Tag: skill-estate
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Where are the guilds, part 435438543895
Art historians and teachers are noticing that AI is replacing real masterpieces in google searches. Forgery is extremely old. Galleries and museums have been fighting human copiers and forgers for hundreds of years, and they’ve usually won the fight. Why aren’t they even TRYING to fight against mechanical forgers? This is the key variable in…
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Authorship?
Another day, another point-miss. = = = = = START QUOTE: It’s estimated that 500,000 to 1 million books are published each year, and that’s excluding self-published material. The publishing market has become saturated, with the average book selling less than 200 copies. But suppose one person could “generate” not just a few books in…
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Skills != books
Randomly looking through old architect books on the web, trying again to find an equivalent to Grandma’s apartment building, a fourplex with a separate service hall. Previously I’d looked through my bookshelf of Dover plan books from that era, with no results. There are some fourplexes but no service halls. While googling, another aspect of…
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Not the best argument
Via MindMatters as usual: New AI systems have carved inroads into many industries, not least of all those involving voice and audio. Now the audiobook business is in trouble; since AI has the increasingly good ability to mimic the human voice and generate words, many voice actors and readers have watched the demand for their…
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He says what I say
Arthur Brooks gives the best possible job advice. This is especially important for Uncool people who are NOT going to get satisfaction from the social side of life. Brooks emphasizes COMPLETION: = = = = = START QUOTE: “Maybe you’ll work in your major — probably not. Maybe you’ll land your dream job — probably…
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What would be familiar 2
In previous item I noted that a 1950’s writer would find today’s Hollywood landscape mostly familiar. How about a 1950’s Teamster? Even more familiar. The head of Teamsters in LA is Lindsay Dougherty, who literally wears Jimmy Hoffa on her sleeve. She declares absolute Teamster support for the writers strike in language that Jimmy would…
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Assisted skillicide
The cost of outsourcing a skill is NOT a simple binary. Humans, and our nearest relatives birds, naturally make and use tools. It’s in the genes. When an object is too hard to reach or too heavy to lift, we find external ways to do it. More sophisticated automation has been around for a few…
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Why they fail
Small Christian colleges are collapsing. The NAZI TORTURE CAMP was the final blow, but most were already unsalvageable. Returning to the sieve theme. A few college courses are genuine training. The vast majority are selection devices to guarantee that only the most orthodox students get into top status positions. Christians no longer occupy top status…
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Sieve
The purpose of patents and copyrights is to block innovation, not to enable. The purpose of the current school system is to block most people from developing their skills, letting only the selected few percolate through the holes. Without school, most skills would be fully mature and experienced at 21. The old apprentice system accomplished…
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Classical symmetry
The Enid Postcards site runs a few hundred old pix in slow rotation, eliciting more or less the same comments every time. Repetition tends to bring out patterns. When I lived there I didn’t appreciate the SKILL of the bricklayers who turned out intricate and sturdy art on every wall, whether visible or not. Enid’s…
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QT, KYC, KYW
I’ve been having schadenfreudisch fun watching various accounts of Budweiser’s idiocy. Most people are focusing on the specific politics, but the problem is simpler. QE made it possible to ignore the BASIC RULES OF BUSINESS. Know your customers. Keep your customers. Know your workers. Keep your workers. In the era of profit, successful businesses followed…
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EA fable
Interesting dream this morning. I was working with a Balaji type. He was talking fast, in long sentences with lots of NUMBERS. He was building fences all over the world, trying to cell off all the humans so they would die and he would be the only survivor. I tried to tell him that he…
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Soundscapes
Sarah Hepola’s latest smoky podcast is intensely based in NYC, with NYC sounds in the background. She’s discussing the difference between NYC and Dallas soundscapes, garbage trucks and jackhammers vs crickets and frogs. Reminded me of a couple items I’ve done on the subject. From 2022, a fable based in NYC’s earlier soundscape, dominated by…
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More consequences of QT
Half-baked thought, continuing along the lines of WHERE ARE THE GODDAMN PHILOSOPHERS? Now that the free money of QE/ZIRP has dried up, many pointless projects and pointless IPOs are going away, starting with the huge totally pointless project of bitcoin. Corporations are suddenly realizing that they need customers. Free-money woke idiocy doesn’t work any more,…
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Rembrandt, Picasso, NFT
As usual Sailer manages to ask an off-the-field but provocative question. Why were the women in Old Master paintings usually ugly? The most important fact is that the Great Masters were serving the rich. The rich can afford beauty but they DON’T LIKE BEAUTY. This is an older version of the NFT quandary that I…
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