Nadya

I don't even think what they say holds in the US either - so must be elsewhere.

In the U.S you have brand name with their often noisy labels full of marketing - and then store brand (which is often the exact same stuff as the brand name in different packaging - or stuff that was rejected from quality control of the name brand so is almost the same stuff just slightly worse by some unknown metric). I buy store brand for basically everything but a few food items where the quality is worse enough to be off-putting. Store brand labels aren't quite as plain as No Name labels but are usually a bit more bespoke or just "lower quality" like they didn't want to pay for a graphic designer so had some intern whip up a graphic for the label.

I know the U.K has No Name brand which to my understanding also markets itself as the cheaper no-fuss alternative?

The answer of why is quite obvious to many people but no longer politically acceptable.

There is a large external pressure for studies to show that there are no differences between men and women while there is also demand for studies that show negative outcomes of women in comparison to men. The same problem happens again and again with these studies in that nothing explains the negative outcomes of women. Except one explanation that is instantly discarded for being socially untenable.

The intersectionalist looks at the studies and declares, "It must be something - let's keep looking!" while the sexist takes a look and nods.

Nobody is going to risk their careers or their funding when they can continue being paid to investigate other avenues of explanation. The suffering of people will continue until a more acceptable explanation is found.

And because I don't wish to speak between the lines: There are psychological and emotional differences between men and women. And, from all the humans I've known at least, women tend to give more of a shit about the opinions of other people than men give a shit about the opinions of other people. While the toxic negativity of social media impacts both genders I would honestly be shocked if it didn't impact women more if for no reason other than because they care more.

Seeing my ticket in their Help Center - and I don't see any of my responses. So they weren't getting my emails. I don't blame the Support team at all - they can't help someone they can't speak with - but it's still shitty that my email is blocked from contacting Support due to what is likely a domain blocklist. :(

I guess a word to anyone who uses non-standard email (and by non-standard I sadly mean "not Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo"...) to test if you can actually contact support with your email address. Best to confirm you can when you don't need it than not be able to when you do!

Final update as it has been nearly a day now: no response from support. :)

Changing the email address associated with my account to one that hopefully isn't blocked in the future.

Question in case anyone actually sees this: What downsides would there be to whitelisting email addresses associated to active/paying customer accounts? Seems like a no-brainer move to have your customers whitelisted to send you email if support is primarily done through email. I understand blacklisting domains known for abuse/spam but whitelisting individual accounts from that domain that are paying you seems like a good compromise having only put 5 seconds of thought into it.

I am quite excited that I can take a photograph of scenery with my camera in the blink of an eye without ever having to learn how to paint. I can even send that photo off to be printed to hang on my wall!

E: I misread you so largely removed my post as it delved into the history of what is "art" which isn't really what you were talking about as made clear by your 2nd paragraph. But I feel the point of photography::paintings and what one excitingly sends off to be printed still holds true.

Providing an update: I'm 99% sure my personal email address is being flagged as spam by DO's ticketing system and it isn't that I'm being ignored but that they're not receiving my correspondence. :)

I reached out to @DigitalOcean on Twitter about my tickets and the older one was closed out as a dupe and we moved forward with the most recent one. They weren't able to verify my ID - no reason give but I think I know why - and they asked if we can move forward with an alternate means of verification: a random temp charge between $0.01 and $4.99 to the account and I provide the amount of the charge.

I agreed to this - and 12 hours later I forgot if I had replied so I agreed to it again. This morning I received an automated response asking for me to respond. I responded. 2 hours later still no response - I hit up Twitter again. I'm thinking the reason they weren't able to verify my ID is because they never got my email providing it in the first place.

Now - despite not verifying any charge amount - literally as I was typing this post I received an email stating 2FA was disabled. Either they lied about not being able to verify my ID or they decided to unlock my account anyway without verification which may be of concern to others.

E:

2FA re-enabled and this time I made damn sure to backup my backup codes properly... also responded to the support ticket one final time requesting they verify if they've received it. If I don't hear back I'm going to assume I should change the email associated with my account. :)

What are your opinions of Yves Klein's series of IKB paintings? Do you have an appreciative understanding of the differences between IKB 79 and IKB 191? Are the differences all that important over opening Microsoft Paint, selecting the bucket tool, changing the fill color to blue, and clicking the canvas?

I'm not trolling either. I'm quite bothered by the common argument that "art is effort". Art is not defined by the effort it takes to create and anytime it gets easier (even to a trivial degree) there are always pundits and naysayers.

https://everythingcanbe.art/

I'm glad to hear the process is working for you but I'm also in the process right now.

