The meaning of life lies in death. Death is the boundary of life.
What matters after death? What matters before it?
Avoiding death is impractical. The lifehack is to propagate a bit of your life forwards, i.e. children. Make sure they end up with all the advantage you can give them. Many can't do this, so the other trick is to propagate similar cells - family, humanity, earth creatures.
I'm a believer in occasionalism though. The philosophy/theology takes a few years to click, but in the end I think all that matters is patience and perseverance.
Patience for the trials and temptations of life. Perseverance is the struggle. Some call it a journey, but I think the anime Berserk captures it perfectly. To struggle as if you're branded for death and all odds are stacked against you.
If you believe in a judgement day, then these virtues will be rewarded. If you do not, then throwing yourself into whatever gets in your way is a more enjoyable way of living life than being passive. And in engineering terms, if you channel a lot of energy somewhere, something happens.
Some people think aiming at goals is the most important thing you can do. Sam Altman is one of those people. You can spend a lifetime aiming and still miss.
The job market sucked. The average job was paying less than $1000/month. I was getting freelance work that paid better, but they weren't actually paying what they promised. I started selling crackers and coffee with my wife, until a mentor told me what a fucking idiot I was not doing apps. Everyone wanted apps then, just like they wanted AI, but they didn't want to pay market rates for them.
After pitching a price comparison app to the consumer ministry and getting lowballed, I decided I could make more money just making the app and selling ad space to groceries.
A lot of stuff happened. We pivoted to recipes instead of price comparison. We segmented that into low carb recipes, hardcoded it all. 1200 downloads in 24 hours. We found a grocery partner who was selling low carb stuff like flaxseed. 3000 downloads in the 12 hours after that, with 3% of users actually trying to buy something. We didn't actually build a shopping cart yet, it was in the validation space.
I ended up doing this for a year. We got rabid fans. Our users were losing crazy amounts of weight, like 5 kg per week. We moved our users into WhatsApp groups because it was easier than coding a chat in the app. The fans eventually became so damn rabid, like at one point people were recommending eating fish head with slabs of butter to lose weight. They were passing out from ketosis and malnutrition and telling each other that the passing out was part of the process.
They were becoming so rabid that our suppliers didn't want to deal with them. I didn't want that kind of liability. As admin, I'd correct people and get snapped at.
We sold the company to a weight loss pill company. They offered about a little over a year's salary, and after a year of taking $30 monthly salary, me and my partner were happy to let it go. Plus no taxes and I could actually afford a real computer and chair and freelance.
Since our traffic was organic, the acquirer saved money just putting their product in the app. They hired an SEO consultant. Traffic dropped. They pivoted away from the low carb stuff, hired a motivational speaker, dietitian and tried to make it legit. Traffic dropped further. People were losing healthy amounts of weight on eating veggies and exercising, like 1-2 kg/week. Nobody wanted to eat veggies and exercise to only lose 1-2 kg/week, when they could eat flaxseed pizza and steak and lose 5.
They're different impulses. Some want to consume. Others want to create.
TikTok and social media is a strange mix of both, people posting response videos to everything.
Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist. It's free, it's good enough, and it's not grating to hear after a few days of that favorite song.
The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
But I guess the desire to create something that others would consume is also different from the desire to simply create.
The first isn't bad by any means. There's a million break up songs and that's one of the best sad ones. Most are just... angry? Blaming? Empowering? They work fine. They sell records. Many have have a billion views.
But the second one, even with the clunky translation, strikes somewhere deeper. It's written by someone who had enough time ruminating on a break up. The ending hits a little harder, because break up songs are about endings.
Both are sincere, but the first feels more formulaic. I'm inclined to think the first one is the soda.
I feel Suno leans towards this group of songwriters and poets who have something to say. Sora doesn't.
No, the whole horseshit belongs together of course. Just that the AI slop is the logical culmination of the dumbed down pop-culture of the last 15ish years or so.
> Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist.
I occasionally use Suno to re-imagine songs in different keys, tempos, and genres, and sample them. Most of the output from Suno is slop, but occasionally has a few good bits you can sample, chop up, re-pitch, and create something totally new from, which also has the added benefit of being unrecognizable to rights algorithms and lawyers from major labels.
It's a neat tool for genuine creators, and a crutch for people interested in slop.
Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.
Hopefully AI outcompeting humans at slop sparks a renaissance of humans creating truly beautiful human artwork. And if it doesn't, then was anything of value truly lost?
So true. AI music gens like Suno can't do Paul Shapera works even remotely, but can recreate a lot of pop or EDM music very faithfully. There's just no distance to close, it's already mainstreamly bad.
> Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.
What are you talking about? There’s lots of modern music that’s not corporate slop and that’s absolutely great. Never in history was access to great music as easy as it is now.
