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Idle musing - maybe some genetics is for stored environment?

Eg, perhaps some of your genes’ purpose are to encode memories in DNA.


Natural selection encodes adaptive responses to the environment in DNA (and other molecules), so memories can be encoded to the extent that they are adaptive and can be encoded (i.e., mechanisms may not exist to encode everything using only standing natural variation).

Nuke and DaVinci Resolve are the industry standards for compositing. Node based editing graphs are often called “non-destructive” or “procedural”. It’s basically pure functions in a programming sense.

Blender geometry nodes take this approach for modeling. The rest of blender is destructive in that any operation permanently changes the state.

https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke-family/nuke

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve


> Most critical is the disappearance of dance.

Have you looked at TikTok? It is full of young people performing incredibly complex dance moves.


The GP was clearly talking about dancing as a social activity. TikTok dancing isn't social, it's a performance for an invisible audience.


> isn't social, it's a performance for an invisible audience.

I know what you wrote is fairly obvious but the wording really resonated with how I feel about social media platforms but couldn't quite word it so well.


When I was young (a long long time ago), my family would go up to stay at a ranch in Sierra County California. They had almost no TV or radio reception there -- you still can't get a cell signal at my cousins house. They would have a Friday night square dance that was like a school dance that teens actually attended and danced together, without much irony. Coming from San Francisco it seemed a little weird, even then. It seems so old fashioned now but I really treasure that I got to participate in what people used to do on the western frontier of the US.


Dancing is fun.

My wife was maid of honor (we weren't married yet) at her college roommate's wedding. I danced with several of their friends at the reception; one taught me to two-step (it was in San Antonio). I taught her basic swing. There was exactly zero romantic involvement; I was there with my girlfriend, for heaven's sake. But she was nice, she was fun, and we just chatted as we went through the dances. Got a couple of her funny college stories out of that. And that's what it's about: having an excuse to be physically close to someone else, doing an enjoyable activity that rewards skill, and to gossip a little. We, like all apes, are social animals. We're happier when we do that.


And in 20 or so years people will lament the loss of dancing to an invisible but captivated audience, I'm sure, just like they currently lament the loss of Vine and Myspace.


I agree but would like to point out that I have seen several groups of dancers practicing K-pop dance or something I don't know outside of Sydney convention center recently. So it seems there is still a social circle where people dance but not ballroom or salsa.


Still incredibly isolated with the thin veil of being interactive because you get likes or whatever.

We've traded social connection for micro-dopamine hits.

And I don't think I'm being an old man shouting at clouds. I think it's genuinely worse.


That's what the old men shouting at clouds always think.

"Social connection" and "micro-dopamine hits" are two different phrases for the same thing. Connections through social media apps can be every bit as deep and genuine as those made through standing in the same building.


It's not particularly deep and genuine to double-tap to add a heart emoji to a video of a skimpily dressed complete stranger you "met" 5 seconds ago and will never see again unless Tiktok's algorithms think that would result in greater ad revenue.


It's exactly as deep and genuine as saying hi to a stranger in a bar (and if you think the barman is any less profit-oriented than the Tiktok algorithm you're naive) or whatever the back-in-your-day paradigm was.


If you say hi to a stranger in a bar, you might end up in an interesting conversation, get laid, find a life partner, all sorts of things.

Liking a booty shake video from some thirst trap influencer is exceedingly unlikely to result in any of these.


Liking a video (and if all your videos are booty shakes from first trap influencers that says more about you than about the platform) might end you up in an interesting conversation, getting laid, finding a life partner, all sorts of things.

Saying hi to a stranger in a bar is exceedingly unlikely to result in any of these.


counterpoint: in any given bar interacting with a stranger means this stranger is interacting with you. If the stranger is tapping out, then you are free to go interact with other people. 1:1 interacters to interactee ratio.

In any given social network this ratio is very screwed. Most people have to became interacters at least a couple of times before they can become an interactee.


> Liking a video ... might end you up in an interesting conversation, getting laid, finding a life partner, all sorts of things.

How? Give an example that actually happened. If you can, address the relative likelihood vs. in-person contact.


What? I’m sorry but this is just nonsense. There’s no way liking a video is more likely to result in those things than having a face to face interaction so someone


I met a friend of a friend in a bar last week. He just ran the NYC marathon and some girl he barely knew but thought was cute liked his Instagram photo. He decided to shoot his shot, and asked her to drinks and she accepted.

