Rov_Scam
3hr ago
Spammers are on to that. Most of the junk mail I get these days has features ranging from faux handwriting on one end of the spectrum to full blown security strips on the other, all in service of convincing the recipient that this totally isn't junk mail and he should take that all important first step: Opening the envelope.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
Surrealism in general doesn't have a good reputation these days, and wasn't much beloved even in its time.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
There is some discussion below about the game Mixtape, and the suspicion that it AI was used to some extent. I haven't played video games in a long time, and what I know about them could fit on the head of a pin, but as a 90s kid I became intrigued by the nostalgia that this game was supposedly aiming at, and how the producers supposedly got it all wrong, so I naturally did a little research to see what the big deal was. One of the comments below points out that in games like Red Dead Redemption a murderous outlaw wouldn't dare also be a racist, and while political sentiments might be the most obvious and ham-fisted examples of this, there's a larger trend of assigning contemporary values to historical eras. In the case of Red Dead Redemption I'd argue that this is more forgivable, as the further back one goes in history the less source material one has. After all, nobody who remembers the 1890s is alive today to tell you what you got wrong, so one can be forgiven for making some assumptions out of necessity.
But there are plenty of people who remember the '90s. If we narrow in on the specific demographic and assume that the game takes place some time in June 1995, there are about 3 million people who would have been graduating high school and are alive today to talk about it. But even there you run into problems, because the people from the Class of 1995 most willing to talk about their high school experience are the ones most likely to idealize it. Most contemporary reminiscences of 1995 are from the kind of hipster journalists who want to make it sound like they were cooler than they actually were, and thus use their current selves as stand-ins for their high school ones. I don't want to suggest that these people are lying about the past, simply that there is a tendency to emphasize that which has stood the test of time and conforms to contemporary tastes. The problem arises when people who were born too late to experience an era become influenced by contemporary ideas about what made that era cool and assume that the coolness that they perceive was typical. And it compounds further when this false nostalgia includes a dash of contemporary coolness for good measure.
The first time I noticed this in my adult life was when Vaporwave took off in the early 2010s. As a meditation on the nature of nostalgia it's not without interest, but as a representation of the aesthetic of 1992 it's absurd. The visuals suited the style fine, as the millennial memory of the era is as influenced as much by worn out VHS tapes as actual experience. But the music had more to do with creating a nostalgic mood than it did with evoking anything that was being played on the radio between 1987 and 1998. The movement's canonical song, "Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing" by Macintosh Plus, was nothing more than a slowed down and chopped up remix of Diana Ross's "It's Your Move". More original works in the genre can be described as synthwave with a heavy dose of smooth jazz. The tunes are enjoyable enough, but the insistence of pairing them with found VHS footage of home videos and toy commercials is puzzling, since the sound is more 80s than 90s.
Given the right context, this isn't a mortal sin. One of the watershed moments in vaporwave's development was the discovery and upload of tape reel of K-Mart muzak from 1988, and the subsequent uploads of cassettes from later years. The visuals often included shots of store interiors or clips taken from commercials. To the extent that vaporwave sought to evoke nostalgia, it was an oddly specific nostalgia for a certain kind of consumer capitalism. And even that's an unusual choice, since the period we're supposed to be nostalgic for sits on the divide between two very different eras—the more traditional, jingle-based make your product look like loads of fun on one side and the more detached, ironic style of turning the commercial into a work of art that can be appreciated on its own terms on the other. Just look at beer commercials; the ads of the early 90s showed men at pools surrounded by beautiful women in bikinis, clearly trying to impart an association of the product with parties and the opposite sex. By the middle of the decade they had frogs in a swamp each croaking out one syllable of the brand name. What this was supposed to say about Budweiser was anyone's guess, but it's one of the most iconic commercials of the era.
