Damned for virtual signalling if they make posts about their contributions, damned for destroying tech when they don't. I love these kinds of articles and share them with students all the time.

> I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

I think this is the biggest shift. Minecraft starting out as a .jar file allowed for reverse engineering and modding support became a huge part of its "culture". Coupled with artists focusing on spritesheets, you got to have that same Newgrounds online underground scene but for the next generation of kids.

Roblox is takes a similar place now that Minecraft is ~15 years old and all "grown up". Maybe once Roblox hits that similar fate this new Flash will be ready to fill its shoes.

I started with GIMP and still pull it up first before worrying about Photoshop. For me, the "fighting muscle memory" comes from "huh, GIMP does it like this..."

I favor Carrion over Hyperion and find myself repeating Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry's line "I like junk" quite often.

Hyperion is the better novel but Carrion Comfort is just really exciting and creepy. And the way the mind controllers treated regular humans like toys hits far too close to home now.

Oh absolutely, I don't want to spoil anything but (to sound like a nutcase for a second) if there is an Illuminati then I think they were avid readers of Carrion.

Apropos given your username XD

> if there is an Illuminati then I think they were avid readers of Carrion

lol, I never really thought about that but given recent revelations it does almost seem like they were using it as a template.

I still think about it relatively often. It took me almost a year to finish it between breaks to recover.

Yeah, one of the bad guys even had a private island where he invited all his rich psychopathic friends.

Just chiming in to say thanks for the Pratchett quote! I dare say he's about to beat out Douglass Adams for my top author. Feets of Clay and Hogfather should be must reads for people dealing with AI right now imo.

I recently decided to play around with this, given... well my profile... and I will say that Gemini was good at zeroing in on who I was, but for whatever reason would refuse to stay my name.

I like Discworld's take on "advanced culture" - Ankh-Morpork is simple built on top of the skeletons of the original city multiple times over.

> The missing piece is still discovery.

I think the key issue here is that Attention is a temporal construct, meaning discovery is often tied to "being the first thing that comes to people's minds" which means SEO, reverse engineering the ranking algorithms, and constantly having to manage an "online persona". Note none of those things contribute to the actual work you're doing, just your "marketing department" (and whatever time/financial "budget" you intend to give it).

MrBeast figured out the YouTube algorithm - post early and often. Is that how we exist on modern Internet when every website/thumbnail is engineered by a team to maximize clickthrough rates? I agree RSS is useful, but it faces the same scalability issues if everyone starts filling up your RSS feeds. Given the limited amount of time you can devote to a particular task, we'll return to the era of A/B testing Headlines.

Gonna spend the morning giving this a read. I'd also like to also recommend, in case any one is dreading the "ugh boss talk", the book "The Fred Factor" by Mark Sanborn [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fred-Factor-Passion-Ordinary-Extraord...

> Although to be fair, he does tend to revert by the start of his next story.

I'd say that's most of the Discworld series though. Protagonist is living peaceful, MacGuffin ensues chaos, Protagonist (or Arbitrary Thing) saves the day, the Disc goes back to normal, and the Turtle continues to move.

Discworld is my favorite series and I think Hogfather and Feets of Clay should be mandatory reads for people going into AI.