7 ms·

I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

• mrhottakes 1mo ago
  Great piece. Seeing that depth and context is one of the best parts of gaining intellectual maturity.
• frereubu 1mo ago
  The best thing about gaining an appreciation of this aspect of life is it opens up so many extra pleasures. I can spend an entire day at the (free entry!) V&A in London and never be bored. Likewise with a great book (when my 11-year-old isn't around!)
• jrmg 1mo ago
  I’ve long held the opinion that humans ‘over’-value complexity. It’s why we can spend so much time tasting, analyzing, and enjoying fancy coffee or whisky - despite the fact that almost everyone is repulsed by them the first time they try them. Literature might be the same? To be clear, I enjoy all three!
  • tony_cannistra 1mo ago
    Don't forget software engineering
  • bobson381 1mo ago
    To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!
  • mmooss 1mo ago
    I get your idea but I wonder about the construction of this argument: Is it the complexity itself people value, or the rewards of things that are complex? IME, the most valuable things are complex. Maybe that's because there is not enough capacity in simplicity to contain exceptional value (speaking very generally and loosely - we really need to define terms). Also, I certainly think people value complex things, but I strongly disagree that they are over-valued. All the best things in my life seem complex. I could imagine that complexity stimulates the brain in a different way and that adds to reward.
  • basilikum 1mo ago
    Good writing isn't complex for complexity's sake though. Mistaking complexity for quality is the most common mistake when it comes to writing — and I allege one central reason why many people like and trust LLM output. I'd argue that complexity is not even the right word to describe what the author describes. Thickness or depth is more accurate.
  • aeturnum 1mo ago
    The simpler pleasures and pains of life are easier to speak to and we have a lot more (proportionally) media that reflects those experiences. Particular media does it better and worse and so there's a hierarchy, but if you are looking to have your enjoyment of good food and drink reflected in a story that's pretty easy to find. But life is often more complex than that and it requires great skill to accurately reflect that complexity in creative works. When you're struggling with an experience that is difficult to talk about and understand, a creative work that seems to "get it" can be really valuable in sorting out how to think about that experience. I rarely need help in describing how much I like coffee, but I welcome good writing on the subject of "how should one understand the mixed experience of being very close to someone who you often disagree with."
  • furyofantares 1mo ago
    Is it even possible to over-value an experience? I suppose with an experience I'm taking value as a synonym for enjoyment level, I'm not sure what else it means in that context. I guess you can enjoy something to the detriment of your focus on other things and then to your overall wellbeing. But idunno if someone being really into analyzing fancy coffee or something counts.
  • andai 1mo ago
    Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • e12e 1mo ago
    Hemingway might have a few words to say about that. Just a few, mind you. Not many.
    • eszed 1mo ago
      Lol. I had the same thought: "but, but... Hemingway!" Of course, his magic lies in how much thickness he creates with such terse prose.
  • ip26 1mo ago
    I'm always suspicious we read far too much into most works, as if they were all live examples of The DaVinci Code. It feels inevitable that one day, centuries from now, someone will "realize" that JK Rowling embedded a map of hyperspace into her phonemes or that Banksy was actually issuing incisive commentary on the contrast between ancient Sumerian government and veganism all along.
• MarkusQ 1mo ago
  This is also true in science; some things reward depth of study in a way that just isn't apparent from the outside. https://xkcd.com/877/ https://xkcd.com/877/
• idontwantthis 1mo ago
  I really enjoyed reading this and I've been thinking along similar lines when I imagine viable careers of the future. No one will care if code is "thick" but why would anyone buy a novel written by AI? What does the reader get out of it? It seems like the humanities might be the most stable career path available.
  • apsurd 1mo ago
    i’m working on a little ios widget display currently. even a tiny little one view box has hundreds of nuanced design and structure decisions behind it. That reasoning is the thickness not the amount of code that powers it though they are somewhat interrelated.
  • Avicebron 1mo ago
    Haha and suddenly we'll have the pivot where all the software engineers try their hand at being writers. I can already see glimpses of it here wirh articles like this. Code can be thick, but it's really the value and conscientiousness of the thing being created that will be judged as "thick". One hope I have when the wave of AI acceleration comes smashing down to reality is that it will force people into being deliberate, measured, and "thick" with their designs, approaches, attitudes, etc.
• tony_cannistra 1mo ago
  I have to say, this guy should teach English to high-schoolers.
  • SamBam 1mo ago
    I genuinely think that the vast majority of English teachers have had experiences like this. It's what made them become English teachers. Then, with all the best intent in the world, they try to explain to their students "Look, you don't get this, this fat book is transcendent if you can just sit with it and understand it! I, too, used to think that English class was just stupid words that they force you to read, but let me help you get this! You've got to..." But all their students hear is Charlie Brown's adults going "Waa waa waa..." because they're genuinely not mature and experienced enough to "get" the book the way the English teacher understood it. Ten years later a student will re-read one of their literature books, have this same epiphany, and talk excitedly about deep literature is, and someone will tell them they ought to be an English teacher. And the cycle continues. Ok, so some English teachers are of course better than others, and some will convey their excitement a little better, and some students will be mature enough to understand it better than others. But I will definitely maintain that all (close to all) English teachers have this same love of books, and want desperately to pass it on.
    • imp0cat 1mo ago
      - “Blah blah blah blah skeleton, blah blah blah blah mitochondria! Make sense?” - “No!”
      • genderdoog 1mo ago
        Relevant: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/behind-bluey/ep5-showandtell/102308366 https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/behind-bluey/ep5-show...
    • horsawlarway 1mo ago
      I think this is one of the more important points in this thread. The problem is that too many pieces require experiences that the majority of the classroom just doesn't have. It's not that students don't venture far enough into the cave to find the treasure, it's that the treasure literally isn't treasure to them yet. The venturing that needs to happen for them to find the treasure isn't time spent in the material, it's time spent gaining life experiences. Ex - there was nothing you could have done to make a book like "The Great Gatsby" good for me as a 15 year old. It's filled with themes that I had no experiences to connect with - no lost romances, no wealth (or even really a sense of wealth and money), no major life regrets, nothing at all to make this book hit. It's a dreary book about miserable, unlikable people when read from the perspective of a 15 year old student. So why are we asking 15 year old students to read this book? And that doesn't mean we can't throw students in over their heads every now and then (ex - exposure to the unfamiliar is fine). But if that's all you give them... they decide reading is pointless. You have to strike a middle ground with material that hits home. And there's a range of teacher quality here as well - some are genuinely good at pushing students towards understanding the value in material, even if they lack experiences. But most aren't (at least in the US educational system I went through, which was a mix of decent public schools and expensive private schools)... they're passionate and well intentioned, but fail to empathize with the emotional maturity and world view of their young students.
