63 Comments

LOL. The Canva paragraph 😭 it really does blow butt

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Re #1 , probably. But the counterpoint is that I used midjourney to generate some images of “fat Gwyneth Paltrow” and “the Gen X Mrs Roper” this morning and I gotta say, it sparked a lot of joy.

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1000% true! I get a lot of joy from farting but i wouldn't start a tech compa-- wait a second

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100% it’s rubbish, not least because they’ve stolen a bunch of people’s work without permission. It’s billed as new & revolutionary and maybe it would be in the hands of people who had a moral compass but so far it can’t seem to handle just drawing people without weird melty arms and 1000 teeth. 🙄

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is the mascot an Orb? to be fair i would buy from a company that was so bold as to just have their mascot as an orb

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holy shit ur right the orb is powerful

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Yoo that canva design is literally dog feces. It's a bizarro world right now as these fucking silicon wannabe tech lizards try and endow magical AI to do human creative work. AI is super good at helping me learn finance. I tell my homie Chat GBT to explain a financial ratio and we gucci.

But it can't make art.

Although once we're all wiped out by robots and they need to create emotionless taglines for their artisan robot fuel cafe's, then AI will fucking shine, boy.

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Hey, I think we have similar interests. A few months back I built a project following the design principles described in this tutorial: https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io

- it almost won an award but lost to a site with rotating sandwiches

- thanks to it I met a man who sold his startup and pivoted to selling beef jerky via stripe. Our wearing is a straight line, and we call each other #meatverse

In all seriousness though:

>Am I crazy about all this AI stuff or does it really suck?

It sucks. If you don't have an advantage over your competitors,

1. come up with a new game, and then

2. tell everyone else that they suck at it and you're the champion.

Mix this with the enterprise feature checkbox fetish (how decision makers choose vendors) + fomo and AI makes perfect sense.

This comment by Zygmunt Bauman feels pertinent: https://publish.obsidian.md/untested/Proteus+-+uncertainty+is+the+only+certainty

(it's a post draft, please ignore the rest of the post after the quote!)

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hahahaha ok ya know what I already knew about your meat gpt and am a big fan!

that Bauman quote rules and god damn you for making me once again want to create a digital garden I swore I'd never do that again

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Quality rant. Don't disagree. (NOTE: for credibility purposes I will NEVER publicly agree with anything that comes out of Alex Dobrenko's mouth. But I *can* state that I don't disagree, which is what I'm doing here.)

It's all very wearying, aye, all of it. The tools are amazing and will be used to do fantastic things (for example, I gather AI is being used in medical imaging to spot potential tumours etc. in a way human eyes can't, which is terrific).

But the hype is the worst. It's crypto all over again - another thing that has the seed of something useful, wrapped up in layers of bullshit kilometres thick. It also enables a lot of bottom-of-the-Dunning-Kruger-graph people to spout off super-aggressively/confidently about all sorts of stuff they don't actually understand, which is never good. It's catnip for fuckwits.

So - I'm not worried about the machines. I'm worried about the idiots and soundrels using them to be even more awful to other people, as you say. That's the threat.

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Why does it feel like it's the SAME fuckwits as last time? Crypto -> NFTs -> A.I. feels like the same thing, over and over again. Which is a shame, because as you say - there's interesting ideas in there, but they repeatedly keep getting hijacked by numbskulls whose only motivation is profit.

And we all saw how much profit NFTs ended up making.

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👆

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I also came of age in 1999, when everyone said Amazon was the stupidest idea ever and it was going to fail, and the Internet was a joke, and then everyone over-invested in it, and the bubble burst, and everyone said "it's an even bigger joke!," and now I'm talking to you on the Internet, like we know each other, and it's how we both make a living....

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His point was not that AI is useless. His point is that AI is over-hyped and we are wasting money on vaporware. There are so many things we could use so much money on rather than a skinned ChatGPT.

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Oh I meant that everyone said it was overhyped. No one thought it was useless. In fact, they called it "The Information Super Highway" and they made it sound like the solution to all our woes :) Good catch! Sorry I wasn't specific enough.

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no AI sucks balls

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Artificial Intelligence is the perfect name. Artificial: fake, insincere, false, affected, unnatural, stilted, overdone, bogus, counterfeit, phony, sham...

I wonder if AI used AI to come up with their name.

However.....last week a reader/friend posted a limerick about a 909 pound pumpkin (yes there are 909 pound pumpkins) in the comments of my newsletter, After 21 Club. I asked him if he'd like to do a guest post for this coming week and he created a pretty surreal Halloween-ish, burning pumpkin-ish, Devil-ish image. No attempt on his part to copy anything, it was just for fun. I'm cool with that. Plus he's fun - and I'm cool with that too.

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This was hilarious to read!

And represents 100% my sentiment every time I visit Product Hunt!

A billion companies "founded" every hour to solve the same problem.

- Code without coding

- Marketing without selling

- Design without designing

But it does make sense... It's all about who survives at the end.

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Ai, especially when it writes, feels like an essay that an early high school student procrastinated and turned in 5 min before the bell.

Using as many words as possible to say absolutely nothing

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i have a non-AI, non-tech goodness/praise report.

all around me are these stacks of smoothe parchment-type piles with a mish-mash of the alphabet all over them. they're sewn or glued together and wrapped in a sturdy, sometimes pretty, painting or image. they take up a lot of space on my shelves and are a pain in the ass to pack into boxes when i move. but they definitely hold things in place —mainly me and my eyeballs.

if you could find a big store where they're all organized and maybe even catalogued, i'd recommend checking it out.

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1. Both are true!

2. Had my heart broken once. Once.

4. Yes, but they're very, very small.

5. My family. Duh.

7. Yup. Sorry, pal.

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‘no way he did that without god's help’ SENT ME 💀💀💀 loved your take!

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I so get that AI for half of Alex, is terrible! And it's no reason to bring serif fonts, god forbid Times New Roman, back into our lives like we're 90 years old. ALSO or Also, in the veterinary world, AI means Artificial Insemination, and I stand by that. So, even the supposedly cool initials for Artificial Intelligence are, well, spermy. Kinda makes the whole thing ejaculatory. Not the Fun New Party Trick we are all being smarmed with. High six, indeed!

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