You should use your own words. It might seem that a tool like Grammarly is just an advanced spellcheck, but what it's really doing is replacing your personal style of writing with its own.
It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.
My elementary school kid came home yesterday and showed me a piece of writing that he was really proud of. It seemed more sophisticated than his typical writing (like, for example, it used the word "sophisticated"). He can be precocious and reads a ton, though, so it was still plausible that he wrote it. I asked him some questions about the writing process to try to tease out what happened, and he said (seemingly credibly) that he hadn't copied it from anywhere or referenced anything. He also said he didn't use any AI tools. After further discussion, I found out that Google Docs Smart Compose (suggested-next-few-words feature) is enabled by default on his school-issued Chromebook, and he had been using it. The structure of the writing was all his, but he said he sometimes used the Smart Compose suggestions (and sometimes didn't). He liked a lot of the suggestions and pressed tab to accept them, which probably bumped up the word choice by several grade levels in some places.
So yeah, it can change the character of your writing, even if it's just relatively subtle nudges here or there.
edit: we suggested that he disable that feature to help him learn to write independently, and he happily agreed.
The analogy with tab-completion of code seems apt. At first you blindly accept something because it has at least as good a chance of working as what you would have typed. Then you start to pay attention, and critically evaluate suggestions. Then you quickly if not blindly accept most suggestions, because they're clearly what you would have written anyway (or close enough to not care).
Emacs has completion (but you can bind it to tab). The nice thing is that you can change the algorithm to select what options come up. I’ve not set it to auto, but by the time I press the shortcut, it’s either only one option or a small sets.
From his description, it sounded like this was more of #1. He cared a lot about the topic he was writing about, and has high standards for himself, so it's very likely that he would have considered and rejected poor suggestions.
I have mixed feeling about it. On the one hand, you're right: carefully considering suggestions can be a learning opportunity. On the other hand, approval is easier than generation, and I suspect that without flexing the "come up with it from scratch" muscle frequently, that his mind won't develop as much.
That reminds me of one of the biggest IMO missing feature of Wordle: They never give a definition of the word after the game is finished! I usually do end up googling words I don't know (which is quite often) but I'm guessing I'm one of the few who goes to the trouble. I've even written to The New York Times a couple times to suggest adding a short definition at the end as I honestly feel like a ton of people could totally up their vocabulary game and it surely could be added with minimum effort (considering they even added a Discord multiplayer mode).
Is Wordle really the best vehicle for that, though? I mean, it tends towards a subset of 5-letters words the audience is more likely to know in advance, excluding a lot of the more-surprising words.
A "click to see more about why this answer fits" crossword, on the other hand...
How often have you played Wordle? I've played well over 1000 games, and at lesat 1/5th of those were words I had to look up. They seem to enjoy picking obscure words in order to make the game more challenging.
None of those stand out as "WTF does that even mean", but maybe I'm the weird one if we adjust for age-demographics or book-reading.
If I had to guess at a riskier 20%... Guava, a fruit some people may not have had; Gunky because it's slang; Mogul, Vogue, and Mooch were borrowed from other languages; Cello is something people may have heard more than read; Hoist.
Even as someone who already knows the definitions of 100% of those words, it'd still be neat to see those definitions, and maybe even some etymologies or other interesting trivia. “Cello” would be a great opportunity for a factoid about the oldest known cello, “guava” would be a great opportunity for a quick recipe using guavas, etc.
> Perhaps the unusual outcomes are just more memorable, and so seem more frequent?
That's a good point and could very well be true. I just know I've played plenty of games where I was mad that they didn't show the meaning. So let's say its 5% for native speakers, and up to 20% for non-native speakers - that's still a golden opportunity to expand vocabularies. And honestly it can't be a lot of work to add a couple lines of static text. At worst it would be ignored, and at most, help people learn more interesting words.
Oh how I despise these suggestions. You sometimes look for a way to express something and you are on the verge of giving the world something truly original, but as soon as your brain sees the suggestion it goes "oh yeah that fits"
True! There's an important cybernetic aspect to all this, where an automatic suggestion can be an interruption, sometimes worse if the suggestion is decent.
A certain amount of friction is necessary, at least if the goal is to help the person learn or make something original.
