Influencers as the future of culture is not great. Hollywood had a ton of issues but it at least had some... class? If you watch an interview with Mr. Beast or other famous influencers they are concerningly ignorant, have little self-awareness and a child-like approach to reality. It makes total sense given these are teenagers who were lauded with fame for entertaining other teenagers on social media.
I watched the Mr. Beast episode of David Letterman's show, and I had no expectations but figured he must have some charisma as the most watched youtube person. He was unable to explain basic concepts, had no self-awareness, and generally seemed detached from any sort of reality. It was shocking to think that is who is shaping young peoples minds.
“but it at least had some... class”
Not if you’d have asked the WASPs at the time, they very much looedk down on Hollywood. Saw it as vulgar and beneath them for many of the same reasons people dislike MrBeast. The 'class' only came afterwards.
The movie industry was, for much of the 20th century, split between production in Hollywood and finance in New York.
Probably the last gasp of that was Marvel, where, for a long time, the merch and comic people in New York made the final decisions.
Hollywood actors being vapid idiots is a trope, or rather reality, as old as Hollywood. Every time they go on Letterman they have to carefully follow the script written for them to avoid embarrassing themselves and the industry. And they often fail at that.
BTW, actors are very often prostitutes. Have been since ancient times and the association has stuck. Mediterranean yachts are packed full of C-lister actresses/hookers. Not to mention most of them get jobs by sleeping with producers, which is just an indirect form of prostitution. I don't know about you, but classy is the last way I'd describe Jennifer Lawrence sucking Weinstein's dick.
> Hollywood had a ton of issues but it at least had some... class?
It looked that way because they had media training and their public personas were carefully managed, with staged interviews and media appearances. Behind the scenes, it’s a different story.
Influencers are rewarded for seeming authentic. Mr Beast coming across badly in a traditional TV interview just makes his audience think he’s more real.
When I was a kid, I used to world WWF (World Wrestling Federation) with my best friend. We loved the interviews (pre/post "fight"). Those guys were idiots and certainly "detached from any sort of reality", but also very funny to 10 year old boys! I also liked Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. I turned out just fine.
I think things like "classiness," "grace," and "tact" are all but dead, both in Hollywood and across the population. Everyone seems to be mentally teenagers, but in middle-age bodies.
I understand this sentiment. When I look at my own life, one culture constant has been the decline of "formalism" -- dress, language, jobs, inter-generational relationships, privacy. If anything, the average YouTuber is a pretty average person -- not too good looking, not too well coached by a PR team, not too well dressed. Isn't this a cultural "win" because we are getting more authentic content, instead of ~10 major TV networks and film studios deciding who we should watch?
Yep. But give it a few decades for the money to figure out how to wall off outsiders, insulate their little cadres of influencers and firm up networks of fake and real methods to direct popularity.
Still - probably better than Hollywood in the long run, and more accessible, even in the hellish direction it will undoubtedly go.
'Class','taste' etc these are all very subjective. One could argue that Mr Beast built all of his fame from scratch and didnt have it handed to him or having to sleep with some powerful gatekeeper - something you can't say about all your 'classy' hollywood stars. If you go back a century you can probably find people kvetching about the lack of class of these new fangled movie people compared to the theater stars of their day (who actually had to know how to act)
If you research how something like Cursor works I don't think you would believe it is inevitable. The jump that would have to happen for it to replace engineers entirely is insurmountable. They can keep expanding contexts and coming up with clever ways to augment generation but I don't see it ever actually having full vision on the system, product and users.
Beyond that it is incredibly biased towards existing code & prompt content. If you wanted to build a voice chat app, and you said "should I use websockets or http?" It would say Websockets. It won't override you and say "Use neither, you should use webRTC", but an experienced engineer would spot that the prompt itself is flawed instantly. LLMs just will bias towards existing tokens in the prompt and won't surface data that would challenge the question itself.
Sit down and re-read your comment one night with your "I am an engineer and will solve this as an engineering problem" hat firmly on. If you stop thinking of LLMs as lobotimized coworkers trapped inside an API wrapper and instead as computational primitives then things become much more interesting and the future becomes clearer to see.
Unless you, well, state in AGENTS.md that prompts may offer suboptimal options in which case it's the machine's duty to question them, treat the prompter like a coworker and not a boss.
It is really easy to have a routine when you are single and healthy in your 20s. It stops working so well later on. If you have friends, partner, kids, parents, pets, work, health issues etc. the routine is going to be challenged. If that only happens once every few months no big deal, but now that I am in my late 30s with a partner, kid, 3 pets and elderly parents. I literally have something derail my day almost every single day. Carefully planning my week would be a recipe for misery.
I think really successful people are ones that just don't give a shit, like full on narcissism. Like my dream is X, I need to do Y today. The dog is sick? My kid needs a ride? My parents need help? Not my problem I am doing Y full stop.
