• 4 Posts
  • 413 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.

    Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring: -Bigger drives -Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to) -Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy) -Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps) -Etc.

    Now, for the streaming alternative: Netflix Standard: $18/mo Spotify: $12/mo Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.

    Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.

    My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.






  • Again, I’m not saying you should prompt AI to draw everything for you. There are tools that allow you to enhance the quality of your work using AI as a “make this, but properly” option. The person is still there, making the drafts.

    Learning to draw again is not my current priority (focusing on other aspects of self-development at the moment), but I always appreciate the resources and revisit them once I come to it. I do not abandon the idea, and if you have resources that work well with the issue of being able to produce random shapes, I’d always welcome and appreciate them.


  • People don’t crave the system, they rather come to places that are advertised to them.

    What they crave is:

    • Easy onboarding without figuring out what is an “instance” (a concept entirely unknown to them), and which instances are good vs bad for them;
    • A trusted place that won’t become unavailable or buggy because an admin is performing an update or screwed something up or decided they don’t want to do this anymore;
    • Some sort of algorithm to filter out crap out of their feed (not having any algorithm is often not good);
    • Having their favorite creators and friends on the platform (which, again, boils out to advertising for a large part);

    etc.

    Fediverse as a whole and Mastodon in particular is yet to answer to a lot of these challenges.



  • I don’t need anyone’s permission, least so from strangers on the Internet. Neither do I think someone owes me anything - your response is one of scorn, and honestly, I couldn’t care less.

    But I’m arguing for why, in general, AI assistance in art is a good thing. I, for one, am an apt learner when it comes to nearly anything but painting - yet, I too have something to show and illustrate. And I’m not alone. For some people, it’s not a matter of effort but of genuine lack of abilities, and others just can’t afford spending thousands of hours learning how to draw well when all they need is to illustrate a point, or just create something beautiful for themselves and others to enjoy in the meantime.

    Some artists see it as a threat, as a way to devalue their effort and contribution - but it’s not; nothing will ever replace manual art, and it will always be seen as more valuable. Also, only learning to do everything yourself can give you the ultimate control over what the outcome will be. But for people who can’t do it so well themselves, AI assistance is a good way of creative expression, of making the voices we never heard to be heard. You can, of course, plug your ears and ignore it - or you can listen. It’s up to you and your beliefs, and I’m not here policing your decisions.



  • That’s a well thought out response, and I appreciate it. There is certainly something important between what you want and what you end up creating, but any kind of AI art that is harder than “make an image by a simple text prompt” still has that step.

    What I’m saying is, AI is not just one thing. When people hear it, they think of text prompts and automatic responses - yet I think of AI being the assistant in the creative process. You provide the vision, and AI tools help illustrate it the way you wouldn’t be able to.

    Personally, painting is just something that never clicked for me. I can draw a line, an exact shape, I understand perspective and shadows, but the second it moves to “let’s draw that irregular line”, everything gets messy no matter how many hours I put into this. Back in the school years painting and choreography were two only things I failed at, because it requires a lot of intuitive behavior people never care or are never able to put into algorithm. Later, as I tried again and again, I always stumbled with the same thing - circles and squares are all fine, but how am I supposed to draw THAT? For me every break out of basic geometry feels like a good old meme about drawing a horse:

    1000093040

    And for me, AI tools are essential to make my vision into something more complex than a stickman figure. It is still a creative process - AI gets something wrong, some ideas are physically impossible and can’t fit the composition, etc. etc. Any struggle a competent artist faces is still there.



  • Oh, I know the struggle - it’s not that I never made any art whatsoever. What’s in the artist’s head is less of an image and more of an impression to be put into words or lines.

    And I believe that, given more truly free time and less of the simple mind-eating distractions, much more people would embark on an artistic journey, even in the age of AI. It’s just a very human thing to do.

    But while we’re at it, we have what we have, and sometimes having a medium to express yourself right now is better than only having hope to get the tools you need.


  • There are different kinds of accessibility. While I admire people with disabilities who were so dedicated in the pursuit of art, there’s more to it than pure desire.

    Art takes gift. It takes a lot of time to make it into talent, skill. It commonly takes a lot of money for the courses, materials, etc. And in the modern world, not everyone can realistically have or afford all that.

    When I talk of accessibility, I don’t mean “with a ton of effort, every person can technically become at least a bad artist”. I mean “everyone needs to create, yet not everyone can dedicate their life to it”.

    AI art allows us to communicate our visions and ideas, which is to me the most important parts of art overall, without having to grind through art classes. This, in turn, means we can hear and see new voices, ones that previously were never heard.


  • I did read it to the end, I just don’t believe it’s quite the same argument.

    The Oatmeal seems to insist that while AI is helpful to eliminate the boring tasks, art is still a product of effort and struggle. They even later make an argument that these “boring, administrative” tasks might be an important part of creative process, that taking it away means taking something away from the art itself.

    And AI art is not just text prompts and pictures. There are AI tools that allow you to draw basic lines and the AI will fill in and complete the hard parts, so you could male your vision come true without proper artistic skill. This is good, because not everyone can dedicate themselves to art classes, not everyone is talented enough (and I insist that talent is part of building a good skill, unlike The Oatmeal who seems to emphasize effort over gift), yet everyone wants and needs to create beauty.

    To me, the main purpose of art is to communicate our vision, our thoughts, our ideas. Until recently, the ability to do so was limited by the talent, by that skill ceiling. Those who excelled were heard, those who did not were not. By assisting people with things they don’t know how to do well, we can amplify their voices and their visions, which can help us build a more active and inclusionary dialogue.






  • No need to advertise Prism - using it already :)

    Also, UltimMC is a decent offline fork for pirates and privacy enthusiasts (Disclaimer: I do not promote piracy and own a legal Minecraft license)

    I’m so lost and then I try to play like a Beta 1.7.3 player and everyone else just goes “the fuck are you doing?”

    Happily, I joined Minecraft when it was already 1.7.2 (release versioning, not Beta), so my ways are not THAT outdated, and obviously I never had issues with 1.7.10 because it’s literally my first version with two minor updates. Who would have known that it will all stop there…

    Also, I struck some delicate balance with mods at version 1.21.1, but it is for sure still a much different experience.