• amelius 1mo ago
  > ... and I was like ... And you'll need to add an apology for using that phrase too.
• chaps 1mo ago
  There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it. In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online). The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did. Not saying that grades are the end goal but it felt like a slap in the face that the exploration of such a deep topic just.. didn't matter.
  • AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
    What kind of abusive high school gives a 900-page summer assignment?
    • chaps 1mo ago
      One that wants to teach Greek mythology but can't because no child left behind forced teachers to teach the standardized tests over all else.
• legacynl 1mo ago
  Although I appreciate the article, what's the deal with calling depth thickness? Is it because it looks like the meme word 'thicc'? > If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs. “Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!” I don't agree with this statement. Being a snob and/or elitist means looking down upon others. If you appreciate these 'secret treasures' without being a dick about it, everybody wins.
  • EEBio 1mo ago
    I imagine the word thickness represents the great number of (metaphorical) layers of a painting, since paintings are the reoccurring symbol to talk about art in this essay.
  • CocaKoala 1mo ago
    I think I like the term "thickness" over "depth" here because thickness implies a sort of solidity, an ability to stand up to being held and examined, turned over and and handled. Depth can feel unapproachable (the ocean is pretty deep and it is famously challenging to explore) while something which has thickness intuitively feels like you can walk right up to it and try to learn something. This doesn't hold for all things - I would, for example, describe a wine as having "depth" but probably not "thickness" because in the case of potables "thickness" also implies a particular sort of textural feel, but I do like the idea of a piece of art as being thick with meaning as opposed to deep. A book which is deep can be reread multiple times, but a book which has thickness just sounds like a book that can live on your bookshelf and be paged through year after year for decades, with not only the content to support it but also the sturdiness to hold up to the use.
    • pluralmonad 1mo ago
      Also, depth does not necessarily mean substance. Holes in the ground have depth. I think thickness works well here.
  • antonyt 1mo ago
    I don't think the author is claiming you HAVE to be a dick about it. But that the pursuit of "thickness" does in reality give ammunition to a lot of people who are inevitably dicks about it seems observably true to me.
• wxw 1mo ago
  Really enjoyed how thick this essay was. > The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet? Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic here. I don't think the slop-acalypse is held back by taste or an appreciation for "thickness". I think there's already very successful slop media in the world (e.g. see microdramas). In other words, it is happening, but like anything else, it's happening in a non-evenly distributed way.
• mmooss 1mo ago
  By rejecting postmodernism and even the Enlightenment (due to the overwhelming reactionary messaging) most people have unilaterally disarmed themselves, or so I hypothesize. It's hard to talk about these things in any specific, evidence-based way, but here is the idea: Without the ultimate postmodern truth that there is none, that deep skepticism of power especially and always of oneself, how do people decide what to embrace? Whatever is effectively sold to them, no questions asked. There isn't an instinctive worry about but an almost survival-level embrace of mass messaging - the way is to be safe in the crowd, not to doubt it or to worry about its power in society and its effect on you. And without believing in the Enlightenment vision of the transformative power of our minds to make a better humanity, expressed especially in art as the pinnacle of human expression and acheivement, art is ruled out and actually threatens your worldview (and that reactionary messaging) of powerlessness and survival.
• CocaKoala 1mo ago
  Something I learned recently and which this article sort of hints at - look at the three drafts of Under The Wave Off Kanagawa. The composition is different, but also the colours are much more muted. In the first draft, the only colours highlighted are the people in the corner; in the second, the cliffs. The third draft finally colours the wave, but it's a sedate grey-blue. It's not until the fourth draft that everybody recognizes that we get this brilliant dark blue wave rising up over the the boat, dwarfing the mountain in the background. And that's because when Hokusai sat down to print that fourth draft, people had recently started exporting prussian blue dye to Japan; prior to that point, he just straight up didn't have access to that striking blue colour that dominates the print.
• buredoranna 1mo ago
  > The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, > when people will stop looking at anything > made by humans and only look at things made > by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet? I contend people will be willing, even eager, to pay a premium for content provably produced by humans. Are you an artist? A woodworker? Metalsmith? ... start recording your work and post it to youtube. I guarantee people will be willing to pay extra for the thing you built (I certainly would). (edit: formatting)
• exmadscientist 1mo ago
  > Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one? The "why this not that, even when it looks like that would do just fine" style of differential analysis is an exquisitely powerful analytical tool. Asking this question is probably the single most powerful method I know of to generate deep thought, in absolutely any aspect of life. If you haven't tried it... go for it! (Sample question: why'd I choose the word "exquisitely" in the above sentence?) > In the short term, thinness prevails. ... The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?” That tracks with another thing I've noticed I approach differently. I've recently joined a book club and everyone loves to talk about how many "stars" they gave a book. I've never really been able to rank things like that. Aside from there being no such thing as a total ordering of books (or movies or ...), who's to say what five stars from you means, compared to five stars from me? Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? Is everyone still going to be talking about this one in 80 years? I think that's a much better scale than "one to five stars (but actually three to five stars)", and much more interesting. It also bakes in both the inherent subjectivity and inherent fuzziness really well. (Yes, some things... plenty of things... are thin enough to be candidates for "book of the day" or "book of the hour". Few things are forgettable enough to go below that, though there have been some attempts; mostly at that level things underflow and you get in to Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory, which is its own special kind of thing.)
  • Folcon 1mo ago
    > Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? This is a wonderful thought, I thank you for it
  • jihadjihad 1mo ago
    > Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Many times it is only possible to know that post hoc. There are several books I've read that, in the moment of completing them, stand as the best I'd read in the past few years. Others I finished and figured I'd never think of them past the current month. But books and their impact upon you can be surprising sometimes. There are some books I think about often, and that I would say have even influenced me greatly, that I wouldn't have guessed would have that impact when I read them. And others that I figured would remain "book of the decade" that barely made it to the two-year mark before being surpassed by something else.
