irarelypostanything

[irarelypostanything]

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.

[irarelypostanything]

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.

[irarelypostanything]

Coding is hard to compare to other things

We have ChatGPT now. To give someone the initial "spark," you could just ask them to tell an AI in plain English what they want to make. Then it can give them instructions on how to run it. It's not "hello world" anymore, you could probably get someone to produce hundreds of lines of code without having to explain anything behind how it works.

I want to say that this could be a big problem, but it's also what a lot of us have wanted for years. Coding takes a lot of time to learn. Is it really so bad that the people behind GPT empowered everyone with a computer and Internet access to turn plain text into functional code, then explain to them in plain text how it works? The curious could even receive tips on working through hallucinations, but now maybe the barrier to entry is so much lower.

The answer, of course, is yes. This is terrible and a danger to jobs everywhere. We must stop it now by throwing as much misinformation into Tumblr as possible. The moon landing was staged. Pluto isn't a real planet.

Oh wait...

*

One of the ongoing debates is whether software engineering is real engineering. Some would say it is, but it's still quite different than other fields.

I think that a lot of people on social media assume that too much of the "software world" is web-centric. It's not. There's low-level stuff, for example. Some people have to interact with their environment in ways that require them to pick up other knowledge. So yes, some software engineers do have to learn quite a bit about math or physics, the way "real engineers" do.

But it's kind of a contrived debate...

The next is computer science vs. general science. Does computer science require the scientific method? Not really, or not necessarily, but...

Okay, this is a Quora post I read but can't remember. They say that sure, maybe it's not what you typically think of as a science. But the Latin word "science" is derived from simply means "to know."

Hm, is that true? I'll need Tony to verify.

*

The only reason I've been searching for things coding is like is because I want it to be more relatable. You have these symbols, right?

Well...no. Typically, at least here, they're just English words. They have symbols, too, and a logical flow that can take some getting used to.

You have words and symbols, and they do things. The ability to make them do the right things is a bit more like magic than superpowers, or I suppose more like science than art. One guy I met at the soup kitchen compared it to cooking. I don't know about that. In cooking you're bound by certain physical laws, but you still have lots of potential solutions. In coding you may have potential solutions to a problem, but I think you could argue that they're more restricted than they would be in cooking.

If you have an erroneous error, you solve it. You don't just put a band-aid on it until someone devises a better fix. In cooking, if the flavor isn't right, you can correct the ingredients and have it right the next time around. It's not like it takes weeks or months to bake a pie. Cooking is about perfecting, but in coding many products themselves take a lot of time and people to produce.

*

Maybe coding is like Owl House. You have these special glyphs you learn to render, and they do special things. But now you have to learn how to take these magical abilities and apply them at just the right time.

But how many does Luz learn to draw? If it's not thousands, then it's not like coding.

*

Maybe coding is like Harry Potter. You just say random things, and then things happen. But then it's not really like that, because it's not like Hermione spends the better part of an afternoon learning how to make something fly, only to realize that the thing wasn't made from the correct material and they have to derive a different spell. The only guy who really seemed to get magic is the half-blood prince, and look where that got him.

Magic would have to be deconstructive. You'd have to not just learn the spells, but the principles behind why the spells worked like they did. Then you could systematically devise your own spells, but bound by the laws of magic.

*

Where was I going with this, again?

In conclusion, coding is like Harry Potter, but only the potions class in book six.

Otherwise, coding is just redstone machines in Minecraft.

[irarelypostanything]

Adulthood and Toxic Positivity

A few days ago, I watched/wrote about a short video clip with Andrew Huberman and Adam Grant. It's neither here nor there, but I saw a pretty funny AI video (yes, I know...I am one of the idiots who consumes AI-generated content) calling Andrew Huberman "the most optimized man in the world," and then made fun of him. Huberman himself responded.

The video was about procrastination and how to use curiosity to make yourself intrinsically motivated to study. They actually mentioned that if the thing is really boring, like getting a 10-year-old to rake leaves, sometimes you just have to appeal to extrinsic motivation. Tell them how good it will feel to show their parents a clean lawn, or if that fails just pay them $10.

*

In college, we had to write essays, complete problem sets, and take final exams.

No one really liked it. Obviously, some of us enjoyed some things more than others. One guy I know enjoyed doing Webwork. I enjoyed writing essays. That doesn't mean that after getting my diploma, I went out of my way to spend weekends reading books and then composing five-page essays on them while this guy did math problems on his phone. We had things we enjoyed more than others, but that didn't necessarily make it "fun."

So at the risk of being called out for projecting...what the fk changed after graduation? No one in college would write a lengthy Facebook post about how much they loved studying for final exams, how hard their parents fought to afford them this opportunity, and how much they love studying because of how they'll apply themselves. Yet there are a hundred billion posts on LinkedIn that read exactly like that.

Well...it's obvious. LinkedIn is a professional environment, and people are appealing to a certain aspect of themselves (ie career). It's the same idea behind why you shouldn't send a memo to everyone on your company team about how braindead it was for the Sacramento Kings to fire coach Mike Brown. There's a time and place for everything.

So why have I been overthinking it so much?

*

I guess what I mean to say is...

