Tag: risk

Categories
Business Culture Writing

The creative industry loses when works become tax write-offs

Liked

Screenwriters and other creative industry folks lose residuals and portfolio pieces when shows and movies never get released. In the comments it also sounds like health care is connected to residuals?

This practice is another facet of the self-cannibalization that’s happening to the creative industry — which makes sense if studios truly believe AI will save them. If they think audiences will be happy to watch movies starring CGI Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis forever, it’s no problem not to invest in building up a new generation of actors. If they think generative AI will create good enough shows and movies, they can let go of their screenwriters and other technical staff.

Maybe audiences will be fine watching mediocre movies with the same actors and subscribing to streaming services with a huge catalog of nothingness if there are no other options… but I sure wouldn’t stake my entire industry on it. There are plenty of other options for entertainment besides movies and TV. People are already sick of the boring shit studios are making because they will only make guaranteed hits. Netflix is already facing stagnation in subscriptions. The giant library of crap approach worked for Amazon Prime because it was positioned as an add-on benefit to Prime shipping — people weren’t signing up just for the streaming service.

Ironically, I think studios are recognizing these trends… but see AI as the solution. That by switching from human labor to AI, they’ll go from making a handful of boring but reliable hits to releasing a torrent of mediocre content. Maybe that will even make their cruddy feature films seem more attractive in comparison.

See also: Solidarity with the writer’s strike ✊✍️

Categories
Featured The Internet Writing

Blogging’s emotional obstacles

At yesterday’s Galactic Bonus Homebrew Website Club, I appreciated hearing others’ perspectives and approaches to managing some emotional aspects of blogging.

Perfectionism

We discussed overcoming perfectionism on our websites and in our blogging — a pernicious, perpetual challenge for creative expression. I’ve had some success tricking my mind to be less precious about writing shorter, less formal content: this entire mind garden is meant to be a ‘first stop’ for thinking; I created a category called “ponderings” to encourage myself to post little thoughts and curiosities; and in the course of composing a post, if I’m having trouble harnessing my thoughts, I’ll start with a framework of bullet points.

Continue reading “Blogging’s emotional obstacles”
Categories
Art and Design Business Culture Featured Technology

The dream of AI is the dream of free labor

Replied to Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (@siderea@universeodon.com) (Universeodon Social Media)

@clarablackink@writing.exchange

The whole damn point of AI is the fantasy of slave sentiences. “What if we had things that could think but because they are things we can own them.”
@emilymbender@dair-community.social

Corporations are excited to stop paying writers and designers and artists and actors and models and musicians and videographers — even developers. They can’t wait to make movies and games and TV shows with as few employees as possible. They are salivating over their profit margins when they can eliminate their “overhead” of employees.

Individuals are excited to create ‘free’ ‘art’ without investing time or effort into developing a skill or style. Their ideas deserve to exist, and they’ll use whatever tools allow that.

Both corporations and generative AI enthusiasts feel entitled to use others’ work without permission or pay, for their own profit. They can’t afford or don’t want to pay for art or professional writing, but they’ve found a technical way to take it anyway.

This is rooted in devaluing creative labor and wanting to mechanize production: corporations perceive creativity as a quantifiable output that they can reproduce on demand with these new tools. They cannot fathom there’s something humans contribute that they can’t reproduce through technology. To them, creativity can be distilled to data. Hard, clear, ownable.

Continue reading “The dream of AI is the dream of free labor”
Categories
Health Society

Why others get upset when you mask

Bookmarked Why Do They *Think* That? by JTO, Ph.D. (essaysyoudidntwanttoread.home.blog)

I’ll just give you a non-comprehensive run-down of various biases (which are basically rules of cognition that become errors when they’re incorrectly applied) and heuristics (which are basically thinking shortcuts or strategies that can lead to thinking errors), focusing on those that can cause people to be more alarmed by risk reduction than by the risk posed by actual threats.

“Why people don’t seem to care about the health risks”

  • People don’t like to think about death or disability
  • Death and disability are abstract without personal experience
  • Selection and survivorship biases when they only see healthy people out and about
  • People estimate their own risk based on personal experiences
  • “base-rate fallacy: people are much more swayed by single dramatic events than by large numbers or probability statistics”
  • Optimism Bias = expect they’ll have a good outcome
  • Perceived invulnerability = don’t think bad stuff will happen to them
  • Diffusion of Responsibility –> they can’t directly see or be held responsible for the consequences of their actions (e.g. passing along sickness so people you don’t know die)
  • Just World Thinking = “people get what they deserve” because otherwise would have to admit the world is unfair and random, and can attribute their success to their own choices by blaming what others have done differently than them (e.g. get vaxxed)
  • “Fundamental Attribution Error, which leads us to focus on personal vs. situational causes for other people’s behavior and outcomes – though not for our own”

“Why do people seem to care so much that YOU care about Covid health risks?”

