You need to anchor information in something.

It’s how you don’t need infinite personalized family pictures, too, you need the real ones and those few/many good memories.

The reason they are doubling down on this is, I think, the financial and emotional investment into the idea that a communication medium can produce a new message, a search engine can add value other than search of what you know you’re looking for, and so on.

It’s how since my socially dysfunctional childhood I wanted a 3D sandbox world where you can make and live “anything”, but felt that to be strange and unreachable, that’s because one wants to make and live specific things threaded together into one life.

Or, similarly, a deus ex machina like these LLMs. Something that takes ungodly amounts of data and gives evaluations that look like magic.

Also thank god people made that crap so I’m no longer excited.

So, getting back to these people, the possibility of such things and popular belief into them are what gives them jobs. This won’t stop until impossible to maintain.

EDIT:

What I mean is that, say, there’s garbage collection in programming languages, and it’s done by tracking referenced objects with references leading to some root ultimately, like an environment linking objects to their bodies, tra-la-la.

Societies and cultures are not radically different, just if you build search and information discovery (including commercially available content) on such reference graphs, advertising dies and platforms die. And most importantly, generated content dumped into the network dies as a source of advertising revenue and attention, because it has the references erased, it won’t be found in such a search system.

(I have a conspiracy theory that Aaron Schwartz was pressed to suicide because his work could evolve to threaten search engines and social networks, on their blietzkrieg at the moment. RSS is a step in that direction, there was also the semantic web that didn’t take off.)

These people are usually not stupider than me, definitely, so I think they can see this too, that they are sort of boat drivers near a waterfall.

Of course nothing will die, it’s like any other thing in history, if things developing peacefully and naturally kill your farm, you go and kill that natural peaceful development and make something else. If you can. It’s a matter of resulting power balance.

So, before someone reading this silently discards this as idiocy or smartassery, it’s an opinion (like any other).

EDIT2:

The references comparison is not to hyperlinks than anyone can post. It’s to transparent connections like PGP web of trust, smart contracts. To make gathering of content to be indexed similar to garbage collection built on smart contracts, based on trust to authors and human-made lists like web directories of old. That would make it decentralized and resilient to slop and spam. Also almost unusable for advertising and “Google, tell me what to look for, I don’t know that myself”, so probably nobody would want that.

Would also require something content-addressable, partially, and more like Usenet in the sense of being centered around groups and their posts (linkable), not services you connect to.

Anyway, that’s a mania again. I can’t even build a fucking Forth system for a few weekends already. Only started something resembling it yesterday evening.

Make noise for music’s sake.

If you want infinite personalised music, you get an instrument, and learn to play your own.

I like music by people who did drugs, computers can’t do drugs.

Why can’t they figure out infinite personalized income instead?

I can’t think of anything worse than music that’s personalized to me. And I’m not even talking about the many ethical issues around AI either. I just mean it would suck on its own terms.

As a musician and composer, I will never ever use AI to make a single note of music, and will never listen to to AI music by choice. I want someone to put a little bit of their soul in every piece they create, just like I do. BTW, Tidal offers a AI music switch if you don’t want any of that crap to reach your feed.

I don’t want something that was crafted to my taste. I want something so irresistibly unique that it redefines my taste.

This really is the heart of the entire AI pitch; a world where everything is comfortable and familiar and safe and easy and fucking sterile. A world where you never interact with other people because your agents do it for you. A world where you read, watch and listen to endless generic slop tuned to what your tastes were at the moment that you froze them in amber and stopped actually living. A world where digital sycophants tell you how to live and dress and act and what to order at the restaurant so that your mind will never be troubled by a stray thought.

Fucking Christ, I need to go listen to Angine de Poitrine to get the taste of this out of my mouth.

Infinite personalized happiness is narcotics injected straight into your bloodstream. Personalized happiness is the trivial null solution of multiplying by zero to solve an equation. It is achieving thermodynamic equilibrium indistinguishable from a static cold dead rock. The more interesting feat is achieving a dynamic happiness and harmonic responsive to the comings and goings of diverse and varied travelers, none of whom are guaranteed to be safe, and for that, are made all the more interesting.

Shitty moral compass, greedy dumbass, AND bad taste!

Sign me up!!

The worst is that statement sounds so much like he never had any emotion listening to music.
He was never blasted by something he couldn’t imagine before, and he thinks finding new things one like is just a mash-up of what one has heard before already.

Are these guys fucking humans??

I’m not even 100% in the fuck AI camp. But I don’t want AI music, I want music from the bands and artists I like. I like finding new music I’ve never heard and adding that artist to my list.

If they have a bad song, or a bad album, I want that. That’s something to talk about to other fans of the artist. I only like songs from 2 albums from Arctic Monkeys, but I really like those songs.

It’s impressive when virtually every song from a band I enjoy. I can rank them in mind, oh I really like three days grace from when Adam was the singer. I don’t want generic this is fine music 24/7. Or even “this is good” music 24/7. Sometimes I like a song because the beat, sometimes it’s relatable, sometimes it’s funny.

I like picking music when I’m at a gathering and people saying “oh my name always plays good music”. Sometimes if I show up late and someone’s playing music, they stop it and ask me to start playing music, that feels good. I can’t imagine just throwing on generic AI pop or something in those situations.

*Edit: I also like when I’m out and about and hear something I like that I’ve never heard, and I get to Shazam it to see what it is, and now I’ve got a new song or artist to listen to.

I’ll be honest with you, this is one of the things I rarely notice when it’s AI, so this is theoretically targeted at me …

… but I still refuse to seek out AI music or support platforms that allow it for the sake of principle.

Last weekend I went to a concert. I could see the excitement in the faces of the band as I, along with the whole club, were shouting along with them. Good luck to AI to replace that.

I wish that me cancelling my subscription would do something. I just know that there will be new generations, new markets that will absorb the loss until they have new users and think of this as the new normal.