dwringer

> If I want to be an artist I shouldn't have to practise or educate myself. The simple desire to be an artist should be enough!

IMHO this is absolutely the case, and has always been the case. Being paid as an artist, on the other hand, is something entirely different, or having one's art recognized as good by other people. But I am sure everyone remembers other more popular artists telling them they're "doing it wrong" in art class, on forums, or even all the way back to preschool coloring books if someone would deign to color outside the lines.

There have always been those who seek to gatekeep what art is and who they view as legitimate participants in it. I suppose everyone does in some sense. But I am very excited by the prospect of art as a personal developmental journey becoming more open to everyone.

It does seem like the model picked up examples of pronunciations about which people are admonished, and presented them as tips of what to do rather than what not to do. This basic issue with negation also pops up a lot IME with Google's search infoboxes, so hopefully people are at least slightly inoculated.

As long as the fortune is vague enough to apply to more than 40-50 people, then the chance of a fabricated fortune-telling for you coming true simply by pure random coincidence seems to be greater than the chance of winning the lottery.

> and me being 8 years out of date with my python skillz i have no idea what the current SOTA is with python venv tooling :/

It doesn't really matter, by the time you sit down and use it you'll find whatever that is, has also been deprecated and replaced by 2 more.

Thanks for this comment, I hadn't thought to try and sabotage my trajectory prior to engaging autopilot. I thought for sure it was gonna fail, but it managed to set me down gently right at the last moment quite brilliantly.

> Paul Graham (Y Combinator co-founder) has a lot of essays on Lisp or mentions of Lisp

Nobody mentions them much here for some reason, but also the books ANSI Common Lisp and On Lisp, at one time considered almost essential reading. I still think they're fantastic but they're not for instant gratification as they don't give you much in terms of immediate practical applications or real world system examples. Nevertheless they are among my favorite books on programming and I wouldn't be surprised if many people who come here similarly "cut their teeth" with those books.

You can get heightmaps from NASA's SRTM data without any licensing concerns at all, and they can be used in Cities Skylines (without mods) without any problem (provided you put the heightmap into the right file format). This was pretty much always possible, it's just been a lot of steps and sort of a hassle without projects like that facilitating the process for people.

It would be incredible to have a globe viewer/DEM download tool built in to the game, but the bandwith required for hosting the project might turn into an issue (I'm reminded of the situation with high res imagery for Command: Modern Operations/TacView, where users are strongly encouraged to download only what they need due to server constraints).

I've played with Cities: Skylines off and on many times over the years and often do give up in frustration with endless traffic problems, but I think it's down to two main things: one, traffic management is very much "endgame" type content, as you can build a nice self-sufficient little zen garden community without really worrying about it much. But to get big cities it must be dealt with. And two, once you've already built a city, it's way harder to implement good traffic flow. This is painfully evident all the time in the real world.

Now I use a mod to unlock all the map tiles (actually, the entire map) at game start, and I build specifically around my envisioned future transportation needs. It's still a challenge, and I highly recommend the traffic management mod mentioned elsewhere in these threads, but it is not an insurmountable one.

I guess people might argue this all day but I think Cities: Skylines is mostly that, with the rather large caveat that you can't start separate games on the same large map at the same time. You can still get mods (easily, from the steam workshop) which open up the entire terrain, and then use one of several different approaches to build multiple towns on the same map.

I'm sure I'm forgetting other stuff that's missing, but they both scratch the same itch for me.

Huh, this seems to be the same linguistic phenomenon observed in British English with the word "lieutenant" but perhaps independently evolved.

These things are advancing way faster than they're being taken advantage of fully. Even SD 1.4 with months-old technology can produce far higher quality images than most of what's seen from midjourney or the latest tools. Things like ControlNet are amazing, to be sure, but there's nothing "dinosauric" about the technology without it. We haven't begun to see the limits of what's possible yet with existing tools, though you're right about the rapid pace of innovation.

This seems like the primary explanation IMHO. I have never played the games but I'm really enjoying the show. And regardless of the nature of the discourse surrounding TLoU, I would say Reddit strongly tends to come down hard on negativity in general, at least on most subreddits I've seen.

But is Google autocomplete the proverbial shoe shine boy giving stock tips?

If you expanded the prompt to describe the squirrel in redundantly verbose detail it would probably pick it up just fine. The more synonymous descriptors you can work in, and the more naturally you can phrase it, the better it will work.

But IMHO the interesting thing about controlnet is being able to use pre-rendered production art as a basis and allowing SD to respect the original proportions/model/etc. For rough sketches I prefer img2img without controlnet as it gives the algorithm leeway to fix, reinterpret, or "be inspired by" my input image without being too attached to it (since it's full of imperfections anyway).