  • Cognitive Dissonance
  • Confirmation Bias
  • Psychological Reactance –> people get mad when they think their freedoms are under attack or they’ll lose control –> trying to reassert control
  • “people personalize the actions of others, inferring that those people mean to have a negative effect on them – for example, thinking that masked people are deliberately trying to make them irate or imply they’re stupid” = hostile attribution bias
  • group norms, conformity, and group consensus
  • group think happens when going along with your group trumps making an informed decision –> group polarization = group beliefs gradually become more radical

“People wish to be seen (by themselves and others) as reasonable. Because of this, when folks try to decide on a “rational” response to an environmental threat, they often look at the array of available risk mitigation options and try to pick a percentage of these that is neither an ‘under-response’ or an ‘over-response.’” “Unfortunately, that’s not the way risk actually works; a threat is what it is, and it isn’t going to negotiate with you regarding how much you have to do or what is a “fair” amount of effort.”

 

Categories
Health

Covid update April 2022

Long Covid:

In UK, 1 in 37 people has long COVID – 2.7% of population – 1.7 million people for more than a month, 780,000 for more than a year

https://mobile.twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1512069603953823746

People still getting long covid from omicron

https://mobile.twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1512069606231326720

ONS data

Let’s add blood clots to the risks! Yay!

An infection from the novel coronavirus increases your risk of serious blood clots months down the road, a new international study suggests.

Vaccination doesn’t appear to eliminate risk of long covid

https://mobile.twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1512070577686663170

CDC acknowledges in their own documents that many will be disabled

https://mobile.twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1512070577686663170

Biggest risk now from covid if vaccinated is long covid, either extended symptoms or other poor health outcomes like blood clots, brain shrinkage, heart problems

https://mobile.twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1515751560826941441

 

Shifts in symptoms:

Omicron strain more likely to have sore throat

https://mobile.twitter.com/timspector/status/1512349605949808645

 

Protection in buildings:

Far-UVC light (222 nm) efficiently and safely inactivates airborne human coronaviruses – Nature, 2020

A direct approach to limit airborne viral transmissions is to inactivate them within a short time of their production. Germicidal ultraviolet light… is effective in this context but… can be a health hazard to skin and eyes. By contrast, far-UVC light efficiently kills pathogens potentially without harm to exposed human tissues.

Air Disinfection for Airborne Infection Control with a Focus on COVID‐19: Why Germicidal UV is Essential – Photochemistry and Photobiology, 2021

Only two established room‐based technologies are available to supplement mechanical ventilation: portable room air cleaners and upper room germicidal UV air disinfection… SARS‐CoV‐2 is highly susceptible to GUV, an 80‐year‐old technology that has been shown to safely, quietly, effectively and economically produce the equivalent of 10 to 20 or more air changes per hour under real life conditions.

Categories
Health

COVID event risk calculator

Bookmarked MyCovidRisk (mycovidrisk.app)
Categories
Personal Growth

Take the Bet

Watched Would You Take This Bet? by Veritasium from youtu.be

How much would it take for you to risk $10?

I like how he takes this lesson about loss aversion and taking lots of little bets with equal odds of winning and losing, and encourages people to make little bets in their lives when winning could make their lives better. Even if you win and lose as often, overall you’ll come out ahead.

I like this reminder as a pretty risk averse person.

Categories
Personal Growth The Internet

Dark Forests of the Internet

Replied to The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler (onezero.medium.com)

I remember seeing this article when it came out last year, but still found it interesting this time round.

I have been hesitant to be active in social media both for fear of “the baddies” and to protect my own mental health because my brain loooooves social media. I have to do social media for work so I can’t ever escape it, and my few experiences with nasty assholes on my work account reminds me what a thin skin I have.

Lately I’ve realized it’s a kind of hideaway that stops any risk of being attacked but also means that no one sees my work. I’ve preemptively deplatformed myself.

I’mnot reaping one of the real benefits of the internet, meeting other people around the world. My husband, a gamer, has friends all over the US and Canada and Brazil, while I don’t really have any internet friends (yet).

I’ve been attempting to post but not read the feed, which hasn’t really been successful — you can’t meet people just by throwing your work out and hoping someone will read it, you have to engage.

I’m still wary, especially now when tensions between schools of polical thought are so high, but know I need to make more of an effort to interact and put myself out there if I want to get out of social media what it has to offer.