There is a huge audience for AI-generated content on YouTube, though admittedly many of them are oblivious to the fact that they are watching AI-generated content.
Here are several examples of videos with 1 million views that people don't seem to realize are AI-generated:
These videos do have some editing which I believe was done by human editors, but the scripts are written by GPT, the assets are all AI-generated illustrations, and the voice is AI-generated. (The fact that the Sleepless Historian channel is 100% AI generated becomes even more obvious if you look at the channel's early uploads, where you have a stiff 3D avatar sitting in a chair and delivering a 1-hour lecture in a single take while maintaining the same rigid posture.)
If you look at Reddit comment sections on large default subs, many of the top-voted posts are obviously composed by GPT. People post LLM-generated stories to the /r/fantasywriters subreddit and get praised for their "beautiful metaphors.
The revealed preference of many people is that they love AI-generated content, they are content to watch it on YouTube, upvote it on Reddit, or "like" it on Facebook. These people are not part of "the Midjourney community," they just see AI-generated content out in the wild and enjoy it.
The biggest problem is every story telling sub eventually grows the rule "don't question the story"
I'm not sure why the mods adopt it. Maybe they think having a comment section full of people calling out a lie isn't good or something, but whenever the rule goes into place it's like a switch is thrown, and shortly thereafter all the stores in that sub will rot away into lies
Happened to tales from tech support, I don't work here, several parenting subreddits, aita, and more
I really, really wish that Youtube would start tagging this category of video to increase the visibility to end users. My feeling is that the main reason this content might be "winning" in the market is the sheer volume.
Dude I had to stop watching that “sleepy whatever” channel. It was so blatant simply based upon how frequent the “thing” was posting. It’s simply not possible for a human to crank out well researched two hour long videos daily. And even then, the things content is so repetitive in each video (granted that might be the point, it is “sleepless historian” after all).
That sleepless channel is one of an entire series of very similar channels with the same voice and same “style” of content. Some get lots of views, others not so much.
Honestly, eventually people will spot that shit stuff from a mile away. None of it is unique nor does it add any “entropy” as some other commenter here said.
I don't remember what channel but recently I have been into dexter and I have been watching a lot of dexter related content on youtube and I once think that I saw either down-right AI generated or very LLM-y style video / channel in general. Like, the way they speak etc. felt very AI generated imo.
Nobody questioned it in the comments.
I genuinely started wondering what is the point of AI generated content when people will find out its AI and then reject it or shame them etc. but I think that either I believed that humans in general would detect it more often or maybe the fact that people would start using AI in very sneaky ways maybe to not be labelled AI slop while still being very AI assisted.
I don't have problem with AI assistance but I just feel this hate when an AI generated voice speaks AI generated text which I recognize due to the patterns like
"It isn't just X, Its y" and the countless others examples.
Hot take but I don't care if the content I consume is AI-generated or not. First of all, while sometimes I need high-effort quality content, sometimes I want my brain to rest and then AI-generated slop is completely okay. He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone. Second, just because something is AI-generated it doesn't automatically mean it's slop, just like human-generated content isn't automatically slop-free. Boring History For Sleep allowed me to see medieval times in a more emotional way, something that history books "this king did this and then won but then in 1274 was poisoned and died" never did.
> He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone
I'm not in a rock-throwing mood, but I qualify for that easily. False consensus effect cuts against AI...mass-production? aficionados just as much as hardline opponents.
> He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone
Stand by then, because I have rocks and according to you, licence to throw them.
You are free to watch all the slop you want. All I want is for your slop, to not be at the cost of all other media and content. Have a SlopTube, have SlopFlix, go for it! But do it in a way that is _separate_ and doesn’t inflict it on the rest of us, who would _like_ human produced content, even if the AI stuff is “just as good”.
Your later point is hard to convey to people who don't want to hear it.
I don't want AI content, even if it is as good, or even if it were better. The human element IS the point, not an implementation detail.
An AI song about sailing at sea is meaningless because I know the AI has never sailed at sea. This is a standard we hold humans to, authenticity is important even for human artists, why would we give AI a pass on it?
And I mean this earnestly, if an AI in a corporeal form really did go sailing, I might then be interested in its song about sailing.
I don't really want to get pedantic about this, but I also don't listen to pop and authenticity in lyrics is important to me. But authenticity in creation is just as important, I listen to a lot of music with no lyrics at all and it is important to me that it was borne of someone's creative experience.