• digitallogic 1mo ago
  There's a lot of great things about this piece, but I'm kind of stuck on the "Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music". Listened to it a bunch of times now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U Maybe that's the point?
• blobbers 1mo ago
  I'm confused; why is this hitting #2 on HN? I don't see the H or the N in this.
  • adambb 1mo ago
    As you delve further into the article, and (ironically, based on the topic) consider the ideas presented, it becomes more clear. Or skip to near the end to see. TLDR: AI and generic pop culture artifacts have something in common - a lack of a certain type of depth that makes art great.
    • blobbers 1mo ago
      I think that's not the author's point; he's mostly talking that time solidifies ideas as shown by the evolution of points of view. At the same time, his picture of the wave shows that over time the painting feels more distilled and simplified. So is his point actually that simple ideas persist and are appealing? It isn't clear? That an art improves? I think slop-pocalypse misses one thing. AI's time of thinking is very different than ours. A "thick" argument that could take a lifetime in human terms could happen in minutes of AI.
      • the_af 1mo ago
        So it seems in summary you do see the "H" and "N" of it, you just disagree with some parts of the article.
  • loopmonster 1mo ago
    Because it's about AI
  • svachalek 1mo ago
    Because it's thick.
  • bryanlarsen 1mo ago
    Diving deep into something is a core aspect of hacking.
• mlsu 1mo ago
  Really loved this essay, loved the irreverent style. I had a similar literary journey as this guy. I think I would take it a step further though. It's not just that great literature has details and motifs that line up perfectly, it's not just that it took great effort to produce, or has some musicality or rhythm that is beautiful to take in experientially. It's that the thing that is communicated is truthful. Great fiction wipes away the noise of one's day-to-day thinking into some deep and essential truth about the human experience. Which is difficult, because that type of truth is not mathematical, it cannot be arrived at through some standalone logical path. I think students suffer because instruction by its nature is framed as teaching a path to get to some destination. The author mentions this with the egg cracking metaphor. The reason that fiction can produce this type of truth and non-fiction cannot is that fiction relays a human experience, it's relational and personal and that is the whole point of it. And you get that transcendental truth out of it because our life experience is fundamentally relational, it is how we see ourselves in relation to others or god or nature or what have you. Seeing fiction that way is the main difference between myself at 16 and myself today.
  • bambax 1mo ago
    Yes. I really liked and enjoyed reading this post, but was a bit frustrated by the focus on "thickness". Great art is not great just because it has many layers that take some time and effort to discover, like great cooking doesn't need a large number of different ingredients. Great art, as you say, has something true, profound, and original to tell us about the human experience, and it touches us deeply in a way that not-so-great art doesn't. It "stops you in your tracks" as other comments here mention. It hits you on the head and makes you a different person, at least a little. And, there's a magic component to it too. Great art is greater, I think, if you can't guess how it could possibly have been made by a mere mortal. That's where trade comes in. Great art is made by great artisans with a touch of genius, but genius alone isn't enough.
    • Agentlien 1mo ago
      I am actually often a bit annoyed at discussions of depth in discussions of art - especially from art snobs talking about whether or not something is "true art". I think what depth does do is help something stand not the test of time but deep continuous analysis. It really heightens the experience when you're a fan and can dive deeply into something for years and still discover subtleties you somehow missed that elevate it even further. But if something catches your attention immediately granting you a sense of wonder and appreciation which lingers... Well, that is valuable art. Perhaps that's another kind of mastery, managing to convey your ideas so effectively that it doesn't need deeper analysis to digest?
• lordnacho 1mo ago
  As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about? How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is? So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture where you are meant to comment on the motivations of the characters and how the writing style brings that out.
  • hansonkd 1mo ago
    I think books in education often serve as an means to putting yourself in those scenarios and attempting to learn more about different times and cultures.
  • pavel_lishin 1mo ago
    It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning. The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.
    • dehrmann 1mo ago
      > where the performance carries a lot of the meaning The big one for me is you don't necessarily know Elizabethan slang, but when you see the play performed, the dirty lines get delivered dirty.
• patcon 1mo ago
  > But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something. This was a nice metaphor, and made me smile :)
  • recursive 1mo ago
    That part made me feel seen. I took a handful of literature classes, all to satisfy some requirement. I don't think I ever once generated a genuine appreciation of any of it. Sometimes a resentment (particularly for Shakespeare) but most often just an indifference. Like maybe there's something there, but if so, it must be for other people who are just better at understanding this stuff. It's not for me. I just need to come up with some plausible ideas to get through this class with a passing grade.
• Folcon 1mo ago
  There's an interesting part of this that's mentioned in the comments that the original author states: > Haha I had a section in this, but cut it, about how people jokingly suggest we should include one regular person in every Olympic event to show just how astounding Olympic athletes are, and this is also a good idea for art... I've been getting into fiction writing a bit recently and learning to focus on incremental improvement is necessary, for example, getting feedback and trying to find good venues to get it is a challenge because getting helpful constructive feedback is hard I'm beginning to wonder if, because the skill level of the creators of media the average person consumes on a regular basis is so high, it's actually difficult to get good feedback for learning from by asking them until you get to a minimum baseline of skill and improvement is constrained by finding environments that can provide high quality feedback
  • cattenwallen 1mo ago
    Feedback is a gnarly problem because a lot of people assume this means "I, the reviewer, will criticize what I think will improve this work" and "I, the receiver, will receive suggestions to improve my work" but the reviewer and the creative will never have the same idea of what the WIP's ideal state looks like. So the feedback can be actively harmful to the creator. For example, if I'm a Mexican author writing about my abuela, and a feedback is "you should replace all these words with English", that's probably actively harmful to the vision of the work. But also sometimes the creator must be actively open to feedback that "hey, your abuela isn't a person in this story, she's just a female cardboard character" because it's probably a disservice to the vision to have a cardboard character clouded by the creator's nostalgia.
• pranav_tech26 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • dredmorbius 1mo ago
    Complexity should be relative to the material covered. Verbosity without substance is tiresome. But so is hand-waving and vagueness over complex topics (the hallmark of conspiracy theorists and absolutist fundamentalists). Providing a rich exposition of a rich topic is indeed a divine sort of thickness.
