It just looked a lot like an AI image classifier.

I’ve definitely had trouble finding specific books. There’s a popular book about the local climate here which is only available in print. There is a copy uploaded to archive.org, somebody scaned the whole book in, but it’s unavailable for download or check out.

Have you checked archive.org? Or your local library systems?

Also, there are some books which don’t have audiobooks that I’ve wanted to listen to. The Microsoft edge browser has a read to me mode which is really good. If you can find a book in text form, you can sometimes listen to it that way. I’ve actually converted ePub files into text files just for this purpose.

Welcome! My little tips:

You can change your default sorting. I recommend setting it to hot instead of active.

You can filter things by word content in titles. Useful for filtering out some political content if you need a breather.

Have fun! 😁

I’m sure a lot of very smart people thought of it for perhaps 30 to 40 minutes before deciding never to speak of that bad idea every again.

That print does actually look pretty nice, but I hate how inconsistent the two images are. It’d drive me fing crazy to have those prints on my wall when the continuity of design is so clearly lacking.

I’m afraid that we seen to disagree on who an artist is and what is a valid moral trade off.

Is it really the democratization of art? Or the commodification of art?

Art has, with the exception of extraordinary circumstances, always been democratic. You could at any point pick up a pencil and draw.

Ai has funneled that skill, critically through theft, into a commodified product, the ai model. Through with they can make huge profits.

The machine does the art. And, even when run on your local machine the model was almost certainly trained on expensive machines through means you could not personally replicate.

I find it alarming that people are so willing to celebrate this. It’s like throwing a party that you can buy bottled Nestle water at the grocery store which was taken by immoral means. It’s nice for you, but ultimately just further consolation of power away from individuals.

Sorry, I might have went a bit ham on you there, it was late at night. I think I might have been rude

1. Theft does not depend on a legal definition.

Intellectual property theft used to be legal, but protections were eventually put in place to protect the industry of art. (I’m not a staunch defender if the laws as they are, and I belive it actually, in many cases, stifles creativity.)

I bring up the law not recognizing machine generated art only to dismiss the idea that the legal system agrees wholeheartedly with the stance that AI art is defensibly sold on the free market.

2. There is no evidence to suggest AI think like a human / It hardly matters that AI can be creative.

A) To suggest a machine neutral network “thinks like a human” is like suggesting a humanoid robot “runs like a human.” It’s true in an incredibly broad sense, but carries so little meaning with it.

Yes, ai models use advanced, statistical multiplexing of parameters, which can metaphorically be compared to neurons, but only metaphorically. It’s just vaguely similar. Inspired by, perhaps.

B) It hardly matters if AI can create art. It hardly even matters if they did it in exactly the way humans do.

Because the operator doesn’t have the moral or ethical right to sell it in either case.

If the AI is just a stocastic parrot, then it is a machine of theft leveraged by the operator to steal intellectual labor.

If the AI is creative in the same way as a person, then it is a slave.

I’m not actually against AI art, but I am against selling it, and I respect artists for trying to protect their industry. It’s sad to see an entire industry of workers get replaced by machines, and doubly sad to see that those machines are made possible by the theft of their work. It’s like if the automatic loom had been assembled out of centuries of collected fabrics. Each worker non consensually, unknowingly, contributing to the near total destruction of their livelihood. There is hardly a comparison which captures the perversion of it.

Counterpoints:

Artists also draw distinctions between inspiration and ripping off.

The legality of an act has no bearing on its ethics or morality.

The law does not protect machine generated art.

Machine learning models almost universally utilize training data which was illegally scraped off the Internet (See meta’s recent book piracy incident).

Uncritically conflating machine generated art with actual human inspiration, while career artist generally lambast the idea, is not exactly a reasonable stance to state so matter if factly.

It’s also a tacit admission that the machine is doing the inspiration, not the operator. The machine which is only made possible by the massive theft of intellectual property.