If the user is a capable writer who can organize their thoughts and recognize the difference between good and bad copy, they're going to get much more coherent results from tools like ChatGPT. I'd contend that an average primary/secondary-schooler is basically expected to develop those exact skills, without which their AI generated essays will have a multitude of problems just like human-composed ones do.

Maybe they could get Gordon Ramsay to let them model his voice for it. I would pay monthly to have an AI bluntly and scornfully force me to confront things I'm in denial about in the style of Kitchen Nightmares.

Unfortunately that song is in 9/8 and this drum computer appears to be fixed only in 4/4, you'd need an extra two steps to properly do it in this format really. Or at the very least a way to limit the steps to nine.

I have to wonder though - modular synths were always so niche and expensive, they've never been more affordable or available than they are today. In fact they're a small fraction of what systems would cost in any previous decade, so it may be that there are more people using modular synths now than ever.

Whether they're using them for anything is maybe a different question ;)

It is certainly one of the best and most concise ELI5 explanations I've seen.

And just yesterday we were blaming Google for passing on false information about astronomy. GIGO.

Edit: Sorry; tried to edit this before the post went live but the site crashed for me for several minutes. I meant to specify that we were blaming their language model. There's certainly plenty of an argument to be made that Google is partly responsible for the current state of SEO and all that garbage going in.

You're of course correct, but perhaps I should have focused more on the concept of skipping words when reading, misremembering, and "reading what you want to read" - those traits are extremely common if not universal at some level in human readers as well.

img2img creations are probably confusing it because they are totally rearranging how the prompt emerges from what's in the latent space with respect to a new image. So if you make an image of <subject> by passing in an image of <subject>, it's going to represent <subject> in a fundamentally different way than if it relies purely on its own "imagination" for the rendition.

Sure but this seems analogous to creating a claw hammer then showing off how it can be used to drive screws, then saying the hammer isn't doing its job correctly when the screws aren't driven properly.

I think chat technology like this is an incredible tool, but I don't think it's being judged fairly: I don't think its usefulness is as some kind of oracle or advisor expected to provide correct or logical information. That seems so orthogonal (if not diametrically opposed) from its actual function that it really feels like we're being trolled by things like "Galactica". But I'm much more (cautiously) optimistic about the potential use for the technology in web search, which has never been logical or "correct" and has always required critical thinking on the part of its users.

Perhaps there should be more of a disclaimer that the things it says are not and cannot be construed to be factual, no matter how verisimilitudinous.

I like that this thread points out even humans have difficulty with that construction sometimes. We're trying to hold Google's language model to a higher standard than humans in this case I think. I remember "learning" thousands of bits of trivia like that from people who had misinterpreted something they read and misstated it in such a way.

Of course Google has already been putting often-incorrect summaries/factoids in its search infoboxes for a few years now.

> Although it actually seems less like ...

My experience with talking to chatbots has been essentially that the responses are completely open ended and can be taken to mean literally anything you could conceivably infer, and if you continue the conversation as such the chatbot will 100% double down on whatever you assumed. the same prompts and the same context will lead to completely different outcomes based on how the human user responds next. Everything is both a joke and not, both a lie and an honest mistake, everything and nothing at the same time because it's not logical in the first place.

I've noticed users of stable diffusion/image generating AI's don't seem to have any trouble confusing the output for something logical, but with things like ChatGPT it seems like an almost universal fallacy.

As the poster commented, it was a typo in this case and should have been "a". But, in general, we would use "an" preceding an acronym whenever the pronunciation of the acronym begins with a vowel sound. To use some broadcast networks as examples, you could say "A CBS production" [analogous to "a CGI"], but "An ABC production" or "An NBC production" (note NBC is pronounced starting with a vowel sound, at the start of "en").

Unfortunately it looks like the author only listed the possibility of future JPEG support, but it was not implemented.

I have used a program called Pixel Fixer which can learn a profile of each of your cameras and directly process out the dead pixels in the RAW files in a batch operation.

It hasn't been updated in about 8 years so it doesn't necessarily support anything too recent, and is not open source, but I had some success with using it.

I tried making a clown using stable diffusion one day by blending 3 different clown-generating prompts together, and the result that came out was a horrifyingly grotesque inhuman monster. I've never had that happen just blending prompts together to make normal people. The clown makeup screws with how their faces are embedded or something. It ended up with Giger-esque multiple sets of teeth. I can only assume there's a similar phenomenon going on in peoples' imagination.

Thanks for that great perspective, I can absolutely see the benefit of the new design in a cramped display or at lower resolutions. OTOH, the comparison at 4k is strikingly different.