striker
9mo ago
whole lineup of self-described experts in the industry trying to sell it as a productivity tool
No shortage of snake oil people around, looking for the next big thing to try to sucker people into swiping the credit card.
BUT!
It is a massive productivity tool.
Can’t speak to your day to day or possible ways it can help (in short: it can), but I’ve been using it for:
- In-house coder in building a practical web app (I can read a decent amount of code but I’ve never written code professionally). It’s helped me get to a working prototype in roughly 8 hours of prompting/testing/fixing/retesting.
- Trained GPTs for some very specific writing/editing projects, which allows me to get to a very solid first draft in about 10 minutes instead of 2 hours.
- Analyze thousands of rows of data and give some recommended actions, likely costs, potential benefits and timeframes. (This was SEO and web analytics data.)
- Teaching me loads of things. NOT information. More a conversation that allows me to go deeper in my self-education on a particular topic (e.g. coding, mathematics, finance, spreadsheet functions etc etc).
A broader more philosophical question is the possible impact of all this productivity on society and individuals. Will people become less resourceful? Will society as a whole become habituated to forcefed AI-generated soulless crap? Who knows. Probably second, third and fourth order effects that can’t be predicted. But overall, if you actually work with it rather than expect it to do something for you from start to finish, and then get good at working with it, you can fast track the hell out of a lot of things.
striker
9mo ago
Been writing (professionally, freelance, hobby, semi-sordid erotica under a pseudonym…) for 25+ years.
My approach is:
- write the thing
- take account of how writing the thing feels (if it feels flowy, it’s much more likely to be good)
- edit the thing (this can be just a single run through for a short piece, or for a longer or more consequential piece, printing out the whole thing, laying it in sheets on the floor and taking a red pen to anything that seems out of place or which doesn’t add to the forward momentum)
- leave it a while (at least a night)
- read the thing (if it emotionally stirs me or moves me to read it, it has a decent chance of being good, or at least as good as I can make it)
After that, having the courage, tenacity and organisational chops to get it out into the world and into the hands of the best person/people you can find to read it is a whole other set of skills.
If your aspirations are for maximum excellence in writing and editing, I recommend Draft No. 4 by John McPhee.
striker
9mo ago
Reminds me of something the late great British sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney said a number of years ago: “You like giant killers. I like giants.”
Not from the USA, but I get this perspective. I admire sustained greatness, and am happy to role model it, but watching something that’s expected to happen doesn’t often set the pulse racing. Tennis over the past 15 years gave me the sports star I loved the most - Rafa Nadal. He was clearly putting in sustained greatness, but just happened to be playing at the same time as the two greatest ever, so he was often an underdog too. (Some of his matches v Federer and Djokovic at Wimbledon were like Shakespeare plays with rackets and balls.)
[In short, greatness is the left brain ideal. The emotion of a big upset is the right brain ideal.]
striker
10mo ago
Father of a 15-year-old daughter. Our staple diet, and staple diet of everyone we know, is potatoes. At least 5 days a week, at least once a day – potatoes. Daughter spat them out the first time she tried them at six months old and has never got a single one down in all the years since. She can’t seem to eat cooked potatoes in any form. She’s picky, and has always been, and it just seems to be something in her DNA. Who knows.
striker
10mo ago
Hard disagree. We have to “put pussy on a pedestal”. Just like women need to have their men on a pedestal too. This is literally the only way you can flourish over a timeframe of decades without ending up hating everyone and everything, no matter how much you own or how much pussy you plunge.
striker
10mo ago
I enjoy making my own, and it’s always a great hour with the kids rolling out their base and painstakingly preparing toppings and watching everything bubble and rise nicely.
That said, I am also on OP’s side in that there is a pure form of joy in finding a local place that does it consistently well. There’s a guy near me, Eastern European fella, he and his wife work flat out 8 hours a day 7 days a week and close the place for 2 weeks a year. They have 500+ 5-star Google reviews in a town where 50 would be in the top 3%. Unbelievable dedication to his craft. (He’s a bit of a pompous a-hole but every silver lining has a cloud.)
striker
10mo ago
End of day, it's about writing crisp documents.
Honestly I do yearn for a job where this is highly valued. Too often I’ve found myself in places where it’s just bull-in-china-shop stuff, doing things mindlessly and then gathering up the debris mindlessly. I wrote a 6-page memo recently to propose a project and outline its week to week operating mechanisms, medium/long term anticipated benefits and challenges foreseen. May as well have scratched my scrotum for 3 hours for all the good it did.
striker
10mo ago
You'll just tell it to do something and it'll do it. Like any ordinary human.
