[steveBK123]

I'd take it a step further and say this distinction is also contributing to the erosion of hobbies in younger generations. Even more so it is eroding time spent on productive / skill based hobbies and lean into consumption based hobbies.

Due to the rise of influencers, social media is barely a sharing platform anymore.. its just decentralized long-tailed broadcast media.

Many modern people think dining out and travel are hobbies, and in between doom scroll social media.

Time spent staring at the phone is rarely productive or anxiety reducing.

[RyanHamilton]

Great phrase. "social media is barely a sharing platform anymore.. its just decentralized long-tailed broadcast media." really captures the essence of what is happening.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Someone said it should really be called "social marketing"

[Aurornis]

EDIT: The author has been changing the post in real-time to try to undermine the comments calling out the clear AI use. The article now contains an admission that AI was used and the obvious AI slop image has been cleaned up. Some of these comments won’t make sense if you’re looking at the updated article.

Did you notice that this entire blog is just an LLM content farm newsletter? That the laptop in the headline image has a double keyboard AI artifact that the author didn't even spend 10 seconds cropping out?

The recent posts hit all the common points in LLM hallucinated content like the famous "recursive protocol" trope. The posts are about BS like "UFO markets" and reality protocols.

It's ironic that people are consuming this obvious AI slop uncritically while criticizing other people for their uncritical consumption of media on their phones.

[shubb]

Sorry, but wear is the recursive protocol trope? Also do you know a good list of these tropes for llm spotting?

[Aurornis]

If you read through postings of people who are under so-called “ChatGPT psychosis” there are some common themes to the LLM output they use as their proof that ChatGPT is producing epiphanies from their ideas.

For some reason, calling things “recursive” and talking about “protocols” are common. The second post I clicked on in this blog has a section called “recursive protocol” with similar content to all of the other ChatGPT style writing. The subheading talking about “UFO markets” and all of the flowcharts purporting to describe reality are also similar to other ChatGPT fake profound output.

[shubb]

Sorry, typo, I meant to ask 'what'. Agree there are tropes in llm outputs, specific and strangely not specific to a vendor. Very useful for recognising generated content. I was hoping you were aware of a good article to find more in.

[zakelfassi]

Is it AI then if there’s a human author? lol. You are funny.

[hombre_fatal]

One problem is that, like on a recipe page, the core ideas are stretched into a longer narrative.

And then the reader has to consume the narrative to derive the core ideas themself.

So it's off-putting that the reader has to split off the narrative chaff that you didn't even write and/or spend the time editing.

At some point it makes more sense to publish a minimal paragraph of your core ideas, and the reader can paste it into an LLM if they want a clanker to couch it extra content.

[Aurornis]

> Is it AI then if there’s a human author? lol. You are funny.

You have now updated the article to admit using AI to write it.

So why is it funny that I recognized it as AI?

[zakelfassi]

Oh well. If you say so.

[wizzwizz4]

It's an interesting keyboard layout, though.

  ± 2 3 3 2 6 7 8 0 0 = * -
   M W C B T Y U F O P ] [ [ [
    A G G E R H J K L | / ├ examb
   ² X C V B N M / ꕯ └ ;

Your other keyboard has even more exotic glyphs: is that APL?

[zakelfassi]

I'm sorry the GenAI image prevented you from engaging with the ideas. Layout removed if that makes you and others feel better.

[wizzwizz4]

It's not just that, it's that parts of the words are very hard to read. They've been smoothed over. Rather than being drawn to the information content, my attention skips over it like a stone over a lake. Some of the paragraphs are mostly yours: others clearly aren't.

Comparing the two images is a good analogy. You instructed the AI to remove the keyboards, and it completely changed the entire contents of both screens, as well as the hand holding the phone. I'm not sure what app has a modular plug as its "main screen" icon, but that distracts me from the whole rest of the image: even the cardboard surface of the bottom part of the laptop. It's less clear what you were trying to convey with the image than before.

Human-to-human communication is not something that benefits from inserting generative AI in the middle. This whole article is confusing: like a collaboration between a pointillist and an impressionist, except they didn't agree on what they were trying to say, so the picture can only be understood by working backwards and trying to model the production process in your head.

> But—and this matters—the sandbox remains someone else's. The app defines the possibility space. The platform determines what's possible. Users create within the system, never of the system.

I was going to use this as an example of a paragraph I understood, but then I looked closer: I have no idea what the distinction between "within" and "of" that you're trying to draw actually is. Sure, I know what you're trying to say, but which one is meant to be "within", and which one is "of"? The slop header image is a symptom of the broken authorial process that led to this article, not the primary issue with it: the main problem is that you started out with something to say, and ended up with confusing, verbose, and semi-meaningless output.

Most people can write better than this. You can write better than this.

[supportengineer]

Dining out and travel aren’t hobbies?

If that’s not gatekeeping I don’t know what is.

[wiether]

I think the difference is in the intent.

If someone is going to restaurants serving variations of a dish, or if they travel to cemeteries where their ancestors are buried, that's qualify as hobbies.

Whereas, if they go to all the trending restaurants or countries/cities on social networks, that's not hobbies.

In the first case, they make active decisions on what they do; in the second case, they are just following the decisions made by others.

To be clear, both are fines, as long as they feel happy with how they spend their free time and money.

But I know with who I'd like to spend some time, listening them explaining what they did in the last months.

[steveBK123]

Yes, in NYC, theres a very "culture vulture / hype beast" mentality of chasing whatever hot reservation is trendy so you can yap about it to the same circle of friends doing the same thing.

I don't need to know how expensive the tasting menu was or how hard it was to get a reservation because in the words of Logan Roy - "congrats on saying the biggest number".

Tell me about something you did, made, learned, gave back, etc.

Vacations are nice, I take them, but 90% of the time hearing people describe their most recent banal trend following travel is boring. I swear every rich person I know seems to take the same 5-10 trips as each over. I would probably find a discussion of a book you read while on vacation more engaging.

[SapporoChris]

Sure, you can call it a hobby if you wish. I would call it a meritless hobby.

[steveBK123]

They are consumption that can sometimes be thought of as hobbies.

Is shopping a hobby?

Hobbies to me are more about putting something out into the world even if just for yourself or family.

Cooking is more of a hobby than dining out.