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.
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.
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...
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. 😵💫
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...
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...
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…
@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.
« 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...
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.
« 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...
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. 😵💫
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.
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
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:
@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.
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.
@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.
« 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...