Have you ever actually worked with humans? :-)
striker
10mo ago
The ubiquitous availability of beer
Say more? Only been to Germany once for short weekend in Berlin years ago. Have seen comfortable attitudes to alcohol in Europe (wine with meals France and Italy, small beer at 9am on a sunny day in France, gorgeous and strange beers in Belgium). Wondering what the situation is in Germany. I love beer but I hate drunks, and attitudes with and towards drink is off the charts in places like UK where the objective seems way more about getting pissed than actually enjoying oneself maturely.
striker
10mo ago
This jacked middle-aged Russian dude named D who worked as a programmer and read a whole bunch of classic literature. He clicked very well with me and in broken English would tell me a whole lot about life. His analysis of me being someone who needs a strict routine and some meaning in my life to work on more, and how I try to "sell" myself to others in attempts to get them to like me instead of being who I am more freely. I met guys like this dutch ex party head who now runs e-commerce in Africa, a Russian girl who works for a gambling organisation, and a rich Thai guy who abused every drug known to mankind and now has black feet from it.
There’s a book in this, dude!
D, the Russian guy, sounds like a very good person to have met. I wish someone had analysed my like that when I was younger (feels spot on for me too…)
I guess I’m looking forward to your weekly updates.
striker
10mo ago
I agree with all this. Even my darker artistic experiences — such as spending a few hours with Goya’s black paintings in the Prado in Madrid — were the opposite of traumatic. It was moving, transformative. It changed me in some way, fundamentally. Maybe that’s another definition of trauma, but it’s not one I recognise.
striker
10mo ago
To force this off on a tangent, please let me have some examples of this:
who like our films challenging, ambivalent, stimulating, and nihilistic.
If you had a few more mainstream and a few less mainstream examples, that would be great. (I have some ideas — e.g. Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Paris Texas — but love to hear of this is on the right track or you have completely different ideas.)
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure I associate this with the “inflict psychic pain” category. I’m more in the camp of “this describes a difficult but likely universal experience”.
striker
10mo ago
Inquest into young Irish soccer player who died from the effects of a massive brain haemorrhage five days after receiving the one shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine in 2021.
The inquest was told evidence will be submitted that 59 other people suffered intercranial bleeds within 10 days of receiving the same vaccine.
Details of this are dreadful to read. Will be interesting to see what fallout there will be, if any. J&J will no doubt have plenty of big-hitting barristers on their side to sow reasonable doubt that this was anything to do with the vaccine.
I share your frustration, anger, outrage that the craziness of those 2+ years were just allowed to pass and be forgotten. In Ireland (where I am) stories were legion of different rules for those in charge than the rest of the people. Old people were allowed to suffer, die and be buried alone, with no family contact, because of isolation regulations. People who refused to take a vaccine that was (let’s face it) experimental having been rushed through foreshortened clinical trials, were outcasts, prevented from entering any space where the vaccinated were. Apps and QR codes to separate the noble majority from the degenerate minority. It’s an enduring disgrace and it nauseates me that we’ve become too fatigued by it and too sedated 360-degree 24-hour screens to remember what went on. Therefore we’re destined to repeat it, and worse, at some indeterminate point in the future. It makes me sick.
[Edit: There’s so much crap about DEI but so much of what went on was its opposite. It was the preferential treatment of the old and the wealthy at the expense of the young and the healthy. That split has continued with further wealth transfers taking place since then via pensions and taxation. Spoke to a guy recently who, at 65, got his free medical care and discounted entry to the swimming pool and sauna while the hardworking and broke generation can’t afford either.]
striker
10mo ago
She was the one who was sexting by the sounds of it. No word of RFK nudes being sent but seemed to be plenty of hers landing in RFK’s phone. Gotta hand it to him. There’s not a man out there who wouldn’t be happy about this when he’s 70.
striker
10mo ago
I know nothing about any of that, other than the observation that the internet (where I’m assuming lots of what you talk about lives or are least has deep roots in) is opening up thousands or millions of new niches to cater for and profit from new interest groups.
But honestly, I don’t think it’s relevant at all to this point. This is about mainstream publishing and society/culture. Which has become extremely anti-male/anti-masculine in the past ~10 years.
I’m talking UK/Irish literary fiction, which is not internet native. It’s offline establishment native. It holds a powerful influence over the conversations being had by normie people who don’t spend any time on Reddit or X (and who might not be able to find Reddit or X if you asked them to).
As a sideways related example, Entourage was a hit mainstream US show, centering on four male characters and their interests, ambitions struggles, screened between 2004-11. When you watch it now and realise that there’s an almost 0% chance of anything like it being approved now, never mind be given prime time slots for years, you realise how far the mind virus has gone in the decision making corridors of power across all mainstream publishing and media.
striker
10mo ago
Read “Earth” by John Boyne (author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) this weekend. Short novel, second in a series of interconnected “Elements” stories. (Water previously published, Fire and Air to come).
SPOILERS BELOW
Quick and easy read, 165 pages that zip along. Narrator is a young professional footballer in the UK who has been implicated in a high profile rape trial. (He’s charged with accessory to rape, his mate, a more high profile teammate, with rape.) The narrator is gay and came to football via an unconventional route, having previously worked as a rentboy for wealthy, sordid and powerful figures.
