The way I look at it, it would be better if we had a nice, consistent language with rules that make sense but… we don’t have that. English is a nonsense language with more exceptions than rules. So if I’m going to have to deal with something that doesn’t make sense in the first place, I’d rather just go with the flow. If Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.
F-RPGs: Freedom RPGs.
I was kind of curious if this was close to true in any countries with higher urban population densities and the first one I checked was Japan since it has a rural depopulation issue and Tokyo is a pretty populous city and… it was right on the money. Japan’s pop is ~124 million and Tokyo’s is ~ 37 million. So roughly 30% of Japan’s population lives in one city/metro area. Not that this means anything for US population distribution, but I suppose it’s not THAT crazy to think the numbers could be in that ballpark if you weren’t really thinking about it too hard.
Agreed on it being a bad replacement for controller games. I got one around the time one of the FROMSOFT games came out (I think it was Sekiro?) and I tried using for that and it was just not usable for something like that. I haven’t really tried it for anything else since then because I don’t really play games away from my PC, so I don’t have a need for a worse but acceptable way to play M+KB games.
All I’ll say is:
It’s always kind of hard to nail down trendy slang terms, but from what I’ve gathered, and the interpretation I think is useful, is less to do with AI, quality, or effort (although those are certainly common elements of slop) and more to do with what the thing’s role is. What was it made for? What is expected of the audience? Regular art or non-fiction stuff is meant to communicate something to its audience. An emotion, an idea, etc. it requires the audience to engage with it if only in a fairly limited way.
Slop, by contrast, is a product meant to take advantage of the increasingly marketized internet. It’s there merely to capture some small share of the attention economy on a mass scale. It’s not trying to communicate anything to the audience, what it specifically is doesn’t matter, it’s just, to play into the metaphor, feed to fill the trough so people stick around and keep paying, generating data, or looking at ads. All that matters is that it takes up space. It requires nothing of it’s audience, in fact it’s probably advantageous that they don’t spend too much time looking at it, lest they notice how vacuous it is.
Under this definition, we can better sort things out. Someone making art because they want to share an idea or feelings but they use AI because they don’t have the skill to make it themselves? Not slop. Someone making propaganda or misinformation? Not good, but also not slop. It has a purpose which couldn’t be achieved if someone scrolled by it after a second.
Meanwhile, this definition can identify slop, or at least slop-like elements, in other pieces of media you may not have considered. Streaming services have been making movies and TV differently based around the assumption that the audience isn’t actually going to be paying that much attention, so either the content needs to be really attention grabbing, or it needs to be so unremarkable that you get as much out of it while looking at your phone as you would actually giving it your full attention. They make all of this because it’s a cheap way to make it look like their service has a lot to watch so that people keep subscribing. They don’t even necessarily need people to watch it for it to achieve its goal. Just having it existing in the service gives the appearance of value they’re going for.
I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.
That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.
Ok this one got me laughing. Congrats.
Angela Collier: She’s a physicist who does videos on science or science adjacent topics. Most of her videos are pretty funny and accessible and if you’re more interested in math stuff, she has a few videos or segments of videos that go more into that.
Girlfriend Reviews: Comedic game reviews.
Jenny Nicholson: Video essays/rants about various pop culture things.
Lindsay Ellis: Video essays. Although I think she’s mostly been posting on Nebula now. But her old videos are decent.
Simone Giertze: Comedic maker. Started out doing shitty robots but has evolved more into a design channel. The videos are still funny, but the projects are more sincere attempts to make something fun or useful.
Luna Oi!: She’s Vietnamese and does English language videos about modern Vietnamese history and contemporary life/politics from that perspective. Really interesting if your only previous exposure to the country was a brief bit about the Vietnamese war in history class.
I was watching a friend who got it and he tried it solo initially before swapping to online play and it seemed waaaay harder. Not sure if he screwed up a setting and it was really the 3 player version or something.
A while ago I tried it out and I can concur on it feeling clunky. To each their own, but I just have a fairly low tolerance for games not feeling smooth to play. There are a lot of games I’ve dropped in less than an hour because it just didn’t feel good to play even if I might have liked some of the ideas or systems.
