I don’t trust spotify not to fill those playlists with AI slop, now. I also personally prefer to go deeper on a band, rather than thoughtlessly drift through a bunch of stuff I’ll never hear again.
I do like bandcamp’s “people who bought this also bought this” recommendations, though.
I’ve been telling people for years to buy 1-2 albums a month, and then after a couple years you have a sizable library. Spotify is renting.
But spotify is easy and fast, and some people think they listen to way more music than they do. I wonder how many people are paying spotify $10/month to listen to the same 4 albums for years.
People gotta stop watching slop. But it seems impossible to get people to stop using tiktok, twitter, instagram, et al. They just don’t care enough.
Seems like this should be illegal, Google should be broken up, and its leadership imprisoned
The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either.
Ed Zitron, famously verbose web blog guy, wrote a post about how he thinks most of these big businesses are run by idiots that are out of touch with both the product and the users.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
It’s simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.
This is only me describing my personal taste, but:
Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.
I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you’re saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.
Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.
Sometimes I forget people watch YouTube on purpose. Other than music videos and the rare “how do I do this thing in this game?” I just don’t use it
I feel like an alien sometimes. Reading books like some sort of lost time traveler.
I know a guy that’s doing at least once a week, probably more, commute from DC to New York City. To be a product guy at a like 5 person company. As if you really need to be in a shared office to move jira tickets, ask eng again “How’s that feature coming?”, and so on. The CEO is a crazy person.
The CEO is also making the front end developer guy who lives in Connecticut come into the office 2-3 times a week. So he can work on his web page, the one with the code stored on github.
I hate all this “return to office” stuff. I don’t care about management’s feelings or real estate investments, and I don’t care about people who hate their family and can’t focus at home. Making people commute is a pay cut and a blow against labor.
Do they vet the people? Could someone hypothetically sign up for the app, case the rich person’s situation, and then do crimes? Sounds like a good way to find rich assholes.
Sometimes people are my old job post AI stuff and I just tell them “stop using the lie machine”
Automobile companies should be held accountable for destroying and lobbying against other modes of transit, so not really the best metaphor. Also destroying the environment is pretty bad.
Also there’s no cosmic law that says tech companies had to make LLMs and put them everywhere. They’re not even consistently useful.
These big companies have blood on their hands and it seems like no one is willing to do anything about it.
That’s a quote from Eco’s essay on ur-fascism, for the unfamiliar
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Google should be broken up and its leadership fined into oblivion for anti competitive behavior
Make sure you speak clearly with minimal slang, or they might willfully misinterpret what you’re saying to deny your rights. Like to think you want a lawyer dog.
A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc.
A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.
Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them “Business Idiots”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
It is absolutely stupid, stupid to the tune of “you shouldn’t be a decision maker”, to think an LLM is a better use for “getting a quick intro to an unfamiliar topic” than reading an actual intro on an unfamiliar topic. For most topics, wikipedia is right there, complete with sources. For obscure things, an LLM is just going to lie to you.
As for “looking up facts when you have trouble remembering it”, using the lie machine is a terrible idea. It’s going to say something plausible, and you tautologically are not in a position to verify it. And, as above, you’d be better off finding a reputable source. If I type in “how do i strip whitespace in python?” an LLM could very well say “it’s your_string.strip()”. That’s wrong. Just send me to the fucking official docs.
There are probably edge or special cases, but for general search on the web? LLMs are worse than search.
All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent
But i guess it’s always labor that pays the price
Yeah my friend is dating a Google recruiter and he overhears some absurd offers. Like, a reasonable person could retire on a few years at that salary.
I have a hypothesis that rich people are bad at money
Have you tried explaining something to someone lately? A lot of people don’t care and don’t understand. About anything