I disabled them immediately, it feels like the tech version of the ADHD person who keeps interrupting you with what they think you are trying to say. Even if the suggestion is correct, it saves you at most 2 seconds at the cost of interrupting you constantly.
I see the suggestions and then choose something different anyway. I don't want to use one of the top 3 most popular responses to an email from a friend. Even if it's something transactional.
As an adult, I do too. As a middle schooler, we absolutely used word processors’ thesaurus features to add big words to our essays because the teachers liked them.
One problem I see is that LLMs have a more nuanced... well, model of how words and their meanings relate to each other than a dead-tree thesaurus could ever present, what with its simplified "synonym" and "antonym" categories. Online versions try to give some similarity metrics, but don't get into the nuance. (It's not as if someone who takes either approach would want to spend the time reading and understanding that, anyway.)
> she could tell when students were using it to make their writing more fancy pants
I had two teachers who called us out on this, and actually coached us on our writing, and I remember them fondly. (They were also fans of in-class essaying.)
As a non native English speaker my own words wouldnt be in English. If I express myself in English I soon struggle for the right words. On the other hand I think when I read some English text I'm quite capable of sensing the nuances. So it feels when I auto translate my text to English an than read against it again and make some corrections, I can express my thoughts much better.
>It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better."
It is definitely not true that it is better for a poster to communicate like an individual when it comes to spelling and grammar. People ignore posts that have poor grammar or spelling mistakes, and communications that have poor grammar are seen as unprofessional. Even I do it at a semi-subconscious level. The more difficult or the more amount of attention someone has to pay to understand your post, the less people will be willing to put in that effort to do so.
Exactly. Tell that to whoever is grading your next paper, or reviewing your resume, or watching your presentation. People are judged by their linguistic ability even in cases where it shouldn't matter. It's a well known heuristic bias. It's no surprise that many of the people here denying it are themselves quite literate.
For what it's worth, I had a quick look through your comment history and your English seems just fine to me as a native speaker (at least for informal communication).
People who don't have English as their first language often seem to underestimate how good their English actually is. I wonder if it's because their reference point is formal English rather than the much more forgiving English we use in casual day-to-day conversation.
Books and newspapers have had editors for centuries. It is just code review for the written word.
[It looks like MS Word 97 had the ability to detect passive voice as well, so we're talking 30 year old technology there that predates LLMs -- how far down the Butlerian Jihad are we going with this?]
I don't personally use AI/LLMs for any informal writing here or on reddit, etc. But I think it is pretty weird to be overly concerned around people, particularly ESL, who use tools to clean up their writing. The only thing I really care about is when someone posts LLM regurgitated information on topics they personally don't know anything about. If the information is coming from the human but the style and tone is being tweaked by a machine to make it more acceptable/receptive and fix the bugs in it, then I don't understand why you're telling me I need to care and gatekeeping it. It also is unlikely to be very detectable, and this thread seems to only serve a performative use for people to get offended about it.
Other tools to clean up writing are allowed. They did not tell you you must care. You told them they must not. The submisson's use was to tell you and others LLM generated tone was not more acceptable.
> HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law place, and—contrary to the "technically correct is the best correct" mentality that many of us share—we consciously resist the temptation to make them too precise.
The problem with “spirit-of-the-law” is that having rules be subject to discretion is a pretty clear avenue for discrimination and abuse. Not as big of a deal for an Internet forum as it would be for, say, a country's legal code and the enforcement thereof, but the lack of a clear standard for a rule makes that rule hard to follow and harder to enforce impartially.
The typical problem with trying to create clear standards with no spirit of the law is that it never matches the intentions with the 1st, 2nd, etc iterations of developing the clear standards. At least when trying to deal with something nuanced. It can get to the point that it takes more time and effort to follow the clear standards than to think through it fresh each time. The rules can also eat up time and effort to maintain and distract from the original purpose.
"Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments."
What about non-native speakers? Can they not use translation software like google translate any more?
"Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments, except for translating to english"
What about cases of disabilities?
"Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments, except for translating to english and when used as assistive technologies."