Regardless of any of that, I could also say that I don't like AI music because I prefer my artists to have hot showers and it's somewhat none of your business, respectfully.
You both seem to have assumed I don't hold these standards to real artists, which is nuanced but more or less wrong. I don't know why you made that assumption.
> And I mean this earnestly, if an AI in a corporeal form really did go sailing, I might then be interested in its song about sailing.
Would you? That seems achievable with current technology, bolt a PC with a camera onto a sailing ship and prompt it to compose text based on some image recognition.
For sure, I wouldn't read it as if it were a human story though since I can relate and empathise with the human. But it would be interesting to see what kind of experience it had and how it records and explains it.
Just let me choose a filter when I'm doing a search on YouTube and that's a good start. Beyond that I can just block or 'don't recommend this channel' for anything that shows up in my feed, but the fact that these platforms don't let people say 'I don't want this garbage' is the biggest issue I have with it.
I mean, that certainly is a hot take, but you are getting down voted without people responding why.
I can certainly understand just wanting filler content just for background noise, I had the history for sleep channel recommended to me via the algorithm because I do use those types of videos specifically to fall asleep to. However, and I don't know which video it was, but I clicked on a video, and within 5 minutes there were so many historical inaccuracies that I got annoyed enough to get out of bed and add the channel to my block list.
That's my main problem with most AI generated content, it's believable enough to pass a general plausibility filter but upon any level of examination it falls flat with hallucinations and mistruths. That channel should be my jam, I'm always looking for new recorded lectures or long form content specifically to fall asleep to. I'm definitely not a historian and I wouldn't even call myself a dilettante, so the level of inaccuracies was bad enough that even I caught it in a subject I'm not at all an expert in. You may think you are learning something, but the information quality is so bad that you are actively getting more misinformed on the topic from AI slop like that.
I feel like people's pride is getting in the way. On this website people want to present themselves as intelectuals, and anything that breaks this image is a big no-no. Nobody wants to watch slop, everyone wants quality content, yet for some curious, inexplicable reason that scientist all over the world scratch their heads over, most TV channels start as "The Learning Channel" and end up as TLC.
Regarding the second point, that's true, but I feel like we're focusing on worst examples instead of best examples. It's like, when I was a kid my parents would yell at me "you believe everything they say on the internet!" and then they would watch TV programs explaining why it's scientifically certain that the world would end in 2012. There's huge confirmation bias "AI-generated content bad" because you don't notice the good AI-generated content, or good use cases of low-quality content. Circling back to Boring History To Sleep, even if half of it is straight-up lies, that's completely irrelevant, because that's not the point here. The point here is to have the listener use their imagination and feel the general vibe of historical times. I distinctly remember listening to the slop and at some point really, really feeling like I was in some peasant's medieval hut. Even if the image I had was full of inaccuracies, that's completely fine, because AI allowed me to do something I'd never done before. If I ever want to fix my misconceptions I'll just watch more slop because if you listen to 100 different AI-generated podcasts on the same topic, each time it'll hallucinate in a different way, which means that truthful information is the only information that will consistently appear throughout majority of them, and that's what my brain will pick up.
And people who wanted that quality content alwaya desert the channel you talk about. Your argument really boils down to "if you are not the biggest economic driver, cheap to produce then you have no right for that preference".
And even worst "serious history dont need to exist, because most people just want something relaxing after stresful day".
If you want AI-generated c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶n̶t̶ (slop), then you should go ahead and generate it yourself via chatgpt,claude,aistudio gemini and many many others...
I can agree but I wouldn't call human generated content slop, more like messy at worst. Human generated content can actually grow and be unique whereas AI generated slop cannot
This brings to mind one of my favorite TV shows, One Outs. It's about the strategies that a clever and "unsportsmanlike" player brings to a baseball team, exploiting the rules while violating the spirit of the game.
As one example: in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings. If the weather is bad and teams are unable to continue due to rain, a <5 inning game is considered invalid and scheduled for a later date. If one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits. (After all, it doesn't matter how many runs he gives up if the game is canceled.) This, in turn, gives the opposite incentive to the opposing team's offense, who wants their runners to be declared "out" so that the inning can end faster. There's a real-time rules-gaming arms race as both teams test the bounds of what's legally permissible, driven by incentives that lead to a very unusual game of baseball.
