7 ms·

Most of the rest of us don't.

echelon 4y ago
"ought to be enough for anybody" If things stay the same as ever, this life will have been boring. I'm not cut out for another twenty years of smartphone incrementalism. Fuck the status quo. I don't live for "same". Everything in the world as it exists isn't enough. The future could be the most exciting thing if we dream and build it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- barneygale 4y ago
  Have you considered a career in subsistence farming? You're likely to be less damaging to the world.
  - echelon 4y ago
    I'm a filmmaker and love the arts more than you'll know. You're being incredibly sour, and I guarantee you that acting the way you do toward other humans (and yourself) subtracts way more from the universe. I feel sorry for you.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      GP was rude & out of turn, but there's no need to be patronizing like that. You're engaging in the same behavior you're criticizing them for, putting toxicity into the community/universe.
- qwytw 4y ago
  Your future sounds pretty dystopian and very lonely though....
  - echelon 4y ago
    I imagine factory workers and butter churners said the same. You know what really sucks? How labor intensive and capital intensive filmmaking is. How hard it is to make it into the field. How almost impossible it is to lead a production. Think about all of the great ideas that wither on the vine because the Hollywood studio system only has so much capital and can only back so many projects. Think about how many months and years go into a single film, and how few of them succeed. Think about the opportunity cost of learning a creative skill - locking you out of all the other skills you could use to build your vision. When the cost structures drop, people will be more creative and more cooperative. The long tail will be all of us.
    - qwytw 4y ago
      > I imagine factory workers and butter churners said the same. Why? I'm not sure what are you talking about but I doubt most factory workers or butter churners were particularly excited about their jobs... > How almost impossible it is to lead a production. The problem I see is that if everyone is capable of making high-end movies the market will become oversaturated. There is only a limited amount of time consumers can spend watching tv so if making high quality (by current standards) content becomes trivial that will simply raise the overall "quality" bar. As long as there is money to be made it will make sense to invest into improving your content by investing into better "AI", GPUs or whatever. So we'll just end up more or less where we started. I mean that sort of already happened didn't it? We can do things (CGI & production wise) that were impossible or even unimaginable as recently as the 80s or 90s. And things which were extremely expensive and required thousands of hours to accomplish back then are trivial now. So what? Did it become much easier to break in into the industry than before? Or did the bar just got higher? > When the cost structures drop, people will be more creative and more cooperative Maybe. But considering that most people and not very creative and most of their "ideas" are garbage we're just a likely to drown in a sea of technically/visually high quality content that's artistically and creatively worthless. By "garbage" I mean content that very few people will choose to willingly consume if they had alternative options.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Think about all of the great ideas that wither on the vine because the Hollywood studio system only has so much capital and can only back so many projects. Very few; great ideas mostly happen outside of the Hollywood studio system, which is largely about expensive packaging of low-risk ideas, not great ones.
- maxbond 4y ago
  People who don't like your view of the future aren't "antiprogress" or "pro status quo," while you are imagining a little kid enabled to be creative and making lots of great stuff, others are imagining being inundated with targeted ads featuring their loved ones (and inevitably hurting people by showing them recently deceased loved ones, like when Facebook used to say, "you haven't spoken to this person in a while, why don't you send your dead friend a message?"), movies that go nowhere and mean nothing but are barely engaging enough that people watch them (AI is great at discovering solutions that satisfy the objective function while undermining the objective, eg, creating content that keeps you engaged but is devoid of substance), and deepfake misinformation masquerading as news. You're imagining inventing a car and feeling the wind in your hair on the open road, others are imagining being stuck in traffic and cities becoming more and more dominated by parking lots. You're criticizing them for a lack of vision, but that's not correct; they're peering into the same future, and seeing something different. That doesn't make them "antiprogress," they're critics with concerns that would be worth engaging with instead of dismissing. If you care about this project and you want to make the best version of it - ask them why they think that way instead of responding to the version of their concerns which is in your head, and then give some thought to how you could address it. (I'm ambivalent leaning towards skeptical, so not much much of a dog in the race, trying to bridge a miscommunication.)
