Eugenia

The ads have become too long. Some of them are 40 seconds long, for a 3 minute video. That’s unacceptable. I have thought about it, and I think the best would have been a single 8 second ad, unskippable. But never more than that. That, I could take. But multiple ads (even if they’re just 5 secs each but you have to be vigilant to press “skip”), or long ads, or interrupting ads, are just too much to accept.

If society benefits from the democratization of art/books/etc then it’s not a loss, it’s a win for everyone. There were many jobs in the past that were lost because technology made them obsolete. Being a commissioned artist is one of these professions. However, there IS still going to be a SMALL niche for human-made original artworks (not made on ipads). But that’d be a niche. And no one stopping anyone from doing art, be it a profession or not. That’s the beauty of art. If you were to be a plumber, and robots took your job, you’d have trouble to do it as a hobby, since it would require a lot of sinks and pipes to play around, and no one would care. But with art, you can do it on the cheap, and people STILL like your stuff, EVEN if they won’t buy it anymore.

Nobody stops you to be an artist. You can still have a job that is still alive today, AND be an artist in your own free time. As I mentioned, I was a very successful collage artist (NYTimes pick for best book cover, lots of commissions, lots of print sales etc). I decided to leave the surrealness of collage behind because I enjoyed children’s illustrations more. Guess what, I don’t make a dime with my illustrations. I’ve spent $15k on art supplies in 5 years and I made $1k back. But that doesn’t stop me from painting nearly EVERY DAY. I share my work online, and whoever likes it, likes it. I don’t expect sales anymore. Be it because it’s not a popular look, or because of AI. It doesn’t matter to me, I still paint daily.

Not an issue either, my copied works were fully copyrighted. I wanted them to be cc-by, but I never really relicenced them, too much work for 1500 works.

I used to be a very popular and successful collage artist (I’m now an illustrator, I like painting more), and my work has been copied by AI. However, I don’t really care. In fact, I was musing once the idea of licensing everything under the CC-BY license. I don’t mind if AI copies my stuff, because if eventually this democratizes art (as it has already), all the better. Yes, these AI belong to corporations, but if they’re easy to access, or free to use, all the better. I want people to extend what I did, and remix it. I don’t want to be remembered as me, as a singular artist, that somehow I emerged from the void. Because I didn’t. EVERY artist is built on top of their predecessors, and all art is a remix. That’s the truth that other artists don’t wanna hear because it’s all about their ego.

I disagree with the other posts here that you’re overreacting. I think that AI will replace most jobs (maybe as high as 85% at some point). Consider becoming a plumber or an electrician. Until the robots will become commonplace in 20 years from now, you will have a job that AI won’t be able to touch much. And people won’t run out of asses or gaming. So they’ll be stable professions for quite a while. You can still code in your free time, as a hobby. And don’t cry for the lost revenue of being a programmer, because that will happen to everyone who will be affected by AI. You’ll just have another job while the others won’t. That’s the upside.

I understand that this comment is not what people want to hear with their wishful thinking, so they’ll downvote it. But I gotta say it how I see it. AI is the biggest revolution since the industrial revolution.

People can make their own choices. I have 6-7 Linux machines, and asked my brother to install it too. He hated the experience. He bought a Mac at the end, and he’s very happy with it. Some people just don’t want Linux. They don’t care about its philosophy, or that it’s free. They want an ecosystem, and a status symbol.

UFOX and UFOTwitter hashtags. All other major social media are censoring the topic (including Reddit, which once was supposed to be open). Lately, Twitter started doing so too (it barely suggests ufo topics for me in the last month, even if that’s the only reason I’m there), but the hashtags still work as expected. Unfortunately, on all the fediverse media, the topic is still laughed at (despite the various government admissions in the past year), and so there isn’t any discussion about it. Twitter is where it’s at, for that topic.

Edit: Proving my point, providing a truthful answer to the topic’s question, and still been downvoted by the fediverse en mass.

Most dev tools under Linux are falling under the category I mentioned above where corporations actually maintain them and fix bugs. But the same luxury is not afforded for DEs and their apps. Additionally, Xcode is known to be a piece of s. But the Mac UI works well.

Bugs. Bugs, everywhere.

These often require workarounds via the terminal – if we’re lucky. The whole situation gets old after a while, despite myself using Linux for 25 years now, and being an ideological supporter of Free Software for just as long. For new users, it’s terrifying. At the end, convenience wins, and that’s why I’m typing this via an M1 Macbook Air. Despite that, I still have 5-6 older Linux machines/laptops around, and I often run Debian ARM via virtualization too on this Macbook. I won’t ever quite decouple from Linux.

But it’s important to objectively point at its faults, and for the chance that these faults will never get fixed, unless massive corporations come behind it to do the heavy lifting: proper beta testing of absolutely everything on the desktop/apps. That’s the non-glamour part of coding that volunteer programmers hate to do, or can’t do. It’s what saved the Linux kernel, systems utils and server software: the companies that came to clean it up, develop it further, and support it. The desktop doesn’t have that same support. That support died in 2002 when Red Hat announced that it will become a server-only company. Ubuntu is too tiny to help, and they’ve moved to servers too anyway.

