I've never watched a YouTube short.

My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.

If it works for you, great! Most video I watch is in the form of TV shows and movies. And Youtube sucks for that. Youtube is great for some hobby stuff. I used to like it for reviews, but even that sucks now - when I do a search I'm inundated with low effort reviews (i.e. by people who haven't used the product they're reviewing).

But if there's a creator you really like and follow, I can understand that.

> I've never watched a YouTube short.

Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?

> My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.

I don't want to pay money and then have to do this. This is a pain I don't have to deal with in any other service.

For this incentive to work, you have to only send your partner songs that you have earned through accountability. Otherwise, you can not do the thing, but still send your partner a song.

For the carrot to work, you have not also give yourself unlimited access to carrots. Which means for the most part, it still functions sort of like a stick.

You have to deprive yourself of the privilege of sending your partner a song in order to motivate yourself to earn it back.

This is the general problem with these kinds of gamification schemes. They can work, but they do require the self-discipline to not let yourself acquire the goal without doing the thing.

I think it's a lot less exhausting when it's a skill you use often. The problem is that modern society and technology allow us to solve 99% of our problems alone so those social muscles are deeply atrophied for many people.

1. The joy of the process itself. If you're a programmer, it's writing code, running it, fixing bugs, making tests pass. If you're a woodworker, it's the feel of wood sliding under your fingers, a deft hand on a chisel.

2. The satisfaction of a completed work. For a programmer, that's an app you can run and click around and see the features up and running. For a woodworker, it's a sanded finished piece of furniture sitting there in the workshop.

3. Seeing the completed work make a difference in someone's life. For a programmer, that's a user telling you how your app helped them achieve a goal. For a woodworker, it's seeing that furniture in a room, watching it accumulate the patina of use.

So much of people talking past each other about AI comes from people who care a lot about 1 and people who never really cared about 1 but care about 2. It turns out there are many programmers who never really liked programming, they just wanted to have made an app. They are delighted about AI because it lets them skip a lot of step 1 and get right to 2.

But what I think is critically missing is that for most people, step 2 is marginal. It's step 3 where most of the real joy is. An app with zero users does not get you up in the morning. A piece of furniture collecting dust in an attic is not a source of meaning.

And the core problem with AI is that it gives you 2 by burning a whole lot of 3. Yes, you can whip up your "exercise tracker for cats" app in a tiny fraction of the time. So can a million other people. Your app is going to drown in a sea of other forgotten apps. Probably none of them will be maintained and none will reach critical mass.

I've done a lot of creative work over the years and time and again, as digital technology has lowered the barrier of entry, I've watched a horde of enthusiastic new people become disillusioned when it turns out they can make things now, but it's harder than ever to actually connect those things to people because everyone else can too.

I remember when DSLRs got a million people excited about being professional photographers, but now almost none are because photos are a mostly worthless commodity. I remember when CD mixers and Serato opened the doors to a million DJs who no longer had to buy expensive vinyl and struggle with beatmatching records. Now DJ mixes are a dime a dozen and it's harder than ever to be a working DJ. Recording an album used to require a room full of very expensive gear. Now anyone with a laptop and a DAW can do it. Publishing a novel required getting one of a small number of publishers to like it enough to print a thousand copies. Now anyone can upload a PDF to Amazon and share it with the world.

What happens when the barrier of entry gets radically lowered is that it requires some other extrinsic attribute to rise above the competition. In practice, that is either being rich and connected already, or getting extremely lucky. Domains where anyone can play have the steepest power law distributions. You have a few stars that everyone wishes they were and a million people doing it in their limited spare time. Unless you're already one of the elites, it's basically a lottery.

Now that's going to happen with software development.

It certainly wouldn't hurt! I think a lot about how many people in the US would be willing to be artists barely making ends meet if doing so didn't also mean losing access to healthcare.

> But, maybe those are the only two things you see because you're putting the end goal way too high... as in being a renowned novelist to take one example, instead of someone with some following.

Yeah, I agree that it's important to set your sights lower. You can be a successful novelist without being the next J.K. Rowling.

But power laws and the way word of mouth works iteratively within social media is a merciless popularity engine. The best way to get popular is to be popular. There is a positive feedback loop that consolidates most attention on a small number of winners.

You can still find your niche (my two books did!), but it's hard. And finding a niche small enough to not get dwarfed by the superstars but large enough to be a sustainable source of income is nearly impossible. Almost every creative has a day job these days.

There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1].

In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.

In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.

It's a psychologically difficult time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

One semester, I took Intro to Sociology and it was a revelation. I ended up completing all of the courses required to get a minor in sociology within a couple of years. I dropped out before I ever got close to finishing my CS major.

