Nicole Ripka

Rhythm is based on expectations.

People make things when the value of the thing exceeds the cost of creation. When the cost of creation in a medium is high, people are careful only to use it for high-value products. If a movie costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make, you can’t afford to make a bad movie (or at least, not very many of them). You’re going to put a lot... See more

Memory is a contest. It is not a mechanistic psychological process of our brains, but a set of social dynamics which we negotiate together, structured by language, money, power, and technology.

I think that YouTube is a good comparison here. I continue to think it is a violation of SEC rules that Google doesn’t report YouTube costs, but it’s safe to assume that video costs a fair bit to serve; that has certainly come down over time, of course, but it’s more than text. Because YouTube has an advertising model, however, the costs of serving... See more

On the other hand — and I hope I conveyed this in the Article — I really do think that OpenAI has seriously erred by not aggressively building out an advertising model. Google and Meta are years ahead of OpenAI in this regard, which lets them compete with ChatGPT using cash flow today; OpenAI is promising revenues in the future, but from what?... See more

The argument in favor: people love treating things as conscious. In the 1990s, people went crazy over Tamagotchi, a “virtual pet simulation game”. If you pressed the right buttons on your little egg every day, then the little electronic turtle or whatever would survive and flourish; if you forgot, it would sicken and die. People hated letting their... See more