MLB has added a pitch clock to speed up games. 30 seconds between batters, 15 seconds between pitches with the bases empty, 20 seconds with runners on. This has sped up games by an average of 26 minutes!
Sounds a lot like the episode of South Park where the kids don't want to stay in the little league playoffs so they can enjoy their summer break, so they're trying to intentionally lose. Unfortunately so are all the other teams in the playoffs.
> in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings ... if one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits.
There are two bigger strategic wrinkles here:
1. Both teams only need to complete five innings (which is stipulated in the rulebook as making 15 outs, because baseball) if the visitors have the lead. If the home team has the lead after the visitors make 15 outs, then it's considered a complete game with only 4.5 innings played.
2. The batter can refuse to take first base, even in the event of a walk, and be called out instead. In the past you could game this, but with the pitch clock and limits on pitcher substitutions and mound visits, there's now a hard upper bound on how long an inning could be intentionally drawn out.
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I'm actually more interested in how the teams might go about this without the umpires noticing, because the umpire crew chief has complete authority over the game. Once they realize what's happening they can just tell both teams to knock it off and, at their own discretion, suspend the game anyway.
This actually sounds like the opposite of what Michael Crichton described. The Gell-Mann Amnesia occurs when, due to your domain expertise, you are able to see when a publication display a complete lack of understanding on the topic they are covering, yet despite this continue to assume that the publication is qualified to cover topics outside your narrow area of domain expertise. (It is, in a certain sense, a refusal to believe the evidence of your own eyes: you see that a publication has no credibility, yet continue to assume that it has credibility for some reason.)
The effect described by the poster you're responding to is the opposite of that, and actually how credibility is presumed to normally work: you see that a publication get things right in a narrow domain that you have a lot of expertise in (and thus are qualified to identify which publications are purveyors of truth), and extrapolate that and assume, "if this one story is of impressive quality, then there's a good chance the rest of the publication is held to a similar standard." This is how a publication earns a badge of trustworthiness.
One of the selling points for Kindle is that if you switch devices partway through (e.g. switch from reading on your tablet to reading on your phone, or switch from reading the ebook to listening to the audiobook in your car), it remembers what page you're on, so you can resume exactly where you left off.
Amazon actively touts this "Whispersync" feature in their marketing. (From the Kindle product page: "With Whispersync, switch from Kindle to the Kindle app without losing your place (requires Wi-Fi).") One would presume that Amazon achieves this by tracking whenever readers tap the screen to advance to the next page. (And having a timestamp for that tap matters for resolving merge conflicts.)
Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's "Netflix for ebooks" program), authors get paid per page read. (If a person reads the first 5 pages of your book and drops it, the author gets paid less than if they read the whole thing.) One of the things that Amazon has to deal with is fraud prevention, to detect when authors are finding ways to game metrics: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited...
Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's "Netflix for ebooks" program), authors get paid per page read.
I don't like this anyway. If I buy a movie from Amazon Prime and only watch part of it, do I get a partial refund? Seems like they are shafting authors.
Since you seem to have missed the point of my "Netflix for ebooks" analogy (which you quoted): Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service where users can pay $10/month for unlimited access to a catalog of books that authors have chosen to list under the KU program. (This is how subscription services like Netflix work from a consumer standpoint. The difference from the creator side is that authors get paid based on how much people read their books, whereas Netflix funds productions up front, and then uses viewer data to make decisions about which shows to renew.)
The money that people spend on $10/month KU subscriptions is used to pay authors based on which authors people spent the most time reading (or, more accurately, which books you read the most pages of). If I read 400 pages of book A, and 5 pages of book B, then author A gets paid more than author B. I think the reasoning behind this should be pretty intuitive and obvious. Since every KU subscriber only spends $10/mo regardless of how much they read, there is a fixed "pie" to distribute to authors, and it makes sense to divide the pie based on which authors contributed the most to the readers' use of the KU platform.
Readers don't get a "refund" for dropping a KU book 5% of the way through, because even if you quit reading one book, the fact that you stopped reading a book does not change the fact that you still have access to tens of thousands of other ebooks in the KU library for the remainder of that month, which is the thing that you are ostensibly paying for. (I don't phone Netflix to request a partial refund if I start watching the first episode of Bojack Horseman and quit halfway through the first episode, I just start watching Stranger Things or Narcos instead.)
