Readit NewsThat’s the fundamental dilemma of not just the web, but the Internet, as a pull medium opposed to a push medium like television or radio. A human can not remember every URL. From your blank web browser you can only go to URLs you know. Then the only web pages you will ever see are ones that are linked, directly or indirectly, from the ones you know.
Most people only know Google, Facebook, etc. Anything that isn’t linked to from those sites effectively does not exist.
But it does exist. It’s a whole forest full of trees falling and not making a sound. It’s up to you to do what you can to find it.
I'm an indie maker and just launched a small side project: Celebrity AI Image Generator – a tool that lets users generate AI images of celebrities in different styles, outfits, or fantasy settings. You can select from a preset style or enter custom prompts to create stylized portraits.
This is an experiment in combining diffusion models with prompt tuning, with a lightweight frontend. I’m trying to keep it fast, fun, and privacy-respecting (no data is stored, no login required).
Some technical details:
Backend powered by pollinations.ai with some fine-tuned models for stylistic accuracy.
Hosted on GPU-inference servers with caching.
Frontend is built in Next.js.
Image generation is done via prompt + LoRA-based style adapters.
I'd love to learn:
Does the UX make sense to you?
Are the results interesting or surprising?
What would you add or change to make this tool more useful or fun?
Any concerns from a technical or ethical standpoint?
I know the idea of AI-generated celebrity images may raise some questions around likeness rights, which I’m being cautious about. All generations are clearly synthetic, and I'm considering adding filters to avoid misuse.
If you're curious, here's the link: https://www.aicelebrity.design/ I’d really appreciate your thoughts – thanks in advance!
The answer, by the way, is no.
One of the things that flabbergasts me about YouTube and TikTok is the utter bilge that people will watch. TV had some of this: trash daytime TV, late night infomercials, soaps to some extent. But the stuff social media runs on today is a whole other level.
If you went back in time and told me that millions would spend endless hours watching other people play video games while monologuing about nothing and randomly doing the same juvenile reactions over and over, I would not have believed you. Same goes for obvious zero effort AI slop, machine voices reading Reddit posts to a slide show background, incoherent rambling, or for kids videos of people unboxing toys for eight hours… it’s just astounding.
There seem to be these “hooks” that if mastered can take the place of plot, aesthetics, information, and everything else, and mesmerize people.
Sometimes it seems like the banality and bizarre nonsensical nature of it is the hook, like people just want to stare at nothing.
I watch videos of people playing through games and talking about or alongside it. There are two main reasons, both of which I (obviously) think are valid.
1. I enjoy gaming and use these videos as background noise when I’m doing things for work that don’t have a high cognitive load. If I’m going to have something on TV or streaming, I’d prefer it be associated with one of my interests.
2. For games with some sort of planning or problem solving element, I watch videos of people who are better at them than me so that I can learn different ways to do things. A classic example is Factorio, which has a thousand ways to organize a production line. It’s useful to see different people do this in different ways and optimize for different things, and yes - talk through it while they do. That translates into me being more informed and coming up with better ideas myself, which means more fun playing the game.
It’s very much fine for this to not be for everyone and all, but that doesn’t always make it trash/bilge.
LLMs probably sped things up, but it seems like it was inevitable that it would fall into disuse and eventually be overtaken one way or another.
It is available to the entity running inference. Every single token and all the probabilities of every choice. But every decision made at every company isn't subject to a court hearing. So no, that's also a silly idea.
Now we just need Joe Pentium submitting patches to Linux Torvalds
Aside from that cars phone bome anyways as ot is, so another way to crossreference data.
This can be as nontrivial as you want it. The problem is rather that a state shouldn't treat its citizens like that. That is probably why they start with repeat offenders.
The fourth amendment means that there should never be a situation where you are arbitrarily required to provide the government access to, or information about, the ways that you use or modify private property like a vehicle.
Tens of millions of people were woken up to be told to be on the lookout for someone 600 miles away.
My observation is that it's too easy for police to send out an alert. And in Texas it seems that alerts go out for every little thing that involves a cop. They don't even have to be searching for someone who killed a cop. It could just be someone who took off from a traffic stop, and suddenly every phone for 500 miles goes Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!
But when a chemical plant splurts out the largest chlorine leak in a decade, and a cloud of deadly gas sweeps over a few cities, it gets announced in a closed Facebook group.†
†This was in the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.
The other example that comes to mind is, I was in Toronto a few years back and got a “Nuclear incident emergency alert” stating that there was NO problem at the nearby power plant and NO abnormal release of radiation. Equally uninformative, hugely more alarming (and relevant).