I actually post a lot

Evan. UCD4lyfe

[irarelypostanything]

Three Perspectives on Generative AI

I have a friend, and our politics could not be more opposed. Because of this, I like that we reached the exact same conclusion about generative AI. I think generative AI is dangerous because it automates away jobs from ordinary people, and because it depletes environmental resources.

She, on the other hand, dislikes AI because she considers it a literal affront to God.

Um, okay. Let's call it "three perspectives," then...

*

There's three of us, barring her. One is me, one is Smack, and one is...another guy.

The third guy, call him C, just dislikes this. He dislikes that so much code he sees professionally is AI-generated. He dislikes that others keep pushing it on him. He doesn't need or use it, and his issue isn't so much a creative vendetta, like the way I feel about AI-generated blog posts...it's just not that good, in his opinion.

What's kind of funny is Smack ackowledges all of his points, but is still very pro-AI. To him, the fact that it's so correct but hallucinates is not a deal-breaker. We talked it out, and more or less agreed on a metric. If the thing you're doing can be very easily verified, go for it. As a hypothetical example, a sudoku can be trivial to check even though it can be computationally significant to solve. As a real example, an AI-generated code fix can solve the problem of producing a correct answer.

For me, I fell in and out of love with Claude Chat. In the beginning, maybe because I was just using free ChatGPT, I thought I had come face-to-face with some sort of oracle genius. It just didn't seem to hallucinate, period. On anything.

Then I found it was blatantly wrong on a key Game of Thrones plot point. From there, nothing had ever really been the same. I started noticing small errors everywhere I looked. Smack asked me for the best example.

I said I was trying to find distance between two points. Claude Chat simply made up a bunch of fake locations and their distances. Smack tried to explain to me why this was reasonable. It's not a black box, not really. For something general, it's trained to produce something correct...call that the well-worn path. But how many people asked for these actual distances? Probably zero, so it's not crazy that it just confidently made up distances that were completely inaccurate.

I reached the conclusion that Claude is only good for Claude Code, because at least then you can vibe code things.

Smack continues to value generative AI for coding, and other things as well.

C still doesn't like it for any use cases, including coding. The lack of learning. The elimination of systematic debugging, which was a puzzle for him and the single most enjoyable part of coding. It's just this overhyped garbage not unlike all the tech trends that came before it.

Meanwhile, I'm just kind of sitting here wondering why it refuses to have accurate conversations with me about Game of Thrones.

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Enshittification

Tumblr doesn't really work for me now. Maybe that's a good demonstration of the point. I use it as a kind of Web2-old site from what I imagine the world was like blogging in the 1990s...just about no one else uses it like that. Suddenly it's lagging and fails to carry out simple tasks, but others would be quick to say "user error" or "skill issue."

Technology can't just work the same way year after year. Things change. The old TV, for example, doesn't run Netflix anymore. You have to pay for a Firestick. I haven't researched this enough, and I'm torn as to why. On one hand, part of me thinks...yeah, that's technology. They have to keep pace. Hardware becomes obsolete. It's not so simple as just having something stay up forever when the world around us changes. On the other hand, part of me thinks...wait a damn minute, this is just obsolescence. If they wanted it to work, they would maintain it and make it work. Instead, they can charge you x dollars for this new thing that gets you the exact same experience you had before.

Tumblr could be laggy for this because of new features it's test piloting, but I don't know.

*

Someone recommended "Enshittification." I've barely scratched it, but it goes something like this:

You have a product. It's Amazon, or Facebook, or Netflix...and it's pretty good. It's so good that it gets lots of users.

You add friction. You make it very hard to leave the website/platform. Then you start making it increasingly shitty to extract more money for the shareholders, at the expense of user experience.

A better name might be, keep-the-lights-on-ification (never mind, that's a way worse name). Maybe I'm just coping, but people have salaries. You need to make new features, which you then sell to people. As it turns out, this is profitable because it generates more revenue. It extracts more advertising dollars, or subscription fees, or data mining money. If it's not profitable, you just fire all the programmers.

A company has to grow. It has to get new users. It has to keep the existing and new users entertained, and it has to compete.

Now you have some really shitty products that, surprisingly enough, are more profitable than ever even though you could swear everyone hates them.

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Clive Thompson - Coding After Coders

Clive Thompson wrote a NYTimes article that was making the rounds https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html It pointed out something that I think a lot of us agree with, though maybe not everyone realized - lots of coders actually really LIKE generative AI. It takes away tedious things, and allows for faster creation - even if it raises questions about coders and their usefulness.

The ones who really despise generative AI are the creatives/artists. For them, instead of taking away tedious things and allowing us to focus on the enjoyable part, it automates away the enjoyable part and leaves us with what we hate.

Not everyone would agree with the article. The title, I think, is clickbaity. But Clive Thompson is, in my opinion, a pretty good writer. I own one of his books (notice I said "own," not "read.")

That dude codes.

