Knitting bullshit

I'll add in an aside to this, which is not only are there fake knitting podcasts there are fake knitting and crochet patterns, which is a problem because people get a substantial way through making them only to discover that they don't work. In some cases the giveaway is that the supposed final image isn't physically possible, like the images in this article, but the fakers can use a real stolen image and just spam a pattern underneath it.

So: what is the knitting that is real? It has to be the use of your hands, needles, and yarn to produce a physical object, right?

The podcasts work towards something else. The identity of "being a knitter". This is a form of "hobby" that was already not unusual, that of discussing a thing without ever bothering to actually do it. Photographers are especially bad at this: too many lenses, not enough photographs. They've also got comprehensively run over by AI, because you can just generate the photographs now. Same for "authors".

But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.

The AI approach is "wireheading": the logical conclusion of all of that would be to find a means of inserting a wire in your head that provides constant pleasant sensations. Achieving happiness through a constant feed of generated images is less effective, but it's the same order of things.

(see also: authenticity in food, which could easily turn into another ten thousand words)

It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time.

Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens

I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.

Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.

AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.

Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.

The particular type of innovator ghoul that's enabled by generative AI dreams of filling the entire internet with bullshit content. Aggregators (media and content) should be actively pushing them out for their own long-term survival, IMO.

I actually don’t think the article is sufficiently vehement in calling out just how brain-frying this is. And how destructive on a societal level. The razor’s edge between being too uncritical and too cynical is hella narrow.

Even if that were true (which I don’t think it is, this is a different kind of worthless content), you most definitely don’t remember it at this scale, and that’s a major point.

Unlikely to do a better job than it did with anything else.

To me, they are opposite sentiments, and my experience discussing AI with others supports this. The most pro-AI people I meet are very far removed from science, and my research colleagues are definitely more critical of AI than not.

the full suite of options would include perfectly artificial scents. personaly, I am way over in the analog/organic direction, but I get the need to disconect from the "whatever this is™" that passes for a society. the question remains for AI scaling to meet the demands and desires society has always placed on indivuals

the audible exasperated noise comming from the person in line with me, seeing me pull out cash, thereby breaking there own perfect little automated world, mearly by bieng subjected to witnessing such a primitive ritual, not behind me I might add, the person leaving in front of me, is the prime example of someone who will violently reject AI and the rest when it inevitably fails to "fix" everything

Two, the turns of logic are clearly laid out, in a conversational way, which would make it easy to stick a wrench in and form a polemic if you found any of her arguments or logical implications specious. That said, that does make the article quite long. But then, it is anything other than "elliptical", which I think you used as "runs in circles and repeats itself often", while it actually means "omits parts and thus is difficult to understand" (like the ellipsis sign: …).

Also: what the heck is wrong with that podcast farm founder. I hope they have a bad year.