MossyFeathers

I think I understand what they're saying. Replace the "belly drumroll" thing with your favorite hobby; and "status-quo" with "normies".

The first message is pretty straightforward. The consumer wants the best but has an ungodly number of options to pick from.

The second message builds on the first, establishing that this character (lets call him Bob) is a "normie". Bob thinks OP is a weirdo because they find something mundane, like belly drumming, to be a fun hobby. OP tries to convince Bob that it isn't the belly drumming that OP enjoys, it's the hobby that OP enjoys. It's the people around it, the culture that surrounds it, and so on. This concerns Bob because OP has just admitted that they aren't really into belly drumming, it's everything around belly drumming that they enjoy. Bob is even more concerned about OP when OP tries to share the hobby with him. Bob then gets confused when OP ditches Bob and finds a group of friends who appreciate their enjoyment of belly drumming.

The third message then complains that, at some point, belly drumming might become a fad, at which point people who are only into belly drumming as a fad, become the main voice in the hobby; destroying whatever culture the hobby had built up.

I think there's another message missing somewhere in there that OP either meant to write but forgot, or they went full ADHD and just didn't properly connect their thoughts (it's okay, it happens a lot to me, that's probably why I feel like I can understand this lol). I'm guessing this is closer to what OP was trying to say:

People who enjoy the status quo, aka "normies" (actually lets call them Bob again), tend to look at a particular thing and, if they desire it, want to jump to the best. However, when Bob approaches an enthusiast or hobbyist for advice, they get many conflicting answers (because it often comes down to personal taste regarding "the best" of a thing). When Bob probes further, they may find that many of the enthusiasts don't actually give a shit about the thing itself, but instead they enjoy the act of finding "the best" thing.

One example that comes to mind is the running gag that hardcore audiophiles don't actually listen to music, they listen to their hardware. They spend hours and hours fine-tuning their setups using special audio tracks for calibrating your speakers, room, and so on; only to listen to a song or two to confirm their choice. They then return to tweaking their setup, spending more time placing crystals, buying outrageously expensive cables, and so on. These are people who enjoy the hobby itself more than the actual subject matter, and that's okay. As long as they know that the crystals and cables are placebos at best, then that's okay. Maybe they just want to support their favorite audiophile blogger, or think the cables or crystals are very pretty but feel silly for spending $200 on a 3ft cable; so they come up with a story about how it makes the sound better. As long as they're aware that the cables probably aren't doing anything special, that's okay.

(Edit: I can say from experience that when you get into a hobby, you tend to be more willing to spend more money on something than necessary if it means you're helping to support another enthusiast, group of enthusiasts, or small hobby company that you like. I'm guilty of doing this myself and I'm sure many of the people here are guilty of it too if they're honest about it.)

However, people like Bob get confused by this. Why would someone spend thousands of dollars on something they don't care about? Bob doesn't understand that the rituals are what makes it fun for this individual (lets call them Joe), not the objects themselves, and he thinks this is strange. So Bob makes fun of Joe for spending thousands of dollars on something they supposedly don't even like. Joe tries to introduce Bob to the hobby so that Bob might understand why Joe finds it fun, but Bob, not wanting to spend the time to commit, just gets even more confused.

"This is boring", says Bob, "I want to listen to music, not frequency sweeps playing through standalone phono preamps to find the one with the most accurate RIAA curve."

Joe gets tired of Bob mocking his hobby, ditches Bob and finds a group of friends who can appreciate Joe's hobby, even if they don't actually enjoy it themselves. This makes Bob very upset.

However, this isn't the end of OP's saga. OP then goes on to talk about how, at some point, Joe's hobby becomes a fad. Sarah, armed with Beats by Dr. Dre, believes that this is what being an audiophile is. She thinks Beats are the best-of-the-best and that anything more expensive is a scam. She thinks buying whatever is marketed as "the latest and greatest" is truly, the latest and greatest. She believes that this is what audiophiles do. They buy $200~$300 headphones and listen to their favorite music all day.

As such, she gets confused when she runs into a "true" audiophile like Joe. She's more likely to talk over Joe and "fadsplain"(?) the hobby to others because "audiophiles don't listen to frequency sweeps, that's what weirdos do". Furthermore, she's likely to mock Joe for being "behind the times" once the tide goes out. As such, Joe's hobby has been ruined.