I wish more people knew sociology. It affects our lives more directly and profoundly than possibly any other science, but it's mostly unknown by the masses.

Emile Durkeim's "Suicide" is famous in sociology because it helped kick off the entire field of study. It was, I think, one of the first works to consider how a profound individual action (suicide in this case) might be largely determined by the surrounding social structures.

I don't know what a good introductory book would be.

Mostly just replying here because I enjoyed your other comments on this thread, and do not want to get too deep into comments. But man; it makes me sad how much the world changed. Most things in the world feel so heavily inauthentic now.

A comment on your other comment here, though: bespoke software will never be like it used to be. I don't know if anyone will FEEL the way it used to feel to program something, even as recently as 25-30 years ago. I mean, I still remember my excitement at buying my first real IDE, and how tickled I was that parts of it reminded me of Smalltalk/ParcPlace. Like, man; the first time I didn't have to make an icon for an exe independently of the software I was coding and compiling in. Or the first time I figured out cc on an old AT&T unix box with no documentation... or essentially grinding my way through learning SQL in the early 90s when books didn't exist... Who the heck would think that was even interesting now? We all have and had the web but even that seems quaint to the newer people. I am not sure why they code or what they feel they get out of it other than inflated (often poor) attitudes and not always deserved paychecks.

Anyway.

Building actual things with one's actual hands is, indeed, nice. Disagree though about it being in the attic. Sometimes it has every bit as much meaning there as anywhere else. Don't need a reason to create things like that. And not interested in art.

Anyway, not sure I would enjoy it as much as I did the first time, but check out Sissela Bok's writing if you haven't.

There. All my replies to your threads in one place, kinda. Sorry if it is a bit hard to follow.

That's what I wish they would do too. But, realistically, that stuff doesn't actually pay the bills. How many Firefox users actually pay for it? So I'm not surprised that they're thrashing around trying to find some way to make money beyond Google paying them for the search bar.

An absolute failure of Mozilla's leadership.

The AI push and all of their little side-projects that no one asked for are pushes to make money that they arguably wouldn't need to make if they stopped with their little side-projects.

I know that there's a bit of for-profit/non-profit mix going on with the corporate structure of Mozilla. Ultimately, if you make free software, just stick with the non-profit side of things. Make browser improvements, update documentation. That's it. That's all that Mozilla needs to do.

None, since you can't.

I also believe we underestimate how much that costs us too. Yes, it is good that fewer people are breaking their bodies on brutal physical jobs.

But there are many people in the world for whom their physical strength and dexterity are perhaps their most valuable asset. With the loss of those jobs came a loss of an avenue of meaning for them.

I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that the whole manosphere alt-right conservative thing going on in the US is driven in part by a generation of young men who don't find intellectual work to be appealing but don't see many alternatives out there either. It's telling how closely Gamergate is tangled up in that world and how many games are basically simulations of heavily physical prestigious roles.

A recent Onion headline really hits the nail on the head: "'This Here Is Probably Our Bestselling Love Seat,' Says Man Who Would Have Been Powerful, Revered Warrior 4,000 Years Ago"

He works at Best Buy now.

This is exactly the perspective many executives have of their employees.

There's a phrase for it in fact, "Human Resources".

Though that sounds more like natural resources, like trees for a lumber company or paper mill.

To spell it out: When horses are no longer needed for a task, they are sold or sent to slaughter.

I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?

People need jobs in order to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.

Many executives feel zero moral obligation to provides jobs to people and instead treat that as a necessary evil that gets in the way of profit. As soon as that evil becomes unnecessary, they will happily lay off as many people as they can.

In aggregate, when enough executives do that, then people will not be able to find jobs.

When they can't find jobs, they are unable to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.

Even if the board cares, they are pressured by the investors.

Even if the investors care, they are pressured by the pension fund administrators.

Even if the pension fund administrators care, that far removed, they care about their pensioners more.

Similarly, hardly anyone takes a job out of moral obligation to the employer. They need money, and accepts the best job they can get.

We've been doing this for many centuries now, and empirically it has been wildly successful for pretty much everyone involved.

In aggregate, yes. But if you zoom in on the trajectory, you can see that it's peppered with wars and revolutions.

Also famines and diseases we can now easily cure wiping out entire societies.

I'm glad we had this talk :)

Also, those past few centuries have involved the largest violent revolutions and wars in human history.

The idea of employment and money is a relatively modern conception. There is no physical law that states it must work indefinitely and efficiently for all participants.

> I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?

About the same once you run out of money. At least here in the US, ymmv in countries that have sane social safety net policy.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-uphold-laws-targ...