millie

I'm both curious and personally invested on what their outlook on refugees would look like. I've definitely considered the possibility of having to flee to Canada as a trans woman, but I guess the question is how legitimately I'd be able to enter the country and whether I'd have to go into hiding once I get there.

I don't think it's possible to have a significant impact on transphobia on the internet purely via debate and text. I do think it's very possible to have a substantial impact in real life just be being a visible trans person out in public life interacting with people.

A lot of people have never once in their life had a conversation with a trans person. It's a lot harder to weaponize someone's existence when they become a fixture in your life. It also gives you an opportunity to occasionally share some of your struggle with people and educate them in a more direct way, but I think the former is often more valuable.

I mean, yeah. Have you been on reddit since the API stuff? It's absolutely flooded with bots trying to make up the difference. Which is like, reddit playbook 2009. The broken links are pretty prolific too at this point.

It's not going to like, close its doors, but it certainly isn't in the position it was just a few months ago.

Yeah, I've used qbittorrent, deluge, utorrent, and a number of other clients over the years. I greatly prefer transmission. I don't need my torrent client to do anything but download and seed.

I bet this person hates GIMP too.

My memory really only seems to function properly for keeping track of large sets of complicated variables, like writing lore or designing a rule set or coding. Ask it to remember something simple and it'll completely throw it out the window. Which, okay, it's a pain in the ass, but I can really do that first bit in a way that I watch other people struggle with.

I may operate like a confused blob spreading in all directions, but every little piece of that work is a chunk of a bigger picture that I can see clearly. I may be flitting from task to task within that work and advancing ideas as my brain spontaneously shifts focus, but when they're all tied to the same end result they all advance the work in an organic and automatic way.

When I let myself work that way, that's when I really feel what Bukowski meant by "Don't try".

Yes, it takes me literally forever to leave the house in the morning. Sure, numbers without a specific meaning and immediate use swim around in my head like alphabet soup. Okay, I literally can barely tell the difference between one hour and six hours if I'm not using some sort of event to track the time.

But my awareness in the moment is pretty on point. I'll catch things other people won't. I'm great at spotting the silhouettes of animals out in the dark and I notice erratic drivers from a mile away. The same things about my memory that make me terrible at getting my day going or that make it hard for me to keep up to date with people or deal with paperwork also make me way more observant than I would be otherwise. They're also the reason I can track these massive piles of inter-related data and not feel overwhelmed. My memory works differently, but it's pretty useful for what I need it for.

We're different, and sometimes it sucks. But a big part of the reason it sucks is because society isn't built for our particular variety of human. That doesn't mean we're not beneficial to ourselves or our species, and it doesn't mean we're broken. It means we work differently and we have different capabilities.

For some people it may make sense to medicate to make it easier to keep track of things, and some people may not have or may not have found applications for the way their memory works differently; we all have to find what works for us.

But I also think that we don't necessarily have to frame our experience of our own brains around apologizing for not being what society expects or overly pathologizing our own variation from the perceived norm.

You should be able to show.. a little bit of porn during impeachment hearings. 🥚

Lemmy needs proper moderation tools. Currently if someone posts an image you have to take like a dozen steps in a command line to delete it, and it doesn't delete from federated instances when removed by moderators.

So let's say you access lemmy.world through lemmy.film. Anything federated to lemmy.film through lemmy.world that's deleted due to content moderation will still appear on lemmy.film until it's deleted manually.

Couple this with an influx of malicious users and you've got a nasty situation on your hands that isn't sustainable for instance hosts while putting them at significant legal risk.

On the user experience end of things, people seem determined to flood the all feed with bot spam and it seems as though the more hostile tide of reddit users and plants sponsored by bad actors have showed up to play.

Lemmy's devs need to give some indication that they can even be bothered to glance in the direction of producing more robust moderation and federation tools if it's going to keep its momentum. User-level instance blocking would help a lot too.

