I wonder if unconventional writing styles are becoming the signal for deliberate content. If text is too polished– or even using certain punctuation– can lead to readers questioning whether AI assisted in the creation of the text.
It looks like this particular blog previously used conventional capitalization from 2017 to late 2023. The first post in this style appears to hint at a kind of shift in identity of the author, so perhaps, in this instance it is more a signal of personal expression or tribalism than non-AI-ness. Then again, we may see the line between the two continue to blur.
This seems highly revisionist. Cancel culture isn't just about boycotting or being selective about what one consumes. It's not even about holding people accountable.
It's about destroying people and tearing them down in order to make examples of them. It results in antagonists showing up at people's homes, writing letters to employers, creating petitions, attacking people in the nastiest ways possible with out engaging with ideas or arguments.
It's the disproportionate and graceless reactions that distinguish cancel culture from past methods of accountability.
What do you think happens when people get boycotted in villages or “back in the day”? Collections of people get MANY things wrong. Just see relationship advice vs AITAH vs CMV.
Are people used to some benign, harmless, ineffective version of social boycotts? Grace? The Scarlet letter describes what society did to adulterers.
see what happened in 2008 when large groups got together, or the police protests or any number of movements. They start when there is something easy and clear to work with, and soon smash into (and past) nuances.
I agree with the parent poster, these are modern day boycotts, influenced by the malaise of being seen primarily as consumers, and super charged by the emotional polarization of the internet.
Wouldn't modifying current behavior be sufficient to justify the existence of pain? The mechanism can be a useful adaptation even if a single organism cannot learn. Maybe the default state of bacteria is pain and they can only relieve it temporarily. The ones that survive to multiply are the ones best adapted to relieving pain.
The entire purpose of experiencing externally induced pain is to cause a reaction before the threshold of permanent damage is reached. Given our imprecise biological systems, that threshold needs to be crossed with a safe margin of error. It stands to reason that reactions to avoid threats to the the continuation of life are valid, regardless of the presence of nociceptors.
Internal pain (headaches, etc.) may require some manner of cognition to associate behaviors with the result, assuming they have a cause other than flawed biology.
They even released a version of the wii without the gamecube ports or compatability (before the wii mini) which immediately supports gamecube games again if you solder the ports back on.
Netflix shipped DVDs from 1997 to 2023, predating Redbox by 5 years. This is essentially how we got to streaming. GameFly still ships movie and game discs as a service.
Interesting data! And very different from the anecdotes presented in another top HN discussion today, detailing fierce competition with software engineer job postings receiving 100x the number of applicants compared to just a few months ago.
"So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself.
Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today."
Thank you for reminding me of this excellent essay.
Nation Geographic's Trafficked has a fascinating episode on the stolen car market. The episode follows cars that are shipped out of the port of New Jersey to Ghana and documents just how organized the operations are.
I read a story on an auto enthusiasts forum. A guy had his Tesla totaled in the US. He claimed insurance etc and disposed it off. And then out of curiosity he opened Tesla’s app and was able to follow the car all the way across the Atlantic to Czechoslovakia before the car was deregisteted.
A quick search shows that others have made this connection between Altman and lowercase and non-AI authenticity: https://ted-merz.com/2023/12/18/writing-in-lowercase/
It looks like this particular blog previously used conventional capitalization from 2017 to late 2023. The first post in this style appears to hint at a kind of shift in identity of the author, so perhaps, in this instance it is more a signal of personal expression or tribalism than non-AI-ness. Then again, we may see the line between the two continue to blur.