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Some anon on 4chan /tv/, talking about the decline in movie quality, wrote "name ONE thing that has not gotten worse in recent years". From the context of movie discussions and the average age of 4channers, one can infer that the anon probably means roughly the last 10, maybe 20 years.
What say you, Motte?
My thoughts, off the top of my head, are:
AI. This one is self evident. Massive breakthroughs. Yes, there is a danger of Skynet, but that doesn't seem very serious to me at the moment at least and I do not share people like Yudkowsky's despair.
Spaceflight. Look at SpaceX.
Challenges to the establishment: This one is a maybe, and contentious. Much depends on whether you like or dislike the establishment. The first 15 years of the millenium were dominated by bog-standard Democrats and neocons. People like GWB, Obama, and Romney. The last 8 years have seen a partial breakdown of that order, for better or worse. There has also been the rise of wokeism, but despite many apocalyptic prophecies it has not managed to end free speech or liberalism. In terms of sheer numbers, I think that many more people are exposed to heterodox political opinions today than were 20 years ago.
Social media diversity: The Internet of the 90s collapsed into walled gardens and in some places into stultifying echo chambers, but I see reasons to be optimistic about the way things are going the last 3-4 years. Spurred partly by censorship on major platforms, people actually have started to spread out and build their own forums again. This site is one example but there are many others.
DIY scene. With YouTube you can find a dude or a gal doing exactly what you want to learn, with helpful commentary.
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Obvious answer in my mind is cell phones/text messaging.
Budget cell phones ($150 range) have basically not improved since at least 2016. There's maybe a bit more RAM. Displays are the same, CPUs are largely the same, connectivity is the same, functionality is the same, batteries are largely the same. Numeric improvements seem to average out to maybe 20%. (Which may seem respectable, until you consider that in other computing products we were used to doublings over that range.)
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Really? 'Cause from my perspective, cellphones turned from actually useful communication devices into an unholy supernormal stimulus that people have to constantly struggle against in order to function. I'm a teacher; every day I have to take away students' phones, because nobody is going to work if the alternative of getting a dopamine hit is sitting right there.
The internet was bad enough when it wasn't following you around 24/7 in your pocket. You can't opt out, either; society is now built on the assumption that you have a smartphone. My school uses WhatsApp as the official method of group communication for staff.
The fact that phones went from small devices with a week-long battery life to gargantuan machines with a battery life of less than a day is just the cherry on top.
I feel like that's more a product of TikTok/Social-Media but to each their own.
See pretty much every movie plot prior to 1995 that is effectively rendered obsolete by reliable asynchronous communication. (cough Die Hard 3 cough)
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“AI” doesn’t really seem like a thing we should care about getting better in and of itself. Rather if AI is getting better and AI matters at all, then things downstream of AI should get observably better. It’s kind of like “factories getting better,” we don’t really care about the new factories per se but how the factories’ getting better makes life better somehow.
The caveat to this is among people who are just into AI in the same way that lots of people are into movies, maybe they directly care (most people don’t.)
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Related gwern post: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s
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One thing I've noticed is the amount of relatively inexpensive analog synths, guitar pedals, and random peripheral music gear like samplers and drum machines. Back in the 00's when I was playing music in a sort of scene, if anyone had an analog synth it was from the 70's, very expensive, and, uh, temperamental at best. Bands all pretty much used the same pedals in various configurations. Today you can pick up a Korg minilogue on craigslist for a few hundred bucks and have a full analog circuit polyphonic synth and while you're at it scoop up a few boutique pedals, I'm not sure if they're really less expensive than what we were paying for Boss pedals back in the day or if they just don't hold their value, but the takeaway is that it would seem that the kids making music these days must have an absolute mountain of options even not considering DAW/virtual bloops.
Now, affording a place to practice...
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Food in America outside NYC/major metros. The availability of different cuisines, of high-effort takes on local cuisine, of high quality and unique ingredients, of locally brewed interesting beer and distilled spirits... It's mind boggling.
Time was if you were on a road trip and you stopped in a small town, you just hoped for a diner that was clean and would serve a decent turkey sandwich. Chain restaurants were nice because at least you knew McD's or Cracker Barrel would be acceptable food.
Now I pull off in some one stoplight burg in Appalachia and I'm on Yelp reading reviews of a local microbrewery to try the local pickle lager and the Montreal Style Smoked meat platter.
It is unambiguously better than it was 20 years ago, when there were three beers in most bars, none of them local, and chain restaurants were slowly blending everything to grey.
Can't say I've particularly noticed a trend like this in my area — if anything, we've had restaurants and such closing down in my neighborhood over the past few years, and reduced diversity of products in stores.
