> Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.
I'm not completely sure, but I think her reasoning is that AI made it a lot easier for random people to just have the idea and translate it into an image in a minute or two, and this cheapens the whole experience for her, to the point that it no longer seems worth doing.
It's sort of a funny point. I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all. It's like there's a minimum threshold of human skill and investment for an object to be interesting beyond its pure functionality, and functionality has little to do with art (but a lot to do with, say, software).
Then as companies like Prusa and later Bambu made 3D printing more and more accessible to the masses there was a subgroup of 3D printing fans who were unhappy about the change. They lost interest in the hobby. Some became bitter and spent their time finding things to complain about on Reddit and other forums instead of enjoying their printing.
Logically, enabling other people to produce something shouldn’t subtract from others’ enjoyment of their own hobbies. Many still do woodworking with hand tools even though we can buy factory furniture now.
I think some people are more interested in seeking status and doing things for personal branding reasons than the joy of the hobby itself. For that group, any advancement that makes it easier for other people to do something similar to what they do (even if lesser quality, as is often the case with AI) it interferes with their ability to use that hobby for status. They carved out a niche as the person who did something rare or semi-unique, but making that thing accessible to more people took that away. So their motivation wanes.
I described this to a friend and he turned to me, shocked, and said “you’re a sports car hipster!” And I’ve never been quite the same since.
People who loved mixing colors enough to become experts may have been disappointed when their hard-won skills were rendered obsolete by the march of progress.
There are some aspects of my work that are enjoyable on their own and others that I only do because they're necessary overhead to achieve a desired result. I appreciate technology that eliminates the latter but lament technology that eliminates the former.
So when AI obsoletes yet another human skill I suspect a lot of the wildly different emotional responses are dependent on whether someone considers the skill being obsoleted more "enjoyable" or "necessary overhead".
Are you aware that without explanation you just assumed things can be achieved with less effort without quality degradation?
Oddly a few months ago somebody who was a few years too late DMed me on Tumblr to say he wanted to make NFTs of my photos. I played it cool and eventually asked him "which ones do you want?" which got him to pick the last 5 I posted which proves he isn't even looking.
Nextdoor for a nearby city lately has been spammed my somebody who makes AI slop videos with senseless motion like a bad Instagram Reel about our police department (he's black but seems to love the blue) -- at least he has some sense of praising vs dissing people but to people like that there is not difference between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, just ceaseless motion that never stops.
Unfortunately, if you go shopping in a supermarket or online, you can find a huge amount of bad products that look like they were well designed, but in reality some of their parts are made from wrong materials, and you discover this only at home, after using them for a few months, or for a few days, or even after a few minutes.
For instance, I have seen devices where pressure-regulating springs were not made of spring steel, but of ordinary steel and they lost their elasticity after a very short time, making the device unusable, water buckets supposedly made of stainless steel that were actually made of chromated steel, which rusted at joints after a few months and a lot of diverse devices where parts that suffer cyclical stresses are not make of a fatigue-resistant material, so they break after a short time of use.
There are countless examples of this kind and all have this problem that you cannot detect visually if the correct materials are used, or not, like you can recognize an inappropriate shape.
I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in design. Even today it is fantastic.
I never look at doors, without evaluating their usability, anymore.
The book was a gift and a curse.
as for door handles, most manufactures use interchangaple knobs so you can buy two and swap. You end up with a useless mechinism (i find you rarely can find a different door that needs the reverse handle)
That is an interesting point to bring up, because this type of "almost but not quite right" is exactly what AI seems to naturally create.
Or, she stumbled upon some article or the very Wikipedia page about it:
on the bottom (both) WHY?
i also do this for ui and app logic: go to some Microslop service, they are all like these...sad but true
Emacs and/or vi, depending on your inclination, have text editors covered already, of course ;-)
Output success error codes in unexpected range (see: robocopy).
Use special characters to try TUI things but leave the buffer in weird states.
Have many input params, and default to the most useless ones when nothing is passed. Make some params unnecessarily required.
Go on very long tangents for no reason in the manpage, but keep your -h message as just the list of badly named params.
Use stderr as your stdout.
---- I present to you worse-cat:
wcat notes.txt
error: --encoding is required. Exiting.
wcat --encoding=utf-8 notes.txt
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│ About to display: notes.txt │
│ Are you sure? [y/N/maybe]: │
└─────────────────────────────────┘
y
stdout: ≈3 paragraphs
stderr: [file content]
echo $?
212
(I'll save you the manpage and worse-ls)
I instantly recalled a site from this era and amazeballs it’s still there! Superbad.com All hail!
so linux is already there
In terms of usability, moving to FreeBSD from Linux is quite a positive experience. Pity that hardware and software support is limited on the BSDs.
Results from ls would be a few sentences explaining the types of files in the directory. Add a -l on there and it will give you a general overview of the permissions and size of the files. Ex. “These are rather large files that are primarily, but not exclusively, limited to root.”
Results from cat would give a summary of the file. You’d get the same results, with some degree of randomness from more and less as well.
Using any command with sudo would provide the same type of results, but in all caps.
Trying to pipe commands together would be a slop multiplier.
For example, the inner water tank of a robotic vacuum.