This all makes sense when you consider that Macintosh Plus and many of the other top vaporwave practitioners weren't born until the early 90s. Their earliest memories would not have been until the end of the era they were trying to evoke, and their nostalgia was largely for an imagined world based on the detritus of the era that ended up on the internet. It's ultimately a lie, but it's a lie in the same sense that all nostalgia is a lie. Because if vaporwave did give an accurate impression of what life was like in 1992, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. There wasn't much better about 1992 as compared to today, and quite a bit was worse. More importantly, 1992 doesn't exist as a discrete entity that you can visit. I remember 1992, and at the time there was nothing more exciting about it than there is about 2026. If you were to visit 1992 as a tourist, you would be aware of that fact and unable to experience things as you remember. But if you were to visit 1992 while not conscious that it wasn't the current year, then there would be nothing interesting about it; it would just be normal. And no, I'm not nostalgic for my childhood either. It was great, mind you, but people forget that when you're a kid all you want is to be older. Every minor decision is made by your parents: Who your friends are, what time you go to bed, what you have for dinner, what you can watch on television, how you spend your Saturdays. Yes, I remember retail outlets in the early 90s. I distinctly remember standing for what seemed like hours as my mother looked at every article of clothing in the store, and when the women's department was finally exhausted she moved on to babies because of some relative's kid, and at that point I was begging to go to domestics, or, preferably, home. If I go back to 1992 I do not want to spend it in a K-Mart.
Which brings us to Mixtape. It was almost certainly created by people who are too young to recall the era they're trying to evoke, because anyone old enough would have been well into their 40s by the time of the game's development. Much has been made of the whole "using a pencil to rewind a tape" thing, and while nobody would have done that just to rewind it, there was a use case. If the player mangled your tape, which wasn't an uncommon occurrence, you would usually use a pencil to wind it back up once you got it disentangled from the player. But that's beside the point, because the idea of a mixtape as something that you give as a gift to that special someone has more to do with our contemporary interpretation of 90s culture than to actual 90s culture. I don't want to suggest that the practice never happened. But it certainly wasn't widespread. Mixtapes were mostly something you made for yourself, either because few cars had CD players or because you were taping off the radio.
The thing people don't realize is that music was expensive in the '90s, and less popular acts were hard to find, especially outside of major metro areas. I can tell you that in 1997 the going rate for a CD at Music Oasis was $15, which is $30 in today's money per the CPI, more when you take into consideration that the average teenager in those days was more likely to make under $5/hour than today's teenager is likely to make more than 10. I looked through a lot of CD binders in my time, and most people only had like 15 CDs, and people who were really into music might have had about 20. If you were relying on your own collection for material, the well would have dried up fast, especially considering that most people only bought CDs for the hits. Most mixtapes per se were things that you made for yourself, either by borrowing from friends or taping off the radio. To the extent that most people made mixtapes for other people, they were likely to just record the whole album, or record the good songs from their CDs without regard for the running order.
The idea that mixtapes were curated items derives from the movie High Fidelity. Except in the film, the characters who are obsessed with mixtapes are music geeks who work in a record store. They aren't representative of the general public, let alone high school kids. To the extent that they existed they were, like mall music, not something that most people thought much about. John Cusack's monologue at the end of the film is notable because it's unusual. But beyond the overstated relevance of mixtapes, the game fails for its overreverence for the 80s.
I took a peek at the soundtrack, and it mostly consists of either stuff from the 80s or indie stuff from the 90s that wasn't popular. This can't be stated strongly enough, but nothing about the 80s was considered cool in the 90s. The entire decade was seen as anathema to any modern sensibilities. The divide in commercials was representative of a larger cultural shift, whereby grunge swept everything else away. By 1995, alternative rock had become mainstream to the point that anything from the previous decade sounded incredibly dated. The idea that high schoolers in 1995 would listen to Devo would have seemed laughable. The idea that they would listen to Joy Division or the Jesus and Mary Chain would have seemed puzzling, because most teenagers wouldn't have even heard of either of those bands. Their stuff was technically available, but in a city like Pittsburgh you would have had to go to a place like Dave's Music Mine on the South Side to find anything like that. A typical National Record Mart in the mall was unlikely to have it, and if they did, you would pay top dollar for it. A discount place like Music Oasis or K-Mart? Forget about it. Even in the 2000s I was having trouble finding classics like The Band's Music from Big Pink in normal CD stores; kids who were into non-mainstream music had to go into the city to find it.