If authors don't like this arrangement, they are free to not participate in Kindle Unlimited, and sell their books under a more traditional model (where the author sets a price, and people can buy the book for that price irrespective of any participation in any sort of subscription program).
>Readers don't get a "refund" for dropping a KU book 5% of the way through,
But...
Authors get paid by the page?
So Amazon basically gets to stiff authors on the refund that customers aren't getting but Amazon is applying internally to products customers use through their services by way of just not paying authors for content? Seems pretty fucked up to me and the only one that benefits is Amazon. Customers are left with something they don't want and authors aren't paid for their work while Amazon keeps the change...
What the customer paid for is a subscription where they get to read anything they want for however long they want. They don't pay per book, so there's no "left with something they don't want".
Presumably when they stop reading Book A after the 5% mark, they would move on to Book B and Amazon will then pay the author of book B. So Amazon is paying someone for the whole duration that the customer is reading from their collection.
Personally I think it's a fair arrangement. Some of the "books" are really low effort cash grab that you'd literally open, read 3 pages and drop - it'd be unfair if they got paid just as much as well written works of the same length that you finish reading through.
It seems likely to me that if user pays 10usd, Amazon will take it's cut like say 30 percent. Following 7usd will be divided amongst authors according to pages read. Each author will get 7 * pages read that month / total pages read that month.
For example if user reads one page of one book this month this author should get 7usd.
Medium works the same way except with reading time and maybe claps.
This at least is the most logical, fraudfree and fair way to do this.
Authors get paid monthly, approximately two months after the royalties are earned. So if you have a KU subscription and you read 20% of a KU book in January, the author will get paid for those pages in March, and then if you continue reading book and read the remaining 80% in February, the payment for the pages that you read in February will be included in their April statement.
It doesn't jive with Amazon's income from the book. I doubt that users pay for books on a percentage basis. So if someone buys a book, but doesn't read it, then Amazon gets the income, but isn't paying royalty on it.
Note: this thread is about Kindle Unlimited, which has a different monetization/payment model than regular Kindle ebooks. KU readers do not "buy" KU ebooks, any more than Netflix users "buy" the TV shows that they are streaming.
If someone pays $10/mo for access to a library of tens of thousands of books but doesn't actually read any of them, then Amazon gets income without having to pay royalties, in the same way that Netflix still gets your money if you subscribe but don't watch anything. This is true even if you decided to subscribe to KU/Netflix because "Oh, I should get around to reading Harry Potter/watching Stranger Things" and then don't get around to actually reading Harry Potter or watching Stranger Things. This is very much legal.
Unclear. We know how authors get paid for Kindle Unlimited because KDP is a self-publishing platform that anyone can use and Amazon has pages that explain everything when you go through the KDP signup process (plus reports from literally hundreds of authors who are enrolled in the program and post on forums/facebook groups about it). We have significantly less insight into the closed-door negotiations that happen between Netflix and Paramount Pictures to allow Indiana Jones movies to appear on Netflix; there are strategic reasons for both sides of the deal to want the details to be kept secret.
The post you are responding to is about Kindle Unlimited, and not regular Kindle ebooks. Kindle Unlimited, as stated in the post, is Amazon's subscription service where people pay a $10 monthly fee for access to all ebooks in the Kindle Unlimited library. (Or, as I explained it, "Netflix for ebooks.")
The "authors get paid per page read" model is only for Kindle Unlimited, not for regular Kindle ebook sales. When you buy a Kindle book for $6.99 or whatever, Amazon sends the money directly along to the author (or their publisher) after taking their cut, just like you'd expect.
But if you pay $10 a month for a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and read a dozen books by different authors, Amazon has to figure out how to split that fixed monthly subscription fee between all the authors that you read; paying authors based on page reads seems like the best way for your KU money to go to the authors/books that you actually read.
If I had a subscription with a book store that offered me N amount of books a month for a fee, the book store would still need to buy copies of said books from the publisher, who would pay the author whatever was worked out in their contract per sale, whether or not I read one page or the entire book. How is Amazon's model different than that?
It used to be that if Blockbuster wanted to rent out Raiders of the Lost Ark to six different customers simultaneously, they needed to own 6 VHS copies of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now, with streaming, Netflix doesn't have a finite number of "copies" that they can lend out at a time; if every single Netflix subscriber in the country decides that they want to start watching Indiana Jones right now, the only thing preventing Netflix from providing that is their bandwidth, because Netflix has worked out an arrangement with Paramount Pictures that allows them to do this.