I think I've been taking some of this self-improvement content too seriously. Not everything has to be enjoyable 100% of the time. Software engineers have to set up their environments, nurses sometimes have to change diapers, and pilots have to endure some pretty long flights. It's like when we were in school. No one was having or pretended to be having fun 100% of the time as they lost sleep and friendships studying.

[irarelypostanything]

Tech influencers leaving tech

I watched a Hank Green video that criticized the term "influencer." In terms of YouTube popularity, he would qualify as one - but his argument is that he's a "content creator," and that the term "influencer" was actually devised by companies to label people they could use to push their products.

I think we all have this collective idea of what "influencer" means. Facebook. Instagram. It's this popular, typically young adult demographic of people who share details of their lives, careers, and lifestyle tips for the world to see.

From there, in my personal opinion, the topic of "influencer" becomes more interesting. First, there's the idea of a fiction - as in influencers who create this impossible standard in everything from beauty to career. On the other, there's the sheer amount of money involved...the corporations themselves might be a lot more interested in an "influencer" than in an average 9-5 employee.

Then there's social media, and how it incentivizes its users to follow the same templates - regardless of how large or small their following. Meta encouraging AI use for content creation. The ubiquitous "algorithm," and how the user starts to feel like someone playing a video game and learning what does/doesn't generate the invisible dopamine-generating notifications pertaining to "likes."

But it's a really broad topic, and "influencers" can be anything from tech to cooking to beauty...so with no sort of transition I'm going to use this as a jumping off point.

*

Like a lot of people ten years ago, I used to spend a good deal of time following tech influencers like Joma Tech, Mayuko, and Chloe Shih. It was all just kind of fun. Sometimes they would talk about LeetCode, or sometimes they would just leave the camera rolling and show clips of office perks. I was in college for computer science. I doubt that I thought of it as actual studying or research - it was just something to consume.

Now in 2025, there's a trend I've been noticing with tech influencers...

...a lot of them are leaving tech.

In a sense, it makes a lot of sense. To be clear, this next part is just me writing and not really grounding my ideas in any sort of research...but quite a few people are getting laid off. Chloe Shih was laid off as a product manager and decided to become a full-time tech influencer or content creator. Most recently, Pooja Dutt did the same. Nick White disappeared and revealed he had become a full-time streamer, Kevin Naughton quit Google (if I remember correctly), NeetCode left Google to start selling a course full-time...

It might pay pretty well. These people may also realize that their ability to carry a following online is more unique and marketable than whatever skills they were cultivating as 9-5 employees.

But here's the part I keep wondering about - if the entire industry is experiencing lots of layoffs/uncertainty, and if people on social media have switched to seeing get-rich-quick tech content to gloom-and-doom tech content...aren't the views on social media really going to drop off? I'm sure they've thought about this. These people are orders of magnitude smarter than I am.

Pooja Dutt made a video about how much work/research her videos require, and how she also outsources things like thumbnail, video editing. She presents research. Lots of tech influencers provide research. They'll have some question, like Will We Lose Our Jobs To AI, and then there will be these really aesthetically pleasing charts and corporate announcements that have the appeal of a TV series. I find some value in these, I guess.

I'm not afraid to mention named like Pooja because I think of them as better than a lot of other tech influencers. Some of the ones I haven't mentioned by name, I think, are worse. They oversell tech and coding as really easy get-rich-quick schemes, then abruptly so a 180 and start pumping out content about how it's a bloodbath and the only way to succeed is by buying their course.

*

...it's a debate I've been having with Smack for a while. I don't know if all of these "tech influencers" deserve to be lumped together. Some just make videos about how to do x, y, and z while coding, and it's hard to put that next to some clickbait video about how to get ahead of 99% of developers by investing in their new crypto.

But another thing I find interesting...and yes, it's ironic that I keep saying "interesting" in a long post that isn't that interesting...I anticipate the shit comments already...

So let's say you get a job at FAANG, or MANGO, or whatever the fk Cramer is calling it now in his loud show. You've done what only a small percentage of people in the industry have managed to do. Some will trivialize it. Some will argue against it, or caution those who follow them. Personally, I think it's a bit like getting into a prestigious university.

So...how did they achieve this? That's what a lot of their audience wants to know. That becomes one of the most interesting things about them. The question, then, becomes whether or not they're overly/hyperfocused on the skills required to GET a really prestigious job, as opposed to what it requires to maintain/contribute at said job.

I don't really know how to conclude that. Many, like Smack, would simply say they're not the target audience. They're already in tech. Why would you spend lots of time watching content targeted at people trying to break into tech?

*

Do I have a tl;dr? Not really. Yes, this was longer than I thought it would be.

There's documentation on things like Vuetify and Spring Boot. We could blog about that to the end of time.

I'm not sure anyone would read it, though, if the documentation is already so good. Maybe videos would be more appealing.

...and it would be way more interesting to make a video that just has a really scenic/gorgeous video of the new coffee machine, so who am I to judge?

[irarelypostanything]

We Actually Really Liked Elio

I had a professor who encouraged us to do research before writing essays - he said that reading a 50-year-old novel and not looking up existing discussions is a bit like coming to a party late and not knowing what anyone is talking about.

I'm curious what he would say now, in the age of ChatGPT, but I digress.

We couldn't get tickets to Superman, so we decided to give Elio a shot. We were both impressed - maybe even blown away - prompting me to check big YouTube channels to see why so many people didn't like it.

