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Yes. Having them every day. They're original to me, and that's what matters most, I think. It was already relatively common to give birth to an original idea and develop it, and then find out that someone else halfway across the world already had the idea last month. For years now, execution has mattered more than an idea.
Agree.
In memes, it has never been relevant, I think
Why? It has been the case for a long time that memes the jpegs are a kind of analogue for how information and ideas reproduce themselves. Pictures with captions happen to have the perfect mixture of being infinitely reproducable and sticky because they embrace visual (and sometimes aural) media. Other ones (broccoli haircut), behaviours etc., are a little less obvious online, but still memes in a sense.
On plagiarism, passing off ideas as your when they are not is institutionally forbidden, but more than that, I believe is a type of theft and, to me at least, seems to go against natural law. If I wrote a book or article and you say that it is yours, then you stole it, in the same way that if you are squatting in a house I own, that is stealing, or if you take my cattle, etc. I'm not that familiar with silicon valley norms around this. I have heard, albeit only anecdotally, that Apple's Airdrop technology is noticably faster than bluetooth because they have not open sourced it. The openclaw phenomenon seemed to show that someone who publishes open sourced code, at least sometimes, gets their due acknowledgent by the community without having to "own" the idea. Maybe this community norm has sort of relegated IP to being less relevant.
On the whole, I agree in principle that people create original ideas all the time. I also try to. To refine my thinking on this: most ideas that emerge online are well within the accepted range of discourse, I think that is called the Overton Window, and anything without just doesn't seem to surface. I wonder if that means we are doomed to incremental growth, and the days lightning-bolt-like moments of greatness, crearivity and originality--are these days gone?
Why?
I think that in memes the jpegs, or rather in that same online culture, it has not been relevant because, some exceptions aside, it's created from fair use of material, and then spread, also fair use, and reused, also fair use. Taking credit for being the originator of an idea was at least where I've been hanging considered somewhat lame, unless you actually put a lot of creativity in it (i.e you drew something from scratch.) The point is for an idea to spread, so it doesn't matter where it originates, it is relevant only how far it spreads and often, what becomes of it after some remixes.
On plagiarism, passing off ideas as your when they are not
Yes, and it is lame. But the flipside of this coin, where I cannot design a system that I thought up because it turns out it has conceptual components that someone else has patented (that you didn't know about), works against innovation. So if you're on the one hand looking for originality, but on the other looking for ways to limit other people's ideas, then you're in a bit of a split. Outright theft, I agree, is nasty. But what if someone had the same idea? This is impossible to prove and patents are kind of arbitrary.
lightning-bolt-like moments of greatness, crearivity and originality--are these days gone?
Personally I think that most ideas were incremental. Just there wasn't much pressure to talk about things on the mass internet so people just developed things while we didn't know about it until later? Stealth mode is still a thing - we just don't know about these ideas yet. Probably for the better: I like well-developed ideas.
No. I still see a lot of original thought, from humans not bots. Just relatively less signal, because there is much more noise. We're probably well on our way to infinite noise. Filtering becomes key and the most effective filter is finding a community or a hangout that values the same things you do. I do hope you get at least some of that here on SN - personally, I do.
The downside of that is that there is a massive incentive for bubbles forming, and it gets a lot less pleasant to go outside of the bubble, because the first thing you'll have to do is wade through an avalanche of slop.
Yes. Having them every day. They're original to me, and that's what matters most, I think. It was already relatively common to give birth to an original idea and develop it, and then find out that someone else halfway across the world already had the idea last month. For years now, execution has mattered more than an idea. This is why AI is both great and awful: it's great because you can execute better, but since everyone can execute better, the bar is rising, and you get tons and tons of what used to count as "work product" - be it mediocre - but is now just slop. From articles to formal reports, from music to movies, from simple apps to entire protocols, everything taken together averages down in relative quality because of the floods of slop, but there are at the same time massive improvements in a few products. They just stand out less because the needle shrunk in an enormous haystack.
I'm not sure in which way you mean this. For example, in tech, and most especially the silicon valley flavor of tech, this was already dead for 2-3 decades now, because everyone relentlessly copies everything from everyone else, all the time. If you don't, you'll be outcompeted in 3... 2... 1... because they sure as hell will copy all your original stuff.
In memes, it has never been relevant, I think.