I think people know, they just don’t give a shit because they think they’re entitled to have art and artists are arseholes for not giving them exactly what they want

When you put something out there, you allow for the possibility that people will see your work and incorporate it into their mental catalog of art and artistic process

…except when a person is doing it, they’re doing their own thing to it. They take an idea or two and filter it through their own lens and stylise it

Think about it like this - when you do data scraping, you’re still interpreting the results. You’re looking at the data and going ‘ok from this I can draw X and Y conclusions based on this and that’. AI art is like if we removed you from the process - we just shoved all the data into a black box and it goes ding “X is Y”. If you asked it why that’s so, it wouldn’t be able to tell you. You can’t see how it works so you have no idea if it’s reasoning makes scientific sense. It would not be admissible in a paper.

If you pirate shit then you have no ground to stand on for complaining about AI training.

…don’t most people kinda agree you don’t pirate from small artists where piracy is actually hurting them? There’s like, honour along thieves when it comes to piracy, and this is stepping all over the little guy who’s actually hurt by this just to get your grubby little hands on something you think you’re entitled to

I mean if you tend to plug things in at the same computer a lot it’s pretty easy to always plug things in right the first time, even when not looking because you just kinda know what way it’s meant to be. And laptops usually have all theirs pointing the same way so you know one you know them all. If something has text on it, it’s usually oriented in such a way that when plugged in you can read it. Or they have a little face and you know which way the face is meant to be facing

I have a similar “power” and while I’m not flawless, it’s only really new or unfamiliar devices/computers that trip me up. Or plugs that don’t actually have any identifying features and/or unusual ones

Wordpress even has activitypub integration now! Hooray! Here’s hoping automattic do good on their word and bring it to their other projects like Tumblr

Also as much as I like gimp, it is unfortunately not that widely used due to super specialised and hard to use compared to the industry standard juggernaut that is adobe’s creative suite. You’re probably going to get laughed at in any professional industry if you suggest seriously using it.

Congratulations you’re now a snake

A cheap fountain pen like a Lamy safari. Maybe some brightly coloured ink too.

Growing up I loved pens and my dad had some vintage Watermans he used all the time which were unquestionably Cool Pens but also really “fancy” so I wasn’t allowed to touch them, and we just didn’t know that way cheaper and less fiddly fountain pens existed because all of his came from the op shop with ink from borders and not an actual pen store. 8 year old me would’ve been estatic that not only do easier to use cheaper options exist, they’re bright yellow and also you can put any colour in them, not just boring black.

…I feel like everyone answering “Powerball numbers” or “apple stocks” is completely missing the spirit of the question

Nearly - a single bacteria is a bacterium. There’s some Latin rule going on here but I’m not sure I’d reccomend going into those weeds

I think a more interesting (and less dubious) example of this would be Vocaloid and to a greater extent, cevio AI

Vocaloid is a synth bank where instead of the notes being musical instruments, they’re phonemes which have been recorded and then packaged into a product which you pay for, which means royalties are involved (I think there might also be a thing with royalties for big performances and whatnot?) Cevio AI takes this a step further by using AI to better smooth together the phonemes and make pitching sound more natural (or not - it’s an instrument, you can break it in interesting ways if you try hard enough). And obviously, they consented to that specific thing and get paid for it. They gave Yamaha/Sony/the general public a specific character voice and permission to use that specific voice.

(There’s a FOSS voicebanks but that adds a different layer of complication to things like I think a lot of them were recorded before the idea of an “AI bank” was even a possibility. And like, while a paid voice bank is a proprietary thing, the open source alternatives are literally just a big file of .WAVs so it’s much easier to go outside their intended purposes)

That’s because it’s actual cult propaganda. As in “it’s literally made by the church of Scientology, based on the founding literature of Scientology as written by Scientologist leader L Ron Hubbard, by Scientologist actors”

In a vacuum? Yeah it’s cheesy sci fi. With context? Hoo boy…

Like consistently? Or just one or two days a year? Because I feel like bringing out the electric heaters a few times a year is way better than just giving up and using fossil fuel all the time

Also I’d mention that heat pumps are super common over here in Scandinavia so I have my doubts that it’s an issue with the medium and not something else. Maybe you guys have like, heat pumps that are more designed for the heat rather than the cold?