I think there's also an implied message that consumers tend to trigger fads if enough of them are looking for "the best" of a thing, but it's vague enough that I'm not confident about that.

Edit: missed a bit; I think the last message is also trying to reference the first message with the "drum was always attached to their belly" thing and is saying that the hobby was always there, but the fad was started because Bob wanted an easy answer to his question and the market replied. Bob is happy with the market's answer, but hobbyists aren't because it redefined the hobby.

I dunno if I 100% agree with the message, but I probably agree with about 90% of it and can sympathize with OP.

Edit: accidently swapped Bob and Joe at the end, should be fixed now.

I unironically want to go back to the days where ads told you what the product was, what it cost, why you should buy it (compared to competitors) and where to buy it. All the cutesy "we're gonna tell a story" advertising falls flat on its face because, as much fun as the "real deal" can be, 99% of it is designed by committees to reach as big of a spread as they can. It's soulless. I'd rather my soulless advertising be straight and to the point than some eye-rolling, meandering, soul-sucking corporate garbage that takes 90 seconds to say what it could have said in 15s.

Hey advertisers, quit wasting my time, and your money and quit fucking doing it. The reason why the, "narrative advertising" or whatever you call it, works is because it's made by a small company and targeted at an equally small community. Chances are, it's enthusiasts selling to enthusiasts, and they know the people they're targeting better than you ever could.

You. are. not. a. small. company. You. are. not. enthusiasts. Stop it.

Afaik David Byrne and Gary Numan both claim to be autistic, though I dunno if they've been formally tested.

David Byrne is the lead singer of Talking Heads. Try watching something like his Stop Making Sense self-interview or True Stories.

I dunno about much about Gary Numan except that he was a pioneer in New Wave and electronic music in general; as well as the frontman for Tubeway Army (check out the album, Replicas).

In my experience, having a vr setup with vive body trackers consumes the 2.4ghz band really fast; so there are still reasons to swap in the suburbs, but they're more niche.

Source: my PC is too far away from the router for wired, so it uses wifi. I had to switch to using 5ghz because my internet would drop out on 2.4ghz whenever I played VRChat.

I was reading your definition as being too specific. Imo enshittification is any time the relative average quality of a class of products or services decreases, either due to increased prices or decreased quality at the same price. This can be applied to a specific product or service, but can also describe a decline in quality across an industry.

Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.

While I disagree with your comment on the definition of "enshittification", I agree that forced stealth sections are just bad design. I remember those have been a thing for a long time now, and before then it was ice levels.

Copying from a later reply: I was reading their definition as being too specific. Imo enshittification is any time the relative average quality of a class of products or services decreases, either due to increased prices or decreased quality at the same price. This can be applied to a specific product or service, but can also describe a decline in quality across an industry.

Ye, I've heard one of the biggest complaints people have is that they feel like she plays into the "hysterical/impulsive woman" stereotype, but I don't really see it that way. She's a captain who got thrown into the abyss and is trying to get her way out. I've seen people comment on how she threw out the prime directive almost immediately, or that she made decisions that made their trip home longer; compared to Picard who never makes a mistake. Sure, she made some dumb decisions, but comparing her to Picard (who's basically perfect) isn't remotely fair.

Picard is a highly decorated captain running the Federation's flagship in possibly the comfiest position a federation officer can hope for; with a charisma strong enough to answer any conflict with "I think this was all just a big misunderstanding."

Janeway is a captain of a small ship with a crew intended to hunt down insurgents before getting iseki'd to the delta quadrant, killing a large chunk of the original crew and forcing her to team up with the insurgents.

And yeah, of course she's gonna throw out the prime directive; she's going to throw out the entire book. Any good captain would immediately realize that Starfleet regulations work in """civilized""" space, but the further into the unknown you go, the less the regulations make sense. Like, what, was she supposed to just sit there and wait for backup the moment they ran into a problem bigger than them? Yeah, that's a great idea, we'll just wait for Picard to swoop in and tell everyone it was just a big misunderstanding and then Janeway can be on her way. He'll be here soon. Just aaaaanny day now...