But then again, Alaska is very much a special case, being as we're pretty much entirely dependent on outside shipping, and still having supply-chain issues.
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Food everywhere, really. I can easily get stuff from my local store that few people in Finland (outside of Helsinki, perhaps) would have even heard of 20 years ago. Back then there was a concept in the press called "sushi border" referring to what's the northernmost (ie the most remote) location in Finland where you can get sushi; I haven't heard of this concept for over a decade since you can get sushi everywhere.
I theorized in a comment a bit ago that the widespread availability of good and variable food everywhere might contribute to the obesity crisis quite a bit...
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As an add-on, food media. The internet (and youtube especially) has allowed cooking shows to escape the ivory towers of the test kitchen, meaning it's not just the tastemakers you have to go to for insight and instruction. This has not only allowed for a proliferation in the types of recipes and cuisines you can find on the internet, but it's also meant a rather systematic dismantling of a lot of culinary school traditions and myths. There has never been a better time for the curious mind to enjoy making their own food.
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The anon wasn't talking about in movies? Because that's a defensible statement - outside of fidelity increases in camera tech (which really isn't better, it just gives film makers more options) nothing about the cinema industry has improved in the past decade certainly, and imo things have gotten significantly worse. Even the indie side is worse - most mumblecore (and mumblegore) might have been dull and pretentious, but it was so great seeing all those artists putting their visions on film without studio interference. And even if you don't agree, and think things would have been better if Greta Gerwig had run over the Duplass brothers and been jailed for manslaughter in 2004, it was surely better than nothing, better than watching all of those creative visions get bought out and sanitised by Disney so that now they're turning out more cookie cutter live action remakes and comic book adaptations.
I don’t think it’s just sanitizing after the fact. The issue for me is that almost all of them are coming from the same places — the same circles in Hollywood, the same film schools, the same social and political culture and so on. This makes it really impossible to have a truly unique take on a project as there’s nothing unique about your artistic history and therefore you’re interchangeable with anyone who graduates a film school.
LA in general has a very high COL, and most people trying to make it in Hollywood spend years practically unemployed (they become waitstaff and baristas basically, and have to have a very flexible part time schedule to leave time for auditions). That combination pretty much excludes most people who don’t have families that can spend tens of thousands of dollars to bankroll a child chasing that dream. Most art is that way, if you’re going to “go pro” you need the family to bankroll you while you’re trying to break in. That’s a pretty effective filter for working class voices and given that conservatives tend to value financial independence and gainful employment, a fairly effective filter for conservative views as well.
Or, alternately, you can have families that are already in the business — note how many Hollywood types are related (Angelina Jolie is Jon Voight's daughter, George Clooney and Miguel Ferrer were first cousins, and then there's the Coppola and Barrymore families). So add competition with those "born into it" as another barrier for those trying to "break in."
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Also that this cultural clique has become far more insular over time, which leads to even more homogeneity.
The paradox of diversity... All skin colors sexulities and shapes united in ideological monoculture.
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This is more a "take stock of one's blessings" post than anything else, but other than what everyone else has already covered:
I can't speak to other sports, but my impression is that Hockey is more fun to watch. High skilled players like Connor McDavid use speed and slick moves to score highlight reel goals, more players are attempting fancy lacrosse style goals (aka "the michigan"), it feels less grindy, the neutral zone trap/dead puck style is able to be countered, goaltending is either worse or players are better which is resulting in higher score games with greater opportunities for comebacks. The refereeing also feels better? Low bar though.
Sports is kind of a weird one.
I feel like athletic levels are higher, but also that there's more of a metagame in play in most high level sports which makes the teams a bit samey even if the players are, in absolute terms, way better than their predecessors.
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I have no idea what is better now than when I was younger, any more than my parents knew about or understood the cool stuff I was paying attention to when I was a teen.
So many times I've been blindsided by some cool new thing I'd never heard of, only to find that it has five hundred million rabid fans already.
I have a fair amount of faith that lots of things are better, even if I don't know what they are.
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Cell phones are pretty great, I even write my novel on one and pretty much use it for everything other than pc gaming. There's little meaningful tradeoff past the entry level or midrange, they all have good screens, cameras and battery life that lasts a day at least. They might be stagnating, but I'll probably buy a foldable next, probably a Samsung since I crave the pen.
Ozempic looks like it's the real deal. I don't put much stock in people who keep muttering under their breath about some hidden catch, as if the universe works that way. A cure for obesity, as well as seemingly effective against other disorders of executive function like gambling and alcoholism? Hell fucking yeah, maybe it'll turn out to work for ADHD, but that would actually be even more surprising. It's going to get cheaper, nothing has economies of scale like a weight loss drug, there are other companies rushing out comparable drugs, and you can get generics through dubious sources if you wish.