The consensus overall seemed to be

-It's really not bad, just not what you would expect from Pixar

-Existing Pixar/Disney movies did it better

-It was safe and forgettable

So...let me try to take a different angle I haven't seen many people discuss.

The similarities with Lilo and Stitch are obvious. I've also seen the movie compared to Big Hero Six and even The Incredibles. It's about family. There's this child who doesn't really fit in, and he wants to be somewhere else, and there's this mother figure just barely able to keep it all together.

And I would say...sure...

but...

Elio is a movie about curiosity and exploration. Early on, without spoiling too much, there's this scene of Elio meeting two other young HAM radio enthusiasts. There's this military base itself that's implied to be restricted by bureaucracy, but within its ranks is an enthusiastic scientist whose role...again, without spoiling too much...gets expanded later on. There's a scene reminiscent of The Martian that hints at the notion of multiple countries collaborating, a reminder that science does not have to exist for the benefit of any individual country, but for the benefit of all mankind. Predictably, a lot of "social media critics" seem to focus more on the other aspects of the movie, and you'll only see this kind of thing mentioned if you go on obscure Subreddits like the amateur radio page.

*Spoilers*

Other criticisms I've heard on YouTube

-The secondary characters are forgettable

I won't push back on the tertiary characters. The robot. The alien other than the mind-reading one. The various other planet leaders who are part of a peaceful and somehow hyperadvanced civilization, but are completely blindsided by a kind of obvious threat.

I heard a particularly critical reviewer (possum) point out that Grigon was just a minor comic relief character, but then they went through production hell, rewrote much of the script, and recast him as the villain.

But the other characters? Solid. The relationship between the two "outcast children" was particularly sweet. I even liked the clone, who kind of subverted my personal expectation that Elio would come into conflict with his "normal shadow," while Glordon accidentally created some "evil shadow" designed to perfectly fit his father's expectations to the point that he became a kind of Avengers level threat.

-This has all been done before

Has it? Lilo and Stitch, I'd argue (non-controversially), has a lot more to do with the culture of Hawaii than space exploration. The Incredibles plays with the idea of being special (and how our world treats people who are special), Big Hero 6 is a coming-of-age story about loss and the dark path to revenge, and Buzz Lightyear...

...well, I haven't watched that one. Maybe that's about exploration.

So Elio, someone who doesn't feel loved and doesn't seem to belong, goes somewhere else and they create a "perfect" clone of him. The "perfect" clone isn't even remotely interested in space, he does chores, he behaves well, he relates. To the real Elio, this is a short-lived nightmare. He really, truly doesn't belong and is replaceable.

Only he's not. Neither is his friend. His mother figure recognizes that this is not him and misses the real him, much like Glordon's father.

Then he collaborates with the same people he had come into conflict with. He accepts who he is, idiosyncrasies (if I'm using the word correctly) and all. He wanted to give up everything and disappear, a kind of futurama-like-protagonist with a desire to get away from everything. But like in Futurama, we as an audience begin to recognize that he DOES have a place, to the point that those around him will go to considerable lengths to reunite once again.

As the conversation goes

"She gave up being an astronaut for me."

To which Glordon, without a moment's hesitation, responds:

"Wow, she must really love you!"

[irarelypostanything]

on Entertainment, Social Media, and Dopamine

I remember one of the most memorable things from psych1 was the marshmallow experiment. We've probably all heard it already (and let me know if it has been debunked, I don't believe it has). Children are presented with marshmallows, then told that if they can just wait for some duration of time without eating it, then can eat two. It's delayed gratification with an obvious reward.

If they can resist, they actually demonstrate that they have a useful ability. This can be correlated with many other positive attributes.

I guess the point I was trying to make in my last post, if there was one, is that self-help content sometimes has this tendency to equate minor things like this with shocking revelations. It's like the ability to wake up at 5AM, or to substitute soda with water, or to resist alcohol and substitute that with...er...water is somehow the key to health and success and eternal life.

And...maybe it is. The Power Of Habit calls this the keystone habit.

Then Atomic Habits basically did the same thing years later, but I digress.

*

I've spent a long time thinking about why TV series are so interesting. For the most part, no one wants to hear it and usually shuts me down at this point in real-life conversations because I've been on the topic for so long. But you, reader, you are captive audience.

No wait DON'T CLOSE THE WINDOW HANG ON.

Actually, close it if you'd like. I don't know exactly where I'm going with this.

Honestly, it's not that profound. Reddit AND chatGPT can give a satisfying answer.

TV series, like most forms of entertainment, are optimized to be pleasurable. That means you see things that are interesting. Mr. Robot doesn't give you a 2-hour segment of the main character at home trying to make sense of Linux documentation. Casino Royale (stolen joke) just shows a fantastic scene of James Bond winning a car in a poker game, and skips the part where he spends an hour on the phone with his insurance company. If a show IS about tedium, it generally uses humor to punctuate the tedium. The Office is kind of like this. So is Severance, but for different reasons.

So a TV series, being "optimized entertainment," simply has the ability to make everything look interesting. Wall Street? A bunch of people yelling out numbers in million-dollar trades as epic music plays. Startup series? Everything constantly hangs in the balance, lots of negotiations and high-stakes deadlines with more accomplishment and less debugging time. Medical dramas?

