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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there’s so many more shows being made.

    I’m not who you were originally replying to, but I think two seemingly contradictory things can be true at once.

    Yes, there is definitely more content nowadays, and less people watching the same things at the same time because of all of the variety of services and content and platforms, etc.

    But that content tends to still be homogenous. The settings and costumes of the shows might be different, but most content cannot pass, for instance, the bechdel test.

    For all of the emphasis on “eradicating woke” in the last few years, there really isn’t a whole lot of actual diversity in most media. I could probably only name a single show that expresses, for instance, communist ideas, and I think it was cancelled in recent years alongside scores of lgbtq characters in shows.

    Plotlines are typical, production values are stepped up but there’s a large amount of, for instance, ideological consistency among all media produced nowadays.

    If you’re looking for a variety of typical genre shows, yes, you’re spoiled for choice. But when you’re looking for something that breaks the mold even slightly there are really only a handful of things from which to choose.

    And that’s leaving out how much derivative media exists. Vince Gilligan in recent interviews even lamented how he was one of only a few people that could get a new show with a new concept even started in the industry. Many shows are set in “universes” that are decades old. A lot of “new” movies are reboots or sequels of old movies.

    There’s a thread of choiceless variety that used to apply mainly to things like groceries that has now infected much of media as well. Whole political movements now push to eradicate the little diversity (ideological and character identity based) that exists.

    All of this leaves out what happened to music btw, which is becoming so algorithm-driven that it’s hard for those using streaming services to even tell if it was produced by a person.

    I’ll just leave this here as well:

    https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/

    Edit: I realized after a while that the easiest way to summarize the homogeneity you see in modern media is that it is supply-side oriented. Shows, movies, and music are made (or not) primarily based upon how easily the corporate marketing apparatuses think they can shove it down the public’s throat.






  • IMO the best way to use this crap in software development for projects that already exist is to have the fucking things write up or amend docs.

    Developers mostly hate writing docs, and in corporate software I’ve found that the docs are usually added once and then never verified again.

    Writing up profuse gibberish that contains some amount of useful information is what these bullshit machines were made to do. Have it write up some docs, read them and make sure they aren’t completely insane and get a pat on the back from your boss for working with “agentic AI”.





  • It’s great at bullshitting that it did what you wanted, even if it obviously didn’t, which I guess is what counts for results at Microsoft.

    It would be much better if they treated it as the slightly better (yeah, I said it) auto complete that it is instead of the beginning of fucking sky net – which was supposed to be a bad thing anyway, remember?

    But that wouldn’t move the needle on all of the share prices, so instead we have to pretend it can do people’s jobs when it fucking obviously cannot.

    So, instead they keep pushing this AI (auto-complete insanity), and keep burning more and more cash. Imagine if we just put a portion of these billions (approaching trillions) into anything that could actually help anyone. Or don’t, because it’s pretty fucking depressing to think about.