This is my "Sent" folder: https://imgur.com/a/3D1FSYz

Initial ticket was sent to Support on Jan 23rd, I bumped and asked if there was any issue with the information I provided on Jan 29th or if they needed more information, I then provided February's payment on Feb 7th. I wanted the answer to "The date and amount (in USD) of the last billing transaction by DigitalOcean." to be up-to-date since January's was no longer a valid answer for the information that was being requested.

My CTF [0] that has been running for years will break and that's honestly my biggest concern. I have no clue how to even get it up and running again because I've mostly forgotten everything I learned to get it setup to begin with... I kept it out of my repo to prevent accidental spoilers if I ever made the repo public - though thinking back I really should have set up a CTF branch and just never published that branch. So lesson learned if I ever make another CTF: extensively document every single step for how to recreate and setup the game again.

Redeploying the site and even saving all the files uploaded to the site are both relatively trivial. The deploy is almost entirely automated and I can still login to my root user panel, download any uploaded files, and transfer them over to the newly deployed site - so I'm only experiencing minor data loss. (eg. the DateUploaded for files will be lost and I don't care enough to try and back that up to restore it)

Hopefully I do everything right and prevent link rot. Thankfully I'm the sole user of my file host so nobody else is losing any data.

[0] If anyone wants to become the 4th and probably final person to ever solve my CTF - you have just shy of 2 weeks before it breaks: https://nadyanay.me/ctf

I'm OK with it when it is official policy or you were warned beforehand that "No really. If you lose this and you're fucked - we will not provide support for account recovery." Precisely for the same security reason of preventing social engineering attacks for otherwise well-secured assets. But, and it is common with most places, you can jump through some hoops and get it removed my support. I still blame myself for losing my backup codes - but being told Support can help and then being ignored is well... annoying to say the least.

I use cock.li [0] for my emails. This is the official password recovery process:

> I forgot my password!

> Passwords are not reset for any reason. Good luck.

Many years ago - I forgot my password to my email! It was the kick in the ass I needed to begin using a password manager - and since the email was mostly for memes and not really used it was mostly a positive experience with a positive outcome. I occasionally try to login to the email but so far no luck in remembering my password. :)

[0] https://cock.li/help

The support ticket email requested I reply back with that information: Details about the payment method on the account, the date and amount of the last transaction by DO, a photo of a government-issued ID, and a photo of you holding the ID next to your face.

I provided the payment details, the date and amount of the last transaction as text, a screenshot of my bank statement of the transaction, 2 forms of ID (passport & driver's license), and a photo of my face next to both ID's on January 23rd. I replied again on February 7th with the most recent date of my transaction and the amount paid.

No response.

Never lose your 2FA backup codes or you're locked out of your account forever if you lose your 2FA device - despite support having a verification process to remove 2FA in the event you lost your codes - the support tickets are ignored or unmonitored.

I was also a happy DO customer for the last 5 years or so. But now I'm locked out of my account.

My fault for losing my codes (DO are the only backup codes I can't seem to find where I kept them... oddly they are not in my password manager) but they have a process in place for this and don't follow it. I'd be less annoyed if I was told it was my fault and there wasn't an avenue to receive support than being told I can go to support and then get ignored...

Thank you for taking the time to respond back to me - I honestly appreciate it.

The release notes honestly weren't all that helpful - but looking over the Git repo, it looks like a lot of the major crashing/session restoration bugs were squashed in 2020-2021 and the backup functionality was improved enough to make backups more user friendly and somewhat more automated (aka: worth using and not 4 days out of date). There are still some flaws but those flaws come from the extension suffering the limitations of being a web extension - which is a tangentially related but another huge gripe of mine.

Now if only I could find a way to restore my context-menu tab switching - a feature lost when FireGestures was killed off. I didn't use any of the other gesture functionality at all - I only used the "[Popup] List All Tabs" feature which worked great with tab groups back in the day. (See: "Wheel Gestures" http://www.xuldev.org/firegestures/features.php)

E: (moments before I was about to post...)

