> "Most people write a blog post hoping it’ll change their lives, not just the way they think"
Some of us just want an outlet that we control. Even though nobody will ever read it.
The End of an Era
341–350 of 480 posts
Re: The End of an Era
#342> I watch videogame streamers play games. Millions of people do. There will be authors who livestream the entire book-writing-process (just typing that out makes me want to launch one today). No one person will watch the entire process, but enough people will tune in here and there, and it’ll on be on YouTube I would definitely watch this.
Ironically, I finally caught up on an online web series (though it's been adapted to a published book as well as audiobooks) and discovered the author does live stream their writing of unreleased chapters.
They're a bit too prolific to actually dig into their overall process, but you can watch them type for hours straight. It's awfully boring tbh since there's no interaction and they're understandably focused on their work.
If your curious - https://youtube.com/@pirateaba/streams
Re: The End of an Era
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
Im curious what you mean by this
Wow. My comment is auto-collapsed. I'm not aware of this phenomenon on HN. Is it a moderation thing? It hasn't been downvoted. I don't think I've been shadow-banned or had this comment flagged or anything.
Anyway, to answer your question, I was pointing out that the request for "important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs" and "communicating solutions to how to live as a human" as well as lamenting that "We are adrift without instructions" is actually a request for religion. Religion is how to make sense of how to live. So the comment is asking for religion and rejecting religion at the same time.
At the same time, I was pointing out that one religion in particular has directly addressed the point that "writing is not the goal." The "word"—or "logos" in the greek—is the reason, the logic, the rational principle of the cosmos behind the words. It points to that need for a solution for how to live, as well as showing there is a real answer.
Re: The End of an Era
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Price is determined by what someone is willing to pay but value isn't. If the value from art comes from expression, then LLMs directly attack the core value of art.
Damien Hirst, among many other prominent modern and historical artists, famously employed teams of human assistants to execute the bulk of the work. In the Hirst case that extended to the spot paintings, many of which he had very limited involvement in as a direct feature of the concept of the work itself. Something tells me that doesn't alter the value of the art as expression of the intention of the artist, and not…
Have you ever seen the end credits of a movie. It’s not made by one person either. Just like cathedrals aren’t built by one person.
But someone has the vision and make it real. That which is real is a medium from one soul (or many) to you.
I still have to see someone using LLM to share a soulful vision of his.
Re: The End of an Era
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
This assumes one-shot generation. I don't use it that way, and I don't think many people who find it useful do. I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's he…
Many people make the mistake to think LLMs are stochastic parrots, but they are more like pianos, you play the keys and they make music, if you don't bring no new spices to the soup no wonder it comes out bland.
Exactly. LLMs regress to the mean. If you want don't want average, you need to feed the context to push it away from the mean.
Re: The End of an Era
#346LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…
Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why th…
No.
I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally.
There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if they make us happy and don't have negative consequences, why not use them, but we should recognize that it's what they are.
I think that an alien intelligence could communicate with us about Ohm's law and Rieman's last theorem, maybe even debate resource and power allocation strategies (democracy, monarchy, capitalism, socialism) with us, they could probably understand the pull of sports, even if they couldn't participate in it themselves, but art and humor would be completely lost on them and considered a weird human excentricity.
Re: The End of an Era
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eventually, enough engineers will breed with enough engineers, that we'll be a different species, incapable of communicating with weirdo humanity.
You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.
Yes, I've read the book, the two movies (one modern one from the 60s?), and the sequel, very well done!, by Stephen Baxter.
It's a good concept, but for some reason I thought of a military movie I watched recently, where someone was going on about how they were third generation military. And how their friends and family were military. Sort of the same kind of siloing there.
Re: The End of an Era
#348Offtopic for the actual post, but if you don't know the author and like sci-fi mysteries his Silo story is great. I haven't read the books because I'm enjoying theorizing but the Apple TV series is being broadcast now on a weekly basis. It's one of these very dense mysteries that asks you to figure out the clues. It's about a city of about 10k people living underground in a giant cylindrical self-sufficient "silo" be…
I also strongly recommend his novellas and short stories. "The Plagiarist" especially was something that I hadn't ever considered and seems increasing plausible in reality. Also loved Beacon 23 and Sand.
Re: The End of an Era
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has happened with other accelerants in various media/fields: 1. easy access to video recording and editing equipment has made it a lot easier to produce videos on sites like YouTube; 2. easy access to audio recording and editing (Audacity, etc.) has made it a lot easier to produce podcasts and other audio content (via LibriVox, Apple Podcasts, etc.); 3. easy access to writing software and self-publishing (Amazon…
Yes, and as Howey explains in TFA those things might be good for consumers and creators who create for fun, but they are not good for people who create in order to earn a living.
you are not taking into account that creators can be funded in different ways. For example like in Patreon.
You can give part of your money to fund a creator that wants to create in order to earn a living.
I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive
Re: The End of an Era
#350What if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?
AI destroys your writing voice. There are authors who I enjoy not only because they write a compelling story, but they do so in such a way that is lyrically enjoyable. Engineers fall into the trap of thinking that if the slop machine emits the Internet-average sentence to describe a character’s actions, then it will suffice for all audiences and works of literature. “Add more adjectives and flowery language” will onl…
You are ultimately stating that there's something unique about human minds that cannot be replicated by machines. It may be so, or not.