I'm building something that aims to take on a bunch of the issues Substack has. I'm aware of what you refer to in (2), I see the results of all the "use our agent to write content in your voice, _totally_ human" tools, I'm fed up with everything needing a recurring subscription.
But I'm not entirely sure what you refer to in (1). Would you care to elaborate? I'd love to learn more.
> I'm aware of what you refer to in (2), I see the results of all the "use our agent to write content in your voice, _totally_ human" tools, I'm fed up with everything needing a recurring subscription.
I'm sorry but I think you're misunderstanding.
I do not mean "nazi" euphemistically. Not general right-wing politics, not even such hardcore opposition to immigration that it borders on Nazism. Not even crypto-fascists. (No not the bitcoin kind) I mean they're hosting blogs written by out and open nazis. The swastika-armband wearing kind that names their blog "NatSocToday".
There's some contrived argument about net neutrality in all this, but the Substack people have been pretty clear about their support for these nazis beyond merely hosting them. (And no matter how you look at it, being on "The Site With All The Nazis" despite many better alternative existing, is going to be a bad look)
> (1). Would you care to elaborate? I'd love to learn more.
Look at any contemporary Facebook page. Look at any of the older MySpace pages that preceded it. (e.g. A 2008 news article with a screenshot attached https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24161656)
Spot the difference.
Early platforms up to and including MySpace included functionality to write custom CSS (and HTML)
While Zuckerberg is not solely to blame, Facebook has popularized the removal of those features in favour of a uniform website design.
(And congratulations to the smart readers, who at this point in the reply have put together that the "MySpace-era" sites died and were supplanted by the (post-)Facebook era sites right around the same time when smartphones became big and that removing user-CSS features means the pages look the same in-app as on the web as well as making mobile-web responsiveness significantly easier.)
The consequence of this is a significantly more uniform and boring web, which amplifies the "soulless" feel of many of these newer Medium/Substack/etc blogs, as compared to older platforms.
I would even go further and say that the term really has to be almost "equal" - equal access, equal rules, equal legislation or the market isn't really free.
I started building a platform for human-first content but I don't know at this point whether I'm misreading the room completely or other people are also fed up.
As I'm typing this, I'm listening to "I just can't get enough" playing after Google's agentic shopping demo and I literally feel sick to the stomach.
I used to point fingers and laugh at communist luddites and I don't really want to become one and I don't know how I could escape that path.
Listening to the keynote all I could feel was disgust and I can't fathom what people were clapping for.
Yeah, I get that 100%. Didn't watch it but I'd feel the same way. Of course, the people in that room are highly selected/filtered, but still, clapping for that feels nauseating.
I remember when Matt Taibbi called Goldman Sachs a vampire squid on the face of humanity, and that phrase made the rounds for a while. Feels like it should be repurposed for the AI industry.
> Listening to the keynote all I could feel was disgust and I can't fathom what people were clapping for.
My friend, there are equally as many if not more people who are fed up by AI for example, students booing people is a recent case.
The people who are at Google AI are very likely the people who are working at AI and are quite desperate for it for both financial and technical reasons.
> I used to point fingers and laugh at communist luddites and I don't really want to become one and I don't know how I could escape that path.
I think that you are worrying about being luddite because of that label itself. Like because you have laughed previously at luddites, you might be worried about that label and thus having a self contradiction which is creating a small crisis of identity.
For what its worth, its still worth mentioning that companies aren't getting any tangible benefit from AI while burning millions of dollars some of which even layoff-ing people and people speculating about it because of the high costs attached.
It is questionable as to the real practicality of AI in many things. They might be good in certain use cases but I think that we are treating it as something more than a tool, which feels the wrong approach.
There are people highly respected like Mitchell who are saying that there are people that he respects in the industry and literal companies who are in the state of AI psychosis and ask these companies on how they make profit is still a question of sweat to them as it seems that they are degrading the tooling and models (Famously anthropic has had a lot of heat recently)
Also, think about 2022-23, how many skills used then of AI are being used right now. Nobody knows whats gonna happen in next few years (and if they do, they might have exterior incentives too)
So either way if the technology turns out to be absolutely amazing and life changing and people are clapping about it on google I/O. don't worry, the features will come in general testing and you would then see the normal consensus of things and you don't really have to do things or follow them as you can just have your own vibes and you wouldn't really be a luddite.
My point is that if you are trying AI right now because of the fear of missing out or in some sense the fear of being called a luddite at the moment, then even by the own premise of AI, there wouldn't be many skills that you can meaningfully learn about AI and you could just pick it up down the line if or when the tech stops being speculative asset with whole economy relying on it while crossing fingers.
So my point is, don't worry about these labels or anything perhaps. I am a crypto luddite (except stablecoins) and that has worked in my favour for the most part, if AI works great, if it doesn't work, still great :)
Anyways I am really getting interested in robotics and for some reason making my own operating system or reading some source code of C compilers and golang or running ternary LLM models on FPGA (yes LLM related but I am really interested in fpga right now).