I’d also add that like, for a lot of Scandinavia heat pumps work just fine? Like does America just have some really bad heat pumps or something?

I think the only reason why you wouldn’t install one here (aside from obvious cost issues) would be if you already have a robust heating system built into your home, like a hot water system. And if that’s the case, you can use the heatpump of the earth - geothermal! Use the power of the earth’s molten core to heat and cool your home!

(… geothermal isn’t as ubiquitous as I make it sound it’s just, really fucking cool)

Ok using your Google analogy - there’s a reason why “librarian” is a job and “Googler” isn’t. One requires years of skill and practice to interpret a request and find the right information and do all sorts of things, and the other is someone kinda bashing keys to make Google give them what they want. You wouldn’t put them in remotely the same class

There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month

… you’ve never actually made art, have you? The sort of stuff that you enter into contests takes months to make, from the actual painting to rough sketches to reference gathering, and that’s just the basics

Clicking a button a thousand times isn’t really comparable

Demons are real and they live inside your computer delivering your emails and internet. Before computers they used to screw around with physicists and mathematians and break their theories but now they’re too busy to do that anymore.

Not religious in the slightest, my dad just saw me asking what Beastie on his BSD machine’s screensaver was and decided to fuck with me when he realised I didn’t know what a demon (in any sense of the word) was

It’s one of those things that feels really obvious if you cook a lot of east/south Asian dishes - shrimp sauce and mushroom soy sauce have a pretty similar aftersmell to them because they’re so concentrated

Niche hobby website from the 90s that’s both really useful and still updated (somewhat) - the Parker pen penography. Look at all those pens! Genuinely the most useful source of info on the topic of old Parkers that isn’t a big hefty coffee table book. Most of it probably isn’t too interesting to non-fountain pen people, but there’s some articles about the history of Parker and their decline that might be interesting if you like economics and buisness (like the one about the Itala

Or if you’re using for purely notes, OneNote is like, right there. In your system tray. For free.

Idk if this is true for the US but where I live in Scandinavia red is a common house colour because historically it was a cheap colour you could get from mixing red ochre and oil, so red barns aren’t uncommon. Then again the US midwest does have a lot of Scandinavian immigrants so it might’ve bled over culturally because there’s lot of farms up there?

I’ve had a 3d printer for years and I still can’t really get over how nuts it is. Like it feels like one of those things you’d read about in science magazines as this amazing super scientific thing the scientists out in MIT have in their labs like a supercomputer or some expensive toy people who build stuff on YouTube have in their garage next to the lathe and big fancy CNC table, but no, it’s just, here. On my desk. Being used to casually print stuff that I’ve designed myself on the computer like it’s nothing.

My great grandad was a carpenter and I wish I could’ve shown him it. I wonder what he’d think, seeing something that was once only in the realm of handcrafted diagrammes and days of building now a few hours of modelling and printing away.

Maybe we should step away from China for a moment given their government has a very strong motivation to keep tabs on its citizens and the fact their very mention is biasing the conversation and look at another country which has a strong smartphone presence and I often see posted on here as an example of privacy - Norway

We’re effectively cashless (I don’t think I’ve even handled cash since they swapped the banknotes over) and I think most people do their banking from bills to petty transfers on their phone. You can’t get a physical bus card, because that’s on your phone, or the ticket is attached to your bank card. We don’t have an all encompassing WeChat or even like, any homegrown social media. I’m not exactly sure which aspect of WeChat you’re honing in on so I can’t say Norway does that too, but we do an awful lot via our phones. I do have some gripes about how some things are set up, but they’re complaints that aren’t actually exclusive to this specific system.