    • pranav_tech26 1mo ago
      [flagged]
• colinrand 1mo ago
  Omg. this is the best word ever: poptimism
  • phainopepla2 1mo ago
    It comes from a big struggle in the world of music criticism and appreciation, specifically as a reaction to "rockism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism There were issues with rockism, but I still think the wrong side won that fight.
• Bratmon 1mo ago
  In my understanding of literature, I went through the same arc as the poster, but then I made it to the next realization- "thickness" is just your willingness to give authors credit for things they didn't write, and it can be done just as well for works that are considered "schlock" as it can for the canon of works that are considered "great". You can read "Moby Dick" as a story about a fish, and you can read "50 shades of grey" as a treatise on existentialism and the human spirit- it's all up to you!
  • nostromo95 1mo ago
    I'm sure this aesthetic relativism holds up under argument, but this is an 'anti realization' that: -Reduces explanatory power (if Moby-Dick and 50 Shades are the same, why has one been lauded for 100 years, minted the careers of countless academics, etc.?) -Makes the world less interesting
    • deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    • recursive 1mo ago
      One of them has existed for more than 100 years. One of them has been granted credibility by a small number of academics before becoming a safe conservative choice for subsequent ones. I don't know, but those sounds like some plausible answers.
    • ux266478 1mo ago
      On the first point, explanation is inherently subjective. It reduces explanatory power purely because you're forced to acknowledge it was never universally appropriate, which tracks. The variety of explanation you're referring to in this context is one that I always found to be unsatisfactory. It's inherently stripping context (IE every component of what makes something the right place, the right time) out of the equation, which makes comparative analysis absurd. On the second point, I vehemently disagree, and I'm curious how you think a larger, more complicated world can be argued to be less interesting? Does the fact that your hallucinations and delusions are vacuous, and that they don't sit alone in a dark void, paralyze you with fear?
• waterheater 1mo ago
  I remember hearing once that a core element of collegiate humanities education involves teaching that a great work can only be understood and appreciated when the reader first understands the work's context. Only then should the reader attempt to summit the great work. Of course, this is also true in engineering disciplines as well. Perhaps the greatest software engineering work is the Linux kernel. Open the repo, and navigate to a random line in a random file. The odds that you will understand exactly--and I mean exactly--what occurs on that particular line on your first read without an explanatory comment is relatively low. If, however, you consider header files, libraries, how the file fits into the broader kernel, language features, and additional contextual information, your ability to understand that line of code increases significantly.
• nchallak 1mo ago
  This was very good to read. I would like to add "form/structure" to attributes of "thick"ness. It is possible for good art to adhere strictly to a form and yet be universal and transcend the confines imposed by form. E.g. meters in poems. When I write a poem, the imposed constraints make me weigh and choose from multiple words in a way that free-verse doesn't. Now whether that makes for better reading or not is something a reader should say :)
• pavel_lishin 1mo ago
  > The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life. Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
  • thrtythreeforty 1mo ago
    The lake?
    • pavel_lishin 1mo ago
      No, the very first meeting with the Emergents, where ... I forget the character's name (Trixia?), but she's a linguist and she figures out that there's something odd about the painting-carvings in the Emergent habitat. She can't put her finger on it until she spends more time studying their language, and figures out that they... well, we're getting into spoiler territory, so rot13: Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq.
      • thrtythreeforty 1mo ago
        I had forgotten that section. Time to reread, I guess!
      • Folcon 1mo ago
        Well that's a new experience, I naively googled for "Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq" and gemini responded to the text without rot13ing it, so I had no idea why it was telling me what it told me, I had to decode it to make sense of it's answer TIL Gemini can respond to rot13
        • emaro 1mo ago
          I pasted it into Kagi and the smart response just showed the clear text. Usually the smart responses are much more verbose. Just read "a deepness in the sky" last month, surprised to see a reference here.
• dbtc 1mo ago
  This is one of the better written things I have read online in a long time. The quality of the prose almost makes the subject irrelevant.
  • criddell 1mo ago
    He’s a great writer. I subscribe to his podcast which is just him reading his essay/blog post (in one take!) every time he publishes. I don’t think any of them have been uninteresting to me.
• astatine 1mo ago
  I wonder whether people who use open source software in the way I do are merely providing the egg (in the context of tfa). Most people, that I know, rarely modify the code in any way and merely build and use. Do not even read it most times. But, it somehow conveys a sense of _doing_ something that the mere install of a binary does not.
• teekert 1mo ago
  "I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good! But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway. Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure! But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do." This is so true. I should re-read this weekly and not feel like some ultra-philosopher trapped by his own laziness... I can just... not feel guilty, the ideas are not that good... yet.
• ransom_rs 1mo ago
  If you enjoyed this you will probably enjoy Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag[0]. Great piece that discusses why and how art moves us and pushes back a bit against the idea that is presented in this post that real art is art you can ask questions about and get answers from. I think most people including the author can recognize impactful art is more than just being able to get your 'why' questions answered (some might claim modern art is about challenging these assumptions), but it is even more difficult to talk about that concept without sounding extremely snobby, and Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Interpretation
  • trgn 1mo ago
    > Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well. 100%, and just to give an example, she finds good art is excreted (her words - perfectly chosen) rather than created, and I think her example was how the immaculate constructions of somebody like Flaubert lose a certain impact and potency, precisely because they betrays some sort of methodological process. And this cannot yield Truth. To me, reading this now, that sort of analysis struck me rather as very much dated, and an example of that flippant iconoclasm of modern literary criticism, basically, of the hippies. Because, really, who is she to throw Flaubert so casually under the bus? (im joking) Mme bovary is perfect, in a way a classical music composition is perfect, it is the oppressive knowledge that perfection can be willed into the world and it's the artist who has the task to will it in the world, no matter the devotion and commitment required. Causally dismissing this, is at its base adolescent posturing (like the hippies). But more importantly, and this is why I say "dated", is that we now, after 60-80 years very much have witnessed what sort of art we get when creating art should be more akin to some physiological evacuation. It's just no good, and it's being rejected more and more.
