🔗 Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro! – Pivot to AI:

With ChatGPT, Sam Altman hit upon a way to use the Hook Model with a text generator. The unreliability and hallucinations themselves are the hook — the intermittent reward, to keep the user running prompts and hoping they’ll get a win this time.

This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult

🔗 How to survive the weight of an entire industry trying to convince you that you’re inadequate | Mike Monteiro:

The best thing we will ever be able to say about AI is that it’s competent. (…and it’s currently very much not even that.) And while we should absolutely aim for competence in some things (say government), art is very much not one of them. I don’t want my art to be competent. I want it to be stupid. I don’t want my writing to be competent. (Clearly.) I want evidence of human beings attempting to communicate with one another, even if they sometimes fail. Because those failures can be magnificent and moving. I want to fuck up your beige walls. Because your beige walls are fucking boring. I want art to be stupid. I want art to be messy. I want it to be made by people at their most human. We scream. We cry. We make marks. These are all the same thing. These are all moments of humans attempting to communicate when they’re overwhelmed. To take these away is to take away what helps us grow.

I was just watching a review of CD players (for no real reason—I already have one that I am quite happy with) and one of the devices the guy is looking at it is a $1400 CD transport that requires an external DAC.

“Why would somebody spend this much money on a CD transport?” he asks.

The answer he gives is that you’re getting more output connectivity and a digital hub, but I think the real reason is that these companies know that anyone shopping for CD transport devices has that kind of money to spend and is willing to spend it as a signifier of audiophile status.