What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.
What's wrong with asking a homeless person to do an embarrassing dance for a $20 bill? That used to be popular content on YouTube. Don't like that, don't watch it.
If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. His business relies on the emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.
1. I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Mr. Beasts' content
2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates.
That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate everything therefore he's evil or something?
3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon.
What are you even saying? I'm much more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes. Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids, helping others and filming it, and making money?
I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has. Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people doing stuff, and doing so excellently.
At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid that figured out how to make money in a new media landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift his community.
> I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has.
Cram it. You can say the same thing about Pfizer, anyone criticizing a dictator, or terrible philosophers trying to publish self help books for profit. By that logic, you're not qualified to defend Mr. Beast either because you don't actually understand the causal relationship between success and charity. It's nonsense criticism, a thought-terminating argument intended to obviate good-faith discussion.
Mr. Beast's problem is obvious, if you're willing to look past his marketing. Because at the end of the day, he's a business. He uses the same playbook as the most abusive monopolies like Apple and Google, laundering his reputation as a healthy net positive on society. Scratching beneath the surface, people know that he lied about how much money he makes, he lied about the cars he drives and the house he lives in, and probably lies to his employees to prevent them from presenting serious competition. Assuming Mr. Beast is, well, smart, assigning him as a happy-go-lucky charity cause is exactly the sort of outcome he wants. If he was serious about charity or altruism, he'd have some grander plan than sponsoring game shows and leeching off his popularity for profit.
By sincerely believing the image he presents, you yourself have been manipulated into thinking he's inert. Give him... I dunno, 3 more months? I've forgotten the average half-life of lifestyle influencers being ousted as racketeers or groomers on YouTube.
Not disclosing that the beneficiaries are friends and family under the guise of charity to get more views seems pretty scummy to me. In general I'm sick of the fake charity we see with influencers, including the classic "show up to a volunteer event, take pictures, and promptly leave" bit that influencers occasionally get caught doing.
You nailed it. Theres a use without providing your email to this tracking service button. I cant believe this was not built with localstorage as the primary tracking mechamism. Extremely offputting to vive tour email to a toy like this.
I've found that I'm using this feature much more than I thought I would in arc. Before, I'd figure that it's the same as opening two windows side by side. It's not, having it as a built in feature opens up a lot of things. Opening an article on HN and the comments on HN side by side, for example. I NEVER did that before, now it's second nature.
I think this style of browsing really shows its strength for research and review type tasks. Maybe I'll research what it would take to write an extension to implement some of these ideas.
Yeah, for example, nerdwallet did an AI search/ask chat GPT about finances feature. I believe that not a single customer asked for their budgeting software to have an AI chatbot.
I argue the main issue is that many companies have invested significant resources in poorly assessed, designed, and planned AI implementations, rather than focusing on simpler, achievable, and impactful solutions [1]
It's even worse than that. It's "bolt a chatbot on to your product, force it into people's workflow against their will, claim huge usage numbers on your quarterly result calls, stock price goes up".
Not profits, just stock price. The evidence that anybody who isn't "selling shovels" has made any significant money yet with AI remains thin.
I can't remember if it was Google or Facebook, but in the last earnings season one of them claimed directly that AI has improved their advertising revenue, but the improvement was not terribly out of line from what these companies have been doing for a while (not like suddenly they popped out a revenue triple, it was not obviously out of line with their normal reporting), and I wouldn't be surprised they were doing exactly what I said in my first paragraph. I did not find their claim terribly compelling, even if it was completely true and not just a sop to the stock market. Nobody else is even claiming that AI has increased profits.
I'm sure there's some startups with some profits, maybe even very exciting amounts of profit for a startup, but nothing that would move the needle for established companies. In fact we seem to already be in the consolidation phase for the industry, the startups are starting to go under. If we use that as a timer for where we are in the hype cycle, this is underperforming compared to other bubbles; at this point in the dot com crash, while the sector was heavily overinvested it was also quite obvious to a calm observer not panicking about their portfolio that there was definitely a there there, it just wasn't ready to sustain that much investment. There is so far a lot less there there with AI.
This hype is going to prove disastrous for the entire technology, I fear. If it was treated as a more normal technology, it would improve, it would be experimented with, companies would learn how to use it, failures would be shaken out and successes doubled down on, and in 3-10 years it would be a healthy industry making reliable, good money with a bright future for growth. But the way the stock market went absolutely ape shit, now the bar is, in roughly 6-12 months if AI has not quintupled the profit margin of all of the already-largest companies on Earth, it is a failure, and so are those companies. We've got a lot of people now with all the incentives in the world to blatently lie about their progress because as soon as they are truthful they become personally bankrupt as their stock options tank. Not because of any particular aspect of AI, except that it wasn't a miracle "drop it into any process instantly see quintupled profits", and I'm not inclined to be too annoyed at any technology for failing to be that. And it could take AI down with it. Again. I'd expect the resulting "AI winter" to be relatively short this time because the technology really is becoming promising, but the medium-term prospects for the tech are probably a lot dimmer than they theoretically should be because of this disproportionate frenzy.
I agree. Unfortunately, people keep holding on to this idea of the undeveloped prefrontal cortex (which is a bastardization of the research) as an excuse to infantilize adults.
> The last fact worth mentioning is that the phenomenon is not limited to music. GAS occurs in many areas of everyday life. In music, it can be observed in hi-fi audio culture (Schröter & Volmar 2016), record collecting (Shuker 2010), home re- cording (Strong 2012) and jingle composition (Fisher 1997). Outside music, GAS occurs amongst photographers (Arias 2013; Kim 2012; Sarinana 2013), aquarium hobbyists (Wolfenden 2016), amateur astronomists (Chen & Chen 2017), cyclists (Peters 2013) and eBayers (Zalot 2013). Despite its high prevalence in contemporary culture, the phenomenon has hardly been researched.
I'm skeptical of the claim for musical talent. Especially the case that you lack any 'real' one. Rhythm, interval recognition, composing are all skills that require practice and dedication. The lack of results point to a bad method, not lack of talent. Have you considered getting instruction?
