There's no tell. Some people just have an overactive imagination and are hallucinating AI authorship wherever they go. I think the HN audience is especially susceptible to this given the amount of comments like GP. Don't get me wrong, there is certainly AI-slop to go around, but this is just a very well-written article in my opinion. At most, lightly edited. It reads like a human wrote it, but maybe I'm just gullible.
I don't think the quality of discussion about social media suffers from lack of specification. Whether or not you consider HN to be social media, or wherever your decision boundary is, doesn't change that most of the conversation does apply to the general class of apps/websites that have become de-facto short form video platforms. Which lots of people use, so the effects of use are consequential and worth discussing.
The conversations on consciousness though...oh man. I have to steel myself before diving into that mess.
I use the firefox extension "Unhook" to completely hide suggested content on Youtube. Really effective, I kindof can't believe how much time I spent getting suckered into watching video essays that absolutely did not deliver.
There are plenty of people who sincerely enjoy the aspects that make older tech less convenient or practical. Maybe it's an appreciation for the engineering or "comprehensibility," often it's because older tech produces unique outputs that can't be adequately captured by newer technology.
Reducing people's interest to "social signalling" comes off as dismissive.
Come on. This article isn't about the joys of doing things the hard way. To quote: "Then, at the start of 2022 I got my first analogue film camera: a Leica M6. (I know... I dived straight in the deep end.) This was my first introduction to how editing could be easier."
It isn't easier. Film is pain. Pain can be good, but this is selling a mirage.
Hello, original author here. What I meant by “easier”:
Consumer film is designed to be developed and scanned/printed by your lab. You then get a finished image.
Most modern interchangeable-lens digital cameras are designed for you to shoot RAW and edit in software like Lightroom.
Because I first started photography around 2010, I was taught at school to take pictures, then edit them on a computer.
Shooting film for the first time was originally about trying something new in a hobby I enjoy. As stated, it removed the need to sit in front of a computer. “Easier”.
I wish I’d stopped shooting RAW sooner. Trying film led to that realisation.
(And I agree film can be a pain. I’ve ruined several rolls through both stupidity and cameras breaking. I still enjoy it.)
> Most modern interchangeable-lens digital cameras are designed for you to shoot RAW
I don't think I agree. The photos straight off my GH4 are perfectly fine as-is, it's quite a bit of work to get the same thing out of Darktable, let alone something better. I do still shoot in RAW, for those 1% where I do want to go in manually. (The GH4 isn't great in low light.)
> I wish I’d stopped shooting RAW sooner. Trying film led to that realisation.
I mean... yeah. But don't blame the camera for your personal habits ;)
Just to be clear, your comment had a general statement about how you perceived the motivations of "people buying vinyl". That's what I was responding to. (People using VHS filters on social media is by definition social signalling so no comment there lol).
And I completely agree with your point about touting film as "easier" than digital. That's a stretch.
I’m a believer that the hard work brings more joy, digging crates of vinyl and finding that rare album even if it has pops and noise feels 100x more enjoyable that streaming it.
Not asking adversarially at all here: what do you mean by resisting with "real numbers" without media campaigns, social media, or protesting? What do the vested parties actually do to secure their second amendment rights? Do you just mean having large voting blocs?
Feels like a pretty tidy parallel to luxury beliefs. Luxury activities would fit, especially since some of these are the activity equivalent to the belief.
It looks to me like OpenAI's image pipeline takes an image as input, derives the semantic details, and then essentially regenerates an entirely new image based on the "description" obtained from the input image.
Even Sam Altman's "Ghiblified" twitter avatar looks nothing like him (at least to me).
Other models seem much more able to operate directly on the input image.
