The idea is there’s a rush of irrational exuberance when an “innovation trigger” makes a new toy looks promising, and everybody rushes to use it for everything, regardless of whether its suitability-for-purpose is proven. Inevitably many of those pioneers find that it’s not good for their particular problems after all; usage reaches a “peak of inflated expectations,” and crashes into a “trough of disillusionment.”
Then the tech enters a quieter and more gradual “slope of enlightenment” as people work out use cases where the tech actually adds value; then adoption reaches a “plateau of productivity.”
Worth a glance at the way they map this to prior waves of technological exuberance.
From your video, it looks like your definition of hype involves a situation where eventual adoption increases above what is in the hype today.
Here's what the parent comment thinks:
> It's just a hype cycle. In my 15 years in data, I've seen around 3-4. Every time leadership get way too invested in the possibilities, and they waste tons of money on doomed efforts. A good example of the prior one was "Big Data" which was even more pointless than the current AI boom.
Obviously the parent doesn't think of hype the way you think of it because they claim that big data was pointless -- they don't see the eventual "slope of enlightenment". They think of hype cycle in the colloquial way and I was responding to that.
I see this all the time in the website and frankly the patronising "but actually hype means something else" is pointless and pedantic. I urge you to respond to words within the context and not bringing in academic definitions.
The person I replied to put words in your mouth. You and I agree what you meant. You mean that the hype would die down and won’t come back up again. Ever. So reply to the person above who thinks you mean hype this way.
Need work involve money? By far the most important work I do involves volunteer leadership roles above and beyond the things I do for money. Indeed, the whole edifice of modern tech rests on elements of FOSS that are, to within a rounding error, “volunteer”-built and -led. Elon’s an idol, but so is Linus.
The Biggest And Richest have Mythos. But does that diminish the utility, to me personally, of my open-weights model? Or even my humble-individual-grade Opus subscription? Relative to what I could do three years ago, computationally speaking?
Does a pretty good life have to involve controlling more material relative to members of a specific class, rather than just… deciding what’s enough, materially speaking; and stopping there?
Don’t those cases establish that police may, within the bounds of the fourth amendment, detain both the driver and any passengers; which then triggers requirements under other state laws allowing police to compel detained people to identify themselves?
As that link indicates, not every state has such a thing. States can; not every state does.
(And "identify" isn't necessarily the same as "show ID". It's legal to not have any form of ID in the US whatsoever - this comes up with voter ID discussion a lot - and those folks are still allowed to ride in a car.)
It gets even weirder because at least in same states it is ruled if a crime has an age component then once again you can't be forced to reveal ID (which would betray your age) and incriminate yourself even if driving. And then in some states you're required to answer questions unrelated to your identity like if you're carrying a weapon (unless you can't have weapons, in which case you'd be incriminating yourself and then again you don't have to answer).
Local conflicts do not get solved by higher levels, they get tapered over. WIth all the power and resources amassed by the Federal Government, one would think this could've been solved already, right?
One obstacle is geography, and the built environment. Schools are of their communities. Even if you do bus people around, they come home to the same places, norms, and situations; not all education happens in the classroom, and “you don’t belong here” is a thing. The rich schools are in the rich places. The poor schools are in the poor places. The outcomes—often—not always, but often—reflect that. Is a deeply-depressed neighborhood really improved by starving its school? Or deeming it unworthy of a having a school altogether, and emptying its children out to places that “have it more together”?
Another is the idea that schools are motivated by money in the same way profit-seeking ventures are. A company’s shareholders might respond to financial threats and incentives, but the teachers on district-regulated wages? What’s the phrase, can’t squeeze blood from a turnip?
Then there’s of course the construct validity of standardized tests as a measure of “suckiness”—they’re easy to administer at scale and to compare across years and between schools—but do they really capture every flavor of good work that’s done at a school? They’re the best thing we have, but does that make them good enough?
The main issue, though, I think we can frame in terms of a slightly different legibility issue: since the school is the only variable we directly control, we model the school’s “suckiness” as a function of its… what, budget? Staff bonuses? Whoever exactly is it who we’re proposing to punish by removing funds? But just as I imagine we can think of kids who would be fine either way—one of the less provocative stereotypes that comes to mind is that of a Tiger Mom kind of community—we can probably think of kids who won’t be fine. The less provocative stereotype that comes to mind is a child with special needs: with an aide, maybe that child may develop enough to participate in society, and we’re a more humane and moral society for trying. For that matter there are other children who are living and growing up in situations where survival is always going to come before their test scores—and those are probably the students with guardians least equipped to exercise “school choice.” How does punishing their school improve those kids’ outcomes?
Often students who perform poorly need more resources, not fewer.
It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.
> It is, but also it's ok to silently judge people.
You are free to judge people for liking AI music, or in fact anything obviously. We all judge, and must live with judgement. But is this judgement supposed to be of any particular importance given it is equally likely someone is passing judgment on you for something they may personally dislike?
It just often feels as if there is an assumption that one's own standards are that which is "normal," while everyone else's are the weird ones. But to plenty of other people, our own interests, values, hobbies, or lifestyle choices would may be considered equally rubbish and worthy of judgement, according to their worldview and experience.