There is a reason people “sliding into the DMs” is a term. It usually starts with liking posts and later moves into DMs. That same guy also showed me that he also slid into the DMs with some other woman and has another first date scheduled.

Social media is super important for the younger generation and their social life.


A shallow interaction is unlikely to lead to something deeper but occasionally things line up and it becomes the start of a beautiful friendship. That's equally true on social media or AFK.

Maybe introducing yourself in-person is slightly deeper than thumbs-upping someone's video, but by the same token the latter is a smaller step; you can always go with a full-sentence comment or a video response of your own if you want the slightly deeper interaction.


I’m confused on how this isn’t just completely walking back on your previous point


Shallow interactions are shallow, deep interactions are deep, equally shallow interactions are equally shallow whether online or offline and the same for equally deep interactions. I'm not going to argue about what specific action corresponds to the precise depth of pushing like, whether it's saying "hi", grunting, making eye contact, or what have you; both online and offline you have a spectrum of ways to interact and having both shallow and deep options available is important, because you wouldn't want to start at the deep end with a stranger; you start with something shallow and most of the time it stays shallow but occasionally you find it worthwhile to turn it into something deeper.


In public shallow interactions don’t need to stay that way. It’s not a question of the possibility of levels of interaction but the rates.

Many people can go to a bar and fairly reliably get laid several times a month. That’s simply not possible for the overwhelming majority of people using TikTok. TikTok / Twitter/ Instagram etc are designed to be shallow interaction so people stick around. Dating apps fill that niche, but also want people to come back.

Being in public allows for the full range of relationships in any setting. You can meet a great friends at a bar etc.


This argument doesn't hold on a pure numbers basis. If you are one of 10 people to make eyes contact with someone at the bar, you are already in a far more privileged position than being the person who added one of a million likes to a video.

In forms of social media that existed primarily to produce inter-personal connections (i.e. very early Facebook, or maybe even LinkedIn) your argument works significantly better, but the way that instagram/tiktok/etc prioritise influencers in your feed makes the likelihood of 1-to-1 interactions infinitesimally low (unless you yourself are also playing the influencer game)


I mean. I can't small talk to save my life. But saying high to a stranger will at least get me 10 seconds of communication unless they are excessively rude (or you are). That's not going to happen on modern social media.

Someone much more charismatic in the right scene certainly can do such things more consistently. What's the equivalent here, Tinder dates? I wonder which is more effective for that tip charismatic male? (it's no doubt women are wayyy more successful on dating apps. Too successful).


I’ve talked to hundreds of people at bars around the world, and although I don’t remember their names, I can recall general conversations with each of them. I can’t recall anything that I’ve tapped-liked off the top of my head, because it’s very short and one-sided interaction.


Well, saying hi isn't deep at some meat market bar. But I remember in my younger days that my now-wife and I went to the same bar often enough that we knew most of the regulars, and she was talking to someone we knew well, so I was on my own.

I chatted up a woman who was probably 20 years my senior, and the two of us had grown up in the same neighborhood in that city separated only by time. We had a wonderful conversation for an hour or so. My now-wife came over at one point, I said we were having a conversation about my neighborhood, and she said, oh, you people always find each other (it was pretty distinctive in the city, and yes, we really did find each other). Now-wife walked away and went back to the others she had been hanging out with. I knew the exact house this woman had grown up in (it was one block away from where I was living at the time), having ridden my bicycle past it hundreds of times as a kid, and just listened to the stories of what it had been like then.

The bartender played no role in it at all.

You won't have that experience on TikTok.


> That's what the old men shouting at clouds always think.

And they're usually right. It's just that subsequent generations mainly see the new normal and forget.

> "Social connection" and "micro-dopamine hits" are two different phrases for the same thing.

No. It's like the difference between a piece of good chocolate cake and some sugar cubes.

> Connections through social media apps can be every bit as deep and genuine as those made through standing in the same building.

It's possible, but far less likely.


Except that TikTok dancing does not create those connections. It is just something that does not happen.

Standarding in the same building does not create then either. People talking in groups and one-to-one, people meeting the same people regularly does. That is what dancing was.


> Except that TikTok dancing does not create those connections. It is just something that does not happen.

I've seen it happen, so it absolutely can. People have back-and-forth interactions, find regular partners, and form dance groups.


