100%. Any ideas we have to spin up a new artwork game, analysis, or software - how long until someone says: copy that and change it 1% and now it's mine.
To those who sing the lullaby "AI has bad taste": You can tell it what to make. Your taste or any hypothetical taste can modulate everything it makes. There's no taste-moat here, folks.
The pandemic was easy for me to live through because I'm just like that; and it was easy for the disease to evolve in a wet market*…
… but that whole "flatten the curve" thing was because it came within a hair's breadth of overwhelming national healthcare systems and this was obviously a risk to be mitigated before the event.
* this happened in wet markets many times, not just COVID; and this will happen again if steps aren't taken to mitigate that, no matter what you may think about lab leaks which do also happen sometimes because humans are fallible and do make mistakes on occasion.
Most professionals DO steer towards lifestyle changes. They probably look gaunt and sickly because their excess skin sags and they may temporarily look older due to stretchy skin.
These studies control for such variables, confounding effects are easy to think of, but 9/10 times here on HN, the authors DID control and adjust for that confounder, the commenters just didn't read the methods.
Eh, no, the vast majority of splashy headline studies that make it to HN show some associative result where causality is not established. They can not control for all possible confounding. The money sentence from the study is "semaglutide was associated with significantly reduced epigenetic aging relative to placebo across multiple generations of epigenetic clocks."
It kinda seems like a bunch of markers moved randomly and some of them happened to move together: "In contrast, causality-enriched epigenetic clocks28 AdaptAge, CausAge, and DamAge exhibited directionally heterogeneous and statistically non-significant changes." That gets you a publication but I don't know that I'd bet money on follow-up study results.
I have a BA in Music Theory, I think maybe you should consider again. First off, Jazz relies on the same fundamentals and extends them, everything from Classical music is somewhat relevant in Jazz. So if it's only Jazz theory exclusive to classical, it'd be an advanced book indeed.
Second, it literally has a chapter on Popular Music and another on Jazz Theory, and "Classical" is not found in its chapter titles. So I don't think your critique is accurate.
Third, history and time matter. "Theory" came first in "classical" contexts, with codified rules pre-dating even Bach. Jazz was a much later invention that built upon these and other traditions. Both of the Jazz theory books I used in my BA in Music Theoryhad many elementary topics already covered in Classical contexts.
Yes, I think people have this fantasy that Jazz has anything new to offer in terms of music theory. That's false, everything used in Jazz was already part of the practice of classical music sometimes centuries ago. For example, improvisation was common in Mozart time and extended chords were common already in the 19th century. The only difference may be the terminology used in Jazz circles, but this is something that can be learned later if you want to specialize in that style.
They probably didn't read it. The Parent comment suggests Bill is saying AI is wildly powerful, more precisely Parent comment is implying Bill has ulterior motives because AI isn't that powerful yet as he fear-mongers.
The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.
Counterpoint: To become a better writer, write as much as you can.
Reading gives you a flavor, a taste, a style, it allows you to occupy the thoughts of another human.
But getting your thoughts written down? That's writing, not reading. Actually practicing the art of writing is better for your craft than reading someone else's writing.
Matthias Wandel a famous woodworker on YT says it: most of his audience are watching for fun, they don't actually build projects. Would we expect a woodworker to get practically better by not woodworking, but by sampling others work? You might gain a little knowledge, but you'll never see your own limitations and where to grow if you never do it yourself.
Since music comes up in this thread, it's an even better counter example. The act of practicing technique shows you the idioms of each instrument, it shows you HOW to compose for that instrument much more than listening to 100's of recordings. Chopin's genius was knowing the human hand and how it conforms to the keyboard, he knew how to compose for it better than perhaps any other, because he was practical and a virtuoso himself.
When you touch and hear the instrument as you play, when you satisfy your own ear and judgment as Chick Corea says, then you're able to then better mimic others and create new fusions. Just listening to others "as much as you can" isn't going to make you a better performer or technical player at all.
Save the time for doing, not using. Use the time for production, not consumption. Practice makes perfect.
Any art needs theory, practice, and study of the greats. Unless you're some kind of exceptional genius talent out of the gate - and no one is, really - you need inspiration from other work, imitation, understanding, and practice of your own work.
It helps a lot if you're obsessive and/or enjoy it a lot. Ideally both.
None of these are a substitute for talent, but likewise talent isn't a substitute for them.
The point OP misses and apparently everyone here does too, is that if your goal is to become a better writer, you should absolutely read, but read with conviction to learn what makes a good or a bad book. You are not reading it for pleasure at that point. An Uber driver who drives a bus every day of his life is not necessarily better than someone who (a) is more skilled naturally and (b) deliberately practices for much shorter times to become a better driver. How is it any different here?
Cal Newport touches this in his books. The best solo violinists dont practice any longer or harder than the other violinists, they practice deliberately and that looks very different.
So in summary I think OP is pretty wrong. Asking people to just read more without adding this nuance is just going to create a bunch of zombies who read a novel a week and are none the better for it.
The only books that are required reading if youre planning to write are "on writing" by King and Strunk n White. Just memorize the latter. Then read your competition, carefully. Then just start writing.
To those who sing the lullaby "AI has bad taste": You can tell it what to make. Your taste or any hypothetical taste can modulate everything it makes. There's no taste-moat here, folks.
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