Some translation tools and assistive technologies are still going to case the same issues that we have right now so maybe limit the technologies used
"Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments, except for translating to english and when used as assistive technologies. Technologies x, y, z are not allowed a and b and similar can be used for translation c and d as assistive technologies"
But we do not want to spend time/effort on filtering technologies and/or people into the above categories.
In the long run we likely will come up with technologies that most everyone is satisfied with using in different use cases, spelling grammar, assistive, maybe even tone, and others.
In the mean time we can not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If there are clear standards that achieve the goals, great, if not we have to do something until everything shakes out.
Nobody is going to stop using grammarly extensions to post to HN, nobody is going to be able to detect its usage.
This thread just lets a certain kind of people put on their best condescending hall-monitor voice and lecture other people about how they should behave.
And the rule is arguably less useful than speed limits and will be broken about as often (at least speed limits have a very real link to physical safety via kinetic energy).
> This thread just lets a certain kind of people put on their best condescending hall-monitor voice and lecture other people about how they should behave.
I think it is, at least mostly, about the blatant cases that are often already down voted and flag and make it official.
> And the rule is arguably less useful than speed limits and will be broken about as often (at least speed limits have a very real link to physical safety via kinetic energy).
I often see the rules in:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
broken, mostly small ways, I still think we are better off with them or something similar rather than having nothing.
> I think it is, at least mostly, about the blatant cases that are often already down voted and flag and make it official.
Which raises the question of why an official guideline is necessary in the first place. Obvious LLM slop being downvoted into oblivion is itself a good enough measure, without needing to create extra rules by which to hang the innocent.
I was just re-reading the passage from Plato's "The Phaedrus" on writing & the "art" of the letter for an essay I'm working on, and your remark is salient for this discussion on LLM-style AI and social media at large.
That's true, but on the flip side I regularly get downvoted because my English is not the best, so say it mildly. So, now I need to be really careful, to a) write in a good English or b) not to be recognised as an LLM corrected version of my English. Where is the line? I shouldn't be downvoted for my English I think, but that is the reality.
Edit:
I already got downvoted. :-) Sure, no one can tell exactly why. Maybe the combination of bad English _and_ talking sh*ce isn't ideal at all. :-D Anyways, I have enough karma, so I can last quite a while..
The quality of my writing varies (based on my mood as much as anything else, I suppose), but when it is particularly good and error-free then I often get accused of being a bot.
Which is absurd, since I don't use the bot for writing at all.
It’s possible of course but reading all the comments from various non-native English speakers here it seems like a common story. It may indicate a subliminal bias in readers (most of whom are presumably American).
Note that those comments are written in perfectly understandable English. Further note how often you come across comments written in perfectly understandable English, but they're downvoted anyway.
It suggests a bias in writers to assume that people would agree with them if only they could express their thoughts accurately.
> It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.
This is the opposite of how language works. You want people to understand the idea you're trying to communicate, not fixate on the semantics of how you communicated. Language is like fashion - you only want to break the rules deliberately. If AI or an editor or whatever changes your writing to be more clear and correct, and you don't look at it and say "no, I chose that phrasing for a reason" then the editor's version is much more likely to be understood correctly by the recipient.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I don't really want to see someone else's stylistic "warts".
I just want clean, easy-to-read content and I don't care about the person who wrote it. A tool like Grammarly is the difference between readable and unreadable (or understandable and understandable) for many people.
You could run the comments everyone else posts through an AI tool and ask it to rephrase it so that it is clean, and easy-to-read.
You could even write a plugin for your favorite web browser to do that to every site you visit.
It seems hard to achieve the inverse that is (would you rather I use i.e.?) rewrite this paragraph as the original author did before they had an AI re--write it to make it clean, (--do you like oxford commas, and em/en dashes! Just prompt your AI) and easier to read
> You could run the comments everyone else posts through an AI tool and ask it to rephrase it so that it is clean, and easy-to-read.
For those coming from a language other than English, you are more likely to lose information by using a tool to “reconstruct” meaning from poorly phrased English as an input, as opposed to the poster using a tool to generate meaningful English from their (presumably) well-written native language.
There's a big difference between me running a filter on other people's words, and those people themselves choosing to run one and then approving the results.
