You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.

> Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?

You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.

> As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.

Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.

> What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'

Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"

When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.

Okay, but this isn't a news article, it's an opinion piece on some guy's substack.

Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.

(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)

You can still do that right now. I highly recommend it.

Okay, but I don't understand the benefit of writing to an entirely fictitious AI construct instead of writing to the ideal of the kind of reader you'd eventually like to have.

I mean, I get that it's frustrating to pour effort into writing something that effectively nobody reads (i.e. you never connect with a wider audience), but engaging with an entirely fictitious audience seems hollow to me.

LLM's neither think nor reason at all.

RSS subscriptions aren't like Pokemon. You don't have to catch them all. One of the major selling points of RSS is that you can subscribe to sites that update infrequently so you get notified when they have a new update instead of checking the site manually and being disappointed that it hasn't updated in three weeks or whatever.

Adding a bunch of sites that update hundreds of times a day is a great way to DDOS your own attention span

Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually usable.

That must be fun any time you talk about Worcestershire (the sauce or the place).

The 96GB kit I bought (which was more than I needed) was $165. I ended up buying another 96GB kit in June when I saw the price went up to $180 to max out my machine, even though I didn't really need it, but I was concerned where prices were going.

That same kit was $600 a month ago, and is $930 today. The entire rest of the computer didn't cost that much

It doesn't matter how much astroturf I read, I can see what's happening with my own eyes.

> The grievance is moral, not utilitarian.

Nope, it's both.

Businesses have no morals. (Most) people do. Everything that a business does is in service of the bottom line. They aren't pushing AI everywhere out of some desire to help humanity, they're doing it because they sunk a lot of resources into it and are trying to force an ROI.

There are a lot of people who have fully bought in to AI and think that it's more capable than it is. We just had a thread the other day where someone was using AI to vibe code an app, but managed to accidentally tell the LLM to delete the contents of his hard drive.

AI apologists insist that AI agents are a vital tool for doing more faster and handwave any criticism. It doesn't matter that AI agents consume an obscene amount of resources to do it, or that pretend developers are using it to write code they don't understand and can't test that they're shoving into production anyway. That's all fine because a loud fraction of senior developers are using it to bypass the 'boring parts' of writing programs to focus on the interesting bits.

That's the thing, though, it is about their careers.

It's not just that people are annoyed that someone who spends years to decades learning their craft and then someone who put a prompt into a chatbot that spit out an app that mostly works without understanding any of the code that they 'wrote'.

It's that the executives are positively giddy at the prospect that they can get rid of some number their employees and the rest will use AI bots to pick up the slack. Humans need things like a desk and dental insurance and they fall unconscious for several hours every night. AI agents don't have to take lunch breaks or attend funerals or anything.

Most employees that have figured this out resent AI getting shoved into every facet of their jobs because they know exactly what the end goal is: that lots of jobs are going to be going away and nothing is going to replace them. And then what?

Now I want to know how you pronounce words like: through, bivouac, and queue.