Likewise, Amazon has an arrangement with KDP authors that says, "We lend your ebook out to as many KU subscribers as want it. At the end of the month we pay you based on how much people read your books." If an author doesn't like the terms of the KU program for any other reason, they are free to decline the subscription model and sell their ebooks through the regular "customer pays fixed price for ebook, I get money from sale" model. In fact, most authors don't opt into KU; there are a millions of Kindle books, and only tens of thousands of books in the KU program.
Because you pay a fixed subscription fee and the money gets divided between all the authors you've read, it's effectively zero sum: if Amazon wants to give more money to authors who wrote books that people dropped after the 1st chapter, that means less money for the authors who wrote books that people actually liked enough to read past the first chapter. Amazon has structured their program to reward authors for writing books that people consume more of, which seems like a good way of rewarding creators based on the value that they contribute to the platform. If you don't like it, don't opt in and instead sell your books the "normal" way.
The "change" that Amazon keeps can be fixed irrespective of how they distribute the money to the authors.
Lets say user pays $10/month fee. Amazon decides it wants to keep $2 and distribute $8 to authors. Now, there are different ways of accomplishing that:
(i) Distribute proportionately based on which books user downloaded. If user downloaded N books during the month, author of each of the books gets $8/N.
(ii) Distribute proportionately based on amount of time spend by user on each book. If user spent T hours in Kindle during the month, and T_1 time on one of the books, then the author of that book gets $8*T_1/ T.
There are pros and cons of both approaches in terms of fraud prevention, user engagement etc.
Apparently Amazon initially paid authors by e-book downloaded by users, but some authors abused this model. E.g. by splitting a 300-pages book to 6 50-pages books. It also enabled plain fraud, where fraudsters created accounts to download large numbers of books from Kindle Unlimited paid by unscrupulous authors.
It's got to favor certain types of authors/books though. The amount of finished random romance novels has to stomp all over the number of times a "Learn to Code in 21 Days" book is finished :) Seems like a good way to change the quality of books on your service.
Your intuitions are correct; romance novels and thriller novels tend to be the most successful genres on Kindle Unlimited. Different pricing/distribution models attract different kinds of customers. (On the other end of things, I have seen engineers pay $30+ for PDFs about technical subjects without hesitation; I don't often see people spending that kind of money for romance ebooks.)
For similar reasons, the quality and genre of made-for-TV movies currently airing on the Hallmark channel is probably different from what you could experience for the cost of a ticket at your local movie theater: one of these distribution channels caters to people who want to consume several hours of content every day at no marginal cost beyond the monthly subscription that is already part of their budget, while the other caters to people who are willing to pay $15 to spend 2 hours watching a film that a studio spent millions of dollars marketing to them.
But with Kindle Unlimited, you run into the "Someone Else's Money" problem.
Say a user reads the first page of 100 different books—they can do that, because opening each new book has zero marginal cost for the user. Does Amazon now need to pay authors for 100 books?
I don't know how Netflix payouts work but I have to imagine that viewer time is taken into account.
My understanding is that Netflix just pays a fixed, pre-agreed amount up front (either paying a licensing fee for existing content, or funding the production of their own Netflix originals). If lots of people view a show, Netflix takes that data into account when deciding whether or not to renew the the licensing contract (in the case of existing shows) or order a new season (in the case of Netflix's original productions).
Because Netflix pays for their content up front, they have to take a bit of a gamble. (Maybe they spend a bunch of money for a new Coen Brothers film, but nobody watches it, so they take a loss on that project. Or, as was the case in 2008, maybe TV networks grossly under-estimate the value of their catalog of old shows, so Netflix gets to pay peanuts for the content that serves as the bread and butter.)
To your question of "Does Amazon now need to pay 100 different authors?" the answer is "yes".
My understanding is that they tally that up and pay each of the authors at the end of the month with a single payment of the KU revenue, directly paid for books, etc. As each book can be bought multiple ways. Though note this only applies for self-published books as otherwise, it all goes back to the publisher.
You've changed the question. Amazon already pays 100 different authors in this scenario--they each get paid for the single page that was read from each of their books. Paying for 100 books would be much more expensive than paying for 100 pages like they do now.
There's a less invasive way to do that though by storing the latest location for each device. You don't need to store each and every page turn for the page sync feature.