Holy. Shit. Gesturefy recreated that functionality - and around the time I had given up on FF too. Back to Firefox I go! I had tried Foxy Gestures thinking it was the successor to FireGestures but I never gave Gesturefy a chance back then. In case I was bad at describing it, you can test it out yourself after setting it up in the settings: "[Popup] All Tabs" as a wheel gesture - it is an absolute game changer and I am SO GLAD I can go back to my circa-2013~2016 workflow after all these years. Only downside is continuing to scroll doesn't highlight tabs to change - so a small step back - wonder if it is even possible with how WE's are limited.

https://github.com/Robbendebiene/Gesturefy/issues/99

Tab Groups were better when they were baked into the browser. They were extremely buggy when the code was removed and moved into an extension. Not only often losing all of my tabs - but completely forgetting all of my tab groups altogether. Causing me to lose not only important data but also having to re-organize all my tabs into tab groups only to inevitably have to redo all the work next time FF decided it wanted to crash (which was multiple times a day at that point due to the extension...). It happened with such regularity that I grew sick of it and it was the single motivating factor that pushed me to use Chrome as my default browser.

I can only hope/assume they've gotten better since then - but it burned me really, really bad. So much that it still pisses me off talking about it all these years later.

Two of the original features that were extremely buggy were a hotkey to open up a visual overview of tab groups (originally Ctrl+Shift+E) and a way to search for a tab and reduce the number of visible tab groups to only groups containing a tab matching that search.

I see in the screenshots that this functionality seems to exist but also (based on the color coding) plays nicely with containers now. Would you be willing to vouch that it is more stable nowadays? Because if it isn't a steaming pile of shit that crashes if you so much as look in its direction that would certainly motivate me to return back to Firefox.

I mean you'll have to trust me when I say I don't - since if I did I would obviously claim that I don't - but I have a strong match with 3 users where I'm in their top 20. But I don't have an alternate HN account as I don't see any need for separate identities for the ideas I hold on HN. Where as if I want nuanced discussion on Reddit without someone trolling my post history and discounting anything I say because 4 years ago I once posted on a subreddit they don't approve of - I do need an alternate Reddit account. So I will admit to having at least one alternate Reddit account.

Moreover - since Nadya is my "primary" pseudonym, I deliberately make it easy for people to find me across social platforms: https://nadyanay.me/identities

Based on this list you can assume I am Nyu, Nadya, NadyaNayme, or Yuno in a number of places. Three of those names are common and so are commonly already taken by the time I create an account somewhere - so it isn't an exact science. For example - the account "yuno" also exists on HN but isn't me. If it were I'd have capitalized the "Y" and this account wouldn't exist.

As far as I have been made aware - nobody has ever identified any of my other personas as belonging to me.

This all operates under the assumption that both AI-generated and AI-assisted art is not art and does not come from an artist nor will it help artists.

As a photographer, I disagree on all those fronts. As a photographer who likes to edit their photos with surrealist elements that can't be photographed - such as portals to another dimension, aliens, or anime characters - I'm doubly mad that the art I'm creating is suddenly not considered art because I'm using an AI to generate art instead of stealing the art.

In the digital mashup scene stealing art for digitally editing is quite common and nobody really bats an eye as long as the digital editing is 99% of the work. Copyright is constantly ignored by the scene for the last 20 or so years that I've been a part of it. (renders, C4Ds, fractals, stock photography, etc.) Think early 2000s forum signatures. Almost all of the graphic art from that era was made using stolen art to digitally mash together and few people cared it was violating copyrights to not use exclusively permissive CC licensed works.

And now it has a website:

https://everythingcanbe.art/gallery.html

Just an FYI but your link 404's. I assume it is a private repo.

A second photo has been added to the collection - for anyone who thought I might be joking about doing this.

Photos will periodically be added to the collection - not that I expect anyone whatsoever to ever be interested in following a collection of photos that is meant to be boring and uninspired. However - feel free to use this collection of photos as a counterargument to the argument that "art requires some effort". I promise that I will put far less thought and effort into the photos of this collection than I have in any writing of prompts for AI generated art that I've done.

Art is little more than a statement and sometimes a small statement can carry a large message.

https://imgur.com/a/Oez2w64

Tomorrow I will work on setting up a domain and gallery for the images - to facilitate easier discussion and sharing. Is the real artistic statement the story behind the collection and not the collection itself? How can the two be separated? Can one exist without the other?

I still don't see how this isn't the "Realistic Portrait/Scenic Painters vs Photography" argument rehashed.

Imagine you are a painter and you have developed your expertise in photorealistic painting over your entire lifetime.

Would you mind if someone snaps a photograph of the same subject you just painted?

What if your commissioners tell you they decided to buy a photograph instead of your painting because it looked more realistic?

Every argument I've seen against AI art is an appeal to (human) ego or an appeal to humanity. I don't find either argument compelling. Take this video [0] for example and half of the counterarguments are an appeal to ego - and one argument tries to paint the "capped profit" as a shady dealing of circumventing laws without realizing (1) it's been done before, OpenAI just tried slapping a label on it and (2) nonprofits owning for-profit subdivisions is commonplace. Mozilla is both a nonprofit organization (the Foundation) and a for-profit company (the Corporation).

