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475 posts total
Alex Schroeder

I think I'm going to start posting alt texts of gif responses. I mostly dislike gif responses but appreciate a short, poet metaphor.

tiny octopus reaches out to touch a diver's finger

Alex Schroeder

Cambridge, UK: 8C at noon, about 7C less than the historical mean daily maximum for April 22nd. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambri

A peek into the jet stream shows a massive meander bringing cold air from the North. Courtesy of #GlobalWarming: less temperature differential between the poles and the equator weaken the jet stream which then meanders more, swinging the weather from cold to hot and to cold again over the space of a couple of weeks as meanders shift about.

earth.nullschool.net/#current/

Cambridge, UK: 8C at noon, about 7C less than the historical mean daily maximum for April 22nd. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambri

A peek into the jet stream shows a massive meander bringing cold air from the North. Courtesy of #GlobalWarming: less temperature differential between the poles and the equator weaken the jet stream which then meanders more, swinging the weather from cold to hot and to cold again over the space of a couple of weeks as meanders shift about.

Alex Schroeder

Seen via a post on discord - HiSense smart TV borks user's computer, bluetooth due to frankly insane UUID generation spamming the local network.

cohost.org/ghoulnoise/post/528

This kind of thing is why I haven't bought a new TV, even though I want one and can afford one, I want a dumb one and this seems almost impossible. Even if I got one and didn't give it direct network access, I'm not sure I'd trust it not to sneak online using HDMI and connect via more trusted devices...

sbszine

@edchivers I went with an LG G3 and it works well with no network access. (Not sure about the G4 series though.)

Alex Schroeder

Here's something for my Firefox about:config:

image.animation_mode = once

Do you have opinions on media.autoplay.default or media.seamless-looping? I'm always interested in small steps to end that sensory onslaught.

Alex Schroeder

I was away on a two week trip and came back. We bought some Raclette and I ate too much of it. I think I'm just going to lie back and think about fasting for a month. 😵‍💫

Alex Schroeder

Oh rascal children of Gaza.
You who constantly disturbed me
with your screams under my window.
You who filled every morning
with rush and chaos.
You who broke my vase
and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back,
and scream as you want
and break all the vases.
Steal all the flowers.
Come back...
Just come back...

Khaled Juma

(via postersforpalestine.org/)

Oh rascal children of Gaza.
You who constantly disturbed me
with your screams under my window.
You who filled every morning
with rush and chaos.
You who broke my vase
and stole the lonely flower on my balcony.
Come back,
and scream as you want
and break all the vases.
Steal all the flowers.
Come back...
Just come back...

Alex Schroeder

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political,
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent

Marwan Makhoul

لكي أكتب شعرًا ليس سياسيًّا يجب
أن أصغي إلى العصافير،
ولكي أسمع العصافير يجب
أن تَخرس الطّائرة
مروان مخول

(via postersforpalestine.org/)

Alex Schroeder

I am doing some #OpenStreetMap updates in rural Brandenburg, Germany. And I have been reading about water shortage and lowering groundwater levels for a few years. But I never imaged how well one can see the change in the aerial imagery of the last couple of years…

Show previous comments
Frau M.

@tordans The loss of trees is remarkble as well…

b-unicyling

@tordans fair play for mapping in Brandenburg! I'm trying to persuade my parents to switch to an OSM based sat nav while exploring Brandenburg and the adjoining Bundesländer, but no luck so far.

Jigme Datse

@tordans How close are they in terms of time of year. The vegetation changes are what are hitting me hardest.

Alex Schroeder

« Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:
I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping Ariel forest landscape comes through and it's not bad. They submit a ton of work and one or two of the 40 are ok. Nearly on brief. So first round feedback goes through and I tell them about the perspective mistakes, colour changes I want, layers that any matte painting would be split into. Within a day I get 5 variants. Not changes to the ones I wanted but variations.
Again. Benefit of the doubt I give them another round of feedback making it clear. Next day it's worse. I sit there and patiently paint over, even explaining the steps I would take as a painter. They don't do it, anomalies start appearing when I say I want to keep the exact image but with changes. They can't. They simply don't have the eye to see the basic mistakes so the Ai starts to over compensate. We get people starting to appear in the images. These are obviously holiday snaps.
"Remove the people"
"What would you like them changed to?"
"... grass. I just don't want them there"
They can't do it. The one that can actually use photoshop hasn't developed the eye to see his mistakes, ends up getting angry at me for not understanding he can't make specific changes. The girl whose background was a little photography has given me 40 progressively worse images with wilder mistakes every time. This is 4 days into the project.
I'm both pissed about the waste, but elated seeing ai fall at the first hurdle. It's not even that the images are unusable, the people making them have no eye for what's wrong, no thicker skin for constructive criticism and feedback, no basic artistic training in perspective and functionality in what they're making.
Yes the hype is going to pump more money into this. They won't go anywhere for a while.
But this has been such a glowing perfect moment of watching the fundamental part fail in the face of the most simple tasks. All were fired and the company no longer accepts Ai prompters as applicants. Your training as an artist will always be the most important part of this process and it is invaluable. I hope this post gives you a boost in a dark time. » – from a Facebook group called Artists Against Generative Al, via Danielle Sanfilippo, @scottfgray, @Hyades51

« Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:
I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping...