What a terrible interview. The interviewer literally repeatedly asks questions that they've already answered and shows pretty clearly that they haven't bothered actually researching or trying AI art technology. They certainly seemed to have read plenty of articles about how bad AI is, but didn't even bother scratching the surface of how it's actually used.

It reads like a hit piece coming from someone who only reads what comes up in their feed.

Americans largely haven't had much of a choice. In states where the laws are decent and political corruption isn't heavily entrenched, things are alright and the system isn't totally broken. But in places where it has? There's less and less ability to vote in more reasonable laws.

The problems are systemic. The same states have shitty education systems, mass voter disenfranchisement of prisoners and anyone else they can justify taking the vote from, extensive gerrymandering, and every other form of corruption and political inefficiency. The major population centers take a very different approach, but they have to compete with these backward and broken states through an electoral system that skews the results in their favor.

Trying to take direct action outside of the official political framework is also problematic. In Europe you've got the benefit of an extremely high population density and a relatively small area regardless of which country you're in. In the US everything is extremely spread out. The result is that protest is often not terribly effective. You might be able to shut down a couple of streets, but there's no way you're disturbing commerce for more than a single metropolitan area (of which there are many) at a time. It's the same reason mass public transit runs into issues: we're way too spread out for strategies that require high and comparatively uniform population density.

That doesn't mean there's no answer, but it does mean we're going to have to get a little more creative.

I think in general people would have an easier time interacting with the system and just existing in proximity to it if the stakes weren't so artificially raised.

Honestly, I'd argue that raising the stakes via the penal system as well as through things like corporate culture and work ethic have more to do with many of our problems than anything else. We'd probably be a lot better off if we took the time to try to teach people patience by not demanding constant impossible perfection and by giving them the room to exist.

So many people get so stressed about literally nothing. I'll pick people up driving my cab and they'll literally apologize for needing to be picked up or apologize for paying with cash or a card or a thousand other things. I spend more time reassuring people that everything is fine and it's completely acceptable for them to call a taxi than nearly any other endlessly repeated interaction.

It's not a big deal. We're all going to die. Just take a second and let yourself enjoy your life instead of subjugating yourself to assholes and apologizing for it. Part of that is minding your own damn business and not locking people up for dumb shit.

You'd be making a mistake there. AI elements can't be copyrighted, but human-created elements can. There's also a line somewhere at which point AI generation is used as a tool to enhance hand-made art rather than to generate entire pieces wholesale.

Like, let's look at this Soul Token for my Planescape themed Conan Exiles server (still in development).

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1097400802764664843/1110453997413867560/image.png

I went into GIMP, drew a simple skull based on a design I found on google image search, slapped it on a very simple little circle, and popped it into NightCafe for some detail work. The end result is something I composed myself, with the most significant visual elements created by hand and spiced up a bit essentially using a big complicated filter. The result saved me hours and gave me one of many little in-game items to mod into my server that I never would have had the resources to produce in bulk otherwise as an independent developer.

Who owns it?

Well, I drew the skull after training myself on google image search data, but presumably my hand drawing of a fairly generic object still belongs to me. I drew the circle that makes up the coin itself, but NightCafe added some nicely lit metallic coloring, gave it a border, and turned my little skull into a gem. This, of course, requiring some prompt engineering and iteration on my part.

So is adding a texture and a little border detail enough to interfere with my ownership? Should it be? If I didn't hand-create enough of the work to constitute ownership, surely there's some point at which a vanishingly small amount of AI detail being added to the art doesn't eliminate the independent creation of the art itself. If I were to paint an elaborate landscape by hand and then AI generate a border for it, surely that border shouldn't eliminate the legitimacy of my contributions.

At some point, the difference between the use of AI and the use of a filter in an image editor becomes essentially non-existent. Yes, an AI can create a lot more from scratch, but in practical terms it's much easier to get it started with a bit of traditional art than it is to spend hours engineering prompts trying to get rid of weird extra eyeballs and spaghetti fingers.