I personally don't see a problem with someone using a grammar checker as long as they aren't just blindly accepting its suggestions. That said, if someone actually is using it in that way, it shouldn't be detectable anyway, so it probably doesn't matter all that much whether or not it's included in the letter of the rule.
I disagree. HN is going to bury my raw unedited tirade of a comment about those fucking morons that couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. If I send a comment to ChatGPT and open up the prompt with "this poster is a fucking dumbass, how do I tell them this" and use that to get to a well reasoned response because that's the tool we have available today, we're all better off.
The guidelines state:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse
> Edit out swipes.
> Don't be curmudgeonly.
On the best of days I manage to follow the rules, but I'm only human. If I run my comment through ChatGPT to try and help me edit out swipes on the bad days, that's not ok?
I'm not using ChatGPT to generate comments, but I've got the -4 comments to show that my "thoughts exactly as they have written them" isn't a winning move.
If you see an incompetent coder and wish to communicate that the person responsible is a "fucking moron/dumbass", the tone with which you do so is not the problem. Tell us what is wrong with the code, as objectively as possible. That's what the guidelines are trying to convey.
But the problem is that people with poor written language / english skills are 'competing' with people who have superb skills in this domain.
There are people here who sit at a desk all day banging out multipage emails for work who decide to write posts of a similar linguistic calibre for funsies.
Meanwhile you have someone in a developing country who just got off a brutal twelve hour shift doing manual labour in the sun who wants to participate in the conversation with an insightful message that they bang-out on a shitty little cellphone onscreen keyboard while riding on bumpy public transit.
You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
I knew someone was going to comment on my use of the word there despite me putting it in quotes which was intended to let the reader know that I meant that word as an approximation of what I was meaning.
When I say competing I mean competing in the space of ideas here. There is a ranking system here that raises or lowers the visibility and prominance of your comments and it's based on upvotes by other uses. For better or worse people penalize comments with grammatical errors over ones that don't and that affects how much exposure other users have to the ideas that people write and how much interaction they get from them.
If that's the case why would somebody who has good ideas but poor expressive capability bother posting here if their comments are just going to get ignored over relatively vapid comments that are grammatically correct?
> If that's the case why would somebody who has good ideas but poor expressive capability bother posting here if their comments are just going to get ignored over relatively vapid comments that are grammatically correct?
No, I get your point. Unfortunately, alot of people here try to act high and mighty like they are posting here for some altruistic reason. The reason why I, you, and everyone else posts here is the human reason that we want others to engage with our posts. In order to do that, you have to put your best foot forward, which includes making sure the spelling and grammar of your posts is correct. While I do not use an LLM for this, I think that it is vaild to use these tools to make sure nothing gets in the way of whatever point you are trying to make.
> In order to do that, you have to put your best foot forward
In English. You have to put your best foot forward in English. And in your environment with the resources you have at your disposal.
For example, I'm currently engaging with you between steps in a chemistry process that's happening under the fumehood next to me while wearing a respirator, a muggy plastic chemical resistant gown and disposable gloves nitrile globes.
I am absolutely certain that these conditions are different than the ones I would need to 'put my best food forward' in this discussion. I'm also certain that quite certain that you and I would both absolutely stumble if we were obligated to particpate in this forum in a language that we're not proficient in as many users often attempt to do and are unfairly penalized for by other members of the community.
I'm with you on the LLM usage for grammatical issues for non-native speakers. I bet more in this community would feel the same way if Dang whimsically mandated that people had to use a language other than English on certain days of the week.
> You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.
I absolutely do not understand this comment. Are you saying that posting is competitive and that comments have "metrics"?
Yes! If my comment is above yours in a thread, it means I got more upvotes than you did, which means I get special bonuses and more to eat and you go hungry in Internet land. Also it means I'm better than you (obviously) and I get to go to this secret club with all the pretty people and you're not invited. Isn't that how this all works?
Kids have been communicating with "Santa" since forever. This is just another way to do the same - a modern "Santa Hotline". Nothing new under the sun.
Watch as your child's eyes
light up when Santa remembers their name, asks about their day, and responds to their wishes in real time.
$99 for 60 minutes of your child interacting with, their voice getting sent to Google. In a best case scenario, a parent who could already fill that role is standing by.