I would say, judge people if you want. As we all largely do, though I try not to do. Provided it comes with the realisation you're not somehow standing outside the exact same process.
Note: I do not willingly consume AI content, nor do I have any particular interest in doing so. But I have had people very openly judge me for things that for many of us here would be considered entirely normal, including my choice to work with computers for a living. So I do not have a tendency to give any particular weight to the "judgement" of others, silent or otherwise, where my choices do not materially impact that individual or society at large.
To lighten the mood a little more, I am quite openly judged (and silently I expect) because I have a particular enjoyment for Russian hardbass :) Which many if exposed to it I would expect consider it to be total garbage. But it does nothing to reduce my enjoyment of it and nor would I allow it too.
What about the long tail of romance novels, fanfiction, etc though? 50 shades was an outlier in that it was popular but it's absolute drivel, and there is a lot of that kind of low quality writing out there.
If we’re comparing bad quality to bad quality, human bad quality is infinitely more interesting. The fact someone wrote, directed, produced, acted in, etc, in something like Troll 2 or The Room is what makes those movies special. It’s the fact you can go “god damn, someone thought this was good” and be baffled at specific decisions they made. It’s the curiosity of “what was going on there”, “what drove those individuals to do this”, “how much of it were outside forces”, “who are these people”. It’s all the reasons which make it worth it to make a movie about a bad movie.
With AI, even if you enjoy it as bad, as soon as you know it’s AI it loses all interest because there’s zero story behind it. The answer to all those questions becomes “a statistical algorithm made it that way”, and that’s objectively a boring answer.
Imo, fanfiction crowd is overall much more actively creating then your average pop culture consumers. And their engagement with reading is also a fairly active. They are more likely to write themselves and even if dont, their reading tend to be and entry point for own fantasies. I feel like the only ones who have right to judge them are people who write full on books. And those seem to be aware this crowd is also simultaneously the last crowd of actual readers buying their books here and there.
Romance readers got tired of being judged for decades and decades by people who dont read at all, people who read pure power fantasies or what not.
Artists have to agree to be featured on Spotify, and agree to the royalty fees they receive. AI just pillaged recorded human history with zero compensation. Big difference.
> It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
People like what they like, sure. And if someone was particularly into the idea of machines making music, or even take some cynical enjoyment out of this on the full understanding of what it is they are doing. Sure, whatever.
But someone acting like listening to AI generated music is their only choice due to their taste in music? Come on, that's a sci-fi nightmare right there. Not even going full-on ecologist here, but the resource expenditure alone is so out of whack for something only a single person will listen to.
I don't even consider myself a musician, just a human being baffled at the total lack of humanity and how that lack of humanity is being normalized. Talk about sympathy.
Is it though? Do you have calculation how much one suno song does? I work with databases, and I sometimes wonder how much energy those full table scans of the world consume, comparing to ai.
Couldn’t agree more. And for what it’s worth, its aptly-named author Merlin Sheldrake is an absolutely charming human too. As quirky iconoclastic woodland enthusiasts go.
I suspect some folks here might also appreciate his early-career (2011) musical collaboration with brother Cosmo Sheldrake and friends, as the Gentle Mystics:
Cosmo is his brother, wow! (have deeply adored his solo work since discovering it last year)
Aaah, it all connects - a web within a web indeed...
I have got some weekend reading and listening to get to now - thank you all kindly.
As a contribution wanted to mention Paul Stamets and his works - it's all somehow about fungi (and bees sometimes!), and all deeply fascinating
I got the overarching sense of an LLM making drama out of confusing or insignificant things. Some specific LLMisms that irritated me—beyond the creepy soulless AI cartoons—included:
> Fifty minutes. In the cold. Night after night, for seven years.
> Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes.
> No university, no lab, no funding. He pulled down the dataset, wrote his own code from scratch, and ran every test independently.
> one telescope, one mountain, one drawer of plates.
> Different telescope. Different continent. Same signature.
> Signed and numbered. Just 150 copies. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
> […]the wider corpus this comic was built from. The science holds because the receipts hold.
> The Palomar Lights — a story told in data, glass, and light.
It's not technically wrong but the super-short abrupt sentence format of "A. B. C."[0] is weird if you repeat it.
You can get away with it once or twice as a kind of rhetorical flourish but if you keep doing it, it starts to sound like a one-trick pony (or a clanker.)
(IMHO, obvs., I'm not the King of English.)
[0] e.g. "Three pinpoints of light. One photographic plate. Vanished within fifty minutes."
https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...
The idea is there’s a rush of irrational exuberance when an “innovation trigger” makes a new toy looks promising, and everybody rushes to use it for everything, regardless of whether its suitability-for-purpose is proven. Inevitably many of those pioneers find that it’s not good for their particular problems after all; usage reaches a “peak of inflated expectations,” and crashes into a “trough of disillusionment.”
Then the tech enters a quieter and more gradual “slope of enlightenment” as people work out use cases where the tech actually adds value; then adoption reaches a “plateau of productivity.”
Worth a glance at the way they map this to prior waves of technological exuberance.
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