I’m in the same situation as you as well many other people who still workout. The trick is to remove as much friction as possible for working out and adding friction to activities that aren’t good for you. For example, if you don’t have time for the gym, make it easier to workout at home, make working out the very first thing you do when you wake up, etc…
Routines tend to get more and more derailed as the day goes on. Wake up early and get the important stuff done first.
As for narcissism, the optimal amount is not zero. If you want to continue being of value to your family over the long term then sometimes you have to take care of yourself first. Unless it's a life-or-death emergency, others can wait a bit for help.
Really nice article, but it sort of flies in the face of all our biological imperatives.
Being a good "kindee" means forgoing security, control and some safety.
Constant Gratitude for just the miracle of life means forgoing the driving dissatisfaction that will push you ahead.
This is the classic battle between our ancient biological impulses and the reality of modern society. Many religions try to square these: Buddhisms central focus is to "stop grasping" your desires, Christianity wants you to "surrender" and put your faith in god. And then you also have articles like this that have a vague spiritual bent but mostly preach mindfulness and gratitude as a balm to our general dissatisfaction. Do we still need constant anxiety around our safety, do we still need to feel dissatisfied with each achievement and constantly want more? Or were those just useful imperatives for an animal 50,000 years ago but useless to us today?
In my personal life I have momentary success being mindful/grateful, but the bare reality is we are the product of millions of years of life being a short cruel struggle, fraught with danger. Does modern society give us the right to throw all that away and pretend we get to float around observing the beauty of the world? Or is our life supposed to be a battle?
If cooperation is a beneficial survival trait, it would have to be because helping others so they can continue creating value for the group is better for everyone than letting them die. At some point a reward system around helping weak members of the group was conditioned into us.
Viewed under that lens, the author and other travelers who live off the kindness of strangers are a kind of parasite, who exploit that reward system. They have no designs to contribute to the group once they are back on their feet, in fact they have made themselves intentionally helpless as a lifestyle.
Even setting aside ethics and faith, from the perspective of the norm of reciprocity, being kind to travelers (or those who appear to be) is effective in winning them over as allies. In my personal experience, the more aggressive a person is, the more likely they are to be hyper-vigilant or starved for kindness, meaning they tend to be deeply moved by even a small gesture. Of course, genuine psychopaths in confined environments are the exception.
This is an extreme case, but a certain murderer (from a real incident in Japan) stated : "I just wanted to kill anyone. So, I stabbed the person who ignored me when I greeted them."
Agree in general, it would be awesome for AI/LLM/whatever to act as an interface between devs and a highly efficient machine only coding language. All the abstractions we have built to make coding easier could be done away with. No C, no compilers, no HTML/CSS, just machines talking to machines without all the clumsy stuff humans need to make sense of it.
But... Anyone who has vibe coded knows that world is really far away, our careers will be over before it is here. This is like saying we should be telling kids to use Waymo instead of learning to drive. It is a nice dream but I am definitely not gonna bet on it.
I got a new Subaru and the touchscreen is making me insane. I will avoid electronics in cars as much as possible going forward.
It literally has a warning that displays every time you start the car: "Watching this screen and making selections while driving can lead to serious accidents". Then you have to press agree before you can use the A/C or stereo.
Like oh attempting to turn the air conditioner on in your car can lead to serious accidents? Maybe you should rethink your dashboard instead of pasting a warning absolving you of its negative effects?
Usually that legalese goes away after ~30 seconds or when you put it in drive, you rarely have to actually hit “OK”. But I haven’t been in a recent Subaru!
How about a recall and replacement for that defective dashboard with one that doesn't cause distractions and accidents since it has buttons that can be felt even by someone wearing winter gloves?
Having worked on design system teams before people can burn a lot of time and money doing overly nuanced stuff. I have been in meetings discussing removing/adding a property on a React component before.
That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.
Kudos to them afaik they were trying to pay their people well. I think they were paying more than 100k/year. I remember they had open position for double that.
Sure, but even 200k/year is an order of magnitude less than 1.2mil/year (which is what the great-grandparent comment claimed, given their 100k/mo estimate).
> That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient
That's how they worked (they had 4 employees and recently fired 3 of them). Four employees is still a huge cost, for a CSS library with lifetime subscription plans.
Is there a reason you have a full on dev team and use React instead of just wordpress/squarespace? What product needs prompted building it all yourself?
Also holy cow the homepage was 50mb and took 12s to load. No offense but that is kind of nuts. Consider lazy loading everything below the fold instead of just ramming 50mb of media through at the same time.
Thanks for the question, there are things related to shipping routing, custom packages handling and ops related requirements that were easier to do using custom app than Wordpress/Squarespace. There is always a trade-off to make here and the decision was made to go with custom app (which is our platform that evolved over last 10 years).
Thanks for pointing out media loading times, half of that bandwidth is related to the video we show on the home page, we plan to optimise a lot of things that were pushed "for later" before upcoming Valentines Day.
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