Yeah, that’s what microsoft thought too.
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Here’s the actual site:
This site is a thing of absolute beauty.
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I had some issues with some of the later emulators in Firefox, but the concept and execution is otherwise fantastic. I would love to see more things presented like this. I’ve long thought that a museum exhibit style program would be fantastic to show the history of video games, although I foolishly hadn’t thought of it being web-based since I don’t think about webAssembly and what it allows, even though archive.org is right there. I also think this would be a good medium for many other history related topics (films, music, books, etc.)
Does anyone know if there’s any kind of framework that helps streamline this kind of presentation? I’d be willing to take a stab at it for some of my family history/genealogy, but don’t want to start completely from scratch. Prezi/Impress.js go some way towards it, but I’m not sure if that’s the right way to go either.
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Not completely sure this is the right thread for this, since it’s about how GenZ has nostalgia for the past that came before them, but it’s pretty interesting and probably nostalgic for those of us who were around back then. (Even if the speaker does kinda seem like a GenZ Nicolas Cage.)
Some of the comments are interesting:
I was born in 1974. If 1980 me, walked into modern McDonald’s, or even Disneyland, I’d think I walked into a hellish, dead inversion of everything I enjoyed.
If 1994 me, was told about there being no more of the places I spent time, no more 24-hour anything, that places barely stayed open 'til 9PM, I’d also see that as a boring hellscape.
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I didn’t write that comment (and was born a bit later) but I might as well have. For the longest time, I thought my nostalgia for the 80s and 90s was just typical longing for the time of one’s youth- even as a kid I knew that was a thing for every generation. The Boomers’ longing for the 1950s pervaded absolutely every aspect of culture when I was growing up. And of course as children, we don’t register most of the fears and problems that weigh heavily on our parents’ minds.
But the longer time goes on, the more undeniable it becomes: it genuinely has been getting objectively worse and worse since about 2001, and it’s not just because that happens to have been the time I started maturing into an adult. It’s real. The economy, the environment, art, culture, the internet, employment, existential threats, politics, socialization, human rights, education, absolutely everything is worse and declining further with each passing year. For a long time optimists could point to gains in LGBTQ+ rights and claim that at least we’d come a long way in that area during the last couple decades, but now America and much of the rest of the world has gone full fascist and those rights are not only crumbling, but threatening to take all the civil rights gains made during the 20th century down with them. A lot of the comments mention a sense of optimism having died, and with good reason.
I have a fascination with the 70s, the decade before I grew up, but never the intense longing or sense of profound loss that Gen Z seems to have for the 80s or 90s. The fact that they share it with the people who actually grew up in that era is depressing validation that something has gone very wrong in a way that can’t be accounted for by simple childhood nostalgia.
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That is so very well stated! I love how you describe it, everything across the board just declining, and we can all see it. Even people who weren’t even there in the before times.
I remember watching Happy Days and Grease and various old syndicated shows - all the Boomer nostalgia, and I think it was qualitatively different from what we are seeing now. And what the younger people are seeing.
That’s really the core of it. You said it perfectly and I can think of nothing to add.
Except maybe tech, which is kinda getting better but simultaneously getting much worse in the process. And that itself is a weirdness - how is it that they can improve something (technically) and yet keep making it worse? But they do find a way.
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I’m not going to argue against the fact that my phone is a way better music player than my portable CD player and iPod combined, or that the ability to text people, do video calls, or access the internet from anywhere at any time are all amazing. We take them for granted now but that’s only because they’re so useful and appealing that all of us use them pretty much constantly. This is the sort of stuff we dreamed about in the 80s.
Yet it is outweighed by the bad, and not just in the “the magic and wonder is gone” sense that the video mentions. The internet is literally less functional and useful than it was a couple decades ago. Internet searches are shittier, ads are more pervasive, everything is closed off behind a paywall or requires you to sign up for an account, scammers and identity thieves prey upon the slightest lapse in vigilance, AI garbage clutters up everything with misinformation, social media has addicted people to misery and helped make wild conspiracy theories and fringe racist nonsense into national policy.
Hardware is deliberately made difficult to mod or repair, software is increasingly a subscription service, operating systems are stuffed with spyware and bloatware by default, EULAs are the length of a book and strip away every consumer right and protection they can get away with, apps prey on dark patterns to manipulate users, games are packed with microtransactions and DRM, absolutely everything spies on you for corporations or the government and sells your data.
Self-driving cars are a fraud, drones and mobile robots are grabbed by the military to use as tools of oppression, cold fusion is five years away forever, new medicines are made inaccessible or unaffordable, cryptocurrency wrecks the environment and fuels organized crime…
And all of that is just the barest tip of the iceberg, because I’m sure you, I, or anyone else could list examples all night long. Absolutely everything has been deliberately broken, corrupted, monetized, and optimized to cause as much harm or extract as much profit as possible, in the most cynical, ruthless and shameless ways imaginable, until the joy, utility and innovation has been utterly drained from all of it. Yeah, flat screen monitors and faster CPUs are undeniably cool, but the larger picture still shows a dramatic, even catastrophic decline since the early 2000s.