Alex Schroeder

This toot also illustrates how I think OCR is cool. I use tesseract on my laptop and the built-in OCR on my phone every now and then and like that a lot.
I also like translation tools, specially when done locally without any spying. I have great hopes for Firefox’s about:translations! So cool.
Not so onboard with image and text generation.

Alex Schroeder

« Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:
I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping Ariel forest landscape comes through and it's not bad. They submit a ton of work and one or two of the 40 are ok. Nearly on brief. So first round feedback goes through and I tell them about the perspective mistakes, colour changes I want, layers that any matte painting would be split into. Within a day I get 5 variants. Not changes to the ones I wanted but variations.
Again. Benefit of the doubt I give them another round of feedback making it clear. Next day it's worse. I sit there and patiently paint over, even explaining the steps I would take as a painter. They don't do it, anomalies start appearing when I say I want to keep the exact image but with changes. They can't. They simply don't have the eye to see the basic mistakes so the Ai starts to over compensate. We get people starting to appear in the images. These are obviously holiday snaps.
"Remove the people"
"What would you like them changed to?"
"... grass. I just don't want them there"
They can't do it. The one that can actually use photoshop hasn't developed the eye to see his mistakes, ends up getting angry at me for not understanding he can't make specific changes. The girl whose background was a little photography has given me 40 progressively worse images with wilder mistakes every time. This is 4 days into the project.
I'm both pissed about the waste, but elated seeing ai fall at the first hurdle. It's not even that the images are unusable, the people making them have no eye for what's wrong, no thicker skin for constructive criticism and feedback, no basic artistic training in perspective and functionality in what they're making.
Yes the hype is going to pump more money into this. They won't go anywhere for a while.
But this has been such a glowing perfect moment of watching the fundamental part fail in the face of the most simple tasks. All were fired and the company no longer accepts Ai prompters as applicants. Your training as an artist will always be the most important part of this process and it is invaluable. I hope this post gives you a boost in a dark time. » – from a Facebook group called Artists Against Generative Al, via Danielle Sanfilippo, @scottfgray, @Hyades51@dice.camp.

« Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:
I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping...

Alex Schroeder

I’m a big fan of the weekly newspaper I subscribe to and yet I don’t read even half of it – the news just makes me so angry every time I start reading. 😵‍💫

Alex Schroeder

Good evening treepeople.
This is a 1400-year-old Ginkgo tree located within the walls of the Gu Guanyin Buddhist Temple, in the Zhongnan Mountains region of China. Photo by Han Fei.

Alex Schroeder

On the plane, I listened to the (or a five-chapter version of?) The Blue Machine by @helenczerski@fediscience.org. It was cool to be reminded of the most amazing life-cycle example I know: the European Eel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_life_history

Alex Schroeder

If you're interested in understanding what's wrong with corporations right now, what's driving our global capitalist omnishambles? This is an amazingly insightful (if long, and entertainment-industry focussed) deep dive into the madness of modern management theories:

docseuss.medium.com/the-bigges

Show previous comments
mpark

@cstross Great article. I'm just confused why all of the subsections start with Linkin Park lyrics.

Robert Atkins

@cstross The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the MBAs.

JamesK

@cstross @sepdroid That really was worth reading. I don’t pay much attention to the game or entertainment industry in general, but the theme certainly resonated with me.

Alex Schroeder

Shot in the dark. Are there any 90's-era efnet #doom and #quake mods on the Fedi?

#irc #efnet

Jake in the desert

@kevin I do follow @quaddicted_motd - you've probably seen a couple of those. And @jberg probably knows the Doom ones.

Alex Schroeder

I just remembered Simons’ BASIC and looked it up on Wikipedia. He was 16 years old when he wrote it!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simons%27_BASIC

Alex Schroeder

“Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet.”
https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

Now it’s getting personal! 😅

Alex Schroeder

There is a Robert Moses reference in that ⬆️ article, which encourages me to order The Power Broker and read it instead of just listening to the monthly discussion on the 99% Invisible podcast.

Random Geek

@alex @amydentata was gonna say "can it also be that?" but reading the article and looking around – no it quite clearly cannot. At least not as much as the grognards would like.

Alex Schroeder

« The recent return to more muscular competition enforcement still isn’t radical enough. So far, even activist regulators have shied away from applying the toughest remedies for concentration in long-consolidated markets, such as non-discrimination requirements, functional interoperability and structural separations, i.e. breaking companies up. And talk of declaring the so-called “natural monopolies” in search and social media to be public utilities — and forcing them to act as common carriers open to all — is still too extreme for most. »
We Need To Rewild The Internet, by @mariafarrell, @robin

« The recent return to more muscular competition enforcement still isn’t radical enough. So far, even activist regulators have shied away from applying the toughest remedies for concentration in long-consolidated markets, such as non-discrimination requirements, functional interoperability and structural separations, i.e. breaking companies up. And talk of declaring the so-called “natural monopolies” in search and social media to be public utilities — and forcing them to act as common carriers open...

Alex Schroeder

I haven’t been writing much because I saw a young humpback whale and now I don’t know whether anything else is worth writing about.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-04-06-maledives

Alex Schroeder

Amazing. It’s cheaper to buy oil companies and shut them down than to use carbon storage solutions to pay for the shit they dig up.
Sorry for the Linkedin link.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-poljak-40436b4_carboncapture-fossilfuels-carbonprice-activity-7185027356137304064-ykkV
Via @isotopp

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