Yes, there is always something that won’t work. This often happens with Windows (not too often, but it happens), but most often with Macs. Linux is quite buggy in the userspace area, I usually find bugs or crashes within an hour of using any linux distro. The one with the FEWER bugs is definitely Debian. But it does that by not using hacks or beta drivers or software. This creates a rock solid architecture, but some hardware won’t work (in my case, it was the sound chip for an intel J-series cpu that required a third party patch to work and recompile the kernel – while Ubuntu ships with that patch by default, but ubuntu has way more other bugs all around).

So at the end, you will have to ask yourself if you want Linux because it’s the right thing to do and use, or you just don’t want to be bothered with ideology, and just use Windows and be done with it. I’ve asked myself that question and the answer is two fold: as a daily browser laptop, that doesn’t depend on third party hardware, I just use my Macbook Air. It’s a great laptop to have around in front of the TV, or traveling. For third party hardware dependency, and video editing, I use Windows with an nvidia card. For everything else, I use Linux. I have 8-9 computers, most run Linux. I create databases with it, I do some photo editing, financials etc.

1959 mechanical cameras. An electronic camera from 1969. Polaroid SX-70 from 1976. A calculator from 1988: FX85P from Casio. And then the Atari Lynx from 1991.

Linux will eventually make it seriously to the desktop in the next few years, possibly going as high as 15%-20% of the userbase (in my country Greece it’s already at 9%). But only because MS is going to destroy its Windows base by making it subscription etc.

I have. I still use the other ones occasionally for specific topics that don’t get much attention in the fediverse yet (e.g. ufos – I know, I know…), but overall, my main platforms are the fediverse, not the corporate ones.

My favorite idea is Linux or Android-derived, or a completely new, Rust-based AGPL-licensed OS, running on 100% open RISC-V hardware. Same for its phone equivalent. All chips must be open, no secret code in them.

The bread slice can be kept in a plastic bag to stay soft. The avocado must be sliced at only 1/3 (don’t expose the rest), put in a plastic bag with a bit of lemon juice the night before.

Smoked salmon in scrambled eggs, 1/3 avocado, a slice of toasted gluten-free bread, a few leaves of baby kale or spinach, orange juice (preferably freshly squeezed), and as many fruits you want, chopped into a plain yogurt. That’s the ultimate breakfast for me. I like it so much, that I often have it for lunch or dinner too.

I would never touch oatmeal, because I’m celiac: three Canadian research papers have found that even GF oats are actually contaminated in the field, and even if not, oats contain the avenin protein that is chemically too close to gluten, and so many immune systems mistake it for it, and react badly. My gluten-free bread mentioned above would have only rice flour, potato flour/starch, and tapioca starch, but no other grain apart from rice (I react to all other grains).

Traditional painting and illustration! While I now know that I never needed to spend more than $250 for professional-grade tools, I’ve spent about $18,000. As for sales in 3.5 years, they don’t account for more than $800. For that I mostly blame Instagram where it’s not possible to grow anymore organically and get an audience & potential customers. So I moved to the federated open source PixelFed now, if anyone’s interested in my book-style illustration: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli

Also, as a word of advice for anyone who wants to also do illustration and don’t want to do the same mistakes that I did. All you need is:

• The Lukas 24 watercolor palette of student grade ($18). It’s good enough and these days most paintings are scanned, so even if not all colors are lightfast, it’s not a big deal. Few people only buy originals, most go for prints. If you’re going to go selling originals, consider the Daniel Smith primaries set of 6 colors for $40.
• A set of brushes of different sizes, including a flat brush and round brushes including a long thin one to do details, $15
• Pencil, eraser, sharpener, $15
• A set of gouache. Best bang for the buck for professional quality is DaVinci brand ($10 per large tube), or if you want to go cheap, the Himi Miya set for $25. If you go for the cheaper stuff, it’s still advised to get a better quality white tube, so it’s truly opaque (the cheap stuff aren’t opaque enough). So go for Holbein or DaVinci white for $10-$15.
• Soft core colored pencils, set of 48+. $15 (you will mostly need the muted colors to enhance the painting with harder edges)
• Grey, sepia, black ink pens, and manga ink brush pens (for some types of paintings only), $40
• 100% cotton paper for watercolor $25, or any watercolor paper for gouache $10 (gouache works on any, watercolor is more nuanced).
• Brush watercolor markers, e.g. Tombows or Ecoline – in case you want to do such type of illustration too, $30 for a few muted colors.
• Masking fluid for watercolors, $10
• White gel pen and white Posca pen (0.7mm) for white highlights, $15
• Faber Castell white pencil soft pastel, $4
• Caran d’ache Luminance white colored pencil, $4 (the cheaper colored pencils above again don’t include a strong white)
• Caran d’ache Neocolor II white crayon, $4
• A ruler, to help you sketch.

I included various mediums above in white color because highlights are king in illustration, and each provides a different look and feel, depending on the painting. Happy painting!