by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-17 16:08:33+00:00
> The thing that is giving the right juice is that they can hold up meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair competition in response to identity politics.

They can hold the MYTHS of meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair competition, because that's what they are. They are popularly held and by a majority of the country I fear, but myths they remain. You walk around the board room of any major company in the country, and you show me a meritocracy. The new rich, such as they are, were largely a product of the tech industry boom, and none of them are particularly skilled, instead what they had was LUCK. Luck to be starting companies at a particular time in history in which, if you hit the threshold of network effects and popularity, you could become an utterly unstoppable juggernaut of business, by sheer scale.

Now, that's not a NOTHING achievement, to be clear, but it is not merit by ones personal efforts. Facebook today does not exist as the monolith it does because Fuckerburg was just the rockstar of rockstar coders. He is, by most accounts, pretty mediocre in fact, and his website was built so he and the other failsons of his college class could rate the looks of their female classmates. And we know this is true, because it is not fucking possible to "hustle" hard enough to be a billionare. If you disagree, give away everything you have, start from nothing, and go prove me wrong. Go become a billionaire from zero and if you do, I will steam my Macbook and eat it in one sitting, and publish the video publicly.

And that's just NEW industry. OLD industry is stuffed to the fucking gills with the mediocre offspring of the previous generations most lucky business titans. Many of whom, for emphasis, did make solid business decisions, many of which could also be classified as evil, but that's neither here nor there. Many of our politicians similarly have storied pasts full of skeletons, from scandals to failed businesses to dead-end careers. "Failing up" is a concept because meritocracy is horseshit.

> Human vs AI is the same debate. No matter how good AI is, nothing is stopping you from creating.

I made no such claim.

> People have freedom of choice in terms of what they can consume, and if AI is a better creator than you, why should you make people's experiences worse by ramming your mediocrity down their throat with the battle cry of "human made"? You don't deserve an audience just because you're made of meat.

What on earth does this even mean? I didn't say anything about anyone else. I have said, though I do think a preponderance of people agree with me, that I am not interested in consuming things created by people who do not care about them enough to create them, and fundamentally, making stuff with AI is not creation. If you disagree with that assertion, you're free to make that case, but I advocated nothing outside of my own personal bounds of taste.

> If you hate slop, hate it because it's bad, and hate human slop equally.

Can and do!

> For reference, I'm a published artist

No you're not. And I know that because when you click through to your profile, you self identify as the CEO of a company called Sibylline Software, which is incorrect, that's Justin Crump, and you say your name is Nathan. I found info on you on your website though, but the rest of said website is nothing but corporate fluff about AI and enterprise integration and yadda yadda, very unimpressive stuff, and trying to find anything about what your company is allegedly doing or making is difficult both because you're one letter off of a MUCH larger and more successful business, and even googling for your spelling in particular brings up absolutely nothing apart from your business website and a podcast episode. And I wasn't able to find any art whatsoever.

Also you spelled your own company's name wrong in your profile. Assuming you are Nathan Rice. At this point I feel you're a highly dishonest interlocutor and I have no clue how much credibility to assign anything you say.

There is a Nathan Rice who's involved in movies? But he looks completely different to you in his photos.

> I use AI to scaffold projects quickly to ~80% then finish it myself,

As an admittedly amateur artist with a much smaller platform: I would never call 80% of ANYTHING I make a "scaffold." If AI is generating 80% of your final product, I consider that AI generated and I wouldn't be interested, and I would happily Pepsi challenge that if you're so inclined to provide samples.

Edit: Oh, no, I'm wrong, you did just spell it EXACTLY like the other Sybilline Software. Oh well I cannot possibly rewrite this comment AGAIN, this rabbit hole has sucked up so much of my time today, amusing as it is. Enjoy your AI business I'm sure you'll be partying with Bezos in like 2 years.