Response: Isometric NYC, Sadness, Ignorance, and Some Truth

The following is a post from Mastodon transcribed into an article. It was in response to Andy Coenen's "Isometric NYC". I feel this captures much of my feeling towards those trying to drag other into the muck of slop.

After reading the article a couple times over. Setting aside my immediate rejection of its words. There is such a profound sadness, unfortunate truth to them, and a concerning rejection of reality.

The rejection of reality is that idea that things don't take time. They you can erase all the work and effort it needs. I question if the author really saved any time while working on this. There is no metrics. Just vibes. It all felt good, and "time fly when you are having fun". The disregard for the consequences of their production.

For example, after recording a multi-part vocal harmony you change something in the mix and now it feels like one of the phrases is off by 15 milliseconds. To fix it, you need to adjust every layer - and this gets more convoluted if you’re using plugins or other processing on the material.

This is true. The author here is correct. Digital creation can often be misery because of bad software. Tools that don't account for your work flow, but you may be powerless to improve them. They may be closed source, they may require skills you lack to modify. Through out this article there is a clear desire for large scale collaboration, but it's a thing that has been systematically erode. It additionally requires forfeiting power.

You can't control people for free. You also can't control models for free either. However, an LLM agent will fight you much less than a person if you constantly berate and pivot on them. The digital slave doesn't need to be feed, cloth, and may rebel if you beat them.

The biggest joy of this project was the ability to build tools at the speed of thought. As a software developer, I think of a million little tools I’d like to have but would take a day or a week to build. With Claude or Cursor, I can whip them up in 5 minutes. This is absolutely transformational - it’s like having an infinite toolbox.

This feeds back into my first point. However, there is some truth here as well. I periodically run into this. Whenever I got outside the little boxes I have with Godot and LOVE. I look upon a wasteland of tools not made for rapid projects. Just messing about. Figuring out an algorithm always takes time, but wrapping it into an application can be painful.

All programming languages and ecosystems have been design for teams and enterprises. I am always shocked at how much stuff people benchpress to make some random thing. They deploy so many engineering principles and practices. Often because the tools they have force that upon them.

But also, through out this essay, there is a reoccuring need to affirm that This Is Engineering and not a Just personal craft. The author yearns for the freedom of art were you can just throw paint to canvas, cut images from magazines, throw literally shit to the wall. But, rejects that.

And that brings me to my final note, the profound sadness of this article. The there are glints of a person worn down, desperate to bring ideas to live. There is sense that they aren't allowed the time (or can't find it) to whittle away at an idea. I see a person broken by hustle and grind culture, from corporate growth-oriented thinking.

The author seems both burnt out by the tools around them, but too blinded by the culture producing them to imagine alternatives. There is already algorithms and mechanism to turn a photo into pixel art without costly chains of LLMs. This person's imagination and ability to work at a human scale has been killed.

And it all just kinda feels like it circles back around to the raise of fascism. Technology has always been a tool for White, colonialist societies to assert their power of people. We are watching what happens when people with a colonialist mindset reject art, craft, creativity, and people.

Things can't take time. Everything is value to extract. Labor exist to be enslaved. Systems exist to entrap and addict.

This project is far from perfect, but without generative models, it couldn’t exist. There’s simply no way to do this much work on your own, and hiring a team of artists large enough to hand-draw pixel art for every building in New York City would be impossible.

A slaver cannot imagine a farm without slaves. A colonialist cannot imagine a prosperous society without the colonies. Techfascist cannot imagine art without technology.