alt Hacker NewsI like the blog but the premise of the blog is an engineering/epistemological perspective on the craft. The writer clearly cares more about the process, technique and history more than the feeling and validation.
It could be, that a big part of the the future of hobby's and entertainment in this way is the feeling and validation over the actual performance. Or it can be that a massive amount of people find their value in this content.
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ossopite • today at 10:29 AM
The idea that we could create a world where 'a big part of the future of hobbies and entertainment' is people listening to meaningless words made up by machines that help them feel good about themselves sounds horrifying. How could anybody feel ok about that? What would it say about the society we've built?
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So .. I think we need to ask a deceptively simple question here, which is: is knitting real?
I'll add in an aside to this, which is not only are there fake knitting podcasts there are fake knitting and crochet patterns, which is a problem because people get a substantial way through making them only to discover that they don't work. In some cases the giveaway is that the supposed final image isn't physically possible, like the images in this article, but the fakers can use a real stolen image and just spam a pattern underneath it.
So: what is the knitting that is real? It has to be the use of your hands, needles, and yarn to produce a physical object, right?
The podcasts work towards something else. The identity of "being a knitter". This is a form of "hobby" that was already not unusual, that of discussing a thing without ever bothering to actually do it. Photographers are especially bad at this: too many lenses, not enough photographs. They've also got comprehensively run over by AI, because you can just generate the photographs now. Same for "authors".
But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.
The AI approach is "wireheading": the logical conclusion of all of that would be to find a means of inserting a wire in your head that provides constant pleasant sensations. Achieving happiness through a constant feed of generated images is less effective, but it's the same order of things.
(see also: authenticity in food, which could easily turn into another ten thousand words)