I'd love to see a more elaborate discussion on this topic, but so far all we get is some form of 'AI bad!' and then some artists dropping a little bit of nuance without it really seeming to go anywhere.

This technology has the potential to elevate independent artists to the sort of productivity that only corporations, with their inherent inspiration-killing bureaucracy, could previously achieve. That's a good thing.

Source for that? Because all I'm seeing is footage of her striking with SAG and pro-union comments she's made online.

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/a45138901/margot-robbie-sag-aftra-strike-picket-line-outfit/

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishabassi/margot-robbie-sag-aftra-strike-support-actors-rights

The attitude toward celebrities on Lemmy versus on Mastodon is really weird. Same thing with reddit, a lot of the time. Like, okay, I have no idea if that's really Margot Robbie or not, but famous people do use the internet. Attention doesn't make them a different species that forgets how to use keyboards or something.

Might as well be nice?

You're literally asking for the 'average' of a country containing everything from desert to tundra to a variety of types of forest and just about every biome in between. We've got political situations ranging from state endorsed persecution and torture of minorities on the one hand to policies that are at times to the left of the European mainstream on the other.

You might as well compare Norway and Turkey as Massachusetts and Texas. In the latter case they share a federal government, but both also ignore that government when it suits them. Like, look at the confusing legal situation around marijuana in the US. It's legal in more and more states, but it's federally illegal. So like, technically it's federally illegal in states where it's legal, but we just ignore that for most purposes. It does mean that dispensaries largely have to operate with cash, though.

In Massachusetts it's even weirder. We have a ballot initiative process, so the people can make new laws by making a big enough petition and putting it on the next election ballot. That's how we passed decriminalization, then medical, then legalization. No Massachusetts politician really took up the issue and endorsed it, we just voted it in. Which forced our state law makers to basically ignore the federal prohibition.

You could also expect to see this happen in Massachusetts if, for example, abortion were federally criminalized. We already ignore other states' laws about things like family planning and immigration.

The US really isn't a monolith legally or culturally.

I mean, I have no idea if she's Margot Robbie, but I figure I might as well treat her as if she is. Doesn't cost me anything. It's basically the solution to the solipsism problem with lower stakes.

Personally, I think doing a goofy impression of yourself and occasionally breaking character would be a good way to fly under the radar.

If you'd read the article you might have an answer.

Bottom of the lake is pretty cheap iirc.

Real world protest on a meaningful scale is extremely dependent on population density both of individual cities and of the country in general.

In the United States we're extremely spread out, even if we have some urban areas with incredibly high population density. The result is a situation where wide-scale protest logistics really aren't in our favor. Even if you mobilized all of New England's protest-inclined leftists to organize around one city, it's hardly the numbers needed to shut anything down. We can't just all go outside and produce nation-wide mobs in our major cities.

Look at Occupy Wallstreet. They had pretty substantial support and there were busloads of people from all over the country going to New York. But in the end it wasn't enough to create substantial change.

Strikes have been effective because they mobilize the actual workforce that's looking for a result, and are inherently disruptive to the thing they're trying to change. Their demands end up being addressed because they crank up the immediate urgency of addressing them.

We need that. Targeted action that is actually effective on a wide scale. I don't really know precisely what that looks like, but I think a good first step is the kind of action we see around remote work. People literally will quit over it and go elsewhere. Companies have done so much to leech profits out of their employment models that they've reduced any incentive toward long term loyalty.

They really don't have much bargaining power right now, so people can dictate the terms a bit more. Individual decisions regarding how and when companies get to buy your labor or your creative output, as well as which companies you support financially, may well be closer to an actual path through the muck.

Outside agitation can also be incredibly useful. An outside actor in contact with people inside a corporate entity have an opportunity to speak out without the chance, legal or otherwise, of employer retaliation. Again, targeted and largely individual action.

Whatever the solution is, I suspect it'll look a lot more like that if it's going to challenge the status quo in the United States.

Hi Margot Robbie! <3

Huh? I mean buildings get condemned or rebuilt sometimes, but talk like that tells me you haven't been to Boston or New York.