Eh, I don't know. I watched that whole HBO series and heard it was incredibly accurate, but if someone told me it wasn't I would probably just believe them and let it influence my opinion. I couldn't tell a good medical drama from a bad one if it gave me medically inaccurate CPR.

*

One of the first thoughts I had was that maybe, in this day and age, our attention spans have been so diminished that the ability to even watch a 1-hour-an-episode TV show is now amazing. Wait. I think I already made that exact point on Tumblr before.

But social media. That's addicting in a different way.

Likes. Validation. It's "main character mentality" promoted. You get to feel connected, naturally, and you get to gameify your experience. Everyone gathers around your life events, your accomplishments, even you publicly sharing sad events.

But I know my use of second person was annoying, so...comments are disabled on Tumblr, right?

Okay, let me try this again...

"You" wasn't meant to mean "you," I guess..."you" is the "you"ser. The user is incentivized by this magical thing called the like button to act a certain way, to interact with the platform, and I think it really says a lot that people are naturally more inclined to use social media than to put their phones away. It's like a video game, somehow.

So every now and then, I'll wonder why people do something on social media...why they'll share a story that they know isn't true, why they'll cyberbully, or reblog something controversial. I can't help but think, as many already have, that this is the fault of platforms rather than solely on users. It's like they make this video game that's bad, then inevitably blame users when they use things the way they are incentivizing.

Like a TV series, social media is optimized to take as much of our time as possible. It's not even so much that it creates a fake reality, per se...that's a dead horse. Rather, social media is just fast now. Fast opinions. Fast formats (what?). The user just doesn't have time, in the rush of it all, to think long and hard about a nuanced take or to do research.

But then again...I don't know.

They also gave us React, the greatest invention since agriculture.

[irarelypostanything]

on Self-Help Content

9:46PM ...so today I watched a 15-minute video, a clip from an interview with Adam Grant on the Andrew Huberman podcast. I thought that what they shared seemed really helpful (motivation, making things interesting, intrinsic motivation), but then it got me thinking about self-help in general.

I know we've all been down this path. I've been down it a lot.

Dopamine. That's a funny word. I wonder how much the Internet has popularized the term over time, the same way "algorithm" used to be a fairly obscure term that was once mostly associated with the rubik's cube (note to self: citation needed)? If I understand correctly (and I probably don't), dopamine is a misunderstood molecule that is really not the "pleasure molecule" even though Harvard University is an extremely trustworthy source and defines it as the pleasure molecule. The reason for this is that dopamine actually spikes in anticipation, but nuance is hard for me so I'm just going to think of it as the pleasure molecule.

Wow, I am off to a great start. Let me try that again.

*

Dopamine is everything. Food. Reproduction. Novelty. It's the reason it's enjoyable to learn five words of a new language, but also the reason it's enjoyable to get addicted to drugs or alcohol.

It makes sense that 15 minutes of an interview about motivation, and dopamine, would be popular.

There are more talks than that. Andrew Huberman has a whole episode on motivation, and then an entire episode on motivation and overcoming procrastination. Adam Grant has a book, and I read it expecting to be disgusted (Hidden Potential), but I wasn't. I loved it. It wasn't repetitive, the stories were interesting, reading it made me feel good about myself even though the person who recommended it asked how it had improved my life, and all I could think of to say was nothing.

I don't know why I liked that book so much, and disliked "Atomic Habits" so much. The more I think about Atomic Habits, the more I think my criticism says more about me than it does about the book. "Chunk" good habits. Make bad habits difficult and good habits easy. It makes sense, and in fact a lot of it is corroborated in books by actual scientists. But all I can think of, every time I think of that book, is the 1% rule. Get better 1% every day and you will be 37 times better in a year. To hammer the point home, it even makes an analogy of how water doesn't boil until it hits 100 degrees C. at 99, it probably thinks it's pointless...right? No, water doesn't give a fuck one way or another. And how do you measure 1%? The whole thing is just so stupid to me that it overshadows the rest of the book, even though fans are always quick to point out that I'm entirely missing the point. It's a guideline. You don't literally try to get 1% better at everything. You don't improve your chess elo 1% every day, so you go from 1000 to 37,000 in 2026.

Damn it. Okay, let me just try this one more time and actually get to the point.

*

So...we're only human, right?

I don't think anyone, not the podcaster or the interviewee or the scientist, would argue otherwise. They're not trying to make us optimize one little thing every day until we're machines, with machine minds, with the absolute perfection of a self-driving car careening off a cliff. They're just trying to help us to improve, and hearing about small ways to improve is addicting.

The act of consuming self-help content itself feels good. So do most self-help books on the bestseller list. They have relatable stories, stories with enough variety to convince us that vastly different fields are somehow similar. They're easy to read, probably (usually) much harder to apply.

It's really easy to make fun of self-help content. Often times, the people who create them are easy to criticize...after all, with enough popularity they eventually cover everything from romantic relationships to sports to medical practice, and at that point it's inevitable that some journalist will discover that the podcast host secretly was having an affair with six different women simultaneously. Or...maybe it's not. That example seems like kind of a low blow.