  - hyperdimension 4y ago
    I like your analysis. I think you could generalize it to any (even more-hotly) debated topic. People can hear the same thing and imagine two (or more) very different things by virtue of life experience, upbringing, morals, or any number of factors that make us unique. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's a good perspective to keep in mind when disagreeing with someone though.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  I like this vision of the future of entertainment, honestly. I like Star Trek the Next Generation... a lot! It was on when I was a teenager, and I like it because it's nostalgic and actually a pretty wholesome show compared to a lot of the shit that gets produced today. I'd love to see more than the existing 7 seasons, but they'll never make any more of them. It would be incredible if I could just ask my PC "Generate a new Star Trek TNG episode with the original actors and a believable, good story". I could watch a new one every week forever if I wanted! At the speed technology is moving, I expect we might see that in my lifetime. We all saw the cheesy "infinite Seinfeld generator" a few weeks ago. That's v0.1. The technology will inevitably get better--in fact the only thing that could torpedo a realistic "infinite nostalgic TV show generator" are the copyright goons trying to hold it back.
  - brnt 4y ago
    > "Generate a new Star Trek TNG episode with the original actors and a believable, good story" It would be incredible, but incredibly awful. Also, a series is going to have a (set of) formula, but what makes an episode good is if it deviates from that formula.
    - jrussino 4y ago
      Sure, but notice the trend toward prompt engineering and curation... for a show with a big fandom like Star Trek, you could end up with a whole community working on steering the algorithm, generating episodes, rating/up-voting their favorites. There's already a massive interest in fan fiction; this seems like it would be like fan fiction on steroids.
      - jrussino 4y ago
        Stupid shower thought of the day: a block chain for fan fiction "canon", where the community maintains an official consensus of which AI-generated episodes are canonical and in what order, that then gets fed into the AI as input to generate new episodes while maintaining continuity, progression of plot and character growth. Probably with multiple forks.

"ought to be enough for anybody" If things stay the same as ever, this life will have been boring. I'm not cut out for another twenty years of smartphone incrementalism. Fuck the status quo. I don't live for "same". Everything in the world as it exists isn't enough. The future could be the most exciting thing if we dream and build it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
barneygale 4y ago
Have you considered a career in subsistence farming? You're likely to be less damaging to the world.
- echelon 4y ago
  I'm a filmmaker and love the arts more than you'll know. You're being incredibly sour, and I guarantee you that acting the way you do toward other humans (and yourself) subtracts way more from the universe. I feel sorry for you.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    GP was rude & out of turn, but there's no need to be patronizing like that. You're engaging in the same behavior you're criticizing them for, putting toxicity into the community/universe.
qwytw 4y ago
Your future sounds pretty dystopian and very lonely though....
- echelon 4y ago
  I imagine factory workers and butter churners said the same. You know what really sucks? How labor intensive and capital intensive filmmaking is. How hard it is to make it into the field. How almost impossible it is to lead a production. Think about all of the great ideas that wither on the vine because the Hollywood studio system only has so much capital and can only back so many projects. Think about how many months and years go into a single film, and how few of them succeed. Think about the opportunity cost of learning a creative skill - locking you out of all the other skills you could use to build your vision. When the cost structures drop, people will be more creative and more cooperative. The long tail will be all of us.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    > I imagine factory workers and butter churners said the same. Why? I'm not sure what are you talking about but I doubt most factory workers or butter churners were particularly excited about their jobs... > How almost impossible it is to lead a production. The problem I see is that if everyone is capable of making high-end movies the market will become oversaturated. There is only a limited amount of time consumers can spend watching tv so if making high quality (by current standards) content becomes trivial that will simply raise the overall "quality" bar. As long as there is money to be made it will make sense to invest into improving your content by investing into better "AI", GPUs or whatever. So we'll just end up more or less where we started. I mean that sort of already happened didn't it? We can do things (CGI & production wise) that were impossible or even unimaginable as recently as the 80s or 90s. And things which were extremely expensive and required thousands of hours to accomplish back then are trivial now. So what? Did it become much easier to break in into the industry than before? Or did the bar just got higher? > When the cost structures drop, people will be more creative and more cooperative Maybe. But considering that most people and not very creative and most of their "ideas" are garbage we're just a likely to drown in a sea of technically/visually high quality content that's artistically and creatively worthless. By "garbage" I mean content that very few people will choose to willingly consume if they had alternative options.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Think about all of the great ideas that wither on the vine because the Hollywood studio system only has so much capital and can only back so many projects. Very few; great ideas mostly happen outside of the Hollywood studio system, which is largely about expensive packaging of low-risk ideas, not great ones.