It has 1000s of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads at an average of 4.3, plus a lot of positive attention in mainstream media (at least in UK/Ireland, not sure about US etc), so you’d think it’s worth a couple of hours, right?
Yes. But not for the reasons you might think.
Almost all the characters are male (central and peripheral):
- Narrator
- Teammate / rapist
- Narrator’s father
- Rapist’s father
- A pimp who hires out rentboys for wealthy men
- A knighted Lord (“Sir”) who hires rentboys for his sordid pleasure
- A priest
- A barrister
- Another teammate / gay f***buddy
- A farmer’s son
- A football coach
With the possible exception of the priest (a Stereotypical Man of Great Spiritual Understanding) and the barrister (a 2D legal eagle) all male characters are uniformly loathsome, lying, controlling, screening, misogynistic, raping pricks.
Those Amazon and Goodreads reviews are FULL of 5-star reviews from women. The media/newspaper reviews all seem to be left-leaning, virtue-signalling, vapid and vacuous.
Lots of reviewers called it “disturbing”. I think so too, but for very different reasons than they do.
It’s worth reading, and also disturbing, to see up close just how anti-man mainstream publishing has become.
I believe it’s one of the most dangerous books I’ve ever read, because it underscores something I’ve been observing in publishing.
Complex reality, including the inner world psychodrama of human beings, used to be the thing intelligent fiction did brilliantly. It is possible to learn as much about humanity from reading a handful of books by Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Hemingway as you’d get from a hundred lifetimes. Now, mainstream fiction is another front in the war against reality. Instead of learning about humanity you will more often fill yourself with disinformation, much of it from self-flagellating male authors keen to impress feminists and men who deny their own balls.
This book could easily have been called “All Men Really Are Bastards”.
striker
10mo ago
So what does Mike Tomlin do in this situation? First he wastes a timeout unsuccessfully challenging the spot of the ball. Then he wastes another timeout so he can think about the decision. Then he kicks the field goal anyway, because of course Mike Tomlin was going to kick the field goal.
Hahaha 😝
But surely even Tomlin wouldn’t use his last two timeouts at the same time with 7 minutes left and one score down…
striker
10mo ago
Say you’re not “tolerably well off monetarily”. What would you say to someone who has generations of poverty (often extreme poverty) in their genes and wants to break that cycle?
striker
10mo ago
Not sure it’s the dumbest question I’ve ever asked but it is one I’ve never asked in real life (maybe because I’m too embarrassed to ask it, maybe because I’ve never had someone good to ask it to…)
How do you think about maximising your earnings? Asked another way: How do you go about making the most money for the least effort without breaking the law?
striker
10mo ago
Nice rundown. I’m not in the US so the church-based focus of this is quite alien to me. A lot of people here go to Church but it’s down from probably 90%+ in the 1980s/90s to 30% now. (Guessing on these numbers but the fall off has been huge in a generation or so…) And the only people who use Church as social outlet are people aged 80 and up. Sad but that’s just the way it is, and probably a natural result of abuse scandals and coverups.
Could you explain what you mean by “ fraternal organization”? [Yes I can ask Google but just wondering what exactly they look like for you…]
For me (40s, married almost 20 years, two teenage kids) social life is quiet. I still live close to where I grew up but drifted away from all school friends (drift took place all the way through 20s, by the time we were all 35 we had nothing in common anymore). And I haven’t replaced those friends.
I’m involved in management teams of my old football club so it’s good to still be a part of a group of 20-30 year-olds trying to get the most out of themselves and each other. (It’s amateur but serious.)
Otherwise I run but not part of a club and prefer to do it alone. Also a member of a tennis club but it’s a strange social set, plenty of older richer people who have it made and are just enjoying life and I don’t have much in common with them, while the people my age and younger are sort of poor, a bit “drinky”, whiny and unambitious.
I’m after people my age with drive, energy and ambition - next stop might be a golf club. I love lots about the game but my game is crap and I haven’t yet got over the ego hump of getting lessons and putting in the hours to improve.
My wife and kids spend a lot of time together. I work from home, wife works near home, so we’re together 7 nights a week for an hour or two at least, but we haven’t done much socially. (Wife and son are mildly autistic and hate crowds so happier sitting silently with books, art or games at home.)
I’m much more extrovert but haven’t had much of a chance to explore that part of me last number of years. I like things like horse racing and poker but don’t have any friends to go/play with, went alone a few times and actually enjoyed it but still hard to get over the feeling of being a loner (I see other loners kicking their heels and looking smelly and friendless and would hate hate hate to be like them.)
I also write some poetry but have zero time for the poetry/spoken word scene. Full of self important dicks who think capitalism is to blame for their shitty lives and want to take it out on the world with snarky writing that has poor scansion and no rhythm.
Thanks for the question. It made me think about something I’d really like to improve.
Reminded of the story about … was it Leonardo? … who said that he wrote everything down because once he wrote it down he would remember it and never need the piece of paper again.
(Aware of the irony that I have half remembered a story about memory.)
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