They were successfully beaten down. More specifically, the ORGANIZATIONS were beaten down. The most successful protest movements weren’t people spontaneously showing up in the streets. They were the culmination of the efforts of community organizing. There was planning and they had people they could rely on and who relied on them. But things like unions and the Black Panthers were violently destroyed.
Now protesting is atomized like everything else. A protest that forms by posting to show up somewhere at some time on social media with signs is a collection of individuals rather than a group. If you’re just surrounded by strangers you don’t know, are you going to be able to take more radical actions?
That’s not to say none of the more serious/organized protests are happening though. There were those water protectors who tried to stop that pipeline. There were the rail worker and dockworker strikes. I don’t know how organized it was, but it was heartening to see the LA protests start out by actively protecting people being targeted by ICE. And perhaps there are more that just didn’t get any media attention. But in any case, you see how hard they try to crack down on those. But sometimes they can succeed.
Some genuinely mind boggling innovations in UX and AI (not to mention battery) would have to happen to make it even close. There is just way too much that is too awkward to do on a smaller screen or without a proper kbm + the posture of sitting at a desk. You never really see anyone actually using those sci fi handheld devices. They always just kind of magically pull up whatever information is needed without us seeing whatever inputs were required to get there.
Only sort of related: But I always find it funny when I see some older sci fi able to imagine some technology way ahead of it’s time, but fail to think through the implications of how humans will actually interact with it. That’s the part you actually have some info and intuition on even without the technology. If I lived in the 60s I might not have been able to tell you whether we’d ever be able to fit the computers that take up rooms into the palms of our hands, but if you showed me a handheld computer and asked me to suspend my disbelief about the technical wizardry behind it, I could probably tell you whether or not I think someone would actually use something in that way because technology changes, but people don’t. Until we go trans humanist we still have the limits of two hands, 10 fingers, etc.
One funny example of this for me is the pad from Star Trek TNG. There are actually two relevant pieces of technology here:
Despite this, they couldn’t put two and two together and imagine that the pads might be connected through the ship’s computer. When crew members want to send information they have on the pads, instead of just sending data through the computer to the other person’s pad/terminal… THEY GIVE THE PHYSICAL PAD TO THE OTHER PERSON LIKE ITS A PIECE OF PAPER!
If we lived in the cars universe the cabs would be low wage workers instead of property, so the media wouldn’t actually care.
Well it would be a good starting point if we actually had progressive politicians. The Democrats lose because they have no substantive platform for actually helping people because doing that would go against their donors. To be clear, it’s the same for Republicans. There’s a reason why the government just ping pongs between the two parties. The only reliable base either party has is the one that’s more culturally aligned with them, whatever that means at the time.
If they literally ever credibly ran on basic issues like housing, food, healthcare and the elections were fair, they would win. But they don’t, because they can’t, so they will never have consistent support.
It depends. Consider the inputs and outputs of this judgement:
Inputs:
Outputs:
Just as an example I think about sometimes: Sometimes you will get some older politician running for office. They have done and said some horrific things in the past. You point to that as a reason they shouldn’t be elected again. Someone comes out of the woodwork (I’m sure entirely organically /s) and says something like “can’t people change? Don’t they deserve a second chance?” And sure. People can change. And if that politician wants to go work at a McDonalds or something I’m not going to go out of my way to cancel them, but when we have millions of people who could be elected, most of whom, didn’t, idk, support segregation, why does this guy in particular deserve another chance to be in a position of power when he’s already used it in a bad way? In terms of your example, maybe if the sex offender is remorseful and goes to therapy for the issue, they could go reintegrate into society… just maybe not in a job that involves directly working with children right? That sounds reasonable? We can acknowledge the steps they took to reform themselves but also recognize that they lost the right to be trusted at certain kinds of things?
There are some crimes though that are so bad that they can never be forgiven. I don’t think the oil execs who deliberately lobbied to effectively cause the end of the world so they could keep profiting off of it for decades should be forgiven. I don’t think there is a punishment severe enough to serve justice for such a crime. No amount of work they could do to try to fix the problem could undo the damage which they have already caused. There is no actual means of redemption.