If you are talking about connections between people who both create content on the network, sure - however, the vast majority of users only consume content.


I've seen people start creating content because of a conversation they had on that kind of network.


Can be. But it's like a long distance relationship. We already know from decades of offline phenomenon that constant physical connect is a must for a healthy, strong connection. Yes, some people have the discipline to make it work. Most don't.

And that's been my experience online. Lots of neat niche connections with people I'd never meet IRL. But you'd be surprised how quickly that connect can sever when that person leaves the community, even if you keep trying to reach out.

But i don't know, maybe this gen Z figured out something this boomer Millenial and other older generations couldn't. I'm open to being wrong.


Some teen dancing on a streaming service is very different from a venue charging admission and beverages for a couple hundred people spending an evening out.


it looks more like complex twitching or precise execution of an acrobatic program but lacking the soul which would qualify it as dancing. more like little robots trying to dance.


I think the "complex dance moves" comment was sarcasm. It often doesn't come across clearly in written forum posts.


TikTok is now banned.


Clinical machine learning for cancer diagnosis is one promising area

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(23)00094-6.pdf


Kind of off-topic, but I always find it weird to see people's hands and arms in first person games like this. Like, if I think about it, I know my hands are almost always in view, but they almost always fade away and I ignore them.

Whereas whenever I see a first person game, it's almost all I can focus on and it breaks the illusion.


Does it bother you more knowing many FPS are just a pair of disembodied floating 3D arms noodling across the landscape?

Best not think about it too much... lol =3


I still remember the awful Trespasser, which was rightfully called an "arm simulator". You were supposed to be some adventurer gal, bur in reality you were a disembodied arm. Terrible controls, too!


"Mistakes were made" in Trespasser

Shovelware is arguably an industry tradition... the prettier the box art... the more suspect quality of the game... =3


When I see someone advertise themselves on LinkedIn as a “servant leader”, I am skeptical.

Seems like a title bestowed by your peers, not by yourself.


LinkedIn, where the titles are made up and the posts don't matter


Seems like a title bestowed by a marketing agency - real people don't talk like that.


I am interested in how scientists can isolate the increase in mental health problems from the more sophisticated diagnoses that we have now.

How do we know there is more mental health problems (a “bad” thing) vs more mental health problems are diagnosed and treated (a “good” thing)?


What do you mean by "more sophisticated diagnoses"?


Even though it sounds like the journey was the goal, you may want to look at TouchDesigner, which is a powerful tool for this use case.

https://derivative.ca/


I have seen this. Its pretty cool and I do want to learn it.

What I am thinking of is much more of programming language though. The fundemental object is something like a composable tree with some additional state.


Have you considered going the react way?

What I mean is that the react core library does not assume an html target but rather builds a virtual component tree that can be mapped to various semantics (the two I know of are react-dom that produces a DOM and react native that produces whatever is used in mobile UIs)

You could sorta recycle the idea or maybe check if React with SVG might be enough for a (low frame rate) prototype.

It does indeed sound like a very infectious obsession, I hope I can forget about the idea :-)


I did do something similar with Svelte, but the rendering aspect is the last of my issues really.

>It does indeed sound like a very infectious obsession, I hope I can forget about the idea :-)

If you don't I could use someone to talk these things through.


> This ends up recreating housing crises of big cities because people that live and work in the town are getting priced out of living there.

Here is research that contradicts this assertion.

"We ultimately conclude, from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low- and moderate-income families. "

https://furmancenter.org/files/Supply_Skepticism_-_Final.pdf


This doesn’t contradict theories of rising prices; it contradicts some theories of price acceleration.

Adding supply is important but it’s also not enough.


> destruction of the creative industry is already pretty noticable.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I’d be interested to know what jobs have been lost to AI (or if you are talking about something else)


Sorry for the late reply, was way too tired yesterday.

The most extreme situation is concept artists right now. Essentially, the entire profession has lost their jobs in the last year. Or casual artists making drawings for commission - they can't compete with AI and mostly had to stop selling their art. Similar is happening to professional translators - with AI, the translations are close enough to native that nobody needs them anymore.

The book market is getting flooded with AI-crap, so is of course the web. Authors are losing their jobs.

Currently, it seems to be creeping into the music market - not sure if people are going to notice/accept AI-made music. All the fantastic artists creating dubs are starting to go away as well, after all you can just synthesize their voices now.

It's quite sad, all considered.


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