The metaverse is and was a guess at how the children of today might interact as they age into active market participants. Like all these other examples, speculative mania preceded genuine demand and it remains to be seen whether it plays out over the coming 10-15 years.
Ahh yes let’s get the next generation addicted to literal screens strapped to their eyeballs for maximum monetization, humanity be damned. Glad it’s a failing bet. Now sex bots might be onto something…
That's extremely judgmental of you. There is strong merit in building online, international but close-knit communities. I have met many friends for life through the internet and through my own experience as CTO of a popular metaverse project (that failed because of a hostile takeover and ridiculous pivot to a sex bot startup that spat in the face of our loyal users)
I cared deeply about our users, about connection and technology. I also love being outside and meeting IRL with friends I've met online. I just took a road trip through the West with a friend from Armenia whom I met doing metaverse work and the exchange of culture was exhilarating.
VR isn't even required for the metaverse, which tells me you're criticizing something of which you have an incomplete understanding. The metaverse is about people and deep connections. About building communities. That's nothing to criticize.
I'll take your argument a bit further. The thing is -- "human-data" interfaces are not particularly important. Human-Human ones are. This is probably why it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to beat the smartphone; VR or whatever doesn't fundamentally "bring people closer together" in a way the smartphone nearly absolutely did.
VR may not, but social interaction with AR might be more palatable and better UX than social interaction while constantly looking down at at a computer we still call a "phone" for some reason.
LLMs require fuzzy input and are thus good for fuzzy output, mostly things like recommendations and options. I just do not see a scenario where fuzzy input can lead to absolute, opinionated output unless extremely simple and mostly done before already. Programming, design, writing, etc. all require opinions and an absolute output from the author to be quality.
I really just write software for myself only. The time difference (and fun level) between writing software for yourself and writing production quality software is huge.
Feature doesn't work in Safari? Who cares, I don't use Safari anyway. No need to fix.
For really basic overviews of different technologies I've found YouTube videos to be useful.
For code examples I've always found GitHub code search to be super useful.
I haven't really found a use case for LLMs where it's any faster than the research tools already available on the internet.
A good example is writing AWS CDK code, which is a pain in the ass. But there are so many examples to pull from on GitHub code search that are being used in real projects that I've found this method to be faster than prompting an LLM that may or may not be correct.
I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana, just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel something.
Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make classical music worse? No.
Just because something may have been popular in the past and is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music.
If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and storytelling still blows me away.
Art is indeed subjective, but saying classical music has no emotion is a pretty controversial opinion. I've wept from plenty of classical symphonies and don't know much about the genre. A lot of movies just aren't the same without some Hans Zimmerman or John Williams.
Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal, electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up to new music.
I don't think there is any video game that comes close in depth to the Ring Cycle.
I’d add to that that classical music was made at a time recording and listening whatever you want, whenever and wherever, wasn’t a thing.
Many pieces were intended as a whole, and optimised for specific settings.
I’ve long thought I wasn’t an opera person. I listened to pieces of some on my iPod, or on the tv in music class in school. Then, years later, some friend told me he had extra tickets for the opera.
It hit very, very differently. It is likely the experiences I had gone through since school helped the opera’s theme and songs resonate with me. But I’m pretty sure listening and witnessing it, from beginning to end, in a room carefully crafted for this specific purpose and left little room for distractions contributed immensely.
I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow) at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow me to add that one to the list.
All of this is immensely subjective. The pieces presented were utterly bland to me, bordering on the unlistenable. This is obviously not due to a lack of quality for they have plenty, but they register as little more than noise to my brain; to which i prefer silence...
That would be emotion to _you_, not to me. You've also missed this point:
> compared to the other, more modern music I listen to.
Additionally, complexity is not an accurate measure of how "good" art is. But if you want to argue about complexity - and this would mean total complexity, not just sheer storytelling complexity, an easy refute to your point is GTA V, which is arguably one of the most complex pieces of art ever made.
I guess anything is arguable, but I think it would be pretty difficult to make a very good argument that GTA V is one of the most complex pieces of art ever made. I mean, first we’d have to define a piece of art, then we’d have to define what it “complexity” means in that context…
Eh, he’s right though. You could get sidetracked quibbling about the edges of the definitions, or you could just use their centers and see that there obviously are some modern works of art that are immense team efforts and substantially justify the label of “one of the most complex pieces of art ever”.
Depends what we mean by better. If you prefer rock music to Bach then great. Enjoy! I love popular music and classical for different reasons
But if we're talking skill, intellectual depth, craft, then there are objective criteria. Take Bach, his music is like a masterpiece of engineering with its unparalleled compositional complexity and craftsmanship. His mastery of counterpoint being but one example. His work represents a pinnacle of musical architecture, establishing foundational principles that profoundly influenced centuries of Western music.
That just doesn't compare to most pop music does it?
Counterpoint is cool, but a lot of the time is carries the emotional weight of listening to someone solve sudoku.
Objectively, Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to write a song about that lonely feeling you get when you drink too much and get kicked out of the party (a foundational principal of Country Western music)
> Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to write a song about that lonely feeling
For a wide range of such feelings, some can regard as "lonely", as they develop, achieve a triumph, a catharsis, and finally a recapitulation and a comforting, secure resolution -- communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion, i.e., art.
Something that works well is to block websites like YouTube or Instagram in regular browsing but keep them unblocked in Incognito mode. This forces you to sign in every time you want to use these sites.
I've looked into this before. You might be able to pull this off with the YouTube API and Stream Rip using Deezer. Would require a bit of hacking but it could work.
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