Car brain

~ Veselin ~ 7 Comments

Car Brain – Derogatory term for vehicle drivers, whose cognitive functions have been impaired by the act of driving.

Urban dictionary

I love driving. I used to drive everywhere. However, my cardio fitness became low and last year I decided to start walking to improve it. At first, I tried the treadmill but it was boring. So I started walking to my favorite coffee shop instead of driving, and it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. I sacrificed something I love doing for something I don’t. I set some goals on my iPhone for a number of steps/day, and I would tap myself on the shoulder if I reached 4000/day.

The coffee shop turned out to only be about 8-9 minutes walking from home, under 1000 steps. It is on the other side of a highway and that highway can only be crossed at certain underpasses/overpasses (of course, super easy with a car). One of the underpasses is close, and there are others further away. My brain refused to walk there for years because of this imaginary highway border as if the other side of the highway needed passport control.

Then at some point, I started looking for ways to increase the 1000 steps and make the number higher. So I looked for longer routes and switched to the 2nd more distant underpass. I couldn’t walk that way every day as it was more time-consuming, but I would go if the weather was nice.

Many months later, I started questioning myself – I would walk to this distant underpass but I wasn’t making any steps. I did a hike that took forever, and the health app was quite unimpressed. I walked for maybe 4 hours to barely reach 10K steps. The health app had to be wrong, I surely was making more steps and the phone didn’t count them. So I bought an Apple Watch to tell me the correct number of steps. It got me to a lightbulb moment – all the interesting objects were much closer than my car brain imagined.

The shortest route to the coffee shop was so close that it barely makes a dent in the daily step count. The second one, which I thought was long enough to do 2-3 times/week was less than 1km away (or about 12 min). The third one, which I only conquered 2-3 times before the watch, was about 4000 steps away. In order to increase the steps in a noticeable way I needed to go to the 6th underpass, much further than I could imagine. But that zone had different coffee shops and better public transportation.

That 6th underpass connects two very busy bus stations. Our shared office space was under 5 minutes away with a bus from it. Our kids’ dentist was in the area as well. Some of the utility companies, which I would occasionally visit, had offices there. So I started doing things that I’d normally achieve with a car without it. I now walk almost everywhere, and if I can’t reach it by walking, I try to get there by bus or subway.

Most of the places I’d ever try to visit in my normal life, including my previous commute, would be reachable within 45 minutes with this walking-first approach with or without a few bus stops. Some of these places would need more than 30 minutes by car.

My decades-long driving habit didn’t save me any significant time, it only made me less healthy. So it can be considered a health issue of a kind. The urban dictionary definition has merit, and this barely scratches the surface of car brain-related issues in our community. It may not be a disease but its impact may be worse than one.

Thoughts on Content Aggregation

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

TL;DR – ChatGPT is the last occurrence of a long trend for content aggregation and using other people’s content without linking the source. Reasoning:

Aggregated content is worth money

The modern human generates content all the time. It’s very clear that we do it when we post photos on Facebook or write lengthy text on our personal blogs but it’s not just that. Our browser history is content, our search history is content, and our cookies are worth something to the advertisers. We generate content by clicking the TV remote, and most likely by even speaking in the presence of a smart device with a microphone. We generate content every time we click on our phones beyond the password screen. This content is aggregated and transformed to be used by whoever can convert it to revenue with some privacy-related exceptions.

Once an engine has a database of aggregated content, it can attempt to monetize it by finding consumers looking for parts of that content, or ideally by monopolizing an audience in a specific area. Big data, stored in a way that allows quick access is like a black hole, curls the space around it and makes things happen that would otherwise be impossible. This doesn’t change this content’s nature – it’s aggregated from external sources and can’t exist without these sources. Google, for example, produces very little public content.

For the majority of the existence of the Web, the market for such aggregation was dominated by tools that would also link to the information source and share the traffic or the profit so the information source survives. Wikipedia demands a source for everything and the sources are part of each article. Google links to websites. Foursquare would link to that nice restaurant’s website. Some services would directly share revenue. We grew up with this approach and it sounds fair. But it seems like it is going to be challenged again.

Aggregators are becoming the source of truth

I observed some questionable developments around aggregation over the last 5-10 years. Google, for example, has been motivated to keep clicks within the service and it shows. They built an information source called Knol, developed a mechanism for hosting the entire web called AMP, built Google Maps, and integrated summaries in the search results. I can now learn everything about my favorite actors, for example, and see their photos without ever leaving Google. I can make 10-15-20 content-related clicks and still never hit one that leads outside of Google.

When individuals do that very same thing, it raises eyebrows. People would copy/paste and do slight modifications for homework, write a paper, trick crawlers, farm Karma on Reddit, or who knows what else. Other people have tried and succeeded in authoring books with slightly modified content from other sources. Rewording text, translating it from a foreign language, and editing photos can make them hard to trace back to the author has been a practice that’s frowned upon and sometimes challenged with legal actions.

Now that ChatGPT appeared, “AI” is the new big thing. It does not look like an intelligent bot to me, though. It looks like the ultimate copy/paste engine, no wonder it’s so good at writing homework. It has no own knowledge but it appears like it knows everything. It successfully uses other people’s creative efforts and then shares it like it just knows it out of nowhere, not citing the sources or sometimes citing without providing links. It has the knowledge, just chooses not to share, unless asked. I’ve not checked how many people work on it, I would assume thousands, but I doubt any of them are content creators. Expert scrapers – probably, experts in aggregation – likely, big data – most certainly, experts in human language processing – absolutely.

Consequences of this trend

In case ChatGPT completely replaces Google, the traffic to the original creators will decrease, although thanks to Google’s tactics, it might not decrease by much. Why should a visitor read a lengthy blog post if a bot can present a brief summary of that effort without even mentioning who created it? The aggregators and the consumer are both benefitting, it’s just that the content creator is now turned into a free “trainer” of someone’s bot. We’ll all start consuming AI-rewritten text until that breaks too. Given that AI’s text has no creativity, will, or its own ideas, every time one of us consumes it, it diverts thought and effort away from the actual creation effort.

The trend is concerning but I doubt we can do much about it. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. ChatGPT is part of the negative trend of aggregators claiming ownership of people’s content but it may also be convenient. It’s convenient in the same way as The Pirate Bay – it has most movies created with that small issue that the service disregards the will of the people who created the movies. Just like The Pirate Bay, Google, Bing, and ChatGPT can’t exist without the people who created the underlying content they use to generate all these clicks.

I personally hope that people will push back against AI’s content rewrites and focus on services that are fair. I also hope that the disruption that’s coming will crack the near-monopoly over search. Some good things might grow in the cracks, or may not.

Superhero movies

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been reading /r/comicbooks and found this gem that made me laugh and think

Two superheroes I’ve never heard of happened in a well-known superhero universe and, of course, they saved Earth.

I wonder, what makes people like superheroes so much? Most of them are so overpowered that it takes a major leap of the imagination to find them worthy opponents and make the shows. And why would there be any opponents anyway? The superheroes are so willingly fighting each other that each of these superhero universes (Marvel, DC, etc) should just naturally reduce itself to a state with 1 superhero overlord and no opposition like a natural Squid game.

The supervillains are also way too easy in the sense that the entire evil is focused on one person or a person and their handful of helpers. The modern-day great evil is usually living in the shape of ideas that poison people’s minds. “My country is better than your country, and half of your country used to be part of my country” – as an example, but there have been plenty of variations. Bulgaria on three seas. Кримнаш. There’s no way to personalize the rot when it’s an idea, even if the idea has been spread by carefully organized propaganda. This makes the supervillains and superheroes boring.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo