google image search)

Personally I think it's scandalous that the now top comment is an off-topic reference to something tangential to the title, and nothing to do with the article, which isn't really about knitting at all, except for being the hook to which the author was pulled in to the world of AI podcasts, and consequently found their output rather lacking in content. You could substitute the word knitting for almost any hobby, and t…

That wasn't meant to be the top comment, it was meant to be buried somewhere round the bottom!

I did read the whole article and have some thoughts about it. But they are pessmistic and difficult, so I'd rather share something fun.

My on-topic thoughts are that I just spent a long weekend in good company playing music and chatting. Returning to quotidien life made me think the solution is to get as far away from computers as possible, and back to the in-person interaction that we're evolved for.

A big reason IMHO that we're susceptible to phony bullshit (whether it's knitting podcasts or broadcast propaganda) is that we're not evolved for it, and it misses many of the contextual clues present in in-person interaction for which we are evolved.

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