[varelse]

Those models are surprisingly tractable. You're nowhere near as interesting and unique as you might think you are at scale.

Evidence: actual work experience at building latent representations to characterize customer behavior at FAANG. It's hard to come up with something that really gets you, but it's not hard to come up with something likely to make you spend more. You're surprisingly predictable on that axis and even if you aren't because you put the hours into being a crazy outlier, almost everyone else is, and you don't matter.

[convolvatron]

I wouldn't think it would take putting in any hours to be a crazy outlier - just a markedly different value system.

[varelse]

Which itself requires hours of listening to alternative influences in order to develop, no? The pressure to conform within 2 sigma is strong in almost any society IMO.

What people don't seem to grasp is that most of the supposed alternatives to mainstream are pretty mainstream too or we wouldn't have stores like Hot Topic in the first place.