4 ms·

I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side

• arkensaw 9mo ago
  Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money. And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes, Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy. If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea. Google was not the first search engine.
  • pixl97 9mo ago
    > book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers Add to this the 50 bajillion manga/anime's with the exact same trope.
  • amarant 9mo ago
    Ot to the article, but I just feel I need to strongly recommend The Hierarchy by James Islington. It's pretty much the same idea as the above titles but omg it's so well written. Absolute must read!
    • arkensaw 9mo ago
      oh thanks, I'll check that out! BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
      • amarant 9mo ago
        Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason. But yeah up until that point it was great!
        • randallsquared 9mo ago
          It's a whole thing. The Magicians was just following a trend that genre shows need a musical episode if they've been on long enough. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalEpisode https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalEpisode
          • amarant 9mo ago
            Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought! The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.
        • arkensaw 8mo ago
          Magicians was one of the few series where it actually worked, I thought. I just recently watched the Star Trek Strange New Worlds musical ep and it was painful
    • catlover76 9mo ago
      [dead]
  • MrJohz 9mo ago
    Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a university, and is perhaps closer in lineage to Buffy or Charmed than to Harry Potter - it has more of that focus on the interpersonal relationships between characters, and a more complex morality. The better comparison is probably with Percy Jackson, which isn't quite the same concept (being an American series, where boarding school fiction isn't quite as well-known a genre) but matches the ages, sense of discovery, and relationships to authority figures far better. This isn't directly relevant to your point, but I really find it wild that people see two stories that have magic and a school in them and go "look, it's the same thing", especially when the genres and tropes of the two books are so utterly different. For that matter, Harry Potter is also nothing like Earthsea, which is another common reference point. I wonder if Americans just don't have as much experience with boarding school fiction to be able to categorise Harry Potter as a series?
    • arkensaw 9mo ago
      > This isn't directly relevant to your point Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly. Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to realise our ideas because someone somewhere has had "the same idea". They probably have had an idea which could be described in a similar fashion, but it doesn't really mean its the "same idea" I probably stumbled a bit describing those books as the same concept when I should have put "same idea" in quotes
      • collingreen 9mo ago
        Your point came through clearly to me. Shared tropes or setting do not make identical stories and, in fact, often enhance them as a counterbalance or familiar thing to compare against. A wise friend of mine once said, in regard to "ideas are nothing; execution is everything": you can tell a thousand artists to paint a portrait of an Italian woman with a countryside landscape behind her but, good or bad, none of them are the mona lisa.
  • hinkley 9mo ago
    Scholomance but it’s highschool!
  • manmal 9mo ago
    Thank you, it was time for my annual check on the status of Doors of Stone. Whelp. I wonder why LLMs don’t help such cases of writer’s block.
• monero-xmr 9mo ago
  Every business has secrets. You don’t know why a business succeeds unless you know their edge. Looking at my SaaS you’d think you could copy it. And perhaps you could make something that looks the same. But you don’t know my secrets and there is no way I’m telling you. So you will never beat me
  • ant6n 9mo ago
    so, uh. What's your secret, then?
    • oytis 9mo ago
      He's not telling
    • lelanthran 9mo ago
      Crypto scams :-)
  • paulryanrogers 9mo ago
    Never is a long time. Best of luck!
• theptip 9mo ago
  The whole premise is very unimaginative. It just takes one step on the infinite series and does not ask what the asymptote is (if there even is one). If every coked up SDR can build a tech stack, then every junior SWE can get superhuman SEO. If every product has superhuman seo and engineering, and there are 10 or 100x more products, then probably everyone uses the exact right one for their needs, and quality for your specific usecase is higher. (More competition means more quality, more of every differentiator, including lower prices. ) In a world of zero marginal cost of production (turning ideas into reality with a prompt), maybe it’s hard for anyone to eke out profit margin; I can’t see what anyone’s edge would be in this world. The end state here is much more disruptive than “dang, a coked up sdr out-competed me on my SaaS ide-“.
  • rembal 9mo ago
    The edge is ownership - of GPUs, capital, connections and distribution channels (this includes SEO). Also, SEO will be meaningless if LLMs will be the main discovery channels. Much less transparent, and we are already seeing that, for example the "what about South African ***code" grok system prompt manipulation from a few months back.
• jadar 9mo ago
  I was struck that it was full of assertions and backed up by nothing. I suppose his clawdbot could have written it.
  • abirch 9mo ago
    Were we the crows?