What exactly in the process doesn't make sense?

Unless the comment has been edited, it does make sense (other than the fact it's intention might just be an ad for BookShelves reader):

- Use Calibre to cross-convert books.

- Leverage public domain ebook catalogs: Standard Ebooks, Internet Archive, Gutenberg.

- For on-device reading BookShelves app might be an option, with no cloud lock-in.

Wishful thinking.

What it will do is it will spoil it for 99% of small time artists that still managed to make a living out of it. It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.

That "artists" idea is that the Monet's will survive, but art is not a rat race where just the Monets need apply. A healthy art scene needs all kinds of creators, at different levels, and needs to be able to sustain a decent above-average quality chunk of them. Not just the Monets.

Not to mention it seems like the pretentious artist in the discussion sees themselves as some outlier Monet type that will be fine.

Why?

I gave my why's already in the previous comment:

Claim: What it will do is it will spoil it for 99% of small time artists that still managed to make a living out of it.

Why: It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.

Claim: That "artists" idea is that the Monet's will survive, but art is not a rat race where just the Monets need apply.

Why: (because) a healthy art scene needs all kinds of creators, at different levels, and needs to be able to sustain a decent above-average quality chunk of them. Not just the Monets.

As for the last claim:

Claim: Not to mention it seems like the pretentious artist in the discussion sees themselves as some outlier Monet type that will be fine.

Here's the why behind that (since I didn't elaborate as I find it self-evident): because he says he's fine with AI, because AI will sweep the art scene from lesser artists and lives the Monets and real artists. Either he claims that he is one of the lesser artists that's OK for AI to sweep away, or he implies that he's one of the good ones that would be fine. The latter sounds far more plausible.

this is all circular, with the why being the claim. I still see no why, just phrased slightly differently

> Why: It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.

why do you think this is the case though? vs people being more excited to get art made by small artists because they arent ai slop.

tbe small artist opening their stufio to sell prints has always been about the experience of visiting and talking to the artist, not the piece of slop that you end up buying

>I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).

Artists wanted to "be heard and appreciated" since they started banging rocks together for rhythm and painting on cave walls...

>I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.

That's true of 99% of very polished finished work too. Amazing bands and artists in Spotify with sub 1000 streams/month.

>None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.

Absolutely. One big concern is that even if you do it and you're proud of it, many will think it's AI anyway.

Plus the over-inflation of AI generated shit. It could all die in a fire.

Vulkan is not Apple.

Metal is Apple's API.

>The same people that shout "Capitalism sucks, free us from our labor" are the exact same types that hate AI. The exact machine that will free you from your labor, when harnessed correctly, is the exact thing you hate.

No, AI will only free us from our jobs, while still keeping the need to find money to feed ourselves.

"When harnessed correctly" is exactly what wont happen, and exactly what all the structural and economic forces around AI ensure it wont happen.

AI is a tool to increase productivity. Productivity has increased greatly over the past century, yet it's easier to feed ourselves than ever, and we have far more leisure time.

Yeah, it's you. Real purchasing power is up over the past 20 years.

How did you calculate that?

I looked it up on FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/MEHOINUSA672N

Yeah, just not in anything that matters, like rent/housing, education, and healthcare.

And increasingly not even for basics like food, with inflation eating away that PP.

But hey, you can buy tech gadgets cheaper than in the 1990s.

I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed.

It's easier than ever to access quality education but that doesn't mean people will do it on their own accord. The cost of licensure or a diploma has certainly increased. Education for the disabled has improved dramatically.

Historical diseases of affluence now affect the poor more than the rich due to increased availability and affordability but costly procedures disproportionately favour the wealthy flipping the mortality picture. Despite that all cause mortality from cancer is down and survival rates are better. The disparity is real but it's not easy to attribute the cause in a neat package.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28408935/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

>I have a hard time with this perspective. It's hard to measure. The quality difference of housing and healthcare in particular has increased dramatically in the US over the years and our minimum expectations have risen quite a bit as technology has progressed.

People live a reality everyday, "hard to measure" or not, and that's not about the "quality difference of housing and healthcare" increasing dramatically, it's them becoming stratospherically expensive...

Define stratospherically and then compare against outcomes across generations from the silent generation to today.

Life expectancy, cancer mortality, heart disease mortality, infant mortality, infectious disease, high school and college completion, social safety nets, houses w/ a/c, indoor plumbing, w/d, refrigeration... Life for those in the lowest quintile of income is arguably better today than it has ever been despite raging inequality.

Just because things were historically cheaper as a percentage of income, which isn't clearly true across all categories in that timeline, it doesn't mean quality of life was materially better.

idk how impactful that is, you can't really live in a house made of shit bought from Temu

Don't bother. They won't understand.

So much for "cynical"

The whole idea of (good times) Apple was hardware and software made coherently by the same people though.

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" —Alan Kay

>It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc

Not really. 2024 called.

Just because you don't look at the code, doesn't mean it doesn't produce subpar code constantly.

Opus 4.7, high effort. Literally 30 minutes ago. There's a `const UNMATCHED_MARKER = "<hardcoded value>"` that we want to remove from a file. Behold (the first version was a full on AST walk for absolutely no reason whatsoever, by the way):

      function restoreUnmatchedSelectors(cssPath) {
          const cssContent = readFileSync(cssPath, "utf-8");
          const marker = UNMATCHED_MARKER + " ";
          const count = (cssContent.match(new RegExp(escapeRegExp(marker), "g")) || []).length;          
          if (count > 0) {
              writeFileSync(cssPath, cssContent.replaceAll(marker, ""));
              return count;
          }
      }

      function escapeRegExp(s) {
          return s.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, "\\$&");
      }

Don't get me started on all the code duplications, utility functions written from scratch in every module that needs them, reading full database just to count number of records...

You're doing something very wrong. Consistently get a simple sed or similar oneliner for the above, not just on Claude Opus 4.7, across several LLMs.

Maybe if you had a little more faith, you'd get better results :)

> Consistently get a simple sed or similar oneliner

Ah yes. A sed one-liner in a Javascript code

> Maybe if you had a little more faith

Ah yes, all I have to do as an engineer, is to ... checks notes ... have faith

>how'd AI web-design fly?

Most web design is already crap to begin with, so AI web-design will fit right in.

Plus compared to the totally open-ended video generation, web desisn is mostly samey (follows a few trends and conventions), way more restricted, and doesn't include difficult-to-recreate (due to uncanny valley effect) humans in it.

>You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs.

Sure you can, and many otherwise would-be human-designer-clients, will do exactly that. Nike might not, but 99% of the companies hiring designers are not Nike scale.

You are right I think, a lot of clients need a design as a practicality rather than a differentiating factor, they will be more than happy with a generic design output for next to nothing.

Many companies are not really based around their web design being a big factor in their business. Some very influential companies in my area look like they last updated their website in 1998.