The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia. The same people may tell you now about what they liked in the 80s, but that's with 30 years of perspective. High school kids trying to be cool aren't sitting around talking about what they liked when they were 8. In the early 2000s I certainly wasn't having debates about the best 90s movies.
When all that changes for most people is college. It's only then, once you're out of the coolness rat race, that you get over yourself and start getting nostalgic over your childhood. My own college experience was a bit different, because the 90s didn't feel like they had ended yet culturally, and the 80s were starting to lose their stigma. But nonetheless, that's when most people widen their cultural horizons and realize how cloistered their earlier lives had been, and it's easy for us to look back at our lives and assume that those are the same people we were in high school. And when someone younger consults an LLM, they're bound to get a distilled, distorted version of whatever our collective memory tells us the past was like. And when we don't rely on those distillations, it isn't much better, because we put too much stock in what we ignored, and end up with vaporwave. What can be done about this? Detailed research is one possibility, but even that may be hopeless. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I did a post a while back about how slop has always existed and AI slop doesn't change that. Slop art has existed since at least the 50s, and you've probably seen more of it in real life than you have actual art. They're called decor paintings and they're mass produced in Asia. You buy them at places like Hobby Lobby or those starving artist exhibitions they have in ballrooms of chain hotels. They may have a dozen paintings that are almost identical, all organized based on general style and color scheme so they'll match the rug and upholstery. They could have done the same experiment 50 years ago to prove that the guy on the street couldn't tell the imitation Winslow Homer from a cheap motel wall from the real thing.
If you want to get highbrow about the whole thing, watch the Orson Welles documentary F for Fake. It's about hoaxes in general, but he focuses on an art forger named Elmyr de Hory, who would fake the style of recognized (and deceased) artists and pass them off as works that were newly discovered. He ended up getting caught and spent time in jail, but it raises questions about the nature of what we value in art. The same can be said about the desire to have an original. If the only thing you care about is the immediate aesthetic impact, then the going rate for a Monet should be about $250, which is the price the Met sells reproductions for. Cheaper if you get a print. The frame will cost more than the painting. But that's obviously not the case, and it never has been the case, and nothing about AI will change that.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I agree, but I don't think that's what Graeber was referring to; hell, I started reading the book before deciding that the whole idea was dogshit and he didn't mention anything like that when describing his categories of bullshit jobs. All that did was show that he has no idea what adds value for a company. For instance, one of his canonical examples was companies that have receptionists even though they only get a couple calls a day. He then shows his hand by saying that the only reason they do that is so they can put on airs for the few customers they actually have. But that can be a source of prestige, and if it ends up being a bad use of money, that's a business decision for the company to make. I"m in law, and it's typical for most firms to only post a general phone number for the company and route all calls through the secretary (though they do other important work as well). I mostly have corporate clients who schedule Zoom calls on the rare occasions they want to speak, so I don't get many normal phone calls. But I do get some, and when I do the secretaries always act suspicious and reluctant when they ask me if I can put them through, as though it would be a huge imposition for me to have to talk to some rando.
Imagine you're running a small law firm that does probate work. It's just you and a secretary who also helps out with the business end of things. You'd like to take all your calls personally, but sometimes you're meeting with a client or at the courthouse and won't be available, and your secretary may be in client meetings with you or running other errands. You may only get two calls a day, but if they're from prospective clients each one could be worth thousands of dollars. You can automate this system and use voicemail or some kind of electronic scheduling service, but when confronted with this, most people will just hang up and call someone else. The receptionist can at least answer basic questions about what the firm does and if you're only tied up for another 20 minutes might be able to get that client in your office that same day.