Imo, Janeway is a very human (and imo, badass) captain and it'd be more fair to compare her to Kirk than Picard, Sisko or most other captains; and imo she did a much better job than Kirk. At least she wasn't being a sex pest to everyone they met.

When Janeway wants something done, she gets it done, Jane's way.

I find it fascinating that Janeway seems to swing between being everyone's favorite and everyone's most hated captain. I personally think she's awesome and she's one of my favorites.

I don't know where you are, but if your local PD has a slow line then you might try calling that and describe it to them. I say to use the slow line because it could be nothing and it's probably not an emergency as long as no one's fucking with it; but if there's a possibility that it might be explosive then someone should check it out.

I'm kinda looking forward to seeing how this pans out. Personally, I'd want to use it to make small, local hobby networks; kinda like how it used to be that basically anyone with a phone line could start an ISP.

I don't think you understand. Your consciousness is just one process amid a myriad of processes that your brain runs. It's that continuity that matters. You're correct that I don't know if my current consciousness is the same as prior consciousnesses, however what matters is that my brain has never shut off, giving me the feeling as though I am the same person; and it is because of that thread that I am the same person (though perhaps with a different consciousness).

Furthermore, you can't achieve immortality through digital consciousness if you just copy the whole thing and throw out the original. Again, it's the continuity. It honestly confuses me why people think that's a rational idea when the very obvious problem is, "what if something goes wrong and human me wakes up?"

That's why you have people, like me, who get frustrated when people start getting philosophical about this shit because they think you can "just make a perfect copy" of a person to achieve immortality.

Seriously?

No.

You just killed yourself and made a copy of yourself. You didn't achieve shit. Your new self might be happy, but your old self is dead. You're not suddenly going to wake up as a digital clone. You're not waking up at all, it's your clone that's waking up.

And hey, if that's good enough for you, then so be it. Just don't pretend you've achieved immortality; it was your digital clone that did. You're still going to die.

It also confuses me that so many people seem to believe that you're literally brain-dead while you sleep. If you were literally brain-dead then there'd be no way for you to wake up. Sleep seems to be when the brain processes memories too, so if your brain fully shut off, then it wouldn't be able to processes memories while you're asleep. Finally, afaik, once the brain shuts off, it can't turn back on; evolution didn't plan for a situation in which someone's been dead long enough for brain activity to cease before their heart starts pumping again. So why does everyone insist that you go brain-dead the moment your head touches the pillow?

I'll throw you a bone and say that, if/when AGI rolls around, I'll be more than happy to extend concepts like creativity and artistic ability to it. I'll throw you another bone and say you're technically not wrong either.

The question I've come to is less about what is "original vs remix", and instead, "sapience vs machine intelligence". If sentience is the ability for an individual to say, "I think, therefore I am", then sapience is the ability for an individual to figure out that "I think, therefore I am". Furthermore, in this context I define "machine intelligence" as something artificially created which demonstrates elements of sentience or even sapience but fails to meet all the criteria that we would consider necessary for human intelligence (basically machine intelligence is "fake" intelligence).

AI at its current state appears to be nothing more than machine intelligence. It looks cool, it can fool you pretty good, however, in the end it appears to be about as conscious and self-aware as a jellyfish or siphonophore.

Furthermore, the AI doesn't have the ability to create unique experiences. It doesn't have the ability to walk out the door, drive down the street, walk into a surf shop and buy a surfboard. Even if we say, "putting it in a robot is too hard, we'll just put it in VRChat instead", I still have strong doubts about whether or not the AI is actually experiencing anything.

I mean, it can't even learn from itself without human intervention ffs. Unlike a human, you can't train an AI while it's running. Unlike an AI, humans don't ever fully shut off until we're dead (no, your brain doesn't turn off when you sleep; if it did then you'd literally be dead).

So you're not technically wrong, but at the same time AI brings nothing new to the table. It doesn't have new experiences it can mix in with the artwork it was trained on, nor is there evidence that it'd be able to control or shape what it experiences. While I hesitate to attach the physical act of creation to the concept of creativity (I consider creativity to be separate from artistic skill), a large part of creativity is coming up with something new based on a combination of your own experience and the experiences of others. Whether or not you act on your creativity and how well you execute your idea is immaterial.