(#17) If these bloopers don't make you laugh, you're AI
+ the lure of doublewide trailers + dead internet theory
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I’m writing this from a double wide trailer.
Granted, it’s a trailer on the ocean, but it’s still a trailer.
Growing up trailers were “bad” — they weren’t safe for Florida hurricanes, they weren’t quality workmanship, and it wasn’t much cheaper than just building a house yourself.
Still, I lived in one for a while, and that felt bad. It felt worse for (who was at the time) my wife. I know this because the roof would leak, it was very small, and for the nth time dirty rainwater dripped all over the bed and, in tears, she told me she couldn’t take it anymore.
Also the toilet was permanently broken and that was inconvenient.
I find it funny this place is a trailer. It has the tacky all-fiberglass shower. The beam up top that connects two singlewides into a glorious wide of doubles. The feeling that if anything even mildly catastrophic happened, there’s no way this house nor I would survive.
I gravitate towards hacks. Unusual ways to accomplish things. The investors who put a row of trailers by the beach doubled the number of houses for what, less than a quarter of the price of “real” houses? And they probably reduced the build time by a solid 12 months. Genius.
And now I get to sit here as the sun rises, listening to the ocean yearning to rise up and destroy this place, while I write this Friday missive.
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Behind the scenes of the Jellybeans of Dooooom
This week I experimented with longer content creation on Youtube — this video is 10 minutes, shot in about 30 minutes.
After a slide I’d pause the video, make the next slide real quick, then record. It’s more for posterity I guess, I don’t have it in me to chase viral fortunes outside my work at the moment.
Sometimes I’ll watch 10-20 minutes youtube videos over lunch, so maybe it will appeal to those who have similar tendencies.
The blooper images still make me laugh and there’s a cute ending.
SMASH THAT LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE!
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“On the Internet, no one knows you’re a ChatGPT”
I’m not sure if people realize the sheer amount of information onslaught that is coming only just beginning.
SEO used to be good business. I was never great at that patient game — I live for the thrill of instantaneous ROI — but for those that sprinkled their magic incantations of keyword research and sketchy backlinks it is was a lucrative business.
But now ChatGPT is producing more information than all human civilization combined every month. Or something like that. Tens of millions of users a day asking questions and most don’t prompt with “no yapping.” Plus all the other LLMs. I mean just one my projects alone produces ~200 pages of output a day!
Same with images. More than 15 billion images have been created using generative AI as of Aug 2023 so it’s well over 20 billion now. It took humans 150 years, from the first photograph taken in 1826 until 1975, to reach the 15 billion mark. It will only be a few years until we have more AI generated images on the internet than non-AI.
All that to say, I’m not long/bullish on the SEO game.
Or knowing what’s real and not.
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Dead Internet Theory
Speaking of, there’s the Dead Internet Theory and while this (probably?) isn’t true yet, we are heading there. (We are getting close: in 2023 ~47% of internet traffic was bots, some say 73%.)
I’m hoping for a revolt back to a more homespun web that is more about tightknit communities around niche topics and less obsession over how many likes a picture on social media got.
I’ve increasingly turned to newsletters to get good web. Some of my favorites are Kristoffer’s Naive Weekly (“quiet, odd, and poetic web”), Today in Tabs, One Useful Thing, Interconnected, Social Signals, Money Stuff, and Web Curios.
Plus, a bunch of investment newsletters because in the wee hours I still run an investment fund.
Later this year I’m excited to put more time into Hypertext Foundation and support more of the indie web.
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I hope you stumble on something cool on the internet and send it to me.
Josh
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