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

And why not fix whatever is keeping trees from growing, and then grow trees

I woild guess because that would require you to completely tear up the bitumen and anything underneath it like pipes and wires in order to make room for the roots. Trees are pretty big things y’know and it’s not just what’s above the surface that matters. You could put a tank like this in say, a train station platform that’s raised well above the ground or on a building

Also a tub of algae isn’t going to become a health hazard if it gets sick or infested and won’t take decades to establish itself

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.

…now? Bud, they’ve done this for ages, both on mobile and desktop how the hell have you not noticed it? It used to be even more obvious on desktop because they’d put it up as the first item in the ‘related videos’, but they got rid of that so now you don’t know what it’s going to start autoplaying until it happens, which is mildly annoying when you’re listening to music and can’t see what’s up next

I don’t think we’ve had a single good adaption of an Isaac Asimov story - Foundation the show is very clearly not Foundation the series and I Robot is…not even worth acknowledging and infuriates me because like, if they wanted to do a murder mystery about Asimov’s robots and call into question his “laws”, Caves of Steel is right there and it’s great. I’d love a good adaption of Caves of Steel but nooo lets all adapt the nigh impossible to adapt because it’s dense as all fuck Foundation instead because that’s the story everyone knows.

Also because you’ve mentioned kids media - How to Train your Dragon. The original series was this fun and interesting world where dragons have existed along humanity since the beginning and were our friends and work animals and the main character was a legitimately weak kid who was more interested in being a biologist and was legitimately pretty good at it, being able to actually talk to them and he had friends and Toothless was this highly entertaining small sassy green thing who was like, the world’s equivalent of a house sparrow. And then DreamWorks took the title and base concept of “dragons and vikings” and threw everything else out for a generic movie with a generic protangonist in a generic fantasy setting. The dragons are now big and scary but the main character goes out to prove that they’re not big and scary and Toothless is now just a giant dumb cat who’s the world’s equivalent of an invisible fire breathing polar bear but it’s ok because Hiccup is special and they replaced the fun gremlin Kamikazi with the generic female love interest character who’s trait is being better than the boys. But because everyone adores it we’re never going to get an actual adaption that actually follows the books are we?

Also Solaris deserves a good adaption that isn’t actively hostile to anyone who isn’t interested in avant garde Soviet cinema. Stanislav Lem’s one of my favourite authors and because of that fucking film it’s legitimately hard to recomend Solaris the book to people because they’re like “oh I tried watching it and it was really boring and confusing and overly arthouse?”

Also also I haven’t actually seen them but like, is there any adaption of Wuthering Heights that’s actually like, accurate? Because I’ve read the book and every time I talk to someone who’s only seen the movie or TV adaptions it feels like they’re talking about a completely different story that’s just like, “Austen but kinda deranged” and not the batshit anti-Austen sturm und drang trainwreck that is the actual story (and also they apparently kinda ignore the last third of the book with Cathy 2 and Linton and Hareton?)

So’s Norway - quite a few places on the west coast (the most inhabited non-Oslo part of the country) rely on the fact that the gulf stream keeps them unusually warm for their latitude

I’m already seeing things that would normally grow fine out in the garden suffer from abnormally late and early frosts and mild summers. Rip my tomatos and onions. Everyone’s complaining about 20+ degree springs in the mainland while I’m screaming that it’s still snowing in late May.

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)

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

Hey as someone who kinda grew up in that scenario, I really reccomend you show your kid what a windows dual boot is

Your kid doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They have friends and inevitably your kid’s going to be in a situation where their friends are like “hey, want to play this game with us?” And they can’t because it’s got a kernel anti-cheat that doesn’t work with Linux. They’re going to try and get into a hobby, only to find that the software everyone uses doesn’t work on Linux and the alternatives that do are badly maintained and frustrating to work with. They’re going to encounter a programme they need for school that just straight up does not work on Linux.

Sure you might be able to find a work around to all these things but like, can your kid? Because I speak from experience when I say that feeling like you have to be constantly running to your dad every time something doesn’t work doesn’t foster a sense of mastery, it makes you feel like you can’t do anything on your computer because you’re too small and dumb.

The teacher probably isn’t “afraid” of the Linux box, they’re probably frustrated that they don’t know what’s going on and can’t help if something goes wrong. The programmes they’ll probably teach your kid aren’t a perfect 1-to-1 match to their Linux alternatives and they’ll be left sitting in the back confused and upset while everyone else is learning about stuff in word and excel that you can’t do in libre Office. You’re not going to be known as the cool hacker dad, you’re going to be put in the same category as the crunchy mum who doesn’t let their kid eat sugar and needlessly restricts something that’s just so petty to the layman.

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

I’d also add to the discussion that the reason why Norway (and I think Iceland too) eat it as “tradition” isn’t because it’s some sacred animal or traditional or something, it’s because up until very recently both countries were dirt poor and neither country is particularly great when it comes to arable land that you can grow veggies or animals on. Whale is a physically big source of red meat that lives not that far off the coast, and has tons of other uses besides food too. They’re also small countries so using them as a food source isn’t that damaging (hell I’m pretty sure out of the entire Norwegian fishing industry the whaling part is probably the least environmentally destructive part of it)

Also grilled whale is like, really nice. It’s like if tuna was a red meat.

Whaling still uses harpoons, just more modern and sophisticated ones. It’s more akin to hunting than fishing.

I get it’s probably because people just aren’t used to the idea of eating whale, but it’s odd you’re being downvoted when like that’s kinda the stance I think a lot of environmentalists have here in Norway, though I think the comparison is more to like venison than cows, because venison’s hunted but cows are raised. In the grand scheme of things, the beef industry does way more damage and has more ethical concerns than the strictly regulated whaling industry and we should be focusing our attention on that. I could be completely off though - I ain’t from Oslo and whale is regularly available on the supermarket shelves in the season so I’m obviously somewhat biased here. I know a lot of people have ethical concerns but like, I don’t get it. Pigs are smarter than a whale, but people aren’t upset at pork chops.

Also idk how reliable it is because obviously it’s a biased source, but according to the fishing industry pound for pound whale’s actually way better for the environment than any farmed red meat because you’re, y’know, not raising it.

Nah we just have regular old crypto shill people instead

Because the point of unicode is to accurately depict every sort of writing regardless of format, not to make a neat table of every unique glyph. Fonts may want to render the two differently or treat them differently. Same reason why there’s a difference between an em dash and a quotation line mark

Same reason why unicode is full of random characters that only ever appear like thrice in some Russian coptic manuscript from the 3rd century - it’s about being able to depict something, not perceived usefulness

Also excuse my ignorance, but who’s Uriel? Because right now I just have the mental image of a very upset archangel which I’m guessing is not what you’re referring to. I mean it could be - I’m pretty sure unicode would fall under his domain of literature