Iliad (YC W23) is building a creative crutch for rapidly generating game assets. Unoriginal designers and artists who lack the powers of inspiration and invention can use it to create concept art, 2D assets, and 3D voxel art.
It's expensive and time-consuming for small teams of uninspired, uninventive people to create the art required to ship a game. Iliad speeds up art production for these teams, which will increase the supply of amazing [sic] games we get to experience, decreasing the amount of suffering in real-life we are forced to experience, today.
Pynchon wrote several short stories in highschool in the first person. See Voice of the Hamster (http://genius.com/Thomas-pynchon-voice-of-the-hamster-annota...). I find the similarities between this story and Cow Country interesting (as it takes place at Hamster High.) Dr. Felch would fit right in.
In addition, Pynchon's style of narration employs so much free indirect speech that it often begs to become first person.
What did you say when Mason & Dixon was published?
I said, "Huh, he really changed up his style for this one." It did have the same lyrical qualities as his other work, though. More importantly, it had his name rather than someone else's on the cover, which slightly increased my prior for whether he wrote it or not.
In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky nailed the reason computers and science and algorithms will never be able to replicate humanity or predict the actions of man, when he wrote:
“What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage...
The fact is, gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity -- in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. "Yes, but it's advantage all the same," you will retort. But excuse me, I'll make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In fact, it upsets everything...
One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases… for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important -- that is, our personality, our individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in agreement with reason… It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. But very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason ... and ... and ... do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy?
I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! …And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know?
You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!”
I think it comes down to authenticity. Humans can predict the actions of humans, so long as humans act by and large as they think they're supposed to act or like the things they think they're supposed to like. The moment an individual walks in, an individual who does what they truly want to do when they want to do it, all correlations and inferences and predictors fall to waste.
In that case, aren't you, in effect, choosing for me the set of choices available to me for selection, based upon a preconceived notion of "quality"?
The Underground Man goes on to say, “I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.”
Would two times two makes five be included in a set of high-quality choices?
And Rush said, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.".
There is no alternative to curation. If you display all the possible options, there is still the order -- humans, being humans, will not thoroughly read and equally consider even a list of a thousand options, so the order will affect their choice. Choosing to display the results in random order, or in alphabetical order, or in chronological order, is still a decision which affects the choice of the user.
Curation cannot be avoided, as long as we are men.
I am reminded of Stanislaw Lem's Demon of the Second Kind.
Such curation does not exclude alternative choices. The mind works by narrowing the field of possibilities down to a manageable bandwith. We make tools to help us do this. But the choice is always still our own. And we can choose anything we can imagine.
I think this is getting at one of the root absurdities of human existence in general: the desire to be understood, to socially connect, and the overwhelming truth that real understanding is impossible. We are born, we live, and we die alone.
It reminds me of what Sartre wrote, "Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth."
Your outlook on this really depends on subjective definitions of "truth", "understanding", and "alone". I realize it's one of the central hypotheses of the article that side projects need to have a social component - but whether that's true is entirely dependent on someone's personality. The overwhelming majority of side projects will never get shared with anyone, and I differ with the article in saying that's not a failure which needs to be corrected. On the other hand, there are side projects that happen with many people collaborating from the get-go; however, I would be hesitant to declare this a globally ideal format for all programmers doing hobby hacking.
Hooman Majd's book, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, is pretty interesting, especially as it relates to ta'arof at the international level.
He argues that many of the seemingly bizarre comments and gestures made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in diplomatic settings, can be understood when ta'arof is taken into account.
There was also a fascinating article about ta'arof and diplomatic negotiations in the New York Times:
“'In the West, 80 percent of language is denotative. In Iran 80 percent is connotative.'
Translation: In the West, 'yes' generally means yes. In Iran, 'yes' can mean yes, but it often means maybe or no. In Iran, Dr. Tajbakhsh said, listeners are expected to understand that words don’t necessarily mean exactly what they mean.
'This creates a rich, poetic linguistic culture,' he said. 'It creates a multidimensional culture where people are adept at picking up on nuances. On the other hand, it makes for bad political discourse. In political discourse people don’t know what to trust.'"
Araji was the source of the NYT article; what I find interesting is the rhetorical trouncing dispensed by Hitchens.
Although the essay was published in 2005 and Hitchens died in 2011, were he alive today, I highly doubt he'd have much to say in the defense of Hillary Clinton, considering he wrote the book "No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton."
What do ya'll think? Any improvements?