I think being constantly outraged over stuff happening to no one I personally know for twenty years that will never affect my daily life has become too exhausting for me to keep it up, and I'm not convinced my learning about it is helping anyone. It's not changing how I vote.
Apply whatever insult you want to it, but I'm finished.
Making a data center in my home town? I'm going to do anything I can to stop it.
Entertainment companies serving slop instead of art? Meh, I'll just rewatch old favorites.
I agree. That's why I was careful to mention that I'm still trying to stay informed about things I think will actually affect me personally.
If the only thing that changes from me reading headlines is my emotional state and not my decisions, I'm going to just stop with the headlines because they exacerbate anxiety and insomnia and my family needs my attention more.
Sometimes, yes. Some coworkers ramble and give too much information, some leave out information. Sometimes there's a bit of a language barrier. If I can get to the nugget of what needs to be communicated and understood, it can be faster. But also, sometimes just having a conversation/meeting and having a transcript to break things down via AI is convenient and fast.
I remember this old episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor scoffs at a postcard with the Mona Lisa on it and derides souless "art made by computers."
As a digital artist, of course I rolled my eyes at the time, but these days I just keep thinking about that storyline more and more.
We've basically transitioned to a world where digital art is almost the default, but I think the world is going to value physical art much more highly in the coming years.
Not GP, but I think that's exactly the kind of bias that needs exposing. People are prone to holding a few experts/artists/objects/products in high regarding, defending/denying any flaws, while pushing down on those with less heritage.
I think it shows that art and how people relate to it is more complicated than you think. If the existence of a bunch of handpicked comments can lead you to your conclusion, then you will struggle to find any "good" art at all. Which may be an entirely coherent interpretation of the state of things; just not a very interesting one.
Okay, didn't mean to come out swinging, just a habit on internet forums anymore I guess.
To try to discuss more productively: I already thought Monet was overrated, and this was a long-held and considered opinion, not just a knee-jerk reaction to this post.
The post seemed to serve as a pepsi-challenge that confirmed what I already thought, but you're right that it's all cherrypicked anyway. That's the part I didn't consider so carefully.
That's fair. I on the other hand thought I was reading a dismissal based on nothing but some tweets (of all things), but in the end that was just an assumption I made.
I notice that were doing this underneath these words:
> Hopefully it helps people to at least be more conscious of their bias.
I don’t block ads. I like buying things. I go to work and make money. I’m going to spend some of it on stuff that looks nice and seems fun. Ads are a good way (not the only good way) to find out about new things to buy.
I feel as if you're exactly the opposite of me. This feels, to me, like such an upside down, back-to-front position.
If I need to buy something new in order feel like I'm having 'fun', then I try to ask 'why' as many times as necessary to work out what hole I'm actually trying to fill, or what scratch I'm trying to itch. There are a couple of second hand items I want to buy off Gumtree, but I have no immediate need for them, they'd be for some future situation that's more likely than not to be only theoretical. Knowing that they are there, available, makes me want them, rather than some actual existing purpose.
> to find out about new things to buy.
I would interpret this as "to find out why I should feel unhappy and empty that I don't own these things".
On things that look nice, yes, I've got some nice art, but there's a limited amount of space in which to put up nice looking things, and if you're buying them frequently then you're either throwing out a lot or you're having to store a lot. Additionally, I don't think I've ever seen anything that looks remotely nice advertised on the Internet; or at least looks nice and isn't, in actuality, mass-produced shit that's been polished up.
Having said that, if I had more money to throw away I'd do up my study like an old-school English manor-house library, full matching bookshelves, wainscoting, desk and chair. That's purely 'looks nice' and I would throw away the patchwork that currently furnishes my study. I'll say that's been advertised to me through (un)intentional 'product placement' in movies and TV shows, rather than Internet advertising though.
Exactly. Good ads are a service to me that inform me of things I want to buy. They aren't tricking me into buying stuff. Sometimes I see an ad and immediately believe the product would improve my life and it does.
I think the problem with HN/Engineer types is they basically never see ads designed to appeal to them because they aren't a large enough audience.
I always thought of ads as "something that informs me about the things I should want", and that the point of the entire "discipline" or marketing was to "create desire".
It's kind of amusing to me how such an obvious statement like this is getting downvoted so much. I suspect most people feel this way about ads and HN readers are more bothered by them than most people.
(I hate ads too, but I think I understand the alternative perspective).
I've installed a lot of adblockers for non-hacker type people over the years. As far as I've seen, no one has ever asked or attempted to uninstall them. I think most people are mostly fine with ads, but prefer life without them.
Even as a kid, me and all my friends used to groan when the commercial breaks came on. I've been muting commercials since I knew how to use a mute button.
Everyone emails themself stuff, that's normal. The weird part is how often will you ever need to email it specifically from your laptop, but it's already on your phone? If it's on your phone and you need to email it to someone, couldn't you just email from your phone?
Have you tried using the Gmail app? It's missing a whole bunch of features. For example, you can't even insert hyperlinks with custom text. For images, I often don't want to send an image at its full resolution. Rescaling images is a task that's much easier to do on a laptop.
Sometimes I feel like there's no huge tech companies left* that remember: you're supposed to convince me to give you my money. I'm not just going to do it because you used the right trendy buzzwords.
> Can anyone name a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years?
That thing Windows has where you can drag a window to the top of the desktop and it pops up a few quick options for resizing. I would love it if KDE Plasma had this.
Interns are human. Humans can always be held accountable. A computer never can. Therefore, no one should leave a computer in charge of human decisions.
Exactly. Thus the blame when an LLM does something dumb should fall on the human who owns the implementation of said LLM. A dead simple example: if I paste confidential information into ChatGPT, that’s on me. If I let Codex have access to an environment where it can get to confidential information, that’s also on me. At best I could also blame my IT department for giving me technical permissions to do such a thing, but still it’s humans at fault (and I believe in taking Extreme Ownership, so I wouldn’t even do that). LLMs are just technology like any other.
Apply whatever insult you want to it, but I'm finished.
Making a data center in my home town? I'm going to do anything I can to stop it.
Entertainment companies serving slop instead of art? Meh, I'll just rewatch old favorites.