So find music you like that isn't modern corporate slop. My music right now consists mainly of indie stuff I've found on youtube and daft punk. No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music
"No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music"
From wikipedia: Many Daft Punk songs feature vocals processed with effects and vocoders including Auto-Tune, a Roland SVC-350 and the Digitech Vocalist. Bangalter said: "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune. It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesiser. They said it was taking jobs away from musicians. What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just for replacing the instruments that came before. People are often afraid of things that sound new."
Did Daft Punk put in a lot of effort to remix existing sounds to make their own music? Yes. Did they type "pls make french house electronic music number 1 chart" into a text box? No. Did they also credit original authors? Yes. I've not gone through their whole library, but for example, Edwin Birdsong has songwriting credit for harder, better, faster, stronger
> The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
There is a fundamental issue of trust here. Facebook has me tagged as history nerd so I get to see those slop videos. They are fun, but always superficial and often plainly wrong. So unless the slop comes from a known, trustworthy source, the educational element is simply not there.
For throwing an uppercut it's even more important, if you follow wrong slop instructions you can end up breaking your wrist or fingers.
Many of the things on a top #100 list for the last few decades. That includes plenty of "indies" as well as pop.
There are exceptions though. FUKOUNA GIRL by STOMACH BOOK, for example. AI can't come close to replicating something like this. Not the cover art, not the off-key voices, not the relatable part of the lyrics. I don't believe this is a top #100 song, though it certainly is popular.
I'm with you here, resonates so much. I'm so fed up with endless subway tunnels, they all look and sound utterly same and boring.
So I quit riding the overpriced subway altogether and now consume AI-generated subway imagery and soundscapes for free, they are just good enough to feed my passion for boring tunels.
Some ego-bloated edgelords had nerve to tell me that there are, like, other modes of transportation, but I honestly find their high-horse elitism despicable.. Damn morons.
Some want to consume... content that they don't think they could do in one minute themselves. They want to consume content made by other humans, even if it's still brain-eating algorithmic fodder, but still.
Sora proved it quite clearly. These clips had ZERO value.
I get that, but you have to pay to create your own.
And on the second part, I somewhat disagree. I mean, yes everyone has a personal preference, but if you bucket all those personal preferences they all fit nicely together (In many buckets).
I think the point of Suno is to make you not search for your specific thing though, and instead produce your own. Searching for niche music has always been a thing. If our goal is to listen for free, we don't care about Suno (or any other way to make music) one bit, it's just another DAW for those making music.
And AI music in general sure has its fans, check out Only Fire for example.
I feel like nobody is making money from pure wrappers. Services like Cursor or Vapi are derogatorily called wrappers, but they do a lot of work on the harness. It's quite clear what work they do if you try to build your own.
I did try Extra Usage and API credits with Claude and it chews through $5 in minutes. Unlike GPT, the subscription is a better deal. I definitely do not recommend API credits and such. It's more efficient to use Claude through some other provider like Antigravity, Cursor, and so on.
Whoa, if you're using it that much, you should definitely look at the $100 plan. Either that, or you'll have to use an older model or reduce thinking (which does really tank the quality of results unfortunately) or look at a local model. I don't think there's really many other options.
For a while I did a $20 sub to both OpenAI and Claude and just switched back and forth. I was able to get pretty far that way, but it can feel a bit disruptive.
Claude for the default 5-hour limits. Cursor for the monthly limits when those run out. Cursor is one of the more efficient ones for dumb uses... if you're typing out your own tests, it should work great.
A lot of people recommend OpenAI Codex lately, but I feel it's more suited to vibe coding, where you're giving it a very high level idea.
I've seen more bad use from the AI itself than from prompt injections. e.g. someone's instructions exceeded context and it started deleting all her mail.
On stuff in the wild, we also very rarely see prompt injections and hacks. Not to say they're not a problem, but somewhere around #6 on the list of issues to be worried about.
I stick to the basic subscriptions. Whenever I get into psychosis, it yanks me back. I'm forced to read a book, go to the gym, talk to people, or actually have a think about what I'm trying to do. In emergencies, I may buy add on credits or subscribe to a secondary service, but it keeps me leashed.
What matters after death? What matters before it?
Avoiding death is impractical. The lifehack is to propagate a bit of your life forwards, i.e. children. Make sure they end up with all the advantage you can give them. Many can't do this, so the other trick is to propagate similar cells - family, humanity, earth creatures.
I'm a believer in occasionalism though. The philosophy/theology takes a few years to click, but in the end I think all that matters is patience and perseverance.
Patience for the trials and temptations of life. Perseverance is the struggle. Some call it a journey, but I think the anime Berserk captures it perfectly. To struggle as if you're branded for death and all odds are stacked against you.
If you believe in a judgement day, then these virtues will be rewarded. If you do not, then throwing yourself into whatever gets in your way is a more enjoyable way of living life than being passive. And in engineering terms, if you channel a lot of energy somewhere, something happens.
Some people think aiming at goals is the most important thing you can do. Sam Altman is one of those people. You can spend a lifetime aiming and still miss.
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