How much of the anti-musk/anti-tesla success is due to people’s activism vs the cybertruck being a piece of crap? I suspect if Tesla had just kept making EVs and put a bit of effort into fixing up build quality instead of creating pretty much the ugliest, most overpriced, and nonsensical vehicle to hit the road, possibly ever, the company would not be in anywhere near as bad of a position. If, as I have heard, Musk was the one to push for it to be made, and then Musk decided to get involved in politics, creating reputational issues, it all could be said to be his fault.

Playing Receiver in Receiver 2 was a fun surprise.

…unless it is. Tipping points could mean that there will be a certain level of emissions, which we may already be too late to avoid, that will take the earth out of the expected ranges and put it somewhere we can’t predict. I can’t say, but more informed people than me have suggested it as a real worry.

The question of ‘What is the purpose of government?’ is simultaneously deeply important to society and yet rarely, if ever, addressed in a useful context. I have watched people argue about multiple policies, speaking past each other the whole time, just because they had different baseline assumptions as to the purpose of government and couldn’t even see their opponents had a different definition.

A ways back, I saw an article about how the French were rioting because their retirement age was being increased from 62 to 64. I remarked that it was interesting to see the French rioting against a change that wouldn’t even quite bring them to parity with the US but Americans can’t be bothered to riot for almost anything. A Frenchman said they didn’t want to even be more like the US in any way.

This law is absolutely the now-classic American attitude that kids can watch violent movies all day, but if they’rEXC exposed to one female nipple, you gotta shut it all down. Is France turning into America now, following Britain down the red, white, and blue path?

…when I use AI generation, I have an idea or specific image in my head and I do my best to come up with a prompt that will produce what I want, or more usually, I use photoshop…

Therein lies the difference. You have an intended target and use tools to create it. The artistry is in the skill and effort put into communicating your internal concept. To my knowledge, people generally aren’t saying AI is useless in a creative process, just that typing in a few words and hitting ‘generate’ until you get something cool, or just running a filter over an image to make it look like a drawing, isn’t artistry.

…there are AI models for specific tasks, say generating human faces, that co trolled experiments have found that people can’t distinguish between the AI content and the real thing.

I failed to communicate my idea clearly enough. I’m not talking about the artefacts that sometimes make images look weird. I’m talking about the deep brain sense that one can develop that can tell the difference between someone acting vs emoting, singing vs lip synching, etc. An ingenuous performance has a different character to it that can be said to fall into the uncanny valley.

There is also plenty of traditional art that hits the uncanny valley or simply doesn’t look right, but that doesn’t make it any less art, does it?

That depends. If hitting the valley is intentional and done using skill, that’s just normal art. If it has intent but not skill, it’s incomplete art. It’s failing to communicate as intended, much like I failed with words above. It’s part of becoming good at something to screw it up, though, so it’s to be expected sometimes. If it has skill but no intent, that’s craftsmanship rather than artistry. Craftsmanship is great but has a subtle difference in how it is experienced.

there’s still a barrier between the type of art miyazaki is fluent in and AI art.

That’s not so good as an analogy. AI imagery isn’t art by itself. Even in your example of your own work, it’s materials, at best. Saying AI image generation is artistry is like saying hiring someone else to paint a picture makes you an artist. Even ‘prompt engineering’ at its finest makes one an artist as much as project management makes one a programmer. So, the general argument comes from the pretense rather than the tool. Bringing your sentence closer to the mark would be something like ‘There is a barrier between art, which Miyazaki is experienced in, and this particular type of tool one can use.’ It’s an apples to oranges comparison, like comparing the field of astronomy to a camera.

Should we take him as an expert on art and view digital art as less than traditional art? Or should we just roll our eyes at the stubborn old man stuck in his ways?

That’s an obvious false binary. People are perfectly capable of being right about one thing and wrong about another. You give his words weight because of his expertise. That doesn’t mean you have to take them as gospel, but ignoring all of an expert’s opinions because you dislike some of them, or some implications of them, is a terrible idea as well.

Actually, yeah, that’s a bad metaphor from me. Comparing benchmarks would be comparing AI models.

He’s not comparing benchmarks. He’s comparing results, so it’s more about maybe error rate than processing speed.