Can't help but imagine some kid being shunted off to the side during Christmas with only this thing to talk to while their parents are much too busy drinking and listening to some esoteric tech/acc podcast.
Or maybe it's something that parents can do with their children, since that's clearly the intent. It's also the convention for "letters to Santa" since...forever.
Honestly, it doesn't take much of a good faith effort to see this.
Before installing all those apps the author listed, I'd recommend this exercise:
Let the battery die on your phone, and live one week without it. Cold turkey. Tell people in advance if you need to, give them an alternate way to reach you. Replace your phone for that week with a small notebook that fits in your pocket.
During that week, every time you want to do something that requires a smartphone, jot it down in your notebook. Then, fifteen minutes later or so, write down what you did instead.
After a week, you're ready to start using your smartphone again and turn it into a so-called "dumb phone." Read your notebook and think honestly about which things you really needed to do, and which ones weren't such a big deal after all.
I find that regular wilderness backpacking trips in places without cell service accomplish this kind of reset in a fun, social (bring friends!) way that provides plenty of exercise and fresh air, with the added bonus of being a reasonably "normal" explanation/antidote to the social pressure of those "you're doing what??? I need to be able to reach you!"-type conversations.
There's the added bonus that being fully out of cell service effectively removes the ability to cheat altogether, though it seems inevitable at this point that satellite data will be invading the backcountry before long.
This is the way. I've spend few weeks back a wonderful time on remote islands in heart of Sulawesi, Indonesia. I even bought sim card for the operator that was supposed to have some coverage there (to stay connected a bit with kids back home). Suffice to say no phone signal for week and a half, I don't mean internet, not even sms.
Pretty amazing, one focuses on actual adventures, people, food, culture, coral marine life, diving and so on. It felt like spending 2 months there.
Then coming back to all this cheap pathetic crap was a proper 'bleh'.
I switched to a candy-bar style dumb phone for a month and did something similar. My list was pretty much the same as the one in the article with a few small changes.
The most jarring was probably maps - other things like email, messaging etc could be delayed until I could reach a computer but not knowing how to get somewhere right now was problematic and required planning in advance.
I usually kept my smart phone in my car and did a sim swap on the occasion that I really needed it.
same experience. switches to an old school dumb phone. my neighbor joked that I was a drug dealer, lol.
but man did I miss maps. need to go somewhere? get in the car, start the engine, look it up on some map app, and then I'm off.
text messaging and being able to send simple photos was also a loss. definitely missed being able to text the wife a photo of something on sale in the grocery store ("hey, 10% off X, wanna give that a try for dinner?"), and I missed how good some of the auto-fill was after a while.
to a much lesser degree, a phone was nice during some downtime. waiting in line for something, killing time in a doctor's office waiting room, etc. 20 years ago they had magazines, now they don't...
eventually after getting lost a couple of times I just tapped out and went back to the Pixel 4
Normalize checking notifications 1-3 times per day.
Once in the morning, once after work, once some time later in the evening if you feel like it.
During working hours there’s rarely any reason to touch or check your personal phone (and in many professions you simply aren’t able to).
During after-work hobbies and/or family time you are for obvious reasons unable to have your phone on your person (it’s in a locker room, or you’re playing with your kids) or unable to pick it up (any creative or performing arts, or you’re having family dinner).
I have reasons to believe that my sister works like this. We joke that she has "office hours". She will rarely answer messages or calls that she does not expect right away. Then at around eight in the evening, every other days or so, messages will start trickling in.
At first it was a bit annoying, but once you know that she works like that it perfectly fine. I'm starting to think that she's doing modern communication correct.
I've had this for years but it makes me check my phone more often I think. At times I find myself cycling through apps to see if someone replied, whereas if I had a notification I'd know whether or not to bother
Author here: this is exactly what had me turn on notifications for email. I first tried without it, but found myself "checking on important responses" way too much.
> This has cost me a relationship. (it was long distance to be fair).
Tbh, (imho, having tried it) in normal circumstances it would be a miracle to make anything really work like that, but at present you're just fighting a losing, nearly irreconcilable battle, unless you're both wholly on the same page about infrequent synchronous communication.
If a relationship relies on immediate responses to async, unpredictable, text-based communication, and what you want is a sane lifestyle, it's going to be a tough situation.