The worst criticism I heard of the other guy is simply that he creates annoying LinkedIn posts. Well, cast the first stone. We all make annoying LinkedIn posts. That's the point of LinkedIn. If you're not making annoying posts on LinkedIn, you're missing the point of the platform.

*

Okay, it's been 18 minutes. Let me try to wrap this up, one more time.

We're only human, after all. We all sleep in on occasion, or eat donuts on occasion, or write motivational posts on Tumblr about how much it improves coding productivity to use metaphors to relate coding concepts to history, even though no one trusts a blogger who still uses Tumblr (note to self: citation not needed).

Self-help content can feel really good for some people. It doesn't have to say anything profound, it just says improve. Do better, here's how.

And then, for others, it's easy to make fun of. It's easy to make fun of because it reeks of unsolicited advice, and also because some people just aren't in the mood for it for one reason or another (maybe they already have it together, maybe they don't but they are dealing with something and have much higher priorities at this point in their lives than why they should probably get 1-2 hours of direct sunlight every day).

And I guess all I'm trying to think is...

...how can we exploit this to AI-generate our own self-help content so that we can flood Amazon marketplace?

When do we decide to keep improving, and when do we decide we're good enough as we are?

[irarelypostanything]

on Streaming Services, Television, and Attention Spans

Like a lot of people, I had the same speech growing up: My parents told me constantly about the virtues of reading, and the dangers of television. I wanted to delve into streaming services because it's an interesting topic, but I realized that streaming services are just an extension of something people have been writing about for a really long time: Television.

Was it the end times? Was it apocalyptic? I considered that maybe, in this day and age, our attention spans have been so affected by things like YouTube Shorts and TikTok that the act of focusing on a 45-minute-an-episode TV show was a step up. I did a tiny bit of research. I think I did see something on PsychologyToday about how social media can be more harmful than television.

Then I moved onto the next thing, because of course I did.

*

If you made a TV series about streaming services and then put it on a streaming service, I think it could be pretty interesting.

Write about the rapid rise of giants like NBC and CBS, and how over time they got consolidated and absorbed. Write about power struggles and acquisitions, and how we somehow got these weird splits between TV series that prompted large corporations to fight over things like Friends, and How I Met Your Mother. Talk about how Disney got ABC, or how Paramount got CBS (did I say that correctly?), and then explain why it is every platform seems to have the same set of legal dramas, medical dramas, and romantic comedies.

South Park did it. In South Park fashion, they kind of leaned into an over-the-top metaphor. Streaming services were literally represented by the South Park children making sail boats, or "content," to put onto moving water (a "streaming service") in order to prove that water successfully flowed. Someone fought over exclusive South Park rights (possibly a reference to the fight between Paramount and...WB?), and eventually it all got conquered by this guy who wanted to replace all the water and streaming services with literal piss. They call it PP Plus.

*

I am not a scientist. I am not a psychologist. But I think it would be kind of interesting to see how our brains function when we do things like use social media, vs. watch TV on a streaming service, vs. read a book.

I used to reblog (oh, the irony) all kinds of content about how this was the end, about how our brains were already permanently altered by things like Facebook and would never be able to function as a society. But everyone is still...fine...right? It's not like we stare at TikTok while trying to drive and then careen off of cliffs, or get distracted waiting in lines at the grocery store and forget how to pay. I think that everyone has demonstrated that we are all still CAPABLE of concentrating, when warranted, it's just a lot harder to feel good about things in downtime when there's so much competing for attention.

Take, for example, Internet scrolling.

There's something so nonlinear about it. There's some idea, and then a random Google search, and sometimes (at least for me) a trip down a rabbithole of tabs before I've even finished the article or video that prompted the "research" to begin with. At least with a tv show, you just watch. It's linear. And books are a lot better, but tv shows scratch a certain itch.

It can be more "fun" to open a million tabs, but do we really feel good about it? Do I feel a deep and profound happiness every time I decide to watch 50 30-second YouTube shorts about the economy, instead of...I don't know...a book or even 2-hour documentary on the topic?

I don't know if it's the end times, it just feels kind of disappointing to me sometimes. It's like my content has been so optimized to "respect my time" (or the opposite) that I've viewed 50 2-second things perfectly targeted at me instead of stumbling on the one thing that could help me just breathe and think a little bit.

[irarelypostanything]

on Aging and Permanence (kind of)

When I was younger, younger than 18, one of my biggest fears was that we would get trapped in these lives of perfect routine. We would drive the same roads. We would wear the same clothes. Life would become like this prison of no surprises, to the point that we would forget who we were and what we dreamed of doing or becoming.

What I didn't realize, and what I imagine most people share, is that one of my biggest fears now is of LOSING routine. That one day, maybe, I won't GET TO have the job that I have today. Much of the economy is beyond my control. Entire fields can and will disappear. My body, due to aging, can and will change. The people around me are also dealing with aging, though I imagine anyone older than me will read this and think, "Cry me a river." Instead of hearing people confide fears in me like never leaving their job, or never leaving this town, people confide in me about fears that their eyes will go bad and they will be unable to work.

Routine can be a really nice thing. I think that, in a sense, with routine there's some notion of permanence. We can lose things. Finances and health can change. But we can wake up and have our coffee, or our paper, or our daily soap opera, and everything else in the day can be a little more okay.

****

That's my "insight," anyway.