• cm2012 1mo ago
  This writing is so delicious. Just became a paid sub
• joshstrange 1mo ago
  I also feel like I was let down by my English teachers. Even in high school I would complain that they would suck all the enjoyment out of a reading a book. Every book felt like a chore and I was an avid reader, a get-in-trouble-because-I-stayed-up-too-late-reading kid. I was the "reading at an N+1/N+2/N+3 grade" student, but I hated English/reading classes with a passion. I've gone back to re-read some of the books I read in school and disliked and I find myself wondering constantly "why didn't the teacher point that out?" or "why didn't they give me the context to understand that?". I feel cheated in a way. And I had good teachers (I think), I'm not sure if I just wasn't in the right mind-space to understand or appreciate it or what. Oh sure, they'd talk about symbolism and all of that but it always felt a little like BS to me as a kid. Like they were deriving meaning from thin air. I unfortunately cannot remember specific examples or I'd love to go back and re-read the book in question to see if I could understand/see it now. It felt like they never "grounded" the book in the context I needed to "get" the joke or understand the reference/metaphor/etc. I'm sure there were countless clever passages that went right over my head and instead of it being explained I was just supposed to understand that this was a metaphor for XYZ (something I'd not experienced yet, was well before my time, etc). It felt more like I just needed to memorize what they said and parrot it back since I wasn't getting that from what I had read. I have (and continue to) re-read books from school and find myself amazed to find myself enjoying books that I remembered disliking or merely tolerating. Did I need more life experience? Was I just too focused on "more important" things? I don't know. I look back on most of my education and wish I could re-do it with my current eyes/mindset, I feel like I'd get way more out of it.
• enthdegree 1mo ago
  >For most of my life, I treated art museums like celebrity scavenger hunts. [...] This ended when I encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights closed tab.
• nyeah 1mo ago
  I think teachers did tell us exactly this. But we were 15 and we didn't believe them or didn't listen.
  • ares623 1mo ago
    And that's okay for 15 year olds. But for 30+ year olds? Embarrassing.
• aidenn0 1mo ago
  But when I see something incomprehensible, is it thick, or is it just stupid? Surely the literary field has its cranks that believe they have made something deep, but have just made something nonsensical? What's the literary equivalent of TimeCube or chemtrails?
  • alfalfasprout 1mo ago
    Probably Finnegan's Wake
    • aidenn0 1mo ago
      I have a visceral hatred for Joyce so, even if I were a literary expert (which I'm not), I doubt I could judge it in an unbiased manner.
  • andai 1mo ago
    When I read something and don't understand it, is it because the author is financially incentivized to make it sound more impressive than it is, or because they're unable or unwilling to communicate clearly, or both? Sometimes! Often things are genuinely hard, and take a lot of time to get into. (You can read the same paper repeatedly for weeks!) Sometimes, it takes about 5-10 minutes, and it finally clicks, and I go "why the hell didn't they just say it like that?"
• TacticalCoder 1mo ago
  > I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young. It's mixed. It's both true and false. There are a great many books out there, but there's also countless pointless turds. Then something has to be said about your teacher forcing you to read a great book in a language that is not the author's native language. Some do translate well (Dostoevsky for example) but for many others it simply doesn't make any sense. A great book is not just a story: the writing itself is an art form and that cannot be translated. Then many books are just bland, naive, with a ridiculously laughable "message" they try to pass. The problem is a teacher shall force you to read either indistinctly. At least mine was. I could be forced to read great literature just as I was forced to read the latest fart from whatever author was fancy in the city atm for his parents owned a bookstore. Another way to see it is this: how many books (novel books) are there out there? Like, literally, how many? The number is gigantic. How many great novels are there? If you were to pick one at random, which probability that you'd end up on a great one? What's the probability your teacher will pick great ones? In my case, the odds were basically as you'd expect: I remember very few of them because most didn't warrant being remembered.
• hibikir 1mo ago
  The anecdote about the garden of earthly delights is going to be relatable even for art students. I've met art teachers that ended up "trapped" in Madrid by the Prado Museum: A green, American future Ph.D student that was heading to Greece to specialize in old greek art. But instead of flying straight there, they stopped at Madrid to see the Prado, and were never able to leave. Changed their direction immediately, and ended up teaching in Madrid, and retiring there, because one of the countless masterpieces in there stole their life plans away. There's more famous museums, and it doesn't have the most popular paintings for non specialist, but it's just haymaker after haymaker, in every single room. And that's leaving the modern art to the Reina Sofia, a short walk away. (Although I guess keeping late Goya there is kind of cheating, as I'd argue he becomes a pioneer of modern art after the war starts) Books might require quite a bit of work before you can tell they are eternal masterpieces. Seeing the depths of some forms of music might involve not-so-impressive efforts earlier, just to get to the good parts. The very best paintings in the world, in person, can stop people cold. Large format efforts that demand attention even when you don't consider every single small decision. The Garden of Earthly Delights used to be stuck in a corner, at the edge of one of the wings of the Prado. As if "oh well, I guess it fits here, near all the medieval art". It counted as an ambush.
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  • jameshart 1mo ago
    Totally. The right way to approach an art gallery is definitely just to walk round until something hits you. Most astonishing time that happened to me was a wall-sized Rothko that just floored me, in a way I never would have expected a slab of color to. Dali’s La Gare de Perpignan stopped me in my tracks too. Rarely been as stunned by more famous works as when I got blindsided by something that leapt out and said ‘look’.
    • forgotmypasswor 1mo ago
      ^^ this. I was never an art person and then one day I felt like I was just punched in the face when it hit me. It's not like "I like this, it's interesting", it's like "Oh. That."
• ben30 1mo ago
  ‽ interrobang i like this one. I’ve got it to auto correct whenever i put a question and exclamation mark together.
• cjg007 1mo ago
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• akarshhegde18 1mo ago
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• vinipolicena 1mo ago
  Edit: fixing quotes. I've thought something similar but never put it into words. It's nice when someone else puts your thoughts into words so clearly that you go, "That's exactly how I see this topic!" > I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. > But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some narrow antechambers and spelunk through some flooded passageways, but that eventually you would reach a room full of untold riches—well, maybe I would have actually tried.
• rimzyy 1mo ago
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• dzonga 1mo ago
  > I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains. unfortunately a lot of people in tech tend to think in terms of technology - looking at this from one solution - not looking at the problem holistically. turning their brains into slop brains.