Can't wait for it to get cheap enough for us poor Third World bastards, I'll be putting my mom on it ASAP, and then myself if I can shake enough change out of the cushions. I'm not obese, but I have gained like 10 kilos from my habit of having ridiculously cheap and ridiculously greasy biryani as comfort food, even if it's my only meal of the day (!). I've lost said weight before the hard way, through exercise and dieting, and I found both to be too painful to bother with unless I'm desperately single. Give me a pill or give me a jab, I'll take it and I couldn't care less about sanctimonious looks.
Less important, but cool: VR is a thing. Yeah. The Quest 3 looks great, even if I sorely miss the potential of eye tracking, but at that price something had to give. Shame it turns out I'm too lazy to play much, but it's a tick off the bucket list until we can control our characters simply by thinking.
To elaborate on AI:
I've found GPT-4 to be invaluable, the idea of simply googling anything complex fills me with a headache, even if I append a site:reddit.com at the end. God knows I'd spend more time staring at the summaries on UpToDate and Co, I can trust the answers most of the time, even if I make sure to check where I'm not confident in it.
Image generation is almost solved, like 90% there except for the most baroque prompts. DALL-E 3 can understand semantics for multiple characters engaging in different actions, even if it's not quite as aesthetic as Midjourney. Shame they went ham on the safety filters lately, but I already have hundreds of pieces, many of which I've sprinkled into my novel. A luxury, yes, but very nice to have, since I have no intentions for paying for an illustrator.
AI music is coming around nicely, I unironically listen to SpongeBob and Patrick rap Niggers in Paris, and it'll be simple enough to throw the name of your favorite artist who no longer does their old style and get something decent out of it. (I'm looking at you, Alex Turner. AM was the peak, fight me.)
There hasn't been a better time to be alive, we can potentially solve ~all our problems in a few decades. While I've gone from P(doom) of 70% to around 30%, I still take AI X-risk as the most pressing concern of the day. And I certainly don't look forward to AIs taking my jerb, I even spent about an hour chatting with the one person more fucked than I am, a med student. I might get to enter training and progress a bit with a lot of luck, he's going to be lucky to have training programs by the time he's going to sit the exams, worse case is he never finishes the post grad courses before they become obsolete.
Even if I am quite depressed, I'm confident that it's worth sticking around to see the future, we're on the cusp of great or terrible things, to the extent that that classification depends on your POV.
By chance, I tried it a lot of times (through Bing) recently for two characters, a man and a woman. It's pretty bad at doing this. It keeps giving both characters the hair color I specified for one, and gives the man a bag when I specifiy the woman has a handbag. "Holding nothing" doesn't affect this. "Holding a ball of fog" tended to produce fog anywhere in the picture half the time. Also, a woman with a dress had to be specified as Caucasian to prevent the word "white" from being applied to the dress.
I fully concede it's not perfect, but if you compare it to prior models, you'll see it's a massive leap forward.
If I had to roughly quantify it, I'd say that about 2/4 of the pictures are what you asked for if you wanted a particular combination of 2 or 3 entities engaging in different activities. DALL-E 2 Experimental was maybe 1 in 16, and that was a pretty good model.
For MJ, and even SD, it's closer to random chance for getting something accurate.
If you can share an example prompt, I think I know a few tricks to getting it to understand which character or object you're referring to, it's mostly as simple as referring to the specific object directly, when you add more qualifiers.
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Not that easy, and I'm speaking as a whale with Type II diabetes who was put on both Ozempic (until I couldn't get it because people like you were snapping it up to lose ten kilos) and Trulicity. Ozempic I wasn't on long enough, or at high enough doses, to see any results, but at the initial dosage I tolerated it well but did not see loss of appetite, etc. happening, and those were the touted effects of "this makes losing weight so easy!"
Trulicity I had to stop because the side effects were so bad. Yeah, I lost some weight - due mostly to vomiting and diarrhoea from the gastro-intestinal effects, again not from any curbing of appetite.
And both are not 'miracle cures' as you are supposed to also do the traditional "diet and exercise" accompanying taking the drug, not relying on it alone to lose weight.
There also seems to be problems becoming apparent, now that these drugs are being used by the public at large. Even when using 'as directed', the warning leaflet warns about the risk of pancreatitis and other serious side-effects.
