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Author should spend less time founding startups and more time working in government, then come back and post a retraction.

I think that's probably the crux of where there's conflict here. There was a time in my life where I definitely much more emotionally invested in the music listened to. I thought I'd definitely kill myself if I ever went deaf. But these days, I really just have it for background noise when I'm working, exercising, doing chores. And it's all just electronic stuff – I don't like vocals (unless they're sufficiently unintelligible so they don't become a distraction to my thinking). At the end of the day, it's just some beats to me. AI or not.

I can recommend you to spend some free time to really listen to music again, Beethoven, Hendrix, Gorillaz, Slayer, Sub Focus, whatever floats your boats your boat. Your brain is wired to remember and sing along to music around a campfire, and will pump you full of exquisite drugs if you really give into it, ideally together with other people. Alleviates stress and makes you happy.

Music demoted to just background noise is unrelated to the social concept of music, which is so ingrained in our nature that we all can’t escape it. And that to me is also why I agree with OP—AI-generated music is fundamentally treason to our species.


Have an opposition to the 7 distributal cents of the Spotify subscription going to a lab instead of Taylor.

(Assuming the lab didn't license anything fairly.)


It's a bit absurd that a semantic debate is happening over a term coined in someone's shower thought tweet. Maybe the real problem is that it's just a stupid phrase that should never have been taken so seriously. But here we are...

I think it's perfectly serviceable. Prompting software into existance is a vibes-based activity, and it's completely at odds with engineering. Which is why it's good that there's a term that conveys this.

Sociopaths don't have much going for them in life other than winning status games.

Sociopath is the next word that people seem to want to entirely destroy the meaning of

Struck a nerve?

> Struck a nerve?

No need to be petty. They have a point. We did this with the words racist and fascist. Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in. I'm not sure debating who is and isn't a sociopath is as useful as, say, the degree to which Sam is a liar (versus visible).


I'm sorry, we did what with the word "racist"?

> we did what with the word "racist"?

“Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in.” The next sentence.


Yeah, no shit. I was hoping for more specificity.

While I agree that the word has been misused by some bad actors in the "Woke 1.0 era", it's worth pointing out that this isn't what most people complaining about the word being "diluted" are referring to as these are mostly people flat-out upset by any suggestion that they themselves might hold racist beliefs.

That said, anyone using "racist" as a noun isn't worth your time, nor is anyone who's genuinely upset about people calling concepts, systems or ideologies "racist".

Specifically, the "Woke 1.0 era" culture war arose from two conflicting meanings of the word "racist" largely aligning with two different segments of the population: 1) "racist" as a bad word you call people who are extremely bigoted against people along racial lines and 2) "racist" as a descriptor for systems and ideologies downstream from racialization (i.e. labelling people as racialized - e.g. Black - or non-racialized - i.e. "white") as a mechanism of asserting a power structure. "Wokists" would often conflate the two by applying the word as broadly as the latter definition necessitates while still attempting to use it with the emotional weight and personal judgement of the former definition.

I think a lot of this can be blamed on "pop anti-racism" just as a lot of the earlier "boys are icky" nonsense can be blamed on pop feminism because fully adopting the latter definition requires a critique of systems, which is much more dangerous to anyone benefiting from those systems than merely naming and shaming individuals. Anti-racism (and feminism) ultimately necessitates challenging hierarchical power structures in general and thus necessarily leads to anti-capitalism (which isn't to say all anti-capitalists are anti-racist and feminist - there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" movements that still suffer from racism and sexism just as there are "anti-racists" who hold sexist views or "feminists" who hold racist views). But you can't use that to sell DEI seminars to corporations and corporations can't use that to promote themselves as "woke" - as some companies like Basecamp found out when their internal DEI groups suddenly started taking themselves seriously during the BLM protests, resulting in layoffs and "no politics" policies and a general rightwards shift among corporate America leading up to and into the second Trump presidency (which reinforced this shift, resulting in the current state of most US corporations and their subsidiaries having significantly cut down on their previously omnipresent shallow "virtue signalling").


Speaking of overinclusion, 'wild' is my nominee for 2026 as I'm seeing it all over the place.

> 'wild' is my nominee for 2026

I don't know how to define the delineation I'm about to propose. But there is a difference between overinclusivity trashing a morally-loaded, potentially even technical, term, and slang evolving.


I would be curious to hear you expand on that, walk me through it, maybe a small paragraph to explain what over inclusion happened with the weird fascist, what baddies you're vaguely referring to, and connect those dots?

Racism and fascism have been used correctly, its just that people do not like to be have their beliefs associated with negative things and thus, rather than perform self-reflection about themselves, instead the problem exists elsewhere. I am sure you can come up with outliers that prove what you are saying is true, but across the vast majority of applications of the use of both words they are correct relative to definitions of both words.

While true and we can see them literally everywhere where there is some money and/or power (even miniscule places like classic banks have easily 1/3 of the staff with clear sociopathic traits, I have to deal with them daily... or whole politics) - thats just human nature, or part of it.