I used to really take pride in my insights.

I would write something, I would read it over, I would think "Wow, I should share this." Now I think of the question people have probably had before even social media was invented: Yeah, you're welcome to write whatever you'd like, but why do you feel the need to share it with the world? Everything in blogging I encounter has a very "rough draft" sort of quality to it. Even very popular blogs have a rough draft quality to them. Tumblr looks and feels like a rough draft when it's using for pure writing, but few people use it for that and at least it's honest. Medium looks and feels like a professional news site until you spend a significant time actually reading it.

Everyone and their mother has insights. Almost everyone alive has given a lot of thought to things like aging, or power, or the sheer number of stars in the sky and the implications of the aforementioned stars. I guess I just feel that, the older I get, the less people pretend to care about that sort of thing.

It's like layers of an onion. On one layer, you could talk about very abstract things that constitute the universal human experience. You could talk about a sense of wonder, or how it feels to truly feel happy. That could be unifying.

Then, and people care a lot more about this, you have practical things that people actually fight wars about. Monetary policy. Resource allocation. Things that did or did not happen in ancient times, which become the basis of their own ideological wars. And here I am, writing about it as if I were somehow not actively involved in all of this. It just seems so absurd. We're having what seems more and more like a civil war over things like tax rates, how many resources to allocate for welfare, and extremely unimportant social issues that form noise over legitimately important ones. I used to think that things like video games and sports were a waste of time and resources. Now I am fully convinced that things like sports and video games absolutely represent a possible evolution in our collective society.

(refuses to elaborate and moves on)

******

I kind of hate AI-generated insights. Now whenever I free write, I have to acknowledge that someone else could produce a better and/or more interesting insight with AI.

Someone wrote about why Scott Galloway had a cameo in White Lotus Season 3. They said that it was brilliant, and he was there to deftly tie together White Lotus' two themes of wealth and power. The insight was supposedly not AI-generated, but I felt strongly that it was. There was just something weirdly upsetting to me about the idea that someone used AI to generate that.

Why DID Scott Galloway cameo? I figured the explanation would be about some interview, where they revealed that Scott Galloway called them and said hey I really want to be on your show, or maybe they called him and said we want you to be on our show. Season 3, if anything, was not about power but powerlessness. Season 1 was absolutely about rich vs. poor, and how the ultra-wealthy had the ability to ruin lives with the wave of a hand. But season 3 seemed to be more about powerful people struggling with their own mortality, or maybe not, and if anyone wants to argue with me about how that's wrong then I think it would still be a more interesting insight than something about how Scott Galloway cameoed in order to deftly tie the series' themes of wealth and power.

******

We have routines because of how our brains are wired. Someone far smarter than me could give a better explanation than that it's to create a feeling of permanence, a kind of reassurance that in spite of everything changing, we can still keep something known.

Still, I think it's worth thinking about...

Just thought. Unfiltered thought. Spring in Sacramento seems to provide more time for that. I just think that things are so busy, and information is so abundant (and now, for better or worse, primarily AI-generated), that it's easy to avoid thinking about things. Even if the things are pointless. We already have to think about things for our jobs, but where did the time go to think about things that are more abstract?

We have TV shows. We have movies. Some of the people who understand art go to museums, but I am generally not one of them.

There will come a time when we no longer have these applications. Our brains will not be as sharp. Our bodies will not be as agile. The ability to think about things is basically the greatest gift we have, but it's also the reason I felt the need to write this at 9PM while my one reader (hi dom!) groans and wonders about the lack of payoff.

Oh well.

[irarelypostanything]

Writing and the "perception" gap

Someone on a Sacramento Discord started a channel called "Writer's Circle," which was meant to just be used to share writing and encourage each other. I started using it consistently, and what I'm trying to do is write a novel.

...cool.

*

There's a video by Anna Akana, in which she parodies the makeup tutorial. Instead of giving practical instructions, she states how she wants everything to be perceived. For example, instead of just stating that she's putting on lipstick, she states that she's putting on happiness.

...or, something. I don't really remember.

Naturally, Idea Channel picked it up and went on a philosophical tangent about the nature of perception. They described a gap between what we do and how we want to be perceived.

That's social media in a nutshell. Everything is open for judgment, for...uh...varying perception. I'm feeling that a little bit, as I try to write a novel. In my head, there's the perfect thing I'm trying to convey, where all the words are in the right places and the characters are well-developed and the concepts are interesting. Obviously in execution, it's not that.

I met someone at work who took the same creative writing class I had. He lamented that they didn't really talk a lot about execution. The kind of just took it as a given that everyone knew how to write, and so they told them to write and expected great things to happen.

This isn't software. We don't need a whole lot of time to grasp things like basic syntax. But because things are so loose, it can be a lot easier to screw up. Short stories might be called easier. You can just think of a sort of interesting concept, make things happen quickly, and if you're a bad writer and/or do it poorly then the freshness of the idea can cover for the bad writing.

I think. This writing I'm putting on Tumblr right now could be interpreted as an odd bit of stream-of-consciousness.

*

I guess what I'm trying to say is "metawriting" is one of the cheapest things. A teacher I had once said breaking the fourth wall is like breaking a window. It's really fun to do once, but if you try to do it again it will get tiring.

So I'd rather do it here, than in the potential novel.