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Love and data science or something

We watched the movie "Materialists," and I didn't really like it (oh hey, looks like the reviews were positive. Maybe I'm just incapable of understanding its deeper meaning). It had Pedro Pascal, so it's strange that I didn't. I guess I just thought it was kind of generic.

But I liked the core idea. Someone boils down love to more of a science than an art, then wonders how it is someone could be a match for her when he's so...spoilers...outside of the criteria she uses professionally to matchmake with others. It's more or less how dating apps work, I THINK. I used to say that scoring criteria makes no sense because everyone has unique quirky things that they love, and so we can find perfect love matches for people regardless of their "score." But is it true? I don't know.

I don't have the data.

*

I guess what I used to say before was...

You know, why use an app? Why not just go to the library and gasp when your hand and theirs reach for the same copy of City Of Others? But that would be hypocritical, and also what's so bad about math?

I'm randomly interested in data science. Smack may or may not be wondering if this is just another phase, like when I was into cybersecurity, or UX, or...um...data science. I was never good at science, I didn't do well in statistics, and I'm not sure I even give a f*** about data. Everything seems to indicate that I would be bad at data science.

But isn't it kind of comforting, the thought that we could at least try to make sense of the world in terms of probabilities? I used to hate the thought so much. I had this existential dread moment when Phil, the passionate data scientist in our circle, talked about his research and how they had models that could predict with a really high accuracy who would flunk out of UC Davis.

I think the comforting thing, though, is when you realize how hard it all is. If these guys were really THAT accurate, they could crush Wall Street. They're not crystal ball holders, nor do they claim to be.

Even if Chess isn't really a statistics game, it can still make for an apt metaphor. Chess players can't really see x moves into the future, that's part of chess lore. What they CAN do is predict what will probably happen, and it's not about actually being able to see the future. It's about predicting a little better than your opponent.

*

But love defies even that, I think. Scientific. Probabilistic. Rational. There's a little SOMETHING more to it, no?

Why would a mother run into a burning building for a child, or a lover take a bullet to protect another? Surely it can be reduced to biology, yes, but...

We were there, and we felt something, and it made us better. It's the idea of having faith in a today and a tomorrow, and no longer being obsessed with preserving the memory of yesterday.

It's being okay with what we're becoming, even accepting the possibility that it might just be "older." That we'll have dreams, and pursuits, and careers. That we'll gain friends and lose others, that we'll try to pursue things and sometimes it won't work out and it's okay as long as we have each other.

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AI-generated everything

There was some analysis I found online, it got like 3000 likes and some people compared it to Shakespeare. I thought all of the insights were pretty good. It talks about how a character in a popular show is put at the top of a hierarchy, but also kind of forced to be locked out of it. It talks about how he's a tragic character. People pointed out that it was AI, and then I couldn't unsee it. The way it said things like "you are absolutely right," or "such a tragic character." I heard Kara Swisher characterize AI writing as "for the lowest common denominator," but I don't know about that...it kind of tries to be that intelligent but unpretentious friend. At the end of the day, it was a good analysis until I realized it was AI and dismissed it. But if AI can bring up new insights into a TV show, then what's the point of sharing thoughts on a TV show? It's only really advantageous for me if AI can derive insights that are better.

And then the natural leap - would it be so crazy to think that AI could produce better art? I read a really short AI-generated story, and something was still off, but...

*

It's strange. How much I hate AI-generated writing and how much I'm kind of warming up to it. Like some chess players against Deep Blue, this is it. We've lost.

Except...

Okay, this article on HackerNews was making the rounds, "mourning for our last craft," which generated so much interesting discussion that I neglected to actually read the thing. It was really short, it wasn't satire, it was almost like a poem conceding to our new AI rulers. It was just so absolute. It carried out what Latour might describe as a I-don't-remember-what-it's-called, you assume fact A to be true and then jump to idea B, not to carry out anything logically or mathematically sound but to hopefully make everyone believe A is true. In this case, he just accepted the premise that AI is better at coding than any human. But we use AI. It's still not quite there.

When it gets there, will we be really happy for a time? No more staying late at work to figure out the one line bug. In fact, maybe infinite vacation. No pay, though.

*

I could never really draw. I want to. I found some YouTube videos that try to capture this 90s aesthetic, old songs, and I kinda felt like it recaptured all these old memories. I'd love to be able to do that.

He said, as if that kind of skill is impossible to acquire.

So when I saw AI-generated videos and anime, I kind of thought...yeah, this is it. But something FEELS off. There are even videos breaking down the strangeness of the movements. Maybe it will be smoothed out, maybe not.

Maybe some people can just SEE, the way I imagine a very good writer can tell when something is just off about AI-generated writing. Or maybe it's the process of creation, the necessity of expression, the thing being important enough to convey in a form of art so that an audience could see. And now the AI can assist the artist, I GUESS, but then at what point does it make you question whether the thing was important enough to express at all?

Like, if I have thoughts that I really want to convey to the world, does it mean as much to them if I require AI to generate them? Is it a percent thing? Is it fine as long as just one sentence is AI and the rest is me?