So if you're hoping for quick weight loss - yeah, it may do so. But you'll (1) be expected to diet and exercise alongside it, so give up the greasy biryani and (2) be on it for life - stop taking it, the weight piles back on. Most responsible medical advice would be "you only need to lose ten kilos, stop eating the greasy comfort food and become more active" but if you can manage to wangle it, you may not like the side effects. The major mechanism of action of these drugs is to slow stomach emptying (so you feel fuller for longer, thus don't eat as much and as frequently) and that can be accompanied by everything from flatulence to stomach paralysis.
As for a "cure for obesity" - it seems to work for a lot of people, but not all people, and it probably works best the least amount of weight you have to lose. There's no easy, painless way to lose weight, diet and exercise and life-long changes in eating habits are expected to accompany it (so bye-bye comfort foods forever).
Cure for gambling/alcoholism/addiction? I'm very dubious, I don't see how this links up with the reported mechanism of action. It may be that people have a cluster of behaviours (e.g. they drink and smoke when they eat, and if they're not eating as much/frequently, so they're drinking and smoking less) but I do wonder. I need more evidence on this, rather than "I read somewhere that someone said someone else said they were cured of being an alcoholic by taking Ozempic").
It would have been better to put you on a higher dose than give up on it altogether, though it's a shame the starting dose didn't work for you.
Trulicity, while in the same class of drug, isn't one that's licensed for the purposes of weight loss, just for the management of diabetes. Which is perfectly fine, but a failure in that regard is unexceptional.
Besides, as a Catholic, I'm sure you're aware that not everyone is so lucky as to encounter a "miracle", but Ozempic works for most people, with minimal side effects, and that's good enough for me, even if it isn't efficacious in literally everyone.
For every person like you who drew the short straw, there's who knows how many who did what no amount of advice to exercise or diet achieved.
It doesn't just make your digestion slower, it also makes you less hungry too, in an unrelated manner.
My mom's liver is failing, and no amount of attempts to diet or the tough love people have given her has helped. If she doesn't lose weight, I don't like her odds of making it another decade.
Is life worth living? Depends on the liver.
My case is far more discretionary, and as life has demonstrated, I am capable of losing weight the hard way. I'd still very much rather not, and when it gets cheap enough I'd much rather just take a pill. I, like millions or billions of others, am more than willing to pay for convenience.
Expected? Certainly. Do you need to? Not really. It curbs your hunger my itself, and doctors have been impotently suggesting the above to billions who listen and nod intently and go back to having a cheeseburger. The drug makes the burger unappealing. At that point you're not fighting yourself, you're just doing what you want to, naturally or not.
You should be gratified to hear this came as precisely much a surprise to you as it did to the manufacturers and inventors of the drug.
Doesn't mean it's not true, the human body is fucking weird.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-new-weight-loss-drugs-like-ozempic-treat-addiction1/
The research is very much in the preliminary stages, yet it's promising.
Yet the weight loss, which is by far the most important thing the drug does, is indisputable.
Supply chain issues. The chemist was able to get a month's supply of the starting dosage, but when the doctor was upping me to the higher one no dice - they couldn't get it. So that's when my doctor switched me to Trulicity and the side effects were so bad I said "hell with this, I'm not staying on this one".
I read all the wonder stories and was hoping this would happen for me, but nope. Burgers were just as appealing as before. Granted, had I been able to get onto the higher dose for a longer time, who knows? But I think I wouldn't be that lucky. If someone can invent a reliable, guaranteed, "this will kill your appetite" drug that doesn't involve paralysing your intestines or invoking streaming diarrhoea, I'd greatly appreciate that. The only time I haven't been able to eat is when I was so sick, the nurse literally couldn't get a measure of my blood sugar with the 'stick and test strip' meter, and they made me drink sugary energy drink to get the numbers up.
I really, really, really wonder about the addiction results. It'd be grimly funny in that cosmic irony way if it actually does have something to do with the mechanism of addiction, and all the people telling fatties like me "look porker, losing weight is easy: just stop stuffing your face with junk" had to admit that maybe food too is addictive for some people. But probably not, and something weird is going on there.
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If you truly are obese, have Type II diabetes, and can't get access to Ozempic, have you considered a ketogenic diet?
I've been doing it for a couple months now, and the results have been incredible on both my waistline and on the scale. And I'm loving the food too. So delicious.
For me, the need is not that huge. I was only slightly overweight before and I'm doing it mostly out of vanity and for sports performance. For you, the benefits of a keto diet could be life-changing.
I know that pretty much everyone who is overweight wants to poo poo the keto diet, giving excuses not to do it, and reasons why it won't work for them. But it does work for almost everyone who tries it. I'd give it a shot!
I am back on the 'restricting carbs' diet, having fallen off the bandwagon from the early days. The only problem is, I fucking love carbs.