Europe at least has had the benefit of being able to work country-by-country, whereas the US is one massive tangled morass. Hell, even achieving the kind of restructuring and harmonious cooperation that you see in the EU had to come as a result of two of the most atrocious wars humanity has ever mustered in the span of less than half a century.

Kinda puts it a little more into perspective when you consider the absolute shit-show Europe had to turn into before it was ready to grow up.

I worked at Starbucks back in like 04-06 or something like that and it was a great job for what it was at the time. The pace was reasonable, the hours were genuinely flexible, the pay was decent, and the benefits were actual. I was in the highest volume store in the metro area I was living in and I loved working there. It was busy, but the line kept it reasonable, we'd mark drinks ahead of time on cups, and half the time by the time people got to the counter we'd have their drink ready.

After unemployment ran out from COVID I went back for about a year, and it was a completely different beast. Where one line used to create a bottleneck at the register and allow us plenty of time to mark and make drinks, we now had to deal with the drive-thru and mobile ordering all at the same time, which shifts the bottle neck to drink preparation by a wide margin. Working at Starbucks now is essentially standing in the middle of the narrow point of a labor funnel. They've also added a lot more tasks and spread them out all over the place, so the footwork is way more than it used to be. Floor mat coverage also tends to be insufficient because of this, and there isn't really time to slow down to a reasonable pace. Doesn't help when you're scheduled until 15 minutes before the hour in order to avoid having to give you another break.

Pay is basically what it was the last time I worked there plus a couple of dollars. Benefits and stock options are still left dangling as bait, but management seems to try to ensure that as few employees as possible actually get enough hours to qualify. Where previously corporate, in my experience anyway, supported positive managers who had their crews backs, they now seem to love slimy corporate boot-lickers who will rake back every bit of benefit and extract as much labor as possible.

With the drive-thru model it's hardly surprising to see it getting worse, but it is disappointing. What was once a boon to the working class has become just another exploitative company. Not only that, but an exploitative company that's taken their market share and has moved on to cost cutting and labor squeezing. Replacing nice little local cafes first with a polished corporate cafe and slowly turning it into an expensive McDonald's.

I do hope the nice little cafes see the opportunity to capitalize on selling a better product and treating their employees better and take back a bit of that market share.

It's not reactionary to say that capitalism is bad. Capitalism is literally terrible. Not commerce, capitalism. Buying and selling things isn't wrong, but extracting and consolidating surplus labor from the working class is.

The real question is whether or not people will continue to use Unity. Apologies mean less than nothing in a case like this regardless of whether or not they're sincere. This is a company that's shown their cards. Why give them business when you can go elsewhere?

Personally, this has made me start looking more into Godot. I've got a project I'm going to be working on that I was going to do in Unreal, but this Unity stuff has made me skeptical of tying my creative output to any one company that can't be easily replaced. Getting that wrapped up with a proprietary platform that comes with licensing that might change just seems like a bad idea now. Maybe Unreal is okay today, but what about down the road? Why start building into a system that there's no guarantee won't enshittify a few years down the road?

I'd like to get my major mechanical stuff squared away and develop a visual style and then tell more stories without reinventing the wheel every time. Once I've got my assets built on top of an engine, I'd rather add to it over time than arbitrarily scrap it every few years. Updating and refactoring is all well and good, but I'm not in it to code the same system over and over.

That makes Godot look pretty appealing, and any closed source corporate offering look pretty shady.

Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it's the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.

We're actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it's become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.

Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that's no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?

They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn't. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.

Artists aren't lawyers and don't want to be. Except for the ones that are. But that isn't most of us.

Artists make art. If you want to look for the people who like to make policy, look to the jackasses in suits who sit around having meetings about meetings all day to justify scalping the work made by actual artists. The same kinds of people who fund stories like this blatantly uninformed hit piece.

Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

At some point the line will have to be discovered, because the use of AI for art isn't going away. Suits can whine about it all they want. Art doesn't really care.