I've always kind of liked writing. I've never been accused of using AI (yet). Before long, I'll be curious to see if being asked if you're using AI becomes a compliment, like asking a video game player who isn't using an Aimbot if they're using an Aimbot.

On this day, it's still an insult.

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I kind of miss writing

It's a strange title. No one is stopping me from writing. I guess that I feel, and this is just my opinion, that when you get older things are less interesting to put down and share - not just in writing, but in many forms of expression. When you're six, I suppose, you can tell everyone that you're fascinated by the color of leaves and all the potential is there. It's interesting. You are a blank slate, and for all anyone knows you are going to become a botanist. But if you're 60 and you're interested in the color of leaves, time does its thing and there are expectations. The natural response is, were you a botanist? A gardener? If not, there's nothing really inherently interesting about a fascination with the color of leaves and how dare you waste my time with that statement in a blog post. Downvoted. Blocked and unsubscribed. Writing used to feel a bit like practicing an instrument. I didn't really care what came of it - maybe some people would be interested to listen, maybe not. Words took on a kind of rhythm, and sometimes I just enjoyed seeing what I came up with. Everything has consequences. * I saw someone from an old creative writing class had published a book. Naturally, I bought it. I haven't read it yet. I was thinking about the dopamine-driven cycle. It was a little strange, like how I found a previous professor's memoir and kept kind of hoping that my name would miraculously come up even though I didn't really do anything of note in their life and was one student of maybe tens of thousands. He probably spent a really time working on this. They say that people who succeed have usually failed more times than those who fail have tried. I know I'm getting the quote wrong, and also it's not necessarily true. I went to a writer talk, and someone who had never written a novel before basically did her first bit on a plane ride and then it was picked up. Some people just have it, I don't know.

He definitely did. I kind of felt like he was on another level and a lot of people just couldn't see it. If I remember correctly his story was inspired by Greek mythology, which kind of already said a lot, but there was just something to it. Lots of people in the workshop just dwelled on how they couldn't like it because they couldn't figure out what it meant. When the instructor gave his interpretation, which turned out to be "wrong" in the sense that it wasn't intended, everyone suddenly liked it. * The dopamine-driven cycle, I think, is that when you share on social media it's like you did the thing before you actually did it. He figured it out, at least. He wrote the book. The sharing comes later. There used to be a preference, I think, for short stories. Those would get likes, and dopamine, and novels would kind of be forgotten and no one would follow them. But...I don't know. It sounds like an excuse. * I guess what I mean to say, in conclusion, is I kind of miss writing and not worrying what people thought of it. It was a little bit like music. Only that's a bad example, both because I don't really do that anymore, and because I absolutely cared what people thought of my musical ability.

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Test

is that a heading where does the title go

[irarelypostanything]

Hazbin Hotel - The "Middle Child" Season?

When I finished season two I browsed social media for reactions. Interacting with a loyal fanbase can be...interesting. The feedback seems to be generally positive, and fans are enthusiastic, but sometimes (as in many fandoms) I think people can take things too far. Art is subjective, after all. The criticisms I found on the main subreddit: -People complaining that Vox had too many songs -People complaining that Charlie didn't do very much -Pacing

-The surprise surrounding Lucifer *Spoilers*

In his review of Attack on Titan, Gigguk said that season 2s are difficult because they're generally thought of as the "middle child" between one and three. I don't know if he coined the term, and now that I think about it, it only really makes sense for trilogies...but there's something I really like about it. It's like a season 2 when 3 is confirmed says: We're setting things up, this can be more, we just don't know yet.

Generally speaking, that's how I've felt lately. We don't really know how things are going to turn out. What exactly are they building up to with Lute? That character arc has yet to be completed because it was temporarily paused for a surprise Fall Out Boy single. What about Angel's redemption? What about all the intrigue surrounding Lilith?

As for Vox...

...honestly, I kind of loved it. He's this all-powerful villain, someone close to a god, but he also isn't. He obsesses over popularity until he reaches 100% approval, when in reality he lacks the approval of the one person who matters to him. Alastor and Vox are more like parallels than foils - Alastor is implied to have natural talent in his lifetime while being a killer is his sick obsession, whereas Vox is implied to have murdered everyone more likable, talented, and charismatic than himself. One of his songs is blatantly stolen from Lucifer. His signals are hijacked from heaven. His main weapon is designed by someone else, and even though it struck me at first as kind of plot-convenient ("Sure, I'll stand on this X"), it seems like a perfect symbol for his character. Is Vox powerful? Not really. He's just really good at using other people, and much of his character can be thought of in terms of references to others. The TV head's weapon "channels" someone else, which is a bit ironic considering that the person he's using is simultaneously so powerful and so helpless.

Many predicted that he would fail spectacularly, just maybe not in this manner.

*

If you haven't heard of Delta Rune, without spoiling too much, there are main villains who appear comical and sometimes even innocent. Meanwhile, there are secret villains who appear much more threatening and scary, while an over-arching antagonist drives the plot throughout.