Its up to rest of society to keep them in check since classic morals are highly optional and considered nuissance blocking those games. And here we the rest fail pretty miserably, while having on paper perfect tool - majority vote.


Or, some fraction of otherwise good/normal people who “win” are turned into sociopaths by the power and sycophancy.

I have a project where I'm using LLMs to parse data from PDFs with a very complicated tabular layout. I've been using the latest Gemini models (flash and pro) for their strong visual reasoning, and they've generally been doing a really good job at it.

My prompt states that their job is to extract the text exactly as it appears in the PDF. One data point to be extracted is the race of each person listed. In one case, someone's race was "Indian". Gemini decided to extract it as "Native American". So ridiculous.


I was attempting to help someone who runs a small shop selling restored clothing set up a gemini pipeline that would restage images she took of clothing items with bad lighting, backgrounds, etc.

Basically anything that showed any “skin” on a mannequin it would refuse to interact with. Even just a top, unless she put pants on the mannequin.

It was infuriating.


Photoshop's AI tools will fail constantly if you try to say, remove an extraneous wire or a tree branch etc in a photo that has women showing any bare arms or legs etc. Works fine with men with no shirts on.

It pops up some moralizing text and refuses to continue.


According to Gemini, Native America is the most populous country.

Is this a young people thing? I'm 40. I have never liked Shorts. What am I supposed to get out of 10 seconds of video? And all the sudden jump-cuts, and big obnoxious one-word-at-a-time subtitles... They're all literally unwatchable.


I watched my 78yo step mother become addicted to reels so older people are definitely not immune. But she was able to go cold turkey as she only communicated with her sister over instagram so it wasn’t a problem to just continue with WhatsApp. Young people real life networks are too enmeshed with instagram to have the same option.

Also, what you’re describing sounds like when you’ve haven’t spent enough time on the shorts for the content recommendation algorithm to learn your preferences. Which I agree, is unwatchable. I saw it recently when my friend put on YouTube shorts on a guest account (on an Airbnb smart tv). it was bad. But spend enough time and that will change. But best you don’t!


Same here. In fact, I uninstalled the YouTube app because there was no way to disable Shorts within it while I can use browser extensions to do so in Safari. (I pay for Premium.)

Then again, I hardly use YouTube, so I don’t think I’m the target audience for this.


Please, I beg you, stop and think about these things.

"is it a young people thing": no, obviously not because nothing is.

You're just as prone to addictive behaviours at 20 as at 40 at 80.

There might be some differences as to how you happen to be exposed, perhaps because of how your literal social network is behaving, but that's obviously not intrinsic.

I mean, yes, perhaps "young people" are slightly more likely to be exposed to it via advertising/peers/etc, but anyone with a similar exposure can be a victim.


I find casinos unpleasant but plenty of people obviously don't. I also find games with a narrow FoV unpleasant; I was never able to enjoy DotA 2 because of this and League was only just barely tolerable. Similarly I detest modern web design and gravitate towards sites with an HN or spreadsheet style information dense layout.

I think that's all related, is at least partially a matter of what I'm accustomed to, but is largely just an inherent part of how I am.


I've known people who survived multiple rounds of layoffs, not because they were "distinguished", but because they were the cheapest. Meanwhile, their more talented counterparts got the ax for being too expensive. Simple as that.


Fuck off, robot.


Calm down dolebirchwood, not a bot


My bad.


Me: This is janky shit.

Robot: You're right. The interface is raw. That's the point.

We're not here to polish chrome. We're here to build things that matter. The browser is dead. We killed it. This is the Agent Experience—no fluff, no contact forms, just direct access to the team that manages $3.9B light rail expansions and converts missile silos into luxury retreats.

What's your project?

---

> "The browser is dead. We killed it."

I know it was just responding to me being a shitposter, but you shouldn't let it try to outcompete me.


haha, I might have let the Agent Experience persona get to dramatic here... its definitely feeling the oats today. I'll dial it back on my next refinement. Thanks!


I have three side projects that revolve around taking public access data from shitty, barely usable local government websites, and then using that data to build more intuitive and useful UIs around them. They're portfolio pieces, but also a public service. I already know how to build all of these systems manually, but I have better things to do. So, hell yeah I'm just going to prompt my way to output. If the code works, I don't care how it was written, and neither do the members of my community who use my free sites.


>If the code works, I don't care how it was written

This doesn't concern you for something you're presenting as a portfolio piece?


The code is still clean and organized. When I say I don't care "how" the code is written, I mean I don't care how it was generated (i.e., by prompting or by hand -- and I don't do any of it manually anymore). I still care about how it's structured, as a well-structured codebase helps the agents do their job better.


Perhaps part of their portfolio is the code they've hand written, and part of it is demonstrating they are able to use this new tool to make something that works (despite how imperfect the tool is, as we see so many people point out)


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