E:

I'm going to start a series of photographs that are intentionally bad and poorly taken. Poor framing, poor lighting, poor composition. Boring to look at, poor white balance, and undersaturated photos like the kind taken on overcast days. With no discernable subjects or points of interest. I will call the photos art - things captured solely with the press of a button by pointing my camera in a direction seemingly at random. I'm afraid many won't understand the point I am making but if I am making a point it does make the photographs art - does it not? I'm pretty sure that is how modern art works. I will call the collection "Hypocrisy".

E2:

The first photo of the collection to set the mood - a picture of the curtain in my office: https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/i/mUjQ5jTdeqrY3Vn0.jpg

Chosen because it is grey and boring. The light is not captured by the fabric in any sort of interesting manner - the fabric itself is quite boring. There is no pattern or design - just a bland color. There is nothing to frame - a section of the curtain was taken at random. The photo isn't even aligned with the curtain - being tilted some 40 odd degrees. Nor is the curtain ever properly in focus. A perfect start for a collection of boring, bland photos.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&feature=youtu.be

It does sometimes spit out recognizable chunks of its training data rather verbatim. While half of their compiled evidence is entirely unconvincing to me or I disagree with on other grounds (mostly moral and the difference between a human or computer mimicking a style) - there is some that is pretty undeniable. Search for "the dead" or scroll down to near the end of the article and notice the lyrics "generated" for the punk song. Then compare the GPT-3 "generated" lyrics to the second link's [Verse 2].

https://www.twilio.com/blog/building-a-punk-lyrics-bot-in-py...

https://genius.com/Smash-mouth-all-star-lyrics

The fraction was pulled out my behind as a "Yes, there are edits that - even if completely pointless to make - are made nonetheless and nobody will ever know about it without being told it has been edited and anyone claiming otherwise is a liar."

I'm not sure the point of the Tone Deafness test - I scored a 31/32 but on many of the questions if one tone had been replaced with the lower/higher tone I'd never know it had been replaced despite my ability to tell them apart from one another. My point wasn't that you couldn't tell A from a very similar B (you can!) but that if A had been replaced by that similar B in the first place you'd never have known (because you couldn't!). You'd need to have been privy to the editing process to actually know if it had been edited at all.

Imagine an A/B test where A has been removed entirely and you've been asked which edits B has made to A. It's a very different test from an A/B test where you can compare A with B. While a trained ear may be able to hear obvious edits there are literally hundreds of non-obvious edits made to songs during production that you couldn't possibly know about without hearing the original recording to compare against.

Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me - people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in.

There are absolutely edits so subtle that without having seen or heard the original you'd have no way of knowing it was modified at all. Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. These kinds of subtle changes are far more common than the drastic and noticeable edits or even smaller but still quite large edits where people with a trained eye/ear will notice but the average person wouldn't.

When people call themselves "prompt engineers" it's only half in jest. Half of generating something good is guiding the program into generating something good. That means knowing the right keywords to get specific styles or effects, a little bit of luck, and sometimes generating a prompt several dozen times and then creating variations from a seed once you find a specific seed that generated something close to what you liked. It's an iterative process and many of the fantastic images you see weren't "first generations" but likely the 20th or so generation after tons of trial and error working around a specific prompt/idea.

I'd recommend keeping a prompt list and finding what does/doesn't work for what you're after. Try shuffling the order of your prompt - the order of the tokens does matter! Repeat a token twice, thrice, hell make a prompt with nothing but the same token repeated 8 times. Play around with it! If you find an image that's very close to what you want - start generating variations of it. Make 20 different variations. Make variations of the variations you like best.

Also the seed is very important! If you find a seed that generated a style you really liked take note of it. That seed will likely generate more things in a similar style for similar enough prompts.

It's a semi-creative process and definitely takes some time investment if you want great results. Sometimes you strike gold and get lucky on your first generation - but that's rare.

I've found the trick for these - unless a more obvious/direct path exists (eg. you get two somewhat related topics) is to try and find the Nazis first. I tried to go from Arabic to Science/Mathematics but that didn't pan out so pivoted to the Nazis which were only 3 degrees of separation away.

----

"Grammatical tense" to "Scientific method" Time: 150.046 Seconds

Number of links visited: 9

The path you took: [ "Grammatical tense", "Arabic", "List of languages by total number of speakers", "Language shift", "Anti-German sentiment", "World War I", "Nazism", "Pseudoscience", "Science", "Scientific method" ]

Only on that specific page because it uses a custom renderer. Try to place the font on another web page and view it in Firefox.