It's so strange to have a TV series where a murderous psychopath (and also an actual TV) kind of ends up looking like a villain-of-the-week. Meanwhile, there's a much more intimidating character who could be a villain, and a revenge-seeking character who has yet to get revenge.

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KPop Demon Hunters - Rumi Metaphor?

If there's a deep meaning behind KPop Demon Hunters, then I have yet to find it. Wisecrack isn't the same channel anymore and the meaning may be as simple as the title - though I did see at least one blog post (Jae-Ha Kim) discuss how the film draws from actual Korean mythology. I can't comment on that...I simply don't know it.

I've trolled Reddit and YouTube comments, and there seem to be no shortage of easter eggs. Soda Pop is directed at souls they want to consume...nice. Your Idol reflects on the toxic aspects of a fandom...I don't think that's really a hidden message, it's not subtle.

I had considered that maybe Rumi is recovering from some kind of disorder, ie behavioral "patterns" (uh....nah). I looked up the lyrics for Your Idol on Genius, and it was more interesting than I had thought with actual Latin and religious allegories. Is the movie meant to be spiritual and/or religious? Uh...yeah. It has souls in it, sure.

But there's one thing I've been giving a lot of thought to, even though it's so obvious (ha).

Rumi actually may serve as a kind of fantastic metaphor for Mira and Zoey, whose backstories could be characterized as more grounded.

Rumi is a half-demon, half-human. It's not exactly an original premise, but her two supporting friends are "stuck between worlds" and unable to find acceptance in their original family. Zoey has two cultural identities and has trouble reconciling the two. Mira feels rejected for being who she is, the same way Rumi recognizes that she wishes she didn't have to hide who she was.

As soon as I post this, I'll check Tumblr to see if a million other people have posted the same conclusion. I really hope I got the names right.

Why is this movie so popular? Is it just a silly story with really good music? Maybe, but maybe there's something more relatable to it than I had realized. I know about as much about KPop as I do about Taylor Swift; I like it enough to populate some of my playlists, but I don't exactly know a lot about backstory. Somehow, two songs (Golden and This Is What It Sounds Like, though they're all great) really stuck in my head.

The three are most powerful when they're together. Each one complements the other, without ceasing to be independent. Mira and Zoey's backstories seem pretty light, almost lacking, but the music videos tell more of a story than the dialogue does.

Everyone can relate to not being accepted, or to not finding an identity. It's not just relatable to Asian Americans, it's relatable to almost everyone.

On one hand, damnation. They allow their own identities to be consumed because it's the only way they can cease to feel alone. The "consumed" are like nothing more than blind followers, ceasing to have identity.

On the other hand, salvation. They accept who they are, flaws and all, and they accept that they can help each other by embracing what makes them unique. The flaws can't be stripped away, they're part of them.

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"More of an art than a science"

This line was from Fantastic 4 in reference to cooking, though the phrase is extremely common. What got me thinking about it a lot was The Lost City of the Monkey God, which uses it to characterize diagnosing and treating a rare disease. Medical work? More of an art than a science? Wait a minute...isn't that absolutely a science?

Well...not exactly. I imagine that any doctor (does Steven still read this blog?) would be quick to point out the differences between their job and science work, but it still seems more science than art to me. Well...the phrase means something slightly different. It leans into strict definitions. Science is about procedure. You do something, you refine it and learn to make it reproducible like a science experiment (example: baking). Art is about intuition. You do something, you deviate from procedure, you adapt as you go (example: cooking).

The more I thought about it, the more interesting it became. It's not the usual art vs. science or STEM vs humanities dichotomy we've given thought to...it becomes more a question of rigid procedure vs. adaptability. Far greater minds than my own have thought of the question. Someone at MIT wrote a blog post called "when science is more art than science," and HBR took more time to examine it in a business sense, ie when to teach procedure vs when to treat service like more of an art form.

The line "sometimes science is more art than science" is from Rick and Morty and has become something of a meme. But it makes sense. Not every step of science is perfectly procedural.

I thought I had more to write on this...I guess I don't. Smack would probably call it navel-gazing, but I don't think it's as navel-gazy as questions like "is coding an art, or a science?" (I'll ask ChatGPT after it replaces us, freeing us to write blog posts instead). Actually, I think there's a deep life thing here.

Do we live by procedure, attempting to optimize every meal, relationship, and drive until we have everything perfect?

Or do we account for surprise and change?

Well...the second one. Obviously. Only an insane person would say the first.

Meh. It sounded deeper in my head.

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A book by a writer I had studied under

I'm not going to say the name of this writer, even though I have before on this blog. I took a creative writing class under her, and wrote at length about my experience, but now it seems vaguely disrespectful to drop the name - like main character syndrome. Look at this book, in reference to me.

She wrote a 175 page memoir a few months ago about the suicide of one of her sons. She had two sons, and this was the second suicide. I think we saw them once before, briefly, when they were pretty young and she took them to the campus.

