That article wouldn't be deleted, because I can find 20 or so references in paper publications saying things like "The Stack Exchange family of websites is a Q&A service for developers and other technical roles. If you’re stuck on a problem, the chances are someone else was too and turned to Stack Exchange for help", or in some cases doing a quick bio of Jeff Atwood or mentioning codinghorror.

Hmm, OTOH I can also find multiple paper references to perlmonks, such as "Perlmonks is a web bulletin board dedicated to Perl. It’s not specifically a help desk, but if you’ve done your homework and ask a good question, you’re likely to get top-notch help very quickly" - that's from the O'Reilly Perl book. Sometimes I'm overoptimistic about these things, because I want to keep every obscure article.

Well, Perlmonks is still mentioned on the articles for Perl, Outline of the Perl programming language, Perl language structure, and Perl Foundation. (This is because deletionists are lazy and don't actually like doing a thorough job.) So I could see Perlmonks becoming a redirect to one of those pages, which could describe it in a section. Similarly, if Stack Exchange faded into obscurity, it might be rolled into a section of Jeff Atwood's page (or vice versa).

Paternalistic was perhaps the intended word.

Some more errors:

Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at Norwich, A.D. 1373 wasn't really mentioned ever. Those mentions are of the book of Revelations in the Bible.

Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem, not a specific modern version by Seamus Heaney.

> Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem

Knowing the HN crowd, it can also be a reference to beowulf clusters as well.

This isn't slashdot :)

An Abundance of Katherines has only been mentioned on HN three times, and none of those are listed among the 19 claimed mentions.

It's going to be "creativity" (another hazy definition!) rather than effort, though. Photography, often said to be all about framing, seems very low effort. You might take one lucky snap. Then the effort can be claimed to be in years of getting ready to be lucky, which is a fair point, but that displaced effort isn't really in the specific photo. Besides, maybe you're a very happy photographer, loved every minute of learning your craft, and found it no effort at all, just really interesting.

Yeah, photography (editing aside) is about having taste and getting lucky. A good photographer can of course raise their odds of getting lucky, but still. There's some technique in there too, but that's really not all that complicated. That said, I think few things match a good photo. There's something about a photo subject being real that I find fascinating. A photo exhibition does not display the imagination of the photographers, but rather the incredible in the real world.

It does, however, display the photographers ability to say "hey, you should see this" and be right about it.

Yes, but: when I was young I used to love photorealism and hyperrealism, which is super-smooth-and-shiny art that conceals its process in order to awe simpletons. Then I bought an airbrush, and then true color computer graphics happened, and soon after that I began to appreciate brush strokes and the texture of pen marks and the idea of the personality of the artist's hand. But that doesn't mean the process-hiding stuff is non-art, or even bad art. What's wrong with creating an amazingly convincing illusion, wasn't that always the goal, historically? Also there are no prizes for effort, and if your artwork is only struggle, I don't want to see it. Unless you're really badass about it.

I really like Cory Doctorow’s description of why it feels empty, quote:

“Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight.”

OK, but then there's the possibility of reestablishing the bandwidth by selecting the output. If the artist selects one AI image from hundreds, that's like photography, or collage, or "found sculpture" if you can dig it. Then we can do away with the need for hundreds of versions by saying that the artist selected this image from among all the assorted sights seen during the day to frame as art and present to the viewer, and that's just like picking a preferred version from among hundreds, and thus is just like crafting an image. Tenuously. (This falls apart because the selectivity of the selection isn't good enough, I guess. But the process - throwing away bad ideas as you go along - is just like drawing.)

Sort of. It’s like selecting from hundreds of versions of a letter of reference that word the same three bullet points slightly differently. It still feels empty to me, but I guess that’s personal.

I reckon it's not personal, and you and Doctorow are objectively correct, but the explanation isn't great.

art without will is like street vomit: it might be pretty but it's just lumps of old content arranged how you'd expect. less than food; more a waste than a triumph. and it always smells the same.

the street vomit photographer is offering a bit more art through his choices but I can already see he makes poor choices

Art that takes tremendous effort but looks effortless isn't negated by my comment. The process and struggle is still there.

When I was about 12 a car crashed in my quiet street (somebody tried to drive it through a concrete fence), so the next day I sat in the street and did an ink drawing of the wreckage with a mapping pen nib. That was excellent art. Then I stole one of the gigantic suspension springs and took it home to use as a stool, which by some silly definitions was also an act of art. But this all evades the original question about whether the actual car crash is art for evoking feelings, or whether art in fact must involve pictures, or human communication, or what. It's one of the impossible definitions, along with "intelligence" and "freedom". I'm a fan of "I know it when I see it".

Perhaps it has to be a more sophisticated emotion, such as feeling tired of a hackneyed definition.

We have at least established that very boring pieces, such as Andy Warhol's Empire, Kazimir Malevich's White on White, and John Cage's As Slow As Possible, are not art.

Bad code is still code. A painting of code is not code.

I think you're saying bad art is still art, but I'm unsure what to do with the second sentence. I'm toying with "an encoding of art is not art", which might mean that art has to be available to an audience.

Sometimes criminology students kill people, apparently as research: Bryan Kohberger, Nasen Saadi.