I guess it’s like comparing the result of an approximation versus an explicit computation. GenAI makes an approximation of art. It very quickly spits out something that looks a bit like the intended answer. It even gets you close enough to be totally satisfactory for some purposes, in the same way 3 can be a usable approximation of π for some purposes. However, the picture is not the full purpose of creating art. Art is a form of communication, transmitting something from one mind to another using indirect means because telepathy isn’t available. AI is not trying to communicate anything. It’s just an approximation of something someone could say.

Miyazaki is someone with years of experience in creating art so he understands the ‘language’ of art better than some. He has ‘fluency.’ AI images hit the uncanny valley for artists because they are attuned to the difference between what an art is supposed to look like vs what the imitator approximates. They have the fluency to spot the fake the same way you might be able to spot someone speaking your native language as a mother tongue vs out of a phrasebook. Because he is ‘fluent’ in art, people take his words on art seriously, just as one would generally take a born-and-raised German’s words seriously regarding German grammar.

This would make a great little lore item in some RPG to explain why there’s a spell list.

‘We have literal magic that can raise the dead and move us across the world in the blink of an eye. Why the fuck am I having to do dishes by hand?’

‘Because no one actually knows how the spells we have work. We just have these spells left over from when they did, and ‘clean dishes’ isn’t one of them.’

Unimportant caramel.

Caramel shlarmle

Almost no one knows how SD works. That’s not the point. He’s not contrasting it against some other GenAI concept to compare training cost. He’s looking at it based on the results. You don’t have to know how to build a CPU to compare benchmarks for ones built by someone else.

The issue with Rowling is more that she started talking out her rear end about something of which she doesn’t have much, if any, understanding. If she gave you advice on writing YA fiction, it’d be worth something. Miyazaki is a visual artist broadly respected for his art, so his opinions on visual art have some weight. If it was about the cultivation of kumquats, I think I’d ask a farmer.

I think you’d have to have a pretty unique style but if you could come up with one, you might be able to trademark it rather than copyright it.

A lot of people care what Miyazaki thinks because he created over a dozen films that are beloved by millions because of their artistry, is well respected in the anime/manga world, and is generally regarded as a master of his artform. People tend to take your words seriously when they have nearly 50 years of experience and success behind them.

Guerilla horticulture.

If the loot boxes affect your ability to win, don’t buy the game. If they are just cosmetic, meh.

But don’t stop there. If it has day one DLC, don’t touch it. If it has DLC to patch game functions that should be in the base game, don’t touch it. If it has any kind of pay to win function, don’t touch it. If it has a subscription, don’t touch it. If it’s a pre-order, don’t touch it. If it’s put out by a conglomerate publisher that eats real developers and shits out imitations of their IP, don’t touch it.

And most of all, teach these things to gamer kids and their parents. Kids are ignorant of the effect their purchases, and parents don’t have the time and energy to go learn for themselves. Spreading awareness helps everyone.

YEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS!

This feels like I wrote it. I’ve hated advertising for about as long I have been aware of it but I’ve been telling people we should ban it since the first time I saw one of those articles about how everything was becoming clickbait because of advertising. In all that time, the ONLY thing I have ever thought of which would be a negative effect from a ban is the difficulty of getting the word out about a small business. Any other arguments are just dumb. Advertising is inherently harmful to everyone exposed to it, even the advertisers, who have to burn money to make it happen.

I’m all for not wasting the resources involved in dishes but cold canned soup is kind of nasty. I’d at least warm it up if that’s an option.

Already transitioning. Been half doing it for ages. This’ll just be the last bit.

Yep

HR is the bane of progress. HR is there for only one purpose, to keep the company from receiving lawsuits. It does not matter if the person they hire is competent, convivial, corrigible, or even capable of just showing up. They only pay attention to whether it follows their departments’ regulated practices.

In hiring, HR is called upon to select someone, from a pool of sometimes thousands of candidates, based first on their resume/CV, a document broadly expected to be full of lies and exaggeration, (which increases likelihood of hiring someone dishonest) and which can have no visible indications of what the applicant can actually do, then based on an/a series of interviews, a practice which only tests the candidate’s ability to bullshit/be charming for short formalized conversations. (increasing likelihood of selecting for neurotypicality or unreasoning confidence) No HR person knows enough about essentially anything else anyone does to actually be able to tell the difference between a beam collimator and a retroencabulator, and staffing agencies make it even less likely because they are even further from the work.