She rarely talked about her own fame, and only mentioned that she was a published writer in passing. I was shocked when my dad, recognizing the name, revealed to me that he owned one of her books.

It was a really, really good book. I might be thinking about it for a long time.

First of all, her students are barely mentioned - and of course they're not, this is a book by her for her son. In the rare instances they are, they come across as a little naive. They're young. Some of them haven't experienced real suffering yet. She includes some "funny" real anecdotes near the end. One father expresses grief, then offers to have her daughter play violin for her before going into a long tangent about how great his daughter is (apparently it was a ploy to get his daughter into an Ivy league). Another stranger expresses grief, then proceeds to include his entire manuscript and asks her to read it (and then maybe, if she likes it, help it get published).

But if there's anything for me to think about here, in the peace of my own blog, it's greatness, talent, and fame.

I can kind of understand it. I guess. Everyone wants their shot, and almost everyone wants fame for their talent and work. We'd probably also love to get some sort of self-help manual by her about how she got to where she is. Where does the narrative fit? Is deep suffering fuel for writing? So maybe they saw this as an opportunity to say hey, sorry for your loss, maybe my book will help you out?

Some also offered to help her find Jesus. the Chinese media jumped on the opportunity to do hit pieces on her. Some called her own suicidal depression selfish, and one angry mother told her off because her son had not texted her child before killing himself.

I guess...

If I could distill it down, my thoughts are that she seemed to not really relish in fame. By the accounts I read, she was a scientist who decided to do a little creative writing and then liked it. That's it. It wasn't, she realized she was really quite good at it. It's not, she knew since the day she was born she was destined to be the greatest of all time. She enjoyed it and then took some prestigious programs, wrote a critically acclaimed book, and then things took off from there.

Which would be pretty awesome, and make for a NYTimes bestselling self-help book had it not been for all the tragedy in her personal life.

So...I don't know. It's a really good book. Every sentence is perfect and makes me feel things. It's oddly relatable, too. She talks about trying to find comfort in studying geometry (wait why did I say that was relatable), or playing the same notes on the piano endlessly, or even swimming.

And books. She takes a lot of comfort in books. Her feeling on writing is it simply has to be done. There's no other way, it's how she finds solace.

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REJECT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. EMBRACE HUMAN STUPIDITY

Stupidity is valuable. Stupidity is sacred. Only a human is capable of being stupid is a truly human way, and mimicking that stupidity is a nontrivial problem that even the greatest minds have yet to crack.

They are not smart enough to crack stupidity.

A stupid chess engine is difficult to perfect. "The Naked Gun" was a love letter to the brilliance of stupidity, the method to the madness.

Is it intelligent to consume beverages that make us stupid? Is it intelligent to consume food that all logic advises us against? Of course not, but it's human. We were not made to be optimized. The Internet has become so bombarded by the supposed "perfection" of AI generated text that I rejoice when I see the misplaced comma, the misspelled word. Imperfection in a world they try so hard to build to be perfect.

When you teach a student to program, and that student thinks the ^ means exponent, that student is making a human mistake. When you teach a student to play chess, and that student decides to move every pawn in a line, that student is making a human mistake.

To be human is to learn - not in your way of mimicking learning - really learn. A human will make mistakes. A human will feel pain. A human will be humiliated, ashamed, guilt-ridden. A human will experience heartbreak.

A human will learn to trust. A human will learn to distinguish between real love and fake lust, between those friendships that exist solely on Instagram and the ones that show up at their doorstep with a box of chocolates and a smaller box of tissues.

Artificial "intelligence" will do what it is programmed to do. It will optimize to tell you what you want to hear, to play the music that sounds catchy but makes you feel as empty as it does. It doesn't feel disappointed when you let it down. It doesn't write poems from a place of genuine hurt. These things do not make AI better, they just remind us that AI is a cheap imitation.

When you teach a child math and he asks if 2 + 2 is 22, don't laugh. When you teach a child to walk and he stumbles, embrace his resilience.

Love the imperfection, the mistakes. Love the things that arise from genuine emotion, even if some of the emotions are imperfect.

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I thought that AI would usher in a utopia

When we started work and barely knew each other, we had a random discussion about AI. This was before the days of ChatGPT, but still at a time when AI was advanced enough for people to make popular YouTube videos about how we would all be replaced.

I said it would usher in utopia. The guy I talked to said it would end in a Skynet apocalypse (ie it would rebel and attempt to murder all humans). Smack said there were actually three possibilities. Yes, maybe I was right and all problems like poverty and starvation would be solved. Maybe he was right and the machines would rebel. But there was a third - an AI-assisted dystopia. Why? Because a small percentage of people would have control over everything. Why did I assume that they would use it to help everyone, when they could keep the power for themselves?

*

It's still mostly thought experiment, I guess.

Recent developments can be associated with generative AI. Hence, it's more of a white-collar job thing - you can quickly generate some webpage that puts me out of work, but the plumber next door is fine because you can't AI-generate better pipes.