The operator contributes no inspiration. They only provide their whims and fancy with which the machine creates art through mechanisms you almost assuredly don’t understand. The operator is no more an artist than a commissioner of a painting. Except their hired artist is a bastard intelligence made by theft.

And here they are, selling it for thousands.

Does system 76 do a bad job? I’ve looked at their prices, which are high, but haven’t heard anything bad about them.

I’m not a medical expert, but typically your skin is pretty good at keeping pathogens out, at least when you clean yourself regularly.

Keeping your hands clean (and thus your eyes and mouth) should be a priority. A relatively cheap and easy thing to focus on would be cheap, disposable gloves. Buy them in bulk, and carry a wad in a pocket. You can turn old ones inside out and use them as little trash bags. Change them out whenever you feel like it.

If you don’t have a clothes washer at home, consider buying a cheap portable unit that can drain into the shower or sink. I have one, and it rocks.

You might feel a little crazy, but if you have the spare cash, buy some bleach spray and paper towels and wipe down the elevator. It should only take 5 minutes. It could be the case that it only needs to be cleaned every few weeks.

Remember that by keeping your space and person clean, you are doing a lot to stay healthy. People work draining septic tanks for a living and are exposed to sewage, but stay healthy because of good hygiene habits in the long term. I don’t mean to minimize your situation, because I’d feel crazy too, but just keep in mind you’re already doing a good job.

Many ancient practitioners of stoicism were wealthy statesmen, including emperors. And, the literate elite were certainly enamored with it. I’m not a historian, but stoicism was shaped by wealthy and powerful people, as was every popular philosophy.

I’m not opposed to it. I like aspects of Stoicism. But, When it comes to wealth, it always rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed so often to me that wealthy stoics make a virtue out of possessing, but not coveting wealth, and in doing so make a vice of dissatisfaction with one’s wealth. For a rich man, this is reasonable. However, a poor man is correct to be dissatisfied. Poor men need to be angry, and to rise up and demand wealth (in my opinion), their pain and anguish is meant to be felt and to stoke action.

Stoicism is not often presented as compatible with this mindset of mine. I’m sure there are types of stoicism which address this, but most influencers seem to present Stoicism though a relatively uncritical lense.

My caveat to this is that many of the foundational individuals to stoicism, as well as present influencers, are members of the upper class, and while there are a lot of great ideas in there, stoicism can often be distilled into a philosophy of rugged individualism which is more easily achieved with wealth, power, and privilege.

I am of the opinion that stoicism is good, but a disproportional number of those who practice it are often out of touch.

Tons of people already are. The following site is useful for searching papers using ai https://consensus.app/

I do wonder, hypothetically, if free Linux distros had 80% of the consumer market, would we see just as many dangerous exploits and malware as we do on Windows today? It seems to me that the consumer community is so small that it’s hard to say if it’s secure or just obscure.

I understand in theory Linux is more secure… But are individual users really not opening themselves up to attacks, downloading foss software right and left? Using built in stores? Wine emulation?

I have to say after watching the videos, boo to the corpo for the weird exploitative lies, but kudos to the two women for staying in character! They legit put effort into moving like the real robots around them, and all while in what were probably uncomfortable costumes. I hope they get positive social media attention!

If you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you like this other girl? Was she mean to you?

I’ll be honest, this is confusing as hell, so I might be misunderstanding.

I think it’s a little hypocritical that you want it to be a chill, no drama space with the bros, but you also want to exclude a girl because you see her as competition for the guy you like who is in this group.

I understand you had a bad experience with her, but you said that the guys don’t know that. From their perspective, you’re just excluding other girls for no other reasons than seemingly to be the only girl in the group and perhaps to have exclusive access to your crush.

The attrition is slow, but every user lost to Linux is likely lost forever. After a year or so of totally free software, who is going to build a new windows compatible PC, buy a Windows 11 license, and pay for subscription service just to do word processing, or play a few incompatible games?

Windows completely overestimates people’s willingness to throw out their laptop or PC just to get a new OS paintjob. For every person who does it, another one will leave their ecosystem forever.