So is most real art. In fact - artists have even created a dedicated terms to this kind of plagiarism: "style study" or even "reference". You can look for this term on YouTube and find a nearly endless result of artists basing art off of the style of other artists. [0]

It is 100% legal for me to blatantly copy the artistic style of Ilya Kuvshinov. I could even sell such work as my own - because it would be. I'd be seen as a derivative or knock-off artist but it can be done. As far as I can tell the real issue is that the AI does it far better - and much faster - than people can. Creating heavily derivative works that, if nonfamiliar with Kuvshinov's work, could possibly be mistaken as being theirs.

That the AI has learned that artist signatures/watermarks are a "feature" of some artwork and so sometimes adds its own has only reinforced people's mistaken belief that it is stealing art when that simply isn't how neural networks like this work at all.

Speaking of - how many people doing style studies of Ilya's work reached out for permission first? I'd wager zero. Because that isn't a thing artists tend to reach out and ask for permission to do. So why should an AI be expected to ask permission first?

[0] Quite literally only to illustrate my point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrvZTeLP96E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DadJAu0Ogs

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gc8DhwMZDKU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4RSCK-Tn0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPWOy7NxYho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nc--w5NfCM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0K3F9al2Js

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5l8y1HZ1zc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDRS9im1q4s

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4zBoHcIo4mc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0cXa9WxFVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDhtkWRY9qk

Due to a massive rise in doxxing and stalking that occurred after 4chan made checking EXIF data an extremely common tactic when doxxing people - complete with "how to" guides for less tech savvy individuals - most image hosts and social media sites nowadays strip EXIF data from uploaded images. Some sites will detect/extract certain data only (eg: to include the camera/lens used for photography-focused image sharing sites) and scrub the rest. Been that way for roughly a decade if not longer now.

> And when people _are_ shopping around, they search for things like "best vpn providers 2022"

Which coincidentally a number of VPN "review" sites were purchased and the lists "updated" to recommend a certain owner that I'm fairly certain at this point is a honeypot.

https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn...

https://www.techradar.com/news/pc-mag-owner-j2-global-buys-s...

Kape Technologies was formerly known as Crossrider before it was acquired by Teddy Sagi, an Israeli billionaire that has spent time in jail for insider trading. Crossrider itself never had that great a reputation itself, what with their primary product being a development platform through which they were frequently used by third parties to invade ad platforms to serve up malware.

> If you're a global company and you make your product, say, snow-themed globally during the Northern winter, it's simply inaccurate for Southern hemisphere users. I don't really see how that's a political correctness or language issue as much as a factual correctness issue.

If you're a global company then you should already be used to localizing products for various cultures and/or regions. Political correctness would be criticizing the North American branch for selling winter-themed products in the North American Winter months - and variations of that criticism do happen. People doing X in X country where X is normal get criticized because it is not normal in Y country despite taking place in X country where it is normal.

A small, loud, and extremely obnoxious group has mistaken speaking alongside minority groups to help advocate for them and make sure they are heard as speaking for minority groups even if it means speaking over them. They take the far extremes of everything and pretend that's the norm. It's been especially common for people without dyslexia to speak on behalf of those with dyslexia about a particular "puzzle" (Enter the Nth Word of the Nth Sentence of the Nth Paragraph to prove you've read this.) And as someone with dyslexia phrased so well: "I'm dyslexic. Not illiterate and unable to count. I don't think you realize that you come off as patronizing and condescending wanting to "dumb down" the puzzle for me. More likely I think it is because you failed to read and now feel stupid. Please don't speak for me or people like me in the future."

For some context - the "puzzle" occurs when you fail to follow directions on how to continue setup. If you read the instructions - it tells you to hold CTRL while clicking the "continue" button. If you fail to hold "CTRL" while you click it will give you a 2 minute timeout, remove the "continue" button, and provide you a message to please read all of the instructions in order to proceed or you will need to solve an obnoxious and time consuming puzzle. Failure to do so will result in the obnoxious puzzle where you must enter three randomly selected words from the setup instructions to make the "continue" button visible again. Failing to follow instructions will repeat the puzzle over-and-over until instructions are read and followed. There have been no complaints from any dyslexic users about this puzzle in the support Discord - but several complaints from people who do not have dyslexia speaking on behalf of those who do who "might" struggle with the puzzle that would never be encountered in the first place if people followed the setup instructions.