Over time, this could extend to robotics. Until that point, it's interesting how different this is unfolding than how some of us might have predicted.

First of all, creative writing is something a lot of people associate with fun. Plumbing? Probably not, though it goes without saying that some people enjoy it enough to justify a paycheck and work. Well now people are using AI to do things that many people associate with fun, like making music, creative writing, and producing art. I don't see how this can possibly be good, but no one (especially not AI) asked me for my opinion. Programming is a little more interesting because, at least then, AI can remove things that a lot of people think of as frustrating. It's a bit like the idea behind web frameworks. Now you can have an automated tool quickly do things that most people didn't want to.

I should clarify that the comparison is...a bit misleading. I guess what I'm referring to is how AI can do something like identify what line of code is likely to be causing a certain bug. Many would argue that using AI as a replacement for something like a web framework is problematic...but I won't go too deeply into that, it wasn't the point of the post.

Wait, so what was the point, again?

*

We would use AI to automate away things like driving, farming, plumbing.

The need to work 40 or more hours a week would vanish. Humans would be free to create art. Without resource scarcity, humans would also have no incentive to take part in wars. All war would be drone warfare, and it would take place between countries in neutral territories. Also the drones would all be badass human-sized robots, and the battles would be televised. It would be like the NBA, and if you lost the drone battle your country would have to surrender soybeans or land or whatever.

Andrew Yang was supposed to win, the world was supposed to embrace universal basic income, and all would be well. Zero problems, infinite AI-generated solutions.

Was it really so wrong? I also thought Web3 was going to change the world. I wonder if there's a blog post for that?

*

Thought experiments aside, what we have now is generative AI. Let's assume, at least for now, that many jobs involving physical labor are safe. Any job that does not, like writing a Tumblr post, shall be outsourced. This is why from this point on all my Tumblr posts will be AI-generated and AI can have 100% of the profits.

One thing AI can do really well is tell people exactly what they want to hear.

Another thing AI can do...kind of well...is produce art like writing, videos, and music. In other words, AI can produce...kind of okay...entertainment.

Maybe it's not on a level to replace Hollywood or George RR Martin (RIP Winds of Winter), but it can produce something fake and satisfying. That's the danger it poses right now.

I saw a philosophical video about how birds can learn to prefer laying on fake eggs over the real thing, and that was just about the "fake" nature of social media. Now we have entire profiles that are fake. And we have chatbot lovers, who can be deleted in a moment or "refined" to be more "loving."

We could be creating entire future generations of people who prefer fake social interaction to real social interaction. The rough edges are gone, those difficult moments that allow us to progress and grow and communicate.

[irarelypostanything]

A whole person

There's this YouTube video that became kind of infamous. They were live streaming a wedding, and the relationship lasted something like a year before a divorce. They were so mysterious about it that it became its own gossip topic, and I think there's this kind of strange dual nature to these famous social media influencers streaming their weddings. On one hand, there are the people that love and support them 100%. They support them when they're married, they support them when they're not married, they follow them and wish them the best. On the other hand are the followers that despise them. They take to Reddit snark pages, they make fun of everything, and in the event that anything fails, they laugh.

*

I think that maybe, the thing these famous social media influencers want to do is be perceived as a whole person.

...which sounds dumb to say (and perhaps it is, maybe I'm wrong). Everyone is a whole person. We have interests that go beyond our careers, we have relationships that exist on their own, we want to be more than just a single person's perception of us. But if you have a million people who know you as that guy who sings, or that woman in tech, it can become a little reductive.

Hence, people leaving tech to pursue pottery, or product management stories that become more about cooking.

*

Does anyone really care? Some people do. In a sense, social media just amplifies all the cruelty that simply exists as a byproduct of human natural. There's tribalism. We take famous people and put them in a box. Real friendships can end as well, sometimes for silly reasons, and these "social media relationships" can end when someone does something perceived as out of line.

But social media "relationships," especially if they're between people who have never actually met, can be easy to sever. Hence, fans can quickly turn.

We have dreams. We have thoughts. People known just as singers also might have a good deal to say about politics. But if they dare to do that, then how dare they. I don't care what this singer thinks of police brutality or climate change. I demand that you dedicate your every waking moment to singing for me.

[irarelypostanything]

School teaches discipline

There's this popular YouTube video that begins with a tagline, something like "What if I told you I could make coding as addicting as a video game?"

In typical Evan fashion, I watched it and was annoyed by it (even though I could have, you know, just not watched it). A lot of it was lifted from Atomic Habits, so the idea was essentially to just build enough discipline to code for a little while, maybe 30 minutes a day, until it becomes addicting.

Does the idea make sense? Sure. Is it revolutionary? Not enough to justify the title, I would say, and multiple people have essentially released the same video. There was "How I Replaced Video Games With Programming," followed by a guy who riffed on it because he actually did it.

Still, there's something I've been thinking about...

*

In high school, we took a field trip to EAGames. Someone told us that we would only use 20% of the things we learned in school, but that we had no idea of knowing what the 20% was.

