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Stealing Is a Skill

ben-mini.com

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Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#141

Post by hardlianotion »

ecshafer wrote: post #18
cjcenizal wrote: post #6

My favorite quote that expresses this idea is from Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47: “Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field.”

A good example of why this is true I see in my bubble is in Indie tabletop RPGs. Fairly regularly if you follow indie rpg websites and forums, you get the following "I am sick of how Dungeons and Dragons does X so I made a new system". They will then proceed to describe Dungeons and Dragons but with some half-baked idea that is already done in some other game. So you might say "Hey this is already done in Traveller".…

Oh Traveller! It has been such a long time since I thought about it. Have I still got those manuals, I wonder?

Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#142

Post by bingoMen »

Wallace finds something more than just a design problem. Explaining how people think. We don't think in isolation. We think through mimesis (also known as copying).

When a child is learning language, they're not making up new sounds. They're just copying. When a musician learns jazz, they first write down the solos exactly as they are played, before improvising. When a scientist understands a proof, they work through it step-by-step, following the same steps as the person who first thought of it. Copying something isn't the same as thinking. It is thinking.

The people who move fastest aren't the ones who are trying to be the most original. They're the ones who've studied the old masters so well that their new ideas seem natural, not forced. They have copied so much that they can finally trust their instincts to break the pattern.

In this sense, stealing is the mental work of becoming, not just copying, but creating.

Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#143

Post by nusl »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #20
nusl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the age on LLMs it's definitely way easier than what you did.

No, it’s not. I used LLMs. It was still hard as fuck, and LLMs can’t actually help you when you’re trying to reproduce someone’s graphical design (specifically the pg buttons). If you think it’s easy, or even possible without investing months, I invite you to try.

Okay, I stand corrected. Apologies for making the assumptions I did.

Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#144

Post by omnimus »

underlipton wrote: post #125
ebiester wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://kunekuneyokai.home.blog/2019/01/18/virgil-abloh-stea... from a quick look.

Eh. Allow me to play devil's advocate, for funsies. Yes, as the blog post states, Virgil Abloh "stole" (or "steals"). But he did not steal, he "stole" ("steals"). That is, his entire modus operandi was appropriating and "elevating" the work of others. This was expected of him. If his inspiration was not obvious, then it was time to start looking for whoever he did "steal" from. Some (not 100%) of this was from lesser…

The main reason Abloh could work this way was because his buddy Kanye West was famous and this gave the work huge exposure and crucially exposure to a newer audience. That's why fashion companies liked it, it was a new market.

Otherwise this "elevation" of other past work is extremely common practice in arts. Every other art student does recontextualisation even brands do lots of self-referential work. That is why much of the fashion world never cared much about Abloh. It was just not very novel or interesting to them.

About him being black. I think fashion industry is one of the most diverse and black lgbtq+ friendly industries there is but it's extremely elitist. So I doubt anyone cared that he was black. More likely they were annoyed about him being outsider with no formal education who exploded on the scene mostly thanks to his connections and popularity. While the work was always kinda mid.

Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#145

Post by omnimus »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #65

> When you recreate someone’s creation, you learn their story: every piece of brilliance, tradeoff, and imperfection. I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the cop…

I think you romanticize it quite a bit. Painters/artists like any professionals are mostly there just to do the work. Even with Mona Lisa It's very likely that nobody that day cared about smell of the model it was just one other day at the office.

What copying does really teach you is how to actually put the paint on the canvas, how to actually make the image, how to see the details. That's the reason why copying is one of the most common learning techniques in visual arts.

Good luck painting by smelling the emotions and atmosphere of the moment.

Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#146

Post by Xmd5a »

fenomas wrote: post #60
dghlsakjg wrote: post #17

Copywork is an exercise where writers just copy verbatim another writers work. If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work. It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters. This seems like the web design version of this.

Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.

Well I did not learn to write, but came to appreciate a certain kind of minimalism by using a recursive 4-stages narrative model (Greimas) to study some novels by Haruki Murakami.

What really struck me was the fact every single segment down to the level of phrases had a well-delimited function with respect to the rest of the story. A well told story is like a perfect tiling. No gaps that couldn't possibly be closed, no overlap, every tile well-delimited and composing nicely with its neighbors, and more importantly, a way to decompose well aligned tiles (summaries) into well-aligned subtiles (elaborations): if these conditions are met, you'll be able to write a story that conserves something at every scale, i.e. coherence, and hopefully the interest of the reader!

Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#148

Post by mannanj »

anonyfox wrote: post #30
mannanj wrote: post #21

I looked up stealing to ground this comment of mine: > stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice I admire Ben for being so direct. I wonder why we fetishize, herbicide and normalize theft, even deception today. When did this become normal, and why draw the line at digital creation and not just allow theft of physical objects, too? (I mean I get the arguments…

the very point is that theft means you no longer have something since someone else has. copying is you still have it and someone else now too. there is no harm done by copying, except you actually believe that exclusivity as a separate concept is important to you. (debatable, I don't).

why not? I'm curious what you define as "property". Does property have to be physical?

For example if you felt your body and your mind was your property, if someone else copied your mind and was now profiting off of that without your consent, would you not feel that harmful to you?

Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#149

Post by fragmede »

mannanj wrote: post #148
anonyfox wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the very point is that theft means you no longer have something since someone else has. copying is you still have it and someone else now too. there is no harm done by copying, except you actually believe that exclusivity as a separate concept is important to you. (debatable, I don't).

why not? I'm curious what you define as "property". Does property have to be physical? For example if you felt your body and your mind was your property, if someone else copied your mind and was now profiting off of that without your consent, would you not feel that harmful to you?

If someone generated AI porn of me I'd certainly feel violated, among other things, but it's not stealing the same way as stealing my car so I can't get to work is. So it's not stealing, we need a different word. copyright infringement doesn't roll off the tongue though. 盗版 "doh baan" is Cantonese for pirated software/media. The original isn't easy to type, but daoban is.

Daoban might not ever enter western lexicon the same way tsunami or kowtow has, but stealing is just the wrong word to use.

Re: Stealing Is a Skill

#150

Post by parliament32 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #122
parliament32 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Gosh hacker news is so disappointing nowadays. You show a project, you say hey, this is hard, I’m proud of it, and someone comes along and tells you that ackshually it was easy because you used a few prompts. You have no idea. Try to redo what I did if you think it’s easy. No looking at my solutions either. "You slopped it" should be bannable. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the author is wrong, it does nothin…

[flagged]
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