I just tell people that need my attention how to get it. Call me if it's important and/or time sensitive, otherwise I'll just check when I check based on the implied nature of the platform. Instagram is super casual unimportant brainrot usually, Messenger for coordinating plans with older millennials and Gen X family, Whatsapp for younger millennials sometimes, SMS or RCS is slightly more important and I'll get visual but not physical or audible notifications. I make it clear that if it's a group chat, I'll turn notifications off unless I'm specifically tagged, or maybe check in once a week if it's for a specific purpose, but otherwise I hate them. Signal for some things that aren't time sensitive, no notifications, no read receipts on any platform.
> They will perceive your lack of response as you not prioritising them.
And correctly so: you are prioritizing people that contact you in the normal way (via phone calls).
If I send you a text message, it's usually because I don't need an immediate reply; answering me tomorrow is good enough. If I do need a faster reply (if I'm texting an image or some such, or in a noisy place), I'll make a call afterwards, just long enough to set off your ringer so you hear it.
I also deal with notifications in a different manner: I have different ringtones and extensive notification filters set up. Most of my apps will not make any noise with a notification while the screen is off. Most notifications will not show up on the lockscreen. Most notifications will not show up in the status bar. My standard ringtone is an mp3 with a short quiet ring and a long pause before it ends, so while I do get call notifications they're easy to ignore; only important contacts (family) are allowed to bubble or pop on top, and they also get a different ringtone.
I dread migrating my phone, as none of this can be backed up. I changed phones last year and still find the occasional app that I forgot to blacklist notifications for and never noticed because things related to https://dontkillmyapp.com simply prevents it from running altogether when I haven't used it in the past couple days.
One aspect of no phone is how to deal with payments. Specifically UPI payments in India. These are QR code based payments and it is getting more difficult to pay by cash at many locations.
Right next to that is OTPs from financial institutions.
On the way towards the same issue in Vietnam. You can still pay with cash everywhere but it's becoming more and more normal to use QR codes. I guess in the next year or two I'll start to see places that only take QR. It's very convenient... unless you don't have a local bank account, or your phone runs out of battery, or, as happened to me 30 minutes ago, your bank's system goes down.
That would be a great idea if I were on vacation in a cabin in the woods. But realistically, I need my phone for just about everything I do on a daily basis, from payments, to navigation, to communicating with friends and family, and logging into accounts for work.
At least a few of these, like payments and basic communications, can be done from a watch.
Work accounts, camera, and maps are the big blockers for me. I know I can buy a camera but 90% of the times when I take a photo it's to instantly send it via a messaging app, mostly for work.
But I need my phone daily. I can’t log in to my client’s servers without 2FA, can’t make payments, can’t do many things that are super important.
I found Jomo app perfect instead. I blocked all apps and websites that are distracting or promote doom scrolling behavior in me. Once I went through a detox I’ve allowed them in the evenings for 15 minutes only when conditions are met (I’ve exercised and walked 10k steps etc.). I generally don’t have desire to use them then but I might have messages from my friends or I might want to publish something myself.
I do use Reddit and YouTube to follow topics related to work. And to some degree Hacker News as well. Come to think of it, these are the apps that make up for most of the screen time usage for me.
I think a middle ground version of this is possible, e.g. instead of letting your battery die, reset the phone to defaults and don’t install anything with the exception of critical communication apps.
Run the rest of the experiment as described for other categories of use.
Some people have family juggling/concerns that requires frequent contact (usually involving children being remote places).
There are many, many, not so strange reasons that someone might need to maintain contact. Thinking it's not possible suggests a very naive perspective.
Most people probably don't. I'm an editor who's been working in print for years, so the keyboard shortcut for an em dash is muscle memory for me at this point. I have always been a Chicago Manual of Style person, so I don't place spaces around the em dash. AP style guide users do place a space around it.
"Dug tunnels" - one of the most ridiculous boondoggles of any modern industrialist. The Boring Company is a machine for overpromising to get government contracts and underdelivering at exponential scale. He didn't start PayPal, he joined it and ended up getting fired, albeit with a golden parachute that gave him the chance to make more bets.