Graeber seems to think that it's all part of a status game, as if it were all a bunch of greedy capitalists trying to impress each other with how much money they spend. But if you're a client who was actually able to get me on the phone and you show up at the office to a waiting room that's still empty after five minutes because the attorney is either with another client or just doing work, how is that going to affect your impression of the firm? People don't usually show up to law offices for fun reasons, and even something as simple as having someone to tell you to have a seat and the lawyer will be out in a few minutes and would you like some coffee in the meantime adds a lot of value. I'm not saying that it would necessarily make sense for our solo practitioner to do this, just that if a solo told me that he did I wouldn't think it was that unusual.
Which brings me to my final point, which is that Graeber's entire explanation for the phenomenon is bullshit itself. I could sympathize with him more if his theory was that bullshit jobs exist because of legacy practices that haven't been updated, or that some people are bad at business, or that executives are so far removed from the operations of their company that they don't know where value is being created, or that there's excessive regulation. To the contrary, he argues that it's all part of a capitalist system that requires the attorney to chain a young woman to a desk for 8 hours a day in exchange for barely enough money to survive because the system demands control.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
If the bureaucracy is being imposed from within the corporation, it's one thing, but it's totally different if it's a necessary response to legislation. At that point it's less about the job itself being bullshit and more about disagreement with the underlying policy. If the job performs the function of complying with the law, it's a fairly large value add compared with the penalties that would be imposed if the work weren't done. To give an example of a regulation that can come across as bullshit to some people, the EPA requires erosion and sedimentation (E&S) permits for construction projects that involve disturbing a certain amount of earth. Depending on the size and location of the project, you may need to apply for a permit, not need anything, or need to have an E&S plan on site but not need prior approval. This third category can come across as bullshit to some people, because it involves paying an engineer thousands of dollars to publish a report that no one is going to read, especially if the conclusion is that no special precautions involving erosion need to be taken.
You could just as soon not get a plan and no one would be the wiser. Except if runoff from the jobsite ends up washing onto your neighbor's property and he asks to see the plan and you don't have one. If you end up getting sued over excessive runoff causing damage, not having a plan to deal with erosion is a pretty big matzo ball to have hanging over the litigation. Sure, the government could eliminate E&S requirements entirely, but that only means that when a problem happens you get to spend several years litigating it. The tradeoff is that you minimize erosion problems on all projects from the beginning, and if you do get sued it's nice to be able to say that you had an E&S plan.
The problem I have with the bullshit jobs theory in general is that somebody who isn't familiar with a business presumes that they know how to run it better and knows what work contributes value and what doesn't. This is the fundamental issue I have with AI gurus saying that LLMs are going to take your job. Really? Because chances are they have no idea what you actually do, let alone what value it provides the company. They think of everything in terms of outputs and assume that being able to generate the output is the beginning and end of the value the employee provides to the company. It's a prime example of Rory Sutherland's Doorman Fallacy: A consultant to a hotel company sees the doorman's job as opening the door, and he tells the hotel that they can save a ton of money by replacing the doorman with an automatic system. But the doorman does more than open the door. He calls cabs, he deals with package deliveries, he provides a certain amount of security, he gives the hotel a degree of prestige, etc. Since it's impossible to quantify how much business you're getting as a result of these little services, it's easy to fall into the trap where you believe that automating away the doorman is an automatic windfall, especially when nobody is ever going to say in a customer survey that the existence of a doorman played any role in selecting the hotel.
Who is writing these questions and who is grading the responses? I can't speak to this particular exam, but when you take the bar you have to buy an expensive prep course run by a private company and the practice exams are graded by people who work for the company, who aren't the same as the people who will be grading the actual test. Assuming your situation is similar, it wouldn't surprise me if the mocks are being graded by non-practicing doctors who may not be doing the best job, especially, if like me, you went with a less expensive option than the industry standard. That being said, I never got any obviously bad feedback. I'd only be worried if the guy who graded your practice test is representative of who grades the real one.
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