This is apparently how older Kindle models worked, which has made them an attack vector for fraud on Kindle Unlimited:
>KDP [Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's self-publishing platform] pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn’t sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached. ...
>The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book.
>Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the scammers can get paid for a user having “read” a book in Kindle Unlimited by getting the user to jump to the last page. ...
>Interestingly, the flip-to-end scam doesn’t quite work on newer Kindles but still works on older, non-updated Kindles which makes it still a lucrative scam.
It's the same thing with the locations, since your "page" is entirely dependent on your screen size and font setting. The end of a given page could reference no less than 40 different positions in the book (8 possible font sizes, 5 different screen sizes on all available kindles).
It's way more than that because the page breaks will also change based on screen size including apps on other devices. We aren't seeing the full data here so I bet one of the columns here is currentLocation using the word break location (which I've heard is how Loc XXX is calculated for kindle books) instead of a page number.
If every tap generates a “[TIMESTAMP] $USER is on page X in book Y” event, then the there is no difference between recording tap events and syncing progress state in terms of what the client is reporting.
The difference lies entirely in what WhisperSync is storing, which you can neither know nor control.
There's a difference between storing every single tap and just storing the latest position for each book and device pair. And the Kindle doesn't update whispersync every page tap anyways it syncs periodically so the Kindle is storing that tap info and sending it all so it's not like this is just a factor of logging the data it gets sent for updating page position. [0]
[0] I think Kindle on Android is the worst for this. Sometimes I don't get the position synced to my Kindle even 30min+ after leaving the Kindle app. Seems like the way to guarantee the server gets updated is to either exit the app or to return to the library.
Regardless, I fail to see how storing each update is more invasive than just storing the last update when the same number of requests are sent to Amazon.
The whole history builds up a picture of your habits and reading times where only storing the last gives just that the last time you read the book. Think about the difference between storing the last place you were vs everywhere you've been. Individual data points may be innocuous where a collection of the same data points isn't.
I'm really not being difficult. If you've logged the data there is no difference - for one, most of these db systems are write only. Even the ones that aren't probably have a transaction logs. Plus it will be recorded in countless other places along the way.
Slightly off topic: how do you know the DB is write only?? I've been looking for talks about the Kindle back end and haven't found any. I'd love to read about it, it appears to have solved some interesting problems!
Then perhaps you simply missed the point that was being made, which was that it's _possible_ to provide the features that Amazon promotes _without_ logging that much information on an ongoing and permanent basis.
right but that’s how you’re storing it. either way you logged it 90k times, one scenario you’re just creating a new row instead of modifying the existing row
It's just another accumulation of data unnecessarily just having the last page I read for each device doesn't tell you much but having a history of all of that gives Amazon information about my habits and combined with info about the book maybe mood etc.
You could just store the last location for each device which is much less useful for datamining. Any time series of events contains much more information about habits than just most recent X.
I'm not sure I relate to Paul Graham's experience of finding being a "noob" unpleasant -- if anything, I find it's the opposite, because any time you're a "noob," there's so much low-hanging fruit to pick.
New city? There's a bunch of cool/fun things to do that you haven't tried yet. New hobby? Hop onto Youtube and there's hundreds of hours of "explainer" videos made by passionate hobbyists looking to share their favorite parts of that hobby with you. New to a particular field? Other people have probably already done the work of curating the 1% most interesting, important, and fascinating things to learn about. It's easy to feel like you're making progress when you're starting from zero.
I recently bought a guitar and started playing Rocksmith -- think Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar hooked up to your computer, with learning tools designed to help you learn how to play songs of your choosing, along with lessons covering everything from how to play power chords to the very basics of how to hold your guitar when sitting vs standing. I'm a total noob when it comes to playing guitar, but I've enjoyed every part of my time with Rocksmith, from the very first moment I plugged in my guitar and let the software step me through the process of tuning it.
I've found it incredibly edifying largely because the experience of picking up an instrument and learning how to play it has reminded me of what it's like to learn a completely new skill from scratch -- I think spending a week with Rocksmith has not only taught me guitar basics, but also given me a refresher course on how to learn a new skill.
In fact, I wonder if this can lead to its own problem -- someone who gets too much pleasure from the experience of being a noob and may turn into a dilettante, moving from hobby to hobby without ever taking the time to spend years cultivating a deep expertise. Which, I suppose, is fine on a certain level, but there are definitely times when I've procrastinated and hidden from the intimidating prospect of achieving mastery in a field where I already have a lot of experience, and instead spent that time venturing into new fields where there's still low-hanging fruit for me to pick.