The "accomplishments" you're listing are mostly just investments that he managed to hype up very well. I'll give him this, he's an excellent huckster. But listen to his opinions? I wouldn't let him tell me what color an orange was.
"Today, you still find airbrush-inspired art in advertising that’s done digitally rather than with ink on paper. The digital art is a little too perfect though — the gradient blends are flawless, while an airbrush would give you the slightest inconsistencies that made it look more genuine."
I feel that way about so much digital painting and illustration now. Artists can work faster than they can with physical media, but the end result is always missing something when there are no happy accidents.
Ironic, because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections. We were totally going for maximum hyperrealism and clean precision. I had the same experience of craving an airbrush, obtaining an airbrush, then within a year seeing a demo of 32-bit color graphics editing (a museum had a computer set up for the public to try it out) and feeling silly.
> Ironic, because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections
I might be talking out of my ass, but I'm pretty sure we've "known" for centuries that imperfection has an enormous place in art. Before computers, before photography.
> because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections
This is quite amusing, because I always could tell the CGI [in the films] off the real deal because it was or too perfect or too imperfect, along with a shitload of a motion blur.
It was so until Chappie when I couldn't distinguish between the green screen and Rogue One when I couldn't distinguish a fully rendered scene.
Also a conterfeit VHS along with a DivX compressed copies (hey, 4700:700 !) always looked... more immersive than the 'real deal' in a theater, heh.
There’s a lot of CGI that blends in invisibly in most movies made in the last 20 years. Sure we notice the bottom 20% of terrible CGI + stuff that’s blatantly unrealistic, but all the stuff you miss is just quietly worked.
Poor makeup, anachronistic aircraft contrails, unsightly construction cranes, etc get quietly adjusted to make everything look clean in ways that don’t stand out until you start analyzing individual frames. On top of this some kinds of CGI have gotten so common that it’s less obvious how few physical cars are used in car commercials.
I think 80s music is still popular because it is good. Many artists of that era like Elton John, Paul McCartney and specially Stevie Wonder had a very good musical background and the advances in electronic music tech gave them tools to explode their talent to new levels.
This is probably survivorship bias or familiarity bias more than anything.
Music from the 80s/90s that is popular today has stood the test of time; there's a lot more music from these decades that we don't hear today & is not popular. We've also heard those songs a lot more times than contemporary music.
The happy accidents in this case aren't even directly discernable either. It's not like you say "oh that little random smudge is interesting." It's just an impression you get.
Old school animation has the same quality. It's all hand drawn so not quite as exact. It looks fantastic. You wouldn't really even call it flawed, just less formulaic.
I guess that makes me think "how could we model that with computers?" I mean we could make a gradient less smooth. We could add different sorts of noise. It sounds quite complicated but in theory a computer could do this. Practically speaking it may never be worth trying to implement. Kind of a 80/20 issue. That is, you could do a ton of extra work to bump the quality a bit but people are already pretty happy with it so why bother?
Exactly both of these sentiments are what, to me, make photography and film (movies in general) so much more interesting, both visually and emotionally more textured from a couple decades ago, compared to the forced perfection of both today as practiced by so many creators.
I practice black and white photography, for example. So much of what I see of it now looks like the overdone, over-edited forced perfection of style derived from the gritty beauty of much more crudely interesting monochromes of decades past.
There are some cases where CG in old movies looks better than the average CG in new movies, too, probably because the FX team responsible put a lot more work into getting to look right, despite the technological limitations of the era. No matter the medium, care and attention are felt.
I agree. I think when something is at the cutting edge, and you're creating effects no-one has ever seen before - (the first Jurassic Park, say) - people really go the extra mile to make it look as great as possible. Fast forward to today, when CG is pretty much a commodity - and it's often a lot more about getting it done on time and within budget.
True but it is also like saying that some office building came out better than other because the workers put more effort into it. There is skill to to the craft but also it’s a game of constraints and how the project is planned and budgeted is large part of how it will look in the end. I believe what has changed is that producers know that cg looking cg is just a stylistic choice among many others and doesn’t hurt the box office in some genres almost at all.
That's a complaint I have about 80s music. So perfectly synthesized, it's fake. That's why I like 70s guitar and drums over 80s. Humans make artistic mistakes; it adds character.
It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.