- 3
- 11
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932202
- 13
- 10
For those of you who are yet unfamiliar, an Investor is a person whose soul has collapsed into a black hole, rendering them functionally unable to think or respond like a normal human. They are exceedingly dangerous and they rule the lives of every person with a job. As they prefer to work through intermediaries, you are unlikely to meet them directly. (Even their intermediaries can be deeply unsettling. Have you ever seen the end result of a mind scooped out of the skull of a twenty-year-old man? They prefer their servitors young enough to believe stupid things when they wish to deceive you.)
But we live in a world of moral greys, certainly some are faced with the difficult task of societal resource allocation.
What's offensive about Investors is they don't understand the degree to which the desire for profits warps their worldview and their business models.
Witness: Substack. A wordpress clone. See the problem Substack tries to solve is a real problem. The solution they came up with is optimized for making money. These are comical absurdities.
Take the comments system. They understood that they needed niche politics, they understood niche politics thrives on communities. Their comment system is utter trash. They just didn't get it right.
Take the talent acquisition. In theory 'get a bunch of niche writers on your platform by paying them' is a good strategy. In practice when anyone intelligent can get their own domain running any of a number of blog software, the only people who want to write there are 1) political laymen, which is to say, wackadoodles, 2) tech bros with uninteresting opinions, and 3) a small subset of good writers who nevertheless saturate the readership of substack quickly.
Substack isn't a good enough blogging platform to let you use your own domain and if you did you would just use other, better software. Readers have no loyalty to substack.
The bottom line is: why pay money to Investors instead of the content creator?
Substack inserts itself as a middleman no one wanted, creates a product as that middleman inferior to the competition, and will ultimately want more of a cut of these authors' livelihoods than the value they offer in the form of that readership.
I've tried to like their platform but just couldn't get away from the fact that Wordpress's free offering works better and allows payments with the flip of a switch.
And all of this is without getting into the fact that if you write for money you're probably being scammed. Write for free: it's the only way you know you're not colonized.
- 19
- 16
sorry if i broke things not sorry i need to finish the rewrite of rdrama.net's frontend someday because its shit to theme
trying to make it look more like hackernews... how did i do?
- 6
- 12
This could be good for dramacoin, but
- 1
- 8
- 45
- 69
ngl I don’t even really know what a graphics card is, but this was a very fun article with this nerd just btfoing other nerds
warning: long
- collectijism : If you actually read this post you should visit a doctor to up your autism medicine
- 11
- 36
A whole new world of AI awaits
Imagine being 5 years old, dreaming of new adventures for Pikachu and Aladdin, and turning those tales into a cartoon right in front of your eyes... (Perhaps even with you as the main character!) What kinds of new storybook experiences could GPT-3 and DALL-E enable?
My own kindergartener, Noah, loves new bedtime stories, so let's find out.
GPT-3 Story Generation
First, I asked Noah what story he wanted. In his slightly paraphrased words: "I want a story about Ash and Pikachu commanding an army of Pokemon. They're attacking Team Rocket and enemy Pokemon from the land and ocean."
I then asked GPT-3 to flesh out the story:
GPT-3 fleshes out a story about Ash and Pikachu vs. Team Rocket
It was a dark and stormy night, and Ash and Pikachu were leading their army of Pokemon into battle against Team Rocket and their enemy Pokemon. From the land came the sound of thundering footsteps and from the sea came the sound of crashing waves. The two sides met in the middle of the battlefield, and the battle began.
Pikachu and his army of electric-type Pokemon struck first, blasting the enemy with powerful thunderbolts. Team Rocket's Pokemon were no match for the might of Pikachu and his friends, and they soon began to retreat.
But the enemy Pokemon from the sea were not so easily defeated. They launched a counterattack with water-type moves, drenching Ash and Pikachu's army.
But Ash and Pikachu would not give up. They rallied their troops and fought back with everything they had. In the end, they emerged victorious, and the enemy was defeated.
Roald Dahl, watch out.
DALL-E Illustrations
Next, DALL-E generated visuals for the story. Inputting the raw sentences themselves didn't work so well, so I tweaked them to improve the illustrations.
Here's the storybook!
It was a dark and stormy night, and Ash and Pikachu were leading their army of Pokemon into battle against Team Rocket and their enemy Pokemon.
From the land came the sound of thundering footsteps and from the sea came the sound of crashing waves.
The two sides met in the middle of the battlefield, and the battle began.
Pikachu and his army of electric-type Pokemon struck first, blasting the enemy with powerful thunderbolts.
Team Rocket's Pokemon were no match for the might of Pikachu and his friends, and they soon began to retreat.
**But the enemy Pokemon from the sea were not so easily defeated. They launched a counterattack with water-type moves, drenching Ash and Pikachu's army.
But Ash and Pikachu would not give up. They rallied their troops and fought back with everything they had.
In the end, they emerged victorious, and the enemy was defeated.
What a time to be a child.
- 9
- 14
lol
- 1
- 11
This will 100% flop
- 6
- 12
- 2
- 10
Potential drama? We all know GME apes still hold a grudge against Robinhood.