• arcza 1mo ago
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• Alephinitesimal 1mo ago
  A Chinese example of this for me is Jin Yong, probably the most influential wuxia (Chinese martial-arts fiction) novelist in the Chinese-speaking world. His books are popular fiction in the most literal sense: enormously entertaining, widely read, and for many people first encountered simply as page turners. As a kid, that was how I read them too. Only after I started working did I realize how perceptive some of the character writing was. Murong Fu, for example, is genuinely capable, but his ambition is even greater. Everyone around him, friends, followers, even people who love him, is ultimately someone he is willing to sacrifice for his goal. I have met people who seem to reproduce almost the whole arc: the ambition, the triumphs, the disappointments, the pain, the struggle, and sometimes even the madness. Suddenly Murong Fu no longer feels like an exaggerated fictional character. The book never changes. I had finally acquired the experience to see what was already there. That feels like thickness to me.
• nitwit005 1mo ago
  > I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something. Doesn't particularly sound like their English teachers are owed an apology.
  • andai 1mo ago
    Well, a teacher's job is to help illuminate a cave. I can grope around blindly just fine on my own!
• JoeAltmaier 1mo ago
  About the benches: seems like an oxymoron. New Yorkers love busy places! Of course; they live in New York. Plenty of people on the benches in my midwest city park. Because we by and large are uncomfortable with crowds and noise. Why we don't live in New York.
  • eapressoandcats 1mo ago
    The point isn’t so much that the writing is definitely correct as that the writing is interesting and compelling.
• worik 1mo ago
  I really like this, in the world burning, slaughter of the young all around and the economy unbalanced and tettering on the brink... Art. I have a quibble, that does not detract: This is about consuming art, and the appreciation of great art. Part of the pleasure of art, is making art. In a community we appreciate each other's art in an altogether different way. We cheer on our comrades and they cheer on us, and we make (not very thick) art Bless. Thick art is truly awesome, and makes the world a better place. Remember the core of Punk: DIY
  • andai 1mo ago
    >Part of the pleasure of art, is making art. Yes! I'll have to write a response to this article... an ode to crap art! A while back I started consciously making low effort art. It was part of a exercise where I was intentionally desensitizing myself to shame, embarrassment and fear of judgment, because I noticed them severely holding me back in life. So I thought, I am going to make something crap, that people will judge me for, and I am going to share it with them. I wrote about gay werewolves. A lot of people responded quite poorly (overall even worse than expected!), but a few were inspired to write their own short stories, and share them with me, and this was the most satisfying feeling in the world! When you make something crap, and put it out there, you make others feel comfortable sharing their own crap with you.
    • bramadityaw 1mo ago
      > ... gay werewolves Care to share??? :)
• zerotolerance 1mo ago
  How conditioned am I? I thought the title was a play on "em dashes" and when I got into the second paragraph and saw em dashes I immediately flipped to assuming I was reading a story from some never-lived life manifest by a diffusion model. I don't think it is. But that is irrelevant. The point is if our content cannot avoid or ultimately pass the sniff test it won't have the impact we hope.
  • ptidhomme 1mo ago
    Well, it's actually an essay against the thinness of AI slop. > Erasing the line between the thick and the thin has left us defenseless against slop at the exact moment of its onslaught. Everyone can sense there’s something amiss with the prose that comes out of the machines, but we lack the language to talk about it, and so we’ve converged on the idea that slop simply means using too many em dashes, bullet points, and line breaks.
  • furyofantares 1mo ago
    I think you're over conditioned, I think this should have easily passed the sniff test. I'm not sure how to elaborate on this exactly, I'm just very surprised that you got a false alarm.
• janalsncm 1mo ago
  I disagree with many of the points. First, as a point of style it makes no sense for the author to have chosen “thick” rather than the more common adjective “deep”. They describe the same thing, and “deep” even works much better for the cave analogy which is central to the author’s argument. Deep also has ties to game theory, where increasing depth introduces exponential complexity. The deeper you calculate in chess for example, the more likely you are to find emergent ideas and refutations. Thick is simply an odd choice. Now to the analogy of literature to caves. It’s highly flawed: unfalsifiable, and its actual supporting evidence is easily refuted by existence of tradition. If you haven’t found the treasure in the cave, you just have to keep looking. It’s definitely there, right? Further, I am not persuaded by the actual examples the author gave of “thick” art. The nonsense music written on the butt of a subject of a painting is an Easter egg. Ok, the painter doesn’t like secular music, but is there any deeper consideration of why a chromatic scale is fundamentally more sacred than a 13 note scale or a 120 note scale? It’s an anachronistic detail. The example with Hamlet and ears is even worse. The author says “thin art has no answers, thick art does” then in the very next paragraph concludes no one knows if the recurring theme of ears in Hamlet means something or it’s just something Shakespeare felt like adding. And this was my entire problem with finding “themes” in books. This exercise was often an exercise in finding patterns where there are none: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia Ok, Shakespeare had a thing with ears, so what? I’m sure you can find countless patterns, intentional and unintentional in all sorts of books. Who cares if they mean anything. Now please find three of these “themes” (the more obscure and irrelevant the better, because your teacher has probably already found the real ones) and sandwich them between an opening and a concluding paragraph for your five paragraph essay. > This kind of quality can only be proven by longevity. Which answers another question I had when I was scowling in the back of English class: why do we have to spend so much time reading old stuff? And the answer is: this is the only stuff that we can be sure is any good. Great works of art, like successful genes, convince humans to keep passing them on. If something has survived for centuries, then there’s probably something to it. We’re not still brewing Bronze Age beer and we’re not still sailing Bronze Age ships, but we are still telling Bronze Age stories, and this warrants our attention. The fact that the books on the library shelves this year are mostly the same as last year isn’t a statement about the quality of old books. It is a statement about library budgets. Same thing with museum inventories and English literature curriculums. Jane Eyre is going to feature prominently in AP Lit essays this year not because it is a good book (it was one of the worst things I have experienced) but because teachers know it, the library has it, and the curriculum is written already.