To add my two cents, I've studied half a dozen languages over my life and managed to become fluent in three, give or take. My favorite part of the process is always the first few months, when new concepts come the quickest and one sees major progress made every day.
In the end, I think the learning process for almost any skill follows an S-curve, and that initial takeoff is always the most intoxicating period for me. That said, I've spoken about this with others in my classes, and most of them find this early period more daunting and relish later stages, when their footing has become solid.
Yeah I definitely relate to this enjoying the rush of so many new concepts falling into place and making sense. That said I realized there is another level of enjoying a kind of mastery or advanced skill. For me theres this huge intermediate desert thats hard to cross its like first 6 months - enjoy noob gains, 6mo - 5 years kind of sucking, and after many years finally starting to get some new insights at most people never get. I’ve only ever managed it once too and getting paid definitely helps.
>>while this meeting can be gotten out of, it requires some sort of excuse, and an individual's consistent absence is considered a mild crisis for the group.
>any religious group that considers your occasional absence as a crisis is a group i'd stay away from.
Indeed, which is probably why the poster you're responding to specifically made the point about consistent absence (not occasional absence) and it being a mild crisis.
Most religious communities I've observed are also quite lax about what qualifies as an excuse. For example, any sort of travel (be it vacation, visiting family, going on a business trip, or traveling with the team for little Jimmy's soccer tournament), seems to be accepted as valid excuse. So are other institutional commitments, provided that they don't become regular/recurring reasons for missing religious attendance. "I overslept" or "I was tired after staying up late Saturday night" or "I decided that there were other activities I'd prefer to spend my Sunday doing" are not.
Furthermore, having your absence declared to be a "mild crisis" for the group is not necessarily a bad thing: certain excuses like being sick (or caring for a sick family member) are likely to draw the support of the group; if you're in a small religious community where people hold each other accountable for religious attendance, there's a decent chance that if members of your church know that you missed Sunday service due to being ill or pregnant or recovering from surgery (or caring for a family member who is any of the above), some of them will stop by later in the afternoon (or later in the week) to drop off a home-cooked meal or some other sort of care package.
(I understand that some people might prefer to deal with their health situation in private without having a community of people who take it upon themselves to offer support, and I've always been one to appreciate the benefits of solitude and privacy, but in contemporary society I feel like we may have veered too far in the direction of isolation and atomization.)
>if anything, for things like scouting and sports groups, or any kind of group where you learn something together it is more important that members attend regularly.
Many religious practices involve a service that involves teaching (for example, a "sermon" that is delivered to a congregation by a preacher), so for many people, religious attendance falls into the category of "group where you learn something together." Indeed, I've observed it's common for many churches to have weekly sermons that are part of a "series," offering a sort of week-to-week continuity as they provide a deep exploration of a single topic over the course of a month, so if you miss a single service you might perhaps be inclined to ask a friend what was covered in the sermon later in the week when you meet them at something like a Wednesday Bible study or a Tuesday morning prayer group.
> * "I overslept" or "I was tired after staying up late Saturday night" or "I decided that there were other activities I'd prefer to spend my Sunday doing" are not.*
that's when i'd start getting worried. anything that puts pressure on the individual is not healthy. the initiative always needs to come from the individual, not from the community.
if someone wants to attend but it is somehow difficult (transportation, time, staying up late the night before (for whatever reason)) then the community may help find a solution, but it may not pressure the individual into changing.
the responsibility of a religious community is to support its members, not the other way around. if your community is not doing that, i'd look for one that does.
i may got hung up on the term "crisis for the group". for me crisis means that the person or group has a problem within itself.
an individual may have a crisis that prevents that person from attending. then it's up to the group to help and resolve that crisis. but the group should not have a crisis all by itself just because that person is missing. (unless maybe the missing person has the keys to the meetingplace, sure that's a crisis for the group, but mere non-attendance isn't)
even prolonged absence should not lead to a crisis. at best someone tries to check on them once and see if they are fine and find out the reason for non-attendance. if it's something the group can fix, they should look into that, but if it's that persons choice, they should leave them alone.