Right now, I just want to see if I can do it. The pacing is wrong. The characters are reincarnated from past things I've written, but obviously that means nothing to people who aren't familiar with them.

Again, this isn't software. In software we could have a meeting and talk about client needs, and then we'd put together a design and then we'd build something that would serve the client purpose for some period of time. Then, maybe in the end, there would be nothing. Software generally exists to serve some need for some period of time, and then eventually people stop using it and that's fine.

But writing...writing is supposed to be about getting it really, really right. It's built on constant failure. You could write hundreds of pages that go nowhere, just to make the one page that really works.

...I think. I don't know. It's weird for me to try to write with any level of authority about this topic.

*

What I WANT to show in this novel is that little slice of life stories can work. I just finished Pantheon, a science fiction series, which kind of disappointed me because it's so good and because I watched it after I started writing this. In a nutshell, it's about AI, only the AI is the projected consciousness of an individual. They call it UI, but it's basically just AI.

As expected, it goes pretty far into science fiction concepts and ends in pretty spectacular fashion. I don't want to do that. I think there are interesting things that can be said about AI, without having to cover that much time.

The main thing I'm interested in is the history of Replika. Basically, someone lost her best friend, so she used a rudimentary LLM to try to get to talk to him again. I believe it was based on GPT-2, and it was bad, but then GPT-3 came out and it was eerily good. Fast forward to today, and it's so good that there's a Reddit about people falling in love with it.

*

Then I want to talk about the nature of software right now, and how we're at something of a turning point. Layoffs. Schadenfreude. A Matt Walsh video and a million other videos where people just watch tech people get laid off and make fun of them. HBO's Silicon Valley already parodied a lot of the culture. It's this entire subset of people who supposedly set out to "make the world a better place," but the attitude now seems to be shifting (or I was in a bubble, and it was always like this). This tech culture, from the perspective of many, has ruined everything. They try to solve problems that don't exist, and they gentrify, and they've enjoyed this period of free money and seemingly infinite growth. Now that the market is turning and there's a potential new thing that may or may not replace them, a lot of people are really happy.

*

But that's not...that interesting. I guess.

Obviously, the industry is HUGE. There are good people. There are bad people. There are many shades of gray.

So basically, this is a slice-of-life story that's mostly a retelling of Replika. That company is real and has a PR team, so it kind of goes without saying that this novel, if it's ever completed, will be unpublishable. But I want to just see if I can hit the page count, maybe question later if I want to do rewrites or just pivot to something else.

In the universe of the story, there are just some college students and this one woman who does it. She creates Replika when GPT is a relatively new, not that well-known thing. Then there are these characters who represent other shades of...tethics. She's very idealistic. There's this comically evil corporation that wants to acquire the rights to it, and the main character kind of sells out when he realizes that what he lacks of talent can be compensated for when he realizes he can just violate ethics.

*

But what I WANT to say is that some people are good, and that they still can do some very misguided things.

The main idea because this AI. She wants to bring back her dead friend, but in doing so she's mostly overlooking all the things that make human relationships, well...human. Human arguments. Human growth. Real love and real romance is messy, but if you just try to replace a real person with that and give the user the option to overwrite or fine-tune the entity at any given moment, then that's not real. That's a cheap parody of what a person is.

It's ELIZA again. Someone is talking to a cheap imitation of a human, but because we want so badly to reconvene with the dead, we project and we imagine.

That's what I WANT to say, the the novel isn't going at a reasonable pace and I think that's because i've only written short stories. But if I actually finish this and keep trying, maybe i'll start to figure out when things are supposed to happen.

Okay, I've been writing this for almost 30 minutes.

I'll do four minutes of editing and hit publish, then watch the superbowl.

Then at some point maybe I'll write. If only random blog posts about writing counted as novel writing.

[irarelypostanything]

The Idea Of Heroes

I finally got around to watching Hamilton...half of it. Dom showed me a Tiktok explaining that Miranda's "How Far I'll Go" actually uses a key without C, only to finally use a key with C when Moana literally gets close to the sea. My response was...no. There's absolutely no way Miranda did that on purpose.

So then Dom showed me a 30 minute documentary on Netflix about Hamilton's "Wait For It." They go through the composition, and also explain that Burr literally waits for it before the chorus kicks in.

If there's anything this experience proves to me, it's that true power in this world is possessing every streaming service. You start with Disney+, then go to Apple TV to find Hamilton singers singing about mundane things in Central Park, then finally you circle around to a Netflix documentary about why what you just witnessed was impressive.

One thing Dom showed me, which doesn't quite come across the same way if you just listen to the Hamilton soundtrack, is how much Burr and Hamilton are diametrically opposed. One person plays it safe. One person always takes enormous risks. The viewer can sympathize with their parallels, and how the "villain" is understandable in his own way.

It's also arguably not true. Or...surprisingly true. It depends on how much of a fan you are.

****

Aaron Burr probably comes across as more sympathetic. It's unclear how much of a relationship the two had before becoming rivals, and it's definitely unclear if the two ever had mutual respect. But...yes...it's condensing a lot of history down into two hours and 30 minutes. Debates probably also weren't rap battles, and I'm not sure if everyone just met in some bar.