AI art of any reasonable quality still requires significant human input. I don't just mean prompt engineering, I mean actually having an artist using more traditional techniques to make adjustments or provide a base for the AI work. The output of raw AI art on its own can be impressive at times, but it's not consistent enough to maintain a style for any sizeable piece of work.

If you want to be able to create a bunch of assets that look like they were designed for the same project with AI, somebody still needs to do some art.

What AI does do, though, is give those artists the ability to exponentially increase their productivity independently, with no particular need for the sort of labor-hour organization that a corporation provides.

It should be telling that the corporate media spin on this is to attack it and to publicize voices that criticize it, but never those that express nuance. That's because it terrifies every useless corporate lackey who understands its actual potential to empower independent artists of all kinds.

Literally just button remapping support for my MX Ergo.

And for the fool who always comes into these threads to tell me again that I must not have tried in several years, I tried last month. Talked to the Solaar dev, tried to reach out to Logitech, literally nothing to be done.

You feel like this because it's an incredibly unhealthy way to live and an utter waste of human potential. Stop doing it.

I don't really even trust Unreal until Unity takes a legal hit for this. What's to stop Epic doing the same thing?

Considering how locked into an engine a project can get, why risk a corporate engine unless you absolutely have to?

Are you here to repeat that nonsense about file transfer being lossy?

Something something Russublicans.

People who haven't used this tech really have it backward. This enables indie artists to create stuff on their own without corporate oversight. This interview was an opportunity to explore that, but they decided to follow the corporate line of attacking this actually successful four person studio instead of asking about what makes them tick with any actual interest.

Right, but compare the effort to the results. People were bussing in from all over the country, but like what actually changed?

It can certainly be interpreted in a number of ways, but I think you're missing a key element of the story. Humans gaining 'knowledge of good and evil' is the process of humans becoming self-aware. Rather than simply unselfconscously being what we are without judgement, we sort our behaviors into good and evil. Suddenly they know they're naked, and the question they're faced with isn't 'why do you care that you're naked?' but 'who told you that you're naked?'. Animals are naked too, but they're not aware of it because they're not hung up on the mortality of their own actions.

It's not so much, to my reading, that there's an active decision being made to kick them out as that they're no longer capable of benefiting from it. Their self-consciousness itself prevents them from being able to continue to enjoy that primordial state of being before the need to second guess themselves.

It represents the loss of human innocence. It's not that they did wrong and were punished, it's that they came to view the world in a way that's harsher.

Piracy is a pretty great backup system for everyone. You're welcome.

Okay, but the video cuts off just before the answer and the page is formatted to draw attention away from the article.

Unreal is safe now, but there are no guarantees under capitalism. A FOSS license does guarantee that enshittification won't be a factor because it literally can't become the exclusive property of some company with a greedy executive board. Unreal doesn't have that protection, Godot does.

Could Godot be compromised some how? Sure. Can it be enshittified? Not really.

I'm running windows for my daily, but I've got Ditto and it works great. I have like 3 clipboards set up, could set up more. It just needs a different hotkey combination. It's really simple.

Why does the use of AI to modify art require justification?

We seem to have this general culture of people who don't make things coming after those who do. Every decision of design, methodology, or artistic preference treated as though the creator has an obligation to please every single person who posts their opinions on the internet.

The reality is that this simply isn't true. Art that spends all its energy fretting about whether people will like it ends up being some bland bullshit produced by committee. Art that allows itself to be what it is doesn't need opinions and suggestions to flourish.

If the author of that article were remotely interested in their process or what the actual practical implications of using AI on a project are, they could have had something worth reading.

Instead they went into the interview looking to push a position and badgering without listening rather than making even a passing attempt at something resembling journalism. Because ultimately they don't care about AI, or art, or games; they care about rage clicks.

The bucket is also increasingly full of bots and astroturfers. I think they're doing a half decent job of hiding the impact when it comes to numbers, but the drop in quality sheds a little more light.