Bread. Having, say, a bread roll with the salad for lunch sends my blood glucose soaring (and since I'm doing regular testing now, I can track what happens when). Same with noodles, rice, pasta, potatoes... so I have to severely cut back on those.
No problem, I can eat as much protein and veggies as I like, right? Except meals don't seem 'right' without carbs, plus I get hungry within hours so I'm not really reducing what I eat as much as I am now obsessing over "I have to wait minimum two hours after eating to measure my blood sugar to be sure it's within the limits so I can eat again". It's crazy and I don't know why my physiology seems to work like that, but that's how it is.
This is surprising to me. That's the big benefit of keto for me. I don't really get hungry.
When you first start, there's a big difference between 100 carbs/day and 20 carbs/day. Gotta get to ketosis first and then you can relax a bit. But hunger shouldn't be a problem. If you go full carnivore, you'll feel stuffed all the time and have trouble getting even 2000/calories a day.
Personally, I love the keto bread products that are available as well. Not nearly as good as real bread, and expensive as fuck, but it definitely fills out the meal.
By the way, I sympathize. Everyone's body is different and reacts to carbs differently. You seem to have gotten a bad roll of the dice. I hope you find a solution that works for you!
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Ditto from me on basically everything you said.
Under the theories that power Keto, most of the food that's easily available in the Western world is completely terrible for you. Eating food that's terrible for you and also taking a drug that probably makes it have less of an effect for life seems like a worse idea than just eating better food.
I advocate a gradual approach to moving onto Keto. Start by making a list of everything you eat. One at a time, replace each thing with something more Keto, ideally starting with the worst. Keep going until you notice positive effects. The usual standard of 20g of carbs a day is probably not necessary to get down to if you're not trying to lose hundreds of pounds of weight. If you can stay under 100g or so of carbs a day and not notice at least some positive effects, then it's probably not going to work for you.
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Ozempic is probably clearly an all cause mortality improvement for people with obesity, which is a huge win, though I think the cost-benefit is worse if you're taking it for non-health reasons since it does cause an apparent decrease in muscle mass and also elevated heart rate which... probably can't be good?
I think those are the catches.
I sure do hear a lot of muttering from naturally thin types about it though!
Just wait until they figure out how to safely trigger hypertrophy without lifting lol.
You mean steroids? Oh, "safely".
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Myostatin inhibitors exist and have had some promising initial results. That said, I'm more cautious about drugs that allow uncontrolled cell growth than I am GLP agonists.
Hmm, I should check if the people and cattle with myostatin knockout mutations have increased cancer rates.
My bet is no--cancer seems to be more associated with hyperplasia than hypertrophy, and I'd expect a myostatin inhibitor to encourage the latter. My personal worry is more around heart health. Needs more research before I'd dive into self experimentation, though.
I would presume the same, but we're both being lazy by not googling it haha
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The loss of muscle along with fat is a fairly common side effects of any procedure or treatment that makes you lose weight quickly, hell even fasting. Still something worth keeping an eye on.
The elevation in heart rate seems pretty insignificant, unless someone has an existing heart condition, I think it's utterly irrelevant both on its own and given the overall cardiovascular benefits.
Ah, it's great to live in an age of manmade wonders beyond my comprehension!
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Is the decrease in muscle mass worse than what you would expect from just eating less calories?
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Livestreaming has really taken off. I know some people hate the terms "content," and "content creator," but no other word captures the breadth and volume of internet video content. Every possible niche interest has at least one dedicated youtuber or twitch streamer who goes live 5 times a week that the community revolves around. Massive amounts of free and popular media content is good actually. 10-15 years ago when RedLetterMedia first came on the scene, they had to pack their reviews full of shock-jock gimmicky cutaways because that was the only way to get viral attention. The entire genre of "YouTube movie review channel" wasn't a thing that existed back then.
Relatedly: instead of listening to Master of Puppets for the 3rd time in one day while studying or working out, I can play genres that I would have never known about if not for Youtube, like dungeon synth or dinosynth, made by talented amateurs in their basements whose work would never otherwise have been appreciated so widely.
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Related to this there is almost always a very good tutorial on just about everything one could want to learn.
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5. Threat posed by Russia. Their adventure in Ukraine is burning though their resources, even Germany noticed that Russian imperialism is a problem.
6. Low level electronic hardware (SSD for example)
7. Batteries got so much better to deserve own entry (consequences are drones, and various battery powered stuff becoming more viable)
8. Solar and wind power slowly becomes actually useful at grid scale (not sure has it happened, subsidies are making it less clear but there is a clear upward trajectory)
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