What about the Room Where It Happened? It's so relatable and interesting. History. Rivalry. Jealousy. We can probably all see ourselves in both characters, and catchy music makes for a pretty good story we may not otherwise have cared about.

******

Who are our heroes today? I just watched a Trump video that previewed his presidency like a movie trailer. In my own little world, I think the name that brings the most idolization is Elon Musk.

I have pretty mixed feelings. I even considered writing a Medium post about it that would not have aged very well. Under Elon Musk's leadership, Twitter revenue dropped by more than 80%. I wanted to write about how this was nuanced, and how Elon Musk is a complicated person who arguably has done both good and bad things, yet on Medium you will find posts that literally compared him to Jesus...but now if I write that, I would possibly get backlash. Now the lore can be something like - yeah, Elon Musk took over Twitter and then used it to influence the election of 2024. Elon Musk is an IQ 2000 genius and anyone who says otherwise is too stupid to occupy the same space.

Kind of reminds me of a debate I had with Smack. I was arguing that Ken Thompson was a genius who invented Unix in two weeks. A little bit like the JavaScript lore, this oversimplifies. Smack argued that the whole notion of him as the sole inventor kind of spits in the face of open source. There isn't a single "hero," there are thousands of developers.

Yet Smack also has a lot less hesitation regarding Elon Musk. He thinks that if you strip away the controversy, what he's actually achieved is incredible.

*****

Everyone can get behind a good story. Typically it's of someone people pretty relatable in terms of personality. Maybe they're a little awkward. Maybe they're rude, or emotionally unavailable, or just flawed in some shape or form.

But the way the story always goes, at least in a mythical sense, all of these heroes have to be hypercompetent. Their personalities can be flawed, but their genius cannot be. So then we have a million posts on Medium about Jeff Bezos' morning routine, or how billionaires arrange their desktops. It makes me think, does Jeff Bezos ever struggle with constipation? Has Zuckerberg ever found himself accidentally wasting a lot of time scrolling on his own platform?

*****

Lastly, I listened to this darknet diaries episode about Mobman, this mythical unnamed hacker from the 1990s. Someone claimed to be him, then they found out he just stole credit.

The real Mobman wrote a remote access trojan that got really popular among hackers. Other than his undeniable talent, there isn't much I found compelling about his story. He never got in any trouble. He basically gravitated away from hacking. The guy who claimed to be him had a criminal past and was unafraid to do interviews and talk about his amazing mind.

Hypercompetence? Check. Compelling personality and backstory? Check. They went together well to create a fictional persona, and they needed a whole episode to untangle the two.

[irarelypostanything]

My Favorite Scene From Arcane Season 2

There was a debate on Reddit about what genre Arcane falls into - the word "steampunk" comes to mind, but I appreciate how some people characterized it as "magitech." This genre is covered in TVTropes, and boils down to "a world where magic is studied like science."

Wisecrack says that in the world of Final Fantasy 6, magic and technology are used almost interchangeably. Final Fantasy 6 and Arcane have similarities:

-In both worlds, magic existed for some period of time and led to destruction/misery

-In both worlds, ambitious people attempt to bring magic back and are initially met with resistance

The similarities, now that I think about it, kind of stop there. In Final Fantasy 6, magic is this ominous thing that the world is arguably better without - the heroes of the story pursue it out of necessity as a means to match their enemies, but are also happy to part with it. In Arcane, magic is treated as a necessity.

*Spoilers*

...or is it? In this other universe, hextech does not exist and everything seems rather perfect. Usually when this trope occurs, the viewer slowly discovers that the "utopia" is only perfect on the surface, and that some ominous force lurks in the shadows. Arcane more or less flips the trope. Ekko makes quite a sacrifice by choosing not to stay.

Vi dies tragically, but every other character seems to have a perfect ending. Vander lives in peace. Ekko and his friends show potential to be accomplished scientists. Powder seems to get the worst ending, hiding her potential behind trauma/fear, embracing hextech again only to tragically see Ekko die in a similar way...and then she doesn't. It's the antithesis of Jinx. Powder understands, her Ekko wakes up, and then she's allowed to live happily. Everything works out instead of falling to pieces at the last possible second like it does for Jinx.

*****

My favorite scene from Arcane season 2 is something I can't find. A million people have uploaded clips and even fanart of Ekko and Powder dancing. Someone on YouTube pointed out that their dancing is reduced to four frames per second, exactly the number of seconds Ekko can rewind.

My favorite scene is of the two (er, three) working together. A good background song I can't find plays, and then they work on recreating their invention. Days pass. They experience frustrations. Sometimes things are oversimplified with math equations, or with spectacle, but eventually they achieve their goal.

To me, it goes back to the magitech genre. It's reminiscent of the old Avengers movies, where Tony Stark performs hand wavey science/programming/robotics and does things that are convenient to the plot. But because hextech is magic, the annoying part of my brain can shut off and just take the scene in. What they do only has to make sense in the rules of their own universe, and what they can achieve does not have to be realistic by my own standards. It's just fun to watch, and somehow inspiring in its own way.

It was really nice, I thought, to just sit back and take the scene in. These are fighters in a gritty city free to just use their talents for something they believe in. What motivates them, in a universe where their every thought is not about death and war? Cleaning out toxins, solving problems, and inventing things to make their lives better while still remembering the person they loved and lost.