Honestly the bigger question I am worried about is the job market as someone still in high school.
And ps, I am saying this as someone who has been vibe-coding before it was a term or like the LLM way, but I feel like one can churn out a lot of projects and I surely have done it too but they lack any meaning or depth and I am just saving them so that I could in college, learn the languages more properly and understand what they are doing as I wish to understand these softwares.
Just my 2 cents but thanks for reading, not sure if its related to your comment or not but just my thoughts and yeah thanks for reading and have a nice day!
> These are exactly the kinds of sentences that would have gotten us outstanding grades as students of the language.
You're abusing "us" here. There are billions of ESL learners, and the group you're part of who receive outstanding grades for that kind of sentence makes up a tiny percentage. The overwhelming majority would not.
I was under the impression I can copy my package.json and it will analyse that, instead of going through packages one by one, factoring in potential co-dependencies, etc.
As a fellow European who's also working on a similar move, I would just like to note that it is absolutely surreal that we have to consider this.
I wish it was motivated by pure patriotism (give our money to relatively local businesses), but it's motivated by uncertainty, something I wouldn't have expected from the USA in my younger years.
Well, my guess is that OPML is underrated. And I understand that, because it's so different from the social media that we are used to. On my homepage (link in bio) you can find all the feeds that I follow, available as an OPML file. It might be of interest to you, it might not (probably a lot of blogs you know from here, at least half of my 2000 feeds).
One 'dream' of me is to have OPML be the discovery-glue between all kinds of individual personal websites and blogs. But this requires critical mass to have enough to discover and explore, and it needs some fun/interesting software way to do that.
I'm a trans woman who's had a lot of electrolysis. Almost all of us get permanent hair removal on our face if we can afford it. Laser is far cheaper and quicker, but not everyone can get it since it needs specific hair and skin colour combinations.
Electrolysis on my face and neck has cost me tens of thousands. Think $100 per hour, and it taking 100-300 hours to complete typically. Full body hair removal would easily run in to hundreds of thousands, but very few people will be able to afford that.
I also don't see the aesthetics behind it, but I guess that's the hetero guy speaking.
Women are expected to not have beards, and having one or any beard shadow will get you seen as "a man" very quickly. It's both for safety, and reducing the amount of dysphoria we experience.
I looked at the arm hair in the video, than at my grizzly arms and totally forgot about facial hair!
That sounds super expensive, isn't there a trend to do that abroad?
I remember seeing Istanbul airport full of hair transplant patients, apparently people go there to have more hair at an affordable cost, maybe the opposite is also available at less than $100/h?
Electrolysis is something that needs to be done roughly every 6 weeks, as hairs regrow. Each hair can need multiple treatments to fully kill off, too. There's probably some countries where you can hop over the border to get it done cheaper as a day trip, but I doubt most people will be able to do such a long trip every few months.
There's cheaper places than where I go, for sure, but operator skill is a big part of electrolysis. It's the difference between getting scarred or not, and it's the difference of a hundred hours time spent because the operator wasn't using enough power.
The reality is that it's just time intensive, and there's not many good experienced operators around where I live
> Laser is far cheaper and quicker, but not everyone can get it since it needs specific hair and skin colour combinations
Laser is also often (usually?) not permanent (I am the right combination of fair-skinned and dark-haired). And hella painful from personal experience, though I can't compare to electrolysis.
FWIW, as a trans woman, I assumed that was for demonstration purposes to avoid showing anything intimate or identifying. Though some of us do remove essentially all hair south of the eyes.
Thicker and longer arm hair is still a masculine trait. Testosterone thickens hair all over your body. Feminising HRT does revert body hair for some people (but not facial hair, it's a biological quirk), but usually not enough to where cis women are if you started out hairy
I feel like harrier arms on women isn't that uncommon, but that could also just be the people I hang around (they tend to be more punk/hippie than the average)
Also a hairy man. I got a small amount done about 20 years ago because I didn't want to end up with "old man ear hair" like my relatives (TMI, sorry).
At the time, a visit was $60. It wasn't painful but I did feel a twinge/shock for each hair. Multiple visits are required because of how follicles work - they grow hair in phases. The technician would treat the ones she saw, but then I had to wait until the next growth phase to return for her to get the next batch. About 10 trips in all.
Typically not everywhere, but places with really coarse and dark hair like the face and chest are pretty common. Also, you need some done down there for some PIV vaginoplasty (though, some surgeons remove hair in other ways. in general a lot of mtf bottom surgery varies from surgeon to surgeon though)
Yeah, I tend to think of body hair as an adult trait, not a masculine trait. Aesthetically I see this kind of like a badass custom tattoo gun, where the tattoo is your own skin without the parts you don't like.
I think she meant that going to a place to get it done for the whole body costs that much. It still sounds expensive, but who knows.
Though, I have no idea who would want to sit through something that takes ten seconds per body hair. I got a light hair removal device and it's waaaaaaaay faster and cheaper.
They served caviar. It probably had good ROI.
reply