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I can’t disagree with any of this, and I can only feel that the current AI movement will only further hasten our decline.
The internet has already made us collectively dumber in so many ways, and AI products make it so easy to churn out pretty much anything you want with almost zero effort that it completely disincentivizes human creativity.
I feel like an old man screaming at a cloud right now, but I find all this deeply concerning.
People I work with aren’t even trying to solve problems on their own anymore, they just ask a LLM to try figure it out for them.
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I don’t know… I think the people who are going to use AI for creative pursuits were not people who cared much about being creative in the first place, generally speaking? I think that people who want to make music, do art, or write are going to do those things regardless of this technology. The problem is that this will gut creative labor. Many people who do art for a living in some capacity are already living on the margins, and now employers will see AI as something they can replace a warm body with (despite the obvious far lesser quality).
You’re not. Or if you are, I’m right there with ya. Few people are paying mind to the real threat posed by AI and it’s the sci-fi “problems” that some AI researchers are clutching their pearls over. It’s the labor, climate, and dis/misinformation issue…
Yeah, there is that, too… so, I guess, in that sense, it does disincentivize human creativity, if we expand it to things like problem-solving. But I guess I’d also argue that that is what capitalism has always done - tried to replace human creative power with technological power, primarily to save on labor costs.
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I think existing creative people will use it as a tool for brainstorming ideas, and avoiding writer’s block/blank-page syndrome.
Non-creative people will use it to just generate stuff for them.
But long-term, it will probably reduce the development of creativity in people who might’ve otherwise become creative.
Because people who haven’t already studied things like perspective and lighting and color theory and composition or whatever, and struggled through countless hours of practice to get better, may be less inclined to do so. Same for writing and music. It takes a lot of work to make your creative ideas into a good depiction of what you imagined.
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One of the nice things about those machines was the big pull knob (phrasing!) that gave such a satisfying ka-chunk. What does it say that it felt like a beautiful luxury not to have to leave one’s drinking to satisfy another different vice.
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I recently had a frustrating experience with just trying to do laundry. Used to be able to just stick coins in and ka-chunk you’re doing laundry. It now involves, of course, downloading an app, making an account complete with address, phone, credit card, captchas, doesn’t charge exact amount have to add money in $10 increments which means always leaving them extra money, etc. Soooo much more hassle for the only convenience being getting a notification when it’s done, that’s it, everything else about it is terrible. The kids nowadays have no idea.
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Generally speaking, but there are exceptions. NeuralViz on Youtube (the guy who does the Glurons) uses AI tools heavily, and yet it is still a crafted work of creative art.
An artist can use anything to make art, but the point I think is that just because you throw some paint at a canvas, that doesn’t make you an artist. Art is what you do, not necessarily how you do it.
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Maybe, but there is still the problem of it just generating other stuff by other people…
I would say that capitalism does that, more than the specific technology.
Yeah, absolutely. Creative work is still work. And people should be compensated for that work. And the thing that AI is being used to do is to replace the people doing that work, because people who don’t make art but who are in positions of power tend to not see being artistic as work.
Also, I think everyone has the potential to be creative in one way or another. It’s just we live in a society that does not value our innate creativity, and in fact, it’s really wrung out of us early on. We’re told that only some people are naturally creative, and the part where making art or music or literature is a learned skill that any of us really have the capacity for. Creativity, I think, is the natural human state. I don’t think we would have built up any kind of technologies or even civilization because imagining something that isn’t there and finding a way to make it exist is an act of creativity.
Personally I don’t like much AI generated stuff. I think at first it seemed weird and kind of interesting, but pretty quickly, it got to be kind of boring to me. If I see a video and notice AI being used, I’ll usually turn it off, because, I just have no interest and I find it problematic enough, however someone is using it… YMMV.
An artist also lives within a society, and for now, that means capitalism, and that means that the goal of this technology is shaped by capitalism. The point I’m making is that the goal of this stuff isn’t to help people be more creative, the goal is to replace artists. We know that’s the intention because large corporations that distribute art are doing that already.
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This is what I mean. AI has advanced to a level where anybody can get “good enough” results just by typing in some instructions and let the bots do all the work. It’ll compose fully fledged whatever for you — music, artwork, writings, research — no need to learn technique, theory, or hone your craft. The thing is, none of this advances the craft in any way since it’s just regurgitating what already exists. I feel like the more we rely on these tools, the more we’ll stagnate as a culture. I hope I’m wrong.
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Yes. I already miss the days when “AI art” meant dogs with a thousand eyes and giraffes growing out of every available surface, and the text generators were only used to invent physically impossible cake recipes and surrealistic pickup lines.
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