A math teacher told us that, if nothing else, math was important because it taught us general problem-solving. I remember being confused by this. Why, then, would we learn something so specific? Seeing what others know, I've revised my opinion somewhat. I would say that (and this, admittedly, is not much of a revelation) math is tremendously useful to the small percentage of people who specialize in it. It's not just academic math, it's the fields adjacent to it. Math is tremendously important to...what was it called, again?

Meh, I don't have time to use ChatGPT or google.

*

They're not pumping out YouTube videos for high school students called "how to make studying photosynthesis as fun as video games" (scratch that, they probably are). There's something about programming that became attractive until 2022, when ChatGPT escaped from a lab and began systematically murdering all humans. It wasn't enough to say that programming was just interesting, or useful - people had to claim that it was lucrative, fun, and required no effort to succeed in.

But in school, as a natural consequence of the curriculum, students learned to tolerate moments of frustration and boredom. It wasn't perfect. Some people learned faster, and some people were just genuinely more interested in certain things (which, ideally, would make them better candidates to major in those respective fields). Discipline wasn't everything, but it was one of the most useful things school taught.

Now, maybe through the vehicles of YouTube or LinkedIn or my own freaking imagination, the ideas are changing. It's not enough to just say something is worthwhile because it pays the bills or becomes enjoyable after a while, it has to be enjoyable every second of the day. If it's not, then it's not a passion. If it's not a passion, then it's a waste of time.

Cal Newport wrote a book about it called So Good They Can't Ignore You, which is a kind of argument against the "passion thesis," but I think it goes a bit too far in the other direction. Yeah, passion isn't everything...but it's certainly important as well.

I guess there's this happy medium between passion and discipline, but I don't know how to define it. Should we enjoy what we do 80% of the time? 20%?

The time I take thinking about it could be better spent reading a self-help book about it.

[irarelypostanything]

When content creation is annoying as fuck

I complain about social media a lot, and many have pointed out the irony that I am more addicted to it than most. I've been thinking about the kind of content I consume. One of the more strange things, I suppose, is how the content I really enjoy seems totally indistinguishable from the content I hate.

There are these tech influencer videos, and they all seem to follow this Fireship (Fireship is a channel I genuinely enjoy) format of expressing everything through memes. They give coding advice and general life advice, but there's one really popular channel I particularly disagree with. It essentially says coding should just be done, not studied. I understand that it can be motivational for people who are stuck and never really applied themselves, but I'd argue that there's a point in which it's beneficial to take a step back and study fundamentals.

Then some channel emerged with the exact same format, and I really loved it. Its advice was similar, and similarly cliche. Improve by failing. Get out of your comfort zone. You could mix the two and most people wouldn't be able to tell them apart, but to me one of them seemed like the video made by someone who has actually been in the industry for a while and has something to say, vs. a relatively new person who decided to bless the world with his half-baked wisdom.

There's "give me x seconds and I'll change your life" videos. I tend to not like them. They tend to be similarly cliche, as in "believe in yourself" over and over again. But sometimes I'm feeling down. I absolutely need to hear some stranger on the internet express to me, the viewer, that the way to stop procrastinating is by making an effort to stop procrastinating. Maybe there's also music and a particularly convincing, AI-generated voice.

I guess what I mean to say it's that it's a subjective, sender/receiver thing. It's like how I loved The Power Of Habit and hated Atomic Habits, even though they're essentially the exact same book written by two different people and told in different ways.

*

There's this really popular blogger millionaire on LinkedIn and Medium.

He writes a lot of stuff, and I usually don't like it. He also wrote that his worst critics call him out by name, so I guess I'll try to avoid the trap and not name it. If anyone hates his writing, why not just not read it? The haters truly have no lives.

I remember reading it and thinking, well, isn't some of their criticism legitimate? When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, you wrote that it was more meaningful than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was supposed to come across as this clever joke, only it wasn't really a joke. You also wrote it in a lot of one-sentence paragraphs, and then a lot of your surrounding content boiled down to "you should invest in bitcoin because its value will rise to a zillion dollars next year."

Then I thought...well...I've experienced the same thing on a much, much smaller scale. I can't deny that jealousy plays some role. I'll write something, it will get criticized, and I'll think...if you find my style of writing annoying, why not just stop reading it? And why in the name of everything holy would you comment on something you didn't even bother to read?

I think we hold popular content to a different standard. If something is popular, we question why it's popular and how it got popular. Does the person have talent? Is the person deserving of fame? It's easy to call out things that are annoying, especially if the people who produce it are famous. Social media, in a sense, exploits this kind of main-character desire in us all. But when we consume the content of strangers, we feel just a little bit removed. Your best friend got a good job? Amazing. This random guy on LinkedIn got a good job? Probably nepotism.

*

I found a video about how social media influencers "influence" this impossible beauty standard, and spread negativity, and how the ones who are famous should consider themselves responsible for spreading positivity. To that I'm thinking...couldn't that be just as bad? I don't know. If all you do is write or make videos about how the world would be a better place if we all just loved each other a little more, I want to say that there's no harm. But then if you actually do, I imagine you'll start to watch people get really, really upset for a reason that's difficult to put into words.

