43 mins long so here's my subjective short summary in case it's worth it for you:
South Korea developed a widely popular "K-Drama" mini~series industry over decades of iteration, but wages for overworked writers were perpetually pitiful and upside for producers very limited (due to IP & value capture by broadcasters)
Netflix tested the waters licensing existing K-Drama content years prior to Covid then flooded production with much much higher $ to own original IP and make huge returns (NB Squid Games).
Writers & producers are only slightly better off, but their long honed winning formula for creating audience beloved content has been greatly skewed in new directions (i.e. subjectively artistically worse) due to economic dis/incentives.
Modern global tastes, such as for short form slop, are also enshittifying the content.
The HN moderators have asked users to avoid summary comments: "Please don't post summary comments like this. I know they're well-intentioned, but they're not in the spirit of this site. HN threads are supposed to be curious conversations. Also, we want people to respond to the article, not to a summary." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39670657)
caveat emptor re long hashtag techniques on (ipad) safari ...
you may think safari has no effective url limit (i.e. very high) but if you ever treat a url within the url bar as editable you are at risk to be silently truncated to 4096 bytes (eg select a character in the url bar and replace it)
also re-testing potential ~buffer limits in various ways on ipadOS 26.2 safari just now slowed my safari ui down to a crawl
eg after saving example.com with ~20k #hashtag to reading list -- each keystroke in this reply was taking several seconds, so I had to force quit safari and retype to post this warning
> The product quality matters, but it's table stakes. What matters is whether people know your brand exists and trust it enough to buy it.
On a related note, my wife today suggested we buy a replacement Ninja toaster oven for just half the price I'd seen anywhere from a website odd~name.shop that I'd never heard of... the site looked normal, even slick, but a little research turns up the domain didn't exist a month ago.
Now perhaps this is a new business that failed to mention that fact, instead of an AI generated scam website, but I could not be certain without more effort than I wished to exert.
And this is a simple example of my worries from OP's line of thinking--I fear that AI will be increasingly bulldozing us past our cognitive capacity to function normally.
> My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.
FWIW, later in his life there are many findable examples of Jerry finding fault with what he did--since I recalled seeing him express mea culpas I took the time to give you this early (jocular) example from 2014 :
> He acknowledged that my way reduced the chance of failure without making the technical consequences of failure worse, but it was more important that we not be embarrassed. Now that I've been working for a decade, I have a better understanding of how and why people play this game, but I still find it absurd.
If OP's embarrassment comment and the topic of normalization of deviance interest you then you might find this soft (Social) Science Fiction short story to be amusingly enlightening...
"The trouble with you Earth people" by Katherine MacLean (1968)
> there are so many links I have saved that it freezes
If you are motivated enough to write Apple Shortcuts a useful trick for ~Find type actions that overload is to Filter them into reassemblable pieces eg
action find items from reading list filter Title begins with A
(then do B etc)
that this trick often works would be due to the internal nature of the Shortcuts implementation problems, so YMMV
OP describes this ^ long arduous process and then notes:
> Your writing can only be as good as your taste.
That is, using an LLM to help with "collecting these fragments and structuring them" might be okay--should the writer still be able to deeply immerse--but the "stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar" of a faux writer LLM is likely to leave a bad taste in the mind of some readers (e.g. those HN types who "kinda hates LLMs").
That's interesting because I thought the exact opposite. How could the LLM generate the notes? Those are from the person's direct observations, investigation, etc. right? So the idea would be to farm that part out? As off-putting as LLM style writing is, letting the LLM make the content seems reckless and error prone.
I do agree that the LLM style vs. the authors style is off-putting. I have used LLMs to help me write things and I do not like how its not "my" voice. I see no reason it couldnt use my voice given some of my writing samples. In any case, I've found it very easy to revise it in my own words. This is part of the "revise" stage mentioned in the process. In addition, this step is barely necessary for some things, such as technical writing.
This IRL now is very much in the spirit of Mark Stiegler's 1990 humorous thought piece takedown of the $ inefficiency of the B-2 ~stealth bomber by proposing ~everyone buys chances to down one by any means possible.
There is a proper citation below, but you can enjoy this quick read at his dusty website here :
The B-2 Lottery · Marc Stiegler · published in New Destinies, Vol. IX/Fall 1990 ed. Jim Baen (Baen 0-671-2016-3, Sep ’90 [Aug ’90], $3.50, 286pp, pb, cover by David A. Hardy) Original anthology of eight stories plus six non-fiction pieces on space and technology.
South Korea developed a widely popular "K-Drama" mini~series industry over decades of iteration, but wages for overworked writers were perpetually pitiful and upside for producers very limited (due to IP & value capture by broadcasters)
Netflix tested the waters licensing existing K-Drama content years prior to Covid then flooded production with much much higher $ to own original IP and make huge returns (NB Squid Games).
Writers & producers are only slightly better off, but their long honed winning formula for creating audience beloved content has been greatly skewed in new directions (i.e. subjectively artistically worse) due to economic dis/incentives.
Modern global tastes, such as for short form slop, are also enshittifying the content.
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