maxbond 4y ago
People who don't like your view of the future aren't "antiprogress" or "pro status quo," while you are imagining a little kid enabled to be creative and making lots of great stuff, others are imagining being inundated with targeted ads featuring their loved ones (and inevitably hurting people by showing them recently deceased loved ones, like when Facebook used to say, "you haven't spoken to this person in a while, why don't you send your dead friend a message?"), movies that go nowhere and mean nothing but are barely engaging enough that people watch them (AI is great at discovering solutions that satisfy the objective function while undermining the objective, eg, creating content that keeps you engaged but is devoid of substance), and deepfake misinformation masquerading as news. You're imagining inventing a car and feeling the wind in your hair on the open road, others are imagining being stuck in traffic and cities becoming more and more dominated by parking lots. You're criticizing them for a lack of vision, but that's not correct; they're peering into the same future, and seeing something different. That doesn't make them "antiprogress," they're critics with concerns that would be worth engaging with instead of dismissing. If you care about this project and you want to make the best version of it - ask them why they think that way instead of responding to the version of their concerns which is in your head, and then give some thought to how you could address it. (I'm ambivalent leaning towards skeptical, so not much much of a dog in the race, trying to bridge a miscommunication.)
- hyperdimension 4y ago
  I like your analysis. I think you could generalize it to any (even more-hotly) debated topic. People can hear the same thing and imagine two (or more) very different things by virtue of life experience, upbringing, morals, or any number of factors that make us unique. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's a good perspective to keep in mind when disagreeing with someone though.
ryandrake 4y ago
I like this vision of the future of entertainment, honestly. I like Star Trek the Next Generation... a lot! It was on when I was a teenager, and I like it because it's nostalgic and actually a pretty wholesome show compared to a lot of the shit that gets produced today. I'd love to see more than the existing 7 seasons, but they'll never make any more of them. It would be incredible if I could just ask my PC "Generate a new Star Trek TNG episode with the original actors and a believable, good story". I could watch a new one every week forever if I wanted! At the speed technology is moving, I expect we might see that in my lifetime. We all saw the cheesy "infinite Seinfeld generator" a few weeks ago. That's v0.1. The technology will inevitably get better--in fact the only thing that could torpedo a realistic "infinite nostalgic TV show generator" are the copyright goons trying to hold it back.
- brnt 4y ago
  > "Generate a new Star Trek TNG episode with the original actors and a believable, good story" It would be incredible, but incredibly awful. Also, a series is going to have a (set of) formula, but what makes an episode good is if it deviates from that formula.
  - jrussino 4y ago
    Sure, but notice the trend toward prompt engineering and curation... for a show with a big fandom like Star Trek, you could end up with a whole community working on steering the algorithm, generating episodes, rating/up-voting their favorites. There's already a massive interest in fan fiction; this seems like it would be like fan fiction on steroids.
    - jrussino 4y ago
      Stupid shower thought of the day: a block chain for fan fiction "canon", where the community maintains an official consensus of which AI-generated episodes are canonical and in what order, that then gets fed into the AI as input to generate new episodes while maintaining continuity, progression of plot and character growth. Probably with multiple forks.