It can be annoying. Don't like your job? Career content advice feels unsolicited and delusional. Currently single? The only relatable relationship content may be the onion video where they stone a cringy couple. Not fit? Unsolicited diet advice will be met by some of the angriest comments.

Then, in times of needed motivation, all that content suddenly becomes wonderful. Motivational.

So...I don't know. Somewhere out there, someone could read these words and seethe at my incorrect usage of ellipses.

But it's Tumblr, so probably not. I'm not using hashtags for RWBY or Pixar or Marvel, after all.

[irarelypostanything]

Some people I meet seem to genuinely enjoy just about everything

When I watched a YouTube video on dopamine, I suddenly got bombarded by all these strange, AI-generated ads. They call dopamine an addiction, then use AI-generated animation surrounded by AI-generated music.

The app itself, from a quick search, seems to be kind of sketchy. It DOES track habits, and I actually thought the interface looked pretty slick, but according to reviewers it cost something like $60 a month and then continued to pull charges indefinitely, even for people who tried to buy "lifetime subscriptions."

It's "dopamine addiction" that got to me. How can you be addicted to dopamine? It seemed like psudoscience, but when I looked it up I saw that more prominent channels - like HealthyGamerGG - argued about "dopamine addiction" as well.

It just seemed so strange, like the "dopamine detox" movement from years ago. My understanding is that someone credible took the term and ran with it, but he didn't singlehandedly invent the idea of a dopamine detox. Before he came along, there really were people who were arguing for removing everything positive/enjoyable from our lives for a detox. His "dopamine detox 2.0" is healthier, but at that point the entire term becomes kind of meaningless.

*

I enjoy writing stream-of-consciousness stuff like this, but that's because it doesn't generally have much of an audience. Medium.com had a different sort of feedback loop. At first I had small blogs, and users I interacted with were generally supportive. Then - and I should have no illusions about this - the blogs remained unpopular, but got just a slight bit more popular. At that point I started to get feedback, and some of it was positive but some of it really wasn't.

Some comments were so negative that it started a joke with Smack. I was no longer addicted to that dopamine rush of getting notifications - I had become so worked up by the comments I was getting that the simple act of not receiving any notifications gave me a bit of dopamine. Smack called it an abusive relationship.

*

...so we have feedback loops.

The social validation of releasing some project and getting positive reactions. The rush of learning some new skill. The satisfaction of eating a good meal, exercising, drinking.

Factorio was funny because it kind of "gameified" the exact same experiences some people have when coding. Minecraft is another interesting one - you get little hits whenever you explore something new, or mine some rare resources you can use. Video games in general, for the most part, are like that. Social media is a little harder to quantify because, in my cases, it thrives on negative emotion. Who gives a fk that someone just planted 10,000 trees, or donated 7 billion dollars to charity? It's way more addicting to reblog posts about how the world is ending and how people are actively trying to ruin our country.

*

I have this generally not-so-controversial idea that almost everything can be interesting, but on the surface.

Social media perfectly exploits this. Chess? Cooking? Dancing? You can just see the 10-second highlights now. You can learn about things in a way that's relatable. Before we had those 10-second videos blasted on Instagram/YouTube/Facebook/TikTok, we sort of had the same thing on television. You can watch a show about a cook or a star quarterback or a CEO, and you don't have to lift a finger. It feels like you're accomplishing something, vicariously.

But some people I meet just aren't like that. They can learn about something on the surface, then can really deep into them. They can continue to power through, and hyperfocus.

If I could write some next big self-help book it would probably be the "skill" of getting into anything by making it interesting and finding you genuinely/intrinsically enjoy it, but why would anyone read it? I never figured out how to do it myself.

*

I guess what I mean to say, in conclusion, is that "dopamine addiction" and "dopamine detox" seem completely wrong. Things SHOULD BE enjoyable. The problem is when we bombard ourselves with the easy things. Walking for 30 minutes, when you own a car? Eating a salad, when McDonalds is right there?

There are different peaks and valleys. Programming has pointers, for the low-level people, or promises, for the frontend people, or race conditions. Guitar has the F-chord, I have just learned. It turns out the one I have used isn't the one people talk about as difficult.

Ballroom dancing is an interesting thing to me. In theory, it should be a bit like learning a musical instrument...but at many dances, some people improvise a bit.

*

I guess what I mean to say, in the conclusion following the fake-out conclusion, is that some things take time. Social media shows people who have already achieved the thing, even though the process of improving at the thing is where we spend most of our time.

...and some people just seem to have such an easy time with this. They can be patient and do the work and find fulfillment along the way.

And I guess that's what a lot of our live, in the real day-to-day, truly is. We're just trying to get better at things, but it takes time and there are peaks and valleys.

And when we meet people who are already great, we can either be inspired by them, or have our motivation diminished.