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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#431

Post by ineedasername »

maleno wrote: post #280
raincole wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…

I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is no…

To the extent this argument holds, it then fails for something like writing code, as well as any visual art style when works are created on a computer if their original aesthetic derived from the material-world limitations of tools and materials under which it arose: no human skill, no countless hours of labor has gone in to producing digital works in styles or colors where their perceived beauty was rooted to the rarity of seeing, ever in one’s life, something like the shade of blue derived from lapis lazuli. Now? Any child with a screen can produce it.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#432

Post by sevensor »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #360
fhe wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or turn the food over, or move it to a different position inside the microwave -- the way microwave works is that it heats up the food unevenly (there's a wave involved).

I don’t really think repositioning it has a direct effect. An indirect effect of moving it around is that you turn the microwave off for around 30 seconds or more in order to do it. The reason some parts increase in heat faster is that they have higher concentrations of water; allowing the water to stop boiling and all of the heat to spread through is the magic. (I’ve heard the fans that you hear are there to reflect…

> The reason some parts increase in heat faster is that they have higher concentrations of water;

Composition is part of it, but it isn’t the whole story. A microwave oven is a resonant cavity. There are standing electromagnetic waves in there, in several different modes. They have peaks and nulls. That’s why many microwaves have a rotating plate. It physically moves the food relative to the standing waves.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#433

Post by jchanimal »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #368
bsenftner wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is at least three major art markets: 1) pretty pictures to fill in a void (empty walls, dress up an article...), 2) prestige purchases for those trying to fill that void in their imposter syndrome, and 3) fellow artists who are really philosophers working beyond language. The whole reason art is evaluated with vague notions like taste, context, history and so on is because the work of artists left their audienc…

There’s an even deeper issue, not just for art, for all things. The majority of artists, and of all other groups, are in fact mediocre with mediocre virtues, so enough incentives would turn most of them into Whatever shillers like the post describes. So a non expert cannot easily determine, even if they do stumble upon “Serious art” by happenstance, whether it’s just another empty scheme or indeed someting more serio…

The opposite. We are all learning to hone our slop detectors now, real art is more valuable and necessary.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#434

Post by ddorian43 »

Procrastes wrote: post #430

This captures something I've been struggling to describe, and "Whatever" is the perfect term for this. Private Equity & Financialization: Whatever for business Flood the Zone & Deadcatting: "Whatever" for politics It's what I think about when I hear all of the "AI is going to eliminate all the jobs." That's just a convenient cover story for "Tax laws changed so R&D isn't free money anymore, and we need to fire everyo…

The tax law for R&D got fixed though with the big bill.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#435

Post by ranger207 »

I liked the idea in there about how there's so many people out there that look at a thing merely for its potential to "line go up", and the actual thing itself doesn't matter at all, it's just Whatever. The current crypto is the perfect distillation in that regard, but it does apply more broadly to everything. It's the same problem with management as a skill entirely separate from what's being managed: It's abstracting around Whatever (be it a particular crypto token, Netflix show, or plumbing company), and when the abstraction inevitably leaks, the MBA solution is to crush whatever leaks, since that's not purely related to "line goes up". Of course, abstractions don't only leak trivial details, and so when the leaky part is cut off to try to shove the Whatever back into the box, it's cutting off important parts of the Whatever itself, causing it to wither and die. The second half of the article about LLMs and stuff I agree with, but I think that insight from the first part of the article is the more important one

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#436

Post by jchanimal »

globnomulous wrote: post #423
dingnuts wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which really has led to fewer drummers. what's your basis for this claim? please provide some data showing number of drummers over time, or at least musicians, over the last fifty years or so. I tried searching and couldn't find anything but you're so confident, I'm sure you have a source you could link

Sure, here's a blog post that cites BLS statistics showing a 45% decline in the number of working musicians in the US just between 2002 and 2012: https://thetrichordist.com/2013/05/21/45-fewer-professional-...

I’m one of those statistics. But I still play. It’s fun to imagine myself with a full time studio career but instead I’m a database startup founder. (I got into databases by building a web crawler to recommend how musicians could promote themselves on mp3 blogs.)

How many musicians or artists are finding their need to explore similarly met by opportunities that simply didn’t exist in 2002? If art is expression than we should expect the people who might have wielded a brush or guitar to be building software instead.

If this is you, I recommend Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. It’s as pure an expression of the way I like to work in music, as it is aligned with how I think about code and product design.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#437

Post by CuriouslyC »

KaiserPro wrote: post #391
CuriouslyC wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have amazing master blacksmiths who've reached the pinnacle of the craft despite no economic demand for their skills, so clearly the lack of a market doesn't deter curious people looking for a hobby.

> doesn't deter curious people looking for a hobby. curious rich people.

I've met a few master blacksmiths who do fair/con circuits, these are often guys who did stuff in their garage while working a regular job until they were able to build a customer base and online presence.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#438

Post by tromp »

immibis wrote: post #397
fsflover wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value Why is that? You can just buy 0.00000001 BTC.

Having currency is only meaningful if the amount of currency someone has correlates, at least loosely, to some kind of merit or work. Let's say me and my friends agree to carve off 0.00002 BTC supply and pretend that is the whole world of currency. We could run a whole country using that 0.00002 BTC as money. Except that anyone who has 1 BTC can break into our walled garden and, with a tiny fraction of their holdings…

It's such a shame that the premier cryptocurrency chose a speculation friendly emission that concentrated wealth on early adopters (its creator included) rather than a speculation resistant pure linear emission (no halvings) that would give future generations their fair share to mine.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#439

Post by ctoth »

zwnow wrote: post #340
erwincoumans wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. However, according to the author LLM's mostly produce crap, and he doesn't seem to be able to imagine (or want?) that to improve (beyond crap/hallucination and become very useful to many).

Tell me how is it going to be useful to the many? Even better marketing emails? More precise targeted advertising? Even more automated job application rejections? Mass firings due to AI replacing most office jobs? Whats the benefit of LLMs to the many who barely can operate a search machine? I am sorry but thinking this will benefit the many is delusional. It's main use is making rich people richer by saving expenses…

I'm just a regular developer - not rich, not running a company. I used to maintain accessibility apps for blind users (QRead for ebooks, various Twitter clients back when their site was barely screen-reader compatible). Had to abandon them when I got a day job - no energy left for wrestling with deprecated APIs and broken CI pipelines.

Now with Claude Code, I've cleaned up years of technical debt, added proper test coverage, got everything building in CI again with automated release-on-tag. (Yes, CC will literally debug your GitHub Actions yaml.) My blind users are getting updates again after years of nothing.

I'm nobody special. By basic statistics, if LLMs are this useful to one random developer, they're probably useful to millions of others maintaining their own small projects.

Yes, job displacement is a real concern. But the idea that LLMs [only] help the wealthy get wealthier? I'm living proof that's not true. I'm using them to resurrect accessibility tools that the market wouldn't support. That's not exactly a venture capital use case.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#440

Post by projektfu »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #422
eesmith wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A couple" does not always mean two. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/couple - "(informal) a small number" FWIW, "Maximum accuracy for standard linear slide rules is about three decimal significant digits" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule While yes, "Astronomical work also required precise computations, and, in 19th-century Germany, a steel slide rule about two meters long was used at one observatory. It had…

"a couple" always means two. "A few" always means three. That wiki is wrong.

If someone says, there were a couple [of] people there, I would not expect there to have been two, specifically.
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