Japanese 21st century light novel titles have a long way to go if they want to catch up with 18th century book titles, like 12 Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana (now shortened to 12 Years a Slave), and The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates (commonly abbreviated to Robinson Crusoe)
While search engines didn't exist back then, books of that era had these kinds of titles for similar reasons: they were a way of turning the book's cover into a piece of marketing. Books with long titles could explain their appeal to shoppers without requiring them to pick up the book and open it.
Interestingly, one of the things that may have led to titles getting shorter in the 19th century may be the advent of serialized fiction: as printing technology became more widely available, many famous stories like The Count of Monte Cristo and the early works of Charles Dickens were published chapter-by-chapter in weekly publications (quite similar to how manga are published in weekly magazines like Shounen Jump), and if you had an extra-long title that took up half a page every week, it would add to the printing cost in a non-trivial way.
The only real issue RSS has is that ads have to be baked in. Sadly I don't know if we could have an open system with personalized ads.
They've already figured out how to do this. I download the Waypoint podcast (which is part of the Vice Media family) via old-school RSS feed, and the most recent episode I downloaded had a pre-roll ad which specifically called out the city that I live in.
There's not a lot of "discipline" that goes into paying off your credit card each month (in the sense of practice); my credit card auto-debits from my checking account at the end of the month to pay off the full balance for that billing period, so I passively pay for my purchases shortly after making them. The only way I lose money to interest is if I actively decide to log into my account and tell the system to stop paying my balance, which is something which would be bad on a variety of levels and doesn't appeal to me tremendously, so I guess it requires discipline for me to stay out of credit card debt in the same sense that it requires discipline for me to refrain from shoving a chunk of lard into my mouth.
At a minimum, you could benefit from having a credit card that you just use to pay for a monthly subscription (e.g. Netflix, Github, Patreon) and just not use it for any other expenses; stuff it in a drawer and forget about it, or physically destroy the plastic if you don't want the temptation. (Heck, you could probably even request that your credit card have a $15 limit if you want to ensure it never gets used for anything other than your Netflix subscription.)
>(btw I'm in the EU, so I don't get the obsession with CC in the USA)
I wouldn't say that Americans are "obsessed" with credit cards any more than they're "obsessed" with shampoo. Which is to say, yes, there are some people who care a great deal about hair care products and have five different bottles in their shower, but for a lot of people it's just a basic fixture of living that you're kind of expected to deal with and isn't really in people's minds. Yes, I use it every day, but I'm not a credit card enthusiast any more than I'm a shower enthusiast.
I'm a full-time freelancer/remote worker. In late 2016, I made the decision to move to Pittsburgh, partly persuaded Paul Graham's talk about how Pittsburgh could become a startup hub. (PG grew up in Monroeville, 10 miles east of Pittsburgh.)
I feel really good about the decision, CMU feels like a peer of Stanford and MIT but living here is substantially cheaper than living in Cambridge or Palo Alto. (I pay ~$750 for a 1-bedroom apartment that's ~1.5 mile from CMU campus.) The legacy of Randy Pausch's Building Virtual Worlds was also a draw for me personally, as I work in game development and was coming of age when Randy Pausch's delivered his famous Last Lecture (if you had asked me in 2008 who my personal heroes were, Randy Pausch would be the first name out of my mouth). Going to gamedev meetups has kind of allowed me to insert myself into the CMU alumni network post hoc. Very green (lots of beautiful neighborhoods), hip enough for my tastes, and the intellectual climate is everything I had hoped it would be.
If you want to live in a city where companies like Google, Uber, Amazon, and Apple have offices, Pittsburgh may be your cheapest option.
Here are several examples of videos with 1 million views that people don't seem to realize are AI-generated:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxvTjrsNtxA
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDnMpuSYic
These videos do have some editing which I believe was done by human editors, but the scripts are written by GPT, the assets are all AI-generated illustrations, and the voice is AI-generated. (The fact that the Sleepless Historian channel is 100% AI generated becomes even more obvious if you look at the channel's early uploads, where you have a stiff 3D avatar sitting in a chair and delivering a 1-hour lecture in a single take while maintaining the same rigid posture.)
If you look at Reddit comment sections on large default subs, many of the top-voted posts are obviously composed by GPT. People post LLM-generated stories to the /r/fantasywriters subreddit and get praised for their "beautiful metaphors.
The revealed preference of many people is that they love AI-generated content, they are content to watch it on YouTube, upvote it on Reddit, or "like" it on Facebook. These people are not part of "the Midjourney community," they just see AI-generated content out in the wild and enjoy it.