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@davidgerard Clearly the thoughts of a person obsessively interested in skipping straight to the sex scenes in "Heated Rivalry" and ignoring everything else

@davidgerard Discovering that things are of different degrees of semantic density is fun at any age. Demanding to bring about highly individualised hedonistic simulations, on the other hand, gives off children who have yet to develop the theory of mind. How does one learn about the world then, about anything that's different from them or that feels unpleasant?

@davidgerard I was once leading a postgraduate seminar in a university when one of the qualified and registered professionals attending complained that I was introducing words and concepts that they found unfamiliar.

We paused a beat, and I repeated that, and "that sounds like university to me".

Similar thinking.

@davidgerard

"I shouldn't have to experience anything that doesn't interest me" is a level of sociopathy usually reserved for the C-suite...

@davidgerard Yup. I can hardly stand reading normal novels now because I'm accustomed to (novel length, this isn't about focus) AO3 fics where there are content tags AND a norm of marking beginning and end of explicit scenes and whether they're plot relevant. Compared to that, published novels as a reading experience don't feel as consensual.

@davidgerard Why the f… isn't everything how I f…ing want it?

@davidgerard

Isn't that how an adblocker works, though, as far as the web part of it is concerned.

Or Greasemonkey. Or setting your own fonts.

Is this not also user agency.

@davidgerard The terrifying thing about this is that this person claims to be a Senior Product Manager in Security Operations, and therefore presumably has the power to cause her pathological solipsism to forcibly infect others.

@davidgerard "...what information should or shouldn't be there..."

She just wants to talk to herself? Why are you even going out on the web if you already know what should be there?

@davidgerard how can I make my bubble more bubblier?

@davidgerard
The craziest thing about this for me is how she words her expectations.

Not, "imagine if we could do this..." or "it would be great if this were possible..."

Instead, it's "why isn't there a way...?"

Like some idiot forgot to implement the most obvious feature.

@davidgerard

Anyone remember "Garfield minus Garfield"?

https://garfieldminusgarfield.net

@davidgerard So, should Star Wars delete Luke or Leia?

@davidgerard I hate this

@davidgerard wow Adriana has just invented… misinformation 🙃

@davidgerard Fahrenheit 451:

“Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. [...] [M]any were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet [...],was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: ‘now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.’ Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”
“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”

@davidgerard I would like to able to use the web without encountering the solipsistic ramblings of tech-industry cyborgs, please.

@davidgerard On the one hand, terrible.

On the other, I admit that if there was an option to tick to automatically remove any scene where the procedural's main character angsts about his stock-issue sad manpain, I would tick it. Like, technically of course I'm sorry your wife tragically died before the show even started, but also I don't care.

@davidgerard I would like a word with Adriana's parents.

Meanwhile, me to my 5-year-old: "Being bored is GOOD! It's great actually. It's when your mind wanders and you get your best ideas." She always rolls her eyes at me, but nevertheless I persist with this message 😅​

@davidgerard I mean we joke but that kind of thing is where Netflix wants to push people towards (the whole "Audience of One" thing). On LinkedIn that perspective probably kills. Because nobody there appreciates anything.

@davidgerard This reminds me of the pirated Star Trek episodes that the uploader had taken upon themself to scrub of profanities, non-hetero affection, or trans people.

"I want to watch this but without the gays, socialists, and/or POC — even if it makes no sense that way" is always their endgame.

@davidgerard I keep being reminded of the story "The Diamond Age" where the poors get customised news feeds while the upper class in some parts of society get uniform news print.

@davidgerard ah yes I remember the lectures in film school on filler characters; “just put ‘em in there to waste time and space. We just do it out of tradition: there’s no real reason for them!”

@davidgerard Her take on films and series is chilling and screams "TikTok Brain" but she's right about the web (although she could have worded it much better).

Originally, one of the ideas behind the web was that every user could customize his own viewing experience trough browser settings and custom CSS overrides. As websites become more complex this idea faded in the background but its still alive as proven by extensions such as YouTube unhook which allow you to customize YouTube's UI removing or replacing its annoying or distracting parts.

@davidgerard Why do I kind of suspect anyone who would want such a feature doesn't want it due to how the character is written, or for storytelling reasons but has other motives for wanting to see shows made in a way certain characters can easily be white... Washed out?

@davidgerard Analysis Paralysis As A Service

@davidgerard I often skip whole scenes. I watched the whole of the Walking Dead ouvre in 30 mins flat just by skipping those pesky zombie scenes

@davidgerard I *do* have to admire the launch on this one. No smooth introduction, no personal anecdote, not even a capital letter, just straight in on the stunning proposition "films and series have filler characters". Six words in and this is already wild.

@davidgerard our finest minds are truly on LinkedIn

@davidgerard I would go further: Watching a story unfold is very limiting. What if you want to see something from a different angle? How about we make one character selectable and you get to control them with a kind of controlling device? And what if every character you see has a icon above their head that tells you what they are all about? And what if there's a sort of mechanism that records your individual progress in the narrative? You could call it something catchy like Interact Vid!

@davidgerard TBF, there's a lot of fiction which triggers an "I see what you're *trying* to accomplish here, but I'm just not interested" in me (and, trying is quite distinct from accomplishing). So, yeah, I fast-forwarded all scenes in Top Gun: Maverick with that woman who was not connected to the story in any way whatsoever.

@davidgerard
But we can all agree that we should have this option for cutting Strictly Come Dancing down to just the dancing and judges reading out the scores, right?

@davidgerard Those people don't want to experience art, they want to consume content.

@davidgerard watching Netflix like a porn movie

@davidgerard I think we have found a good candidate for being replaced by AI. I mean, a stochastic parrot. And not their *job* being replaced by one; I mean their *brain*. (They're already pretty close to that state.)

@davidgerard I thought they were already working on dynamic storytelling to destroy the last way we make any sense of this world...

@davidgerard More worryingly, can you please automatically censor this website so I don’t see things I don’t like. I can imagine an LLM based filter system being able to do that for text. Is that what she’s shilling?

@davidgerard There are people who make me want to see how the inside of a skull opened with a brick looks like.