• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • No worries, my point was that this is actually not a generalization, but about a very specific type of person. People, especially those who work in restaurants in the US, would see this and know exactly the person that this is about. They’ve all seen at least a few of them and could probably call them out by name.


  • AI art isn’t bad because of its inherent quality (though tons of it is poor quality), it’s bad because it both lacks the essential qualities that people appreciate about art, and because of the ethics around the companies and the models that they’re making (as well as the attitude of some of the people who use it).

    AI has no concept of the technical concepts behind art, which is a skill people appreciate in terms of “quality,” and it lacks “intent.” Art is made for the fun of it, but also with an intrinsic purpose that AI can’t replicate. AI is just a fancy version of a meme template. To quote Bennett Foddy:

    For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. And for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the store are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad or that they’re badly made, although a lot of them are - I mean that they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in a sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage.

    Adam Savage had a good comment on AI in one of his videos where he said something like “I have no interest in AI art because when I look at a piece of art, I care about the creator’s intent, the effort that they put into the piece, and what they wanted to say. And when I look at AI, I see none of that. I’m sure that one day, some college film student will make something amazing with AI, and Hollywood will regurgitate it until it’s trash.”

    But that’s outside the context of your original post, in which you said that AI art would someday be better than what humans can make. And this is where my point about video game graphics comes in. AI is replicating the art in its training set, much like computer graphics seeking realism are attempting to replicate the real world. There’s no way to surpass this limit with the technology that powers these LLMs, and the closer they get to perfectly mimicking their data and removing the errors that are so common to AI (like the six fingers, strange melty lines, lack of clear light sources, 60% accuracy rate with AI like ChatGPT, etc.), the more their power requirements will increase and the more incremental the advancements will become. We’re in the early days of AI, and the advancements are rapid and large, but that will slow down and the hardware requirements and data requirements are already on a massive scale to the tune of the entirety of the internet for ChatGPT and its competitors.


  • I can only speak from my own experiences, so I don’t know if this happens in other countries, but in the US, this is a very specific kind of Christian.

    I used to work retail with a very religious old lady who was excommunicated from the Catholic church because her husband divorced her (he divorced her, not the other way around, and she was the one who was punished, but that’s a different absurd topic) and this meme would describe her brother, who she talked about with absolute vitriol.

    She would describe him as acting like he was a saint despite partaking in every vice you can imagine and being a complete asshole to everybody around him during the week, all because he went to church every Sunday and therefore that made him a good Christian.

    These are a particular kind of holier-than-thou person who expect the world to bend to their whim because of the number of times that they’ve circled the sun on this rock we call Earth and believe that they have the right to treat service staff like trash in the way that royalty treated their servants.




  • You clearly don’t understand how these things work. AI gen is entirely dependent on human artists to create stuff for it to generate from. It can only ever try to be as good as the data sets that it uses to create its algorithm. It’s not creating art. It’s outputting a statistical array based on your keywords. This is also why ChatGPT can get math questions wrong. Because it’s not doing calculations, which computers are really good at. It’s generating a statistical array and averaging out from what its data set says should come next. And it’s why training AI on AI art creates a cascading failure that corrupts the LLM. Because errors from the input become ingrained into the data set, and future errors compound on those previous errors.

    Just like with video game graphics attempting to be realistic, there’s effectively an upper limit on what these things can generate. As you approach a 1:1 approximation of the source material, hardware requirements to improve will increase exponentially and improvements will decrease exponentially. The jump between PS1 and PS2 graphics was gigantic, while the jump between PS4 and PS5 was nowhere near as big, but the differences in hardware between the PS1 and PS2 look tiny today. We used to marvel at the concept that anybody would ever need more than 256MB of RAM. Today I have 16GB and I just saw a game that had 32GB in its recommended hardware.

    To be “better” than people at creating art, it would have to be based on an entirely different technology that doesn’t exist yet. Besides, art isn’t a product that can be defined in terms of quality. You can’t be better at anime than everybody else. There’s always going to be someone who likes shit-tier anime, and there’s always going to be parents who like their 4 year old’s drawing better than anything done by Picasso. That’s why it’s on the fridge.


  • This is a real thing, though. Most mixed use in the US falls into one of two categories: either it was built before zoning codes (like most of the small apartments over businesses) or it’s large apartment/condo buildings. Mixed use has become a more popular concept in the past decade or so, but most residential zoning prevents the building of commercial buildings within the area and largely limits the size of dwellings to single family homes.

    It’s also why 2 and 3 unit housing is a rarity as well. You mostly see either single family housing or large apartment buildings/condo complexes because it’s hard to get approved to build anything else - either through zoning laws themselves or NIMBYs killing any project.

    You can thank Euclidian Zoning for that.




  • It’s less that they can compromise and more that the only policy that they care about is policy that hurts minorities. They’d happily jump on a grenade or march into an oven so long as they can take a liberal and an immigrant with them.

    On the other hand, look at how much effort it’s taken for the fascists to get power again. The groundwork for the current administration was started under Reagan and solidified under Bush Jr. They had to take every branch of the government by force to get to where they are because there just aren’t enough of their supporters to actually get them into office without bending the rules until they break.


  • Also worth noting that the US is not and never has been a “Christian nation.” Not only did the Founding Fathers specifically separate church and state for that reason, but they also didn’t declare a national religion and enshrined religious freedom as well for that same reason. Plus, half of them were agnostic or atheists. Anybody who says we’re a “Christian nation” is just using religion as an excuse for bigotry.

    If God truly exists, he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.

    -Thomas Jefferson