This is what has been most depressing/distressing about watching all of this unfold. People online (and I’m not immune to this either) have this impulse to think “Surely not right? Surely these people will come to their senses and not just blindly follow transparently evil orders right? We’ve been told these people are heroes who stand up for freedom and democracy and our safety right? Surely at least some of them will do the right thing right?” It’s so ingrained into us through support our troops propaganda and various TV/Movies showing them and cops as principled heroes saving the day. We’ve also seen this with corporations. “Wow I can’t believe this company turned away from DEI so quickly. I can’t believe this company is going to keep selling surveillance tech to the government. Surely someone will see how wrong that is.”
And then I snap back to my senses and remember history. We’ve seen what horrors these people are willing to commit, whether they want to or are “just following orders.” Maybe you at least believe that they won’t do it to US, as cynical as that is… and then you remember Kent State, segregation, the violent crackdown on unions, the police rallying around protecting cops who execute people in the streets, etc.
Nobody is going to come to their senses. None of them are coming to save us from themselves. If we don’t stand up for ourselves this is just going to happen and be another chapter in a long history of cruelty.
True. That is the generalization of this rule.
Ads are like a gas (the physics kind). They expand to take up all available space.
You are asking this on a platform specifically filled with people who didn’t want to be on those centralized services. :P
That said, not to be the contrarian, but I think this is one of a collection of issues where the problem is not the technology or organizational structure, it’s just capitalism. Generalizing to talk about any monopolies, there are a lot of benefits to centralized production. Economies of scale, not duplicating work/resources, etc. There is a reason why some industries, called natural monopolies, are either run by the government or a private corporation is granted a monopoly over it in a regulated way. The classic example of this is infrastructure like train tracks. You don’t need 5 different train lines going to all the same places and there’s no space for that anyway. So by having one entity run the trains, you get to avoid the problems with that.
Going back to the internet: Centralization has some of the usual benefits of a more general monopoly: If we have one social media site, we don’t need 30 different shitty versions of a video player when the first one worked just fine. But more specifically, it has network effects: The more people who use a site, the more valuable it is for everyone else to use the site. If I go to a site to chat with people and there’s nobody to chat with, there’s not much point in being there. There is a consistent UI so I don’t need to relearn how to navigate different sites. Plus it makes it easier to find what I’m looking for or discover new things.
None of what I described above is directly caused by greedy corporations. Those are just the dynamics that emerge from the material reality of the internet. If we go rid of corporations tomorrow, I think we’d still end up with a decent amount of centralization because of that. Like imagine all of the big social media sites dissipated tomorrow. Everything goes back to being individual sites with their own forums. What happens? I go to a site that has no users, realize it’s dead, and go back to the more populous one. Or perhaps in an effort to make it easier to find everything someone makes a site that links to all the other interesting sites, curated of course because a list of literally everything on the internet wouldn’t be useful. Maybe you add a forum to that site so people could talk about their favorite other sites in one place. The smaller sites where less conversation happens dry up and the big ones snowball until they’re so big that they’re the place to be. Oops we just reinvented Reddit. As much as I’m done with dealing with corporate social media and want to stick with the fediverse or other stuff, it is still just the case that these sites have less people, and therefore less stuff to do, than those bigger sites, so they lack some of the value I got from those. I’m stubborn enough to put up with that out of principle, but for a lot of people, they’re just going to see that they can’t find anyone to talk about their niche hobby they had a subreddit for or whatever and just move on. It’s hard to achieve escape velocity.
THE problem then, is that these sites are controlled by corporations with profit motives. Their goal isn’t to create the best user experience, it’s just to do whatever makes them the most money. If that means psychologically manipulating people to engage more they’ll do that. If that means censoring speech that scares off advertisers, they’ll do that. If it means making the site worse and then selling people the solution, they’ll do that. If it means abusing their position of power to take advantage of creators on these sites who depend on the site, they’ll do that. And because of this centralized position of power with all of it’s inherent monopolistic advantages, they get away with this. Wrest control away from those corporations and find a way to run these centralized sites with democratic control, and most of those problems go away and we get to keep the benefits.
It’s not obvious that there is a good way to achieve this under capitalism though. The fediverse is certainly an interesting experiment in this by allowing there to essentially be independent sites that get collated into one place with a unified standard for UX, but we’ll have to see if they can overcome inertia to reach the critical mass necessary to be a genuine replacement to centralized corporate controlled sites. I also don’t know enough about the technology to know if this is the best solution or not. So I’d be curious to see if this takes off or if people find another solution.