• Brian_K_White 1mo ago
  Do you not think those teachers all failed Lockhart's Lament? Sure you were too young to appreciate great literature natively. That is simply a function of the human condition. You were not failing at anything, no matter how great the great things actually were that you did not appreciate. There should be like one of the responsibilities of adults is to show kids what's actually so great about greatness. There can even maybe be a profession where the, let's call them "teachers" are specially trained to be aware of the limitations and stages of development of children such that they know how not to drop a heavy advanced things on a hyper 10 year old like a bag of sand, but show them one example concept or facet that they can appreciate, and also in the process show them that there are such things as great things that you don't yet grasp but they are there and when you get there you will find them great. That sounds like the entire purpose of a teacher to me. So if none of them did that, then I don't think it is you who owes any of them an apology. https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansLament/ https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansLament/
  • andai 1mo ago
    It's a sales problem. "Why should I care about this in the first place?" It doesn't necessarily have to be for something, but if you can't communicate any value, then... yeah... the results speak for themselves. One of my favorite thing about getting older is finally learning answers to questions I was asking high school teachers. (e.g. applications in math class... though to be fair, I had the same problem in undergrad too!)
    • Brian_K_White 1mo ago
      Most such things I ever grew to appreciate, happened from some sort of example case that doinged me on the head, and then I recognized how the principle applied elsewhere. Then the understanding of the principle itself was just part of my understanding of life and the world after that. It would seem that the job of a teacher is to understand this themselves, having once been a child themselves or at least having had experience with kids in their own training even if they themselves were a different kind of kid, and to actively construct scenarios that teach concepts to kids who are not already aware of them or believe when things are simply stated at them. Simply telling a kid something is approximately useless. If you want them to understand it, you have to understand them, and arrange for them to walk through some process where they end up arriving at the understanding "on their own". I'm sure it's not easy but my own job is not easy either, but that just means it's a job that has to be done and doesn't just do itself, not that it's not doable.
• andrepd 1mo ago
  > Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely. > This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person. There's nothing more to be said. This right here is what slop enthusiasts will never get, because they equate thought with a thought-shaped object.
• wrecked_em 1mo ago
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• locallost 1mo ago
  As they say, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. I think thick works though are not necessarily works with a lot of detail, but works where when you revisit them, you get something more from them. This does not have to be a detail, but more subtle, as if coming to contact with it the first time changed you as a person, and allowed you to see it with different eyes the second time.
• ninjahawk1 1mo ago
  The thing about treasure is that you often have to find it for yourself, it can be hard to find, butt when you do find it you get some legendary booty. The thickness of some caves in terms of genuine girth is truly something to marvel at.
  • luipugs 1mo ago
    You could say it is asstounding.
    • ninjahawk1 1mo ago
      Asspounding even.
• andai 1mo ago
  Father, I cannot zoom the paintings! Edit: found a zoomable version! https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html
• andai 1mo ago
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• zahlman 1mo ago
  > The Betty Crocker Corporation could put just egg powder into their cake mix, but they don’t, because cracking an egg into a bowl allows people to pretend that they’re baking. Those who use ChatGPT for research should be advised that it will add `?utm_source=chatgpt.com` to the URLs it provides you. Make sure to edit that away if you don't want people to know. And also, you know, make sure you verify the source.
  • anal_reactor 1mo ago
    Fucking toppus kekkus maximus
• ang_cire 1mo ago
  I have always loved long books, or better yet long series, but it's because I just don't want a story I love to end.
• gricardo99 1mo ago
  It was such a joy to read something clearly written by a human, for humans, by someone who takes pride and spends effort in their writing. Reading this article felt like a breath of fresh air, like a vice had been released from my head. Not just the broader point about our increasingly slop-filled world resonated with me, but the writing itself felt like it just flows effortlessly. I guess I’ve been suffering for too long, pouring over claude code jargon-filled responses and going in circles trying to understand its convoluted sentence construction and terminology. I think I’m burnt out on working with agents all day long…
  • kristianp 1mo ago
    Agreed. The AI news cycle is constant and promises the eventual end to human usefulness. I feel like one day we'll be but pets to the machines (like those in Iain M. Banks' culture novels), but real life won't be a communist utopia like his novels.
• akoboldfrying 1mo ago
  Fantastic writing. I didn't want it to end. It's the warmest and loveliest defence of its core idea that I've ever come across, and likely ever will. The humour in particular -- it's disarming, pitch-perfect in making a case that (ETA: in lesser hands would be) beset on all sides by self-seriousness. And yet... I'm not persuaded. I think its stance is completely understandable, and plausible, and wrong. Not about everything -- I agree 100% that thickening an idea (great metaphor!) makes it more valuable to others, and that the work involved in the thickening process itself is valuable to the artist. But I think this piece is wrong about what I take to be its core idea: That art has inherent objective value about which we all ought to agree. In the words of the author: That a particular cave has treasure or not, independently of the explorer. I say instead that it is enough to treat art the same way as we treat modern human relationships: If two people have a bad relationship, it doesn't have to be that one (or both) of them is a bad person. It can simply be that those two people are not a good match for each other. The explanation can be a predicate on two people rather than on one. Similarly, there doesn't have to be a total order on the set of pieces of art -- or even a partial order. I believe that the only reasons to think that there should be are ultimately rooted in either ego ("I feel smart/cultured/a sense of mastery by liking the 'right' things") or tribal belonging ("I feel a comforting sense of inclusion by liking the 'right' things"). This "purely subjective value" idea has always been a deeply unpopular view for "cultured" people to hold, and nowadays that's also true of the general public in regard to AI-generated works. It is called philistinism, and a person who holds it is properly called a philistine. As jarring as the label is, I would encourage anyone exploring this idea not to stop thinking there -- but to keep going, and consider the implications of both it and its opposite. Perhaps, like with the similarly jarring term "Luddite", people will take another look and decide that it is not something to be written off immediately.
• songhonglei1985 1mo ago
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• pinkmuffinere 1mo ago
  > this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I think this is a good candidate to hang on the wall, or perhaps for a tattoo.
• BLKNSLVR 1mo ago
  Engaging article to read. I very much like the "the shape of a thing" bit: There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person. But read the whole article, it's worth it. Which of them will drive people so mad they’ll major in the humanities? Absolute gold.
• teaearlgraycold 1mo ago
  So many things we spend our time on in school never have the basics explained. Why am I reading Shakespeare? Why am I writing an essay? Why am I learning algebra? By the time I realized writing is the process by which you organize your thoughts (not just record them) I was a few years out of school. I started appreciating Shakespeare after watching Throne of Blood at 21. I generally enjoyed learning math, but it was not impressed upon me that the mental machinery you build to solve algebra can be used for soooo many things. I was lucky to go to an excellent public school. My teachers were generally pretty good and cared. And yet they didn't manage to embed these basic facts in my head. I worry they were too busy making sure I could pass a test and didn't spend time making sure I'd got the most important lessons out of the subject.
• bryantwolf 1mo ago
  This piece is great. And it’s totally true that we’re surrounded by walls of slop. I stop reading things all the time when I notice the tinge of AI. That said, I don’t think that just because this is the way things are, this is this is the way things have to be. Even with our interactions with AI. And I have hope. Ted Chiang had a great piece in the New Yorker years ago called “Why AI isn’t going to make Art”[1] where he describes something similar. There are 10,000 choices to make in every good pieces of art. AI makes the average choice for every decision and the average choice is derivative and uninteresting. There in I think lies both the problem and the solution. Rather than autocompleting our work, we’d all be so lucky to have a captivated and motivated reader who asks all of the questions this author suggests, so we can get better and better at asking them ourselves and making great art. [1] https://dmd-program.github.io/dmd-300-master/assets/Chiang-AI-NewYorker.pdf https://dmd-program.github.io/dmd-300-master/assets/Chiang-A...
  • yorwba 1mo ago
    If it were just a problem of making too average choices, it could be fixed by sampling at a higher temperature. But I think there's a bigger problem in that the correct choices depend on the context in a complicated way, and LLMs can't handle arbitrary deep dependency chains, so by default you get the average choice based on superficial cues instead of the average choice based on careful planning. Which is why for coding, chain-of-thought and tool calls are necessary to make the implicit explicit. Making artistic choices explicit and subjecting them to a planning process with iterative refinement would probably already improve quality a lot (consider image generation models using a prompt rewriting to create more varied and detailed outputs) but to get the most out of it, you'd likely need a model specifically trained for that process. And considering that coding is much more lucrative, it might take a while before we get there.
• Honali 1mo ago
  The test of whether a work keeps unfolding under sustained attention is much better than asking whether it produces a strong reaction in the first five seconds
• giveaccountpls 1mo ago
  I only disagree with looking down on people who dislike poems that don't rhyme. Rhyming is another way to demonstrate effort, a thing that the author claims is thick. Not to say I dislike all non-rhyming poems, but it is just less impressive to capture an idea or feeling without rhyming, than it is with. One of the signs of a declining band is the discarding of rhyming. This is usually accompanied by uninspired lyrics. The result is often something only for the die-hards to enjoy.
  • DataDaoDe 1mo ago
    To be fair I didn't understand the author's statements as looking down on people who dislike poems that don't rhyme. Regardless, I think, and hopefully we could both agree, that we shouldn't look down on people for any reason. Humans have inherit value and worth that does not depend on laws, leaders or their views on any topic. I will say, I am always impressed, if some time has gone by and I pick up some Chaucer, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare again. Interestingly, now that I am reflecting on it, one of the most impressive and dense, at least to me, is Milton, who writes in blank verse in Paradise Lost, which itself provides a counterpoint to the notion that non-rhyming poems are less impressive. I think I still agree with you though that ceteris paribus, Paradise Lost with rhyme would be even more impressive, though I do wonder if it would have the same impact.
• thimble_io 1mo ago
  Free admission changes how you experience a museum. No pressure to justify the ticket means you actually let things surprise you instead of checking off famous works.
• bramadityaw 1mo ago
  This is a really good essay. I'll bookmark it as motivation for my own art.
• throwfaraway135 1mo ago
  One reason we see so much thinning in the current media(books, films, music etc.) is that old western/European media is considered tainted by history, so you need to reinvent or change it sufficiently to be different.
• psd1 1mo ago
  > Leaving the egg out of the cake mix This is the best expression of why i love Stone Roses but hate Coldplay. Coldplay is sublime, perfect pop music. The Roses were kids with a four-track trying to create sublime, perfect pop music and falling short, but you can complete the journey on foot. Case in point, for your delectation or derision, the middle 8 of She Bangs The Drum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWBZpGMWOik&t=115s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWBZpGMWOik&t=115s Having said that, the Roses weren't "thick" - i haven't discovered new things from repeated listening.
• nicbou 1mo ago
  Experimental History is such a consistently pleasant read. I often refer to the "skull full of poison" one. Less Penguiny has a short blog with similar writing style. Not as good but very good nonetheless
• beacon294 1mo ago
  What a good article, I really love the punchline at the end. If you skim the article, you can't even tell it's there. That certainly increased the thickness of the article, for me.
  • xandrius 1mo ago
    Skimming Adam's articles should come with a fine and some time in.
• rsynnott 1mo ago
  For those who enjoy the Bosch painting, there’s this fun robot, which posts random crops of it daily: https://bsky.app/profile/boschbot.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/boschbot.bsky.social It’s been going years now, still hasn’t run out (though it seems to have added a few of his other pieces recently). There’s a Twitter version too, but I think it broke when Musk screwed up the api; don’t have an account to check.
• jimbokun 1mo ago
  > But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some narrow antechambers and spelunk through some flooded passageways, but that eventually you would reach a room full of untold riches—well, maybe I would have actually tried. No the author wouldn't have. He wasn't ready yet as a teenager to understand what he understands now.
• ozim 1mo ago
  I think I am one of those people that caved in. I like hamburgers and beer and that is what I end up telling people but of course I tried to engage people and no one appreciated any higher level of depth besides burgers and beers. I am going to scream inside my soul when I see a flat deadpan useless story telling like if someone hangs a gun over the fireplace, writes two paragraphs about it and then ... it never fires. Of course never firing might be the point of the story, but it never is. There are also ways to enjoy hamburgers and beers, not everything has to be elaborate and a lot of things being plain simple is celebration of life as it is. Can you enjoy your burger and beer? Then leaving room for being surprised by the cook who really took time to make something of the burger or just this twist in a beer that well is not an eye opening moment, but goes into your head and makes you think a little.