Something I really enjoyed about this article is that really helps explain a counterintuitive result in hand drawn 2D animation. It's a well known phenomenon in hand drawn 2D animation that naively tracing over live action footage usually results in unconvincing and poor quality animation. The article demonstrates how sampling and even small amounts of noise can make a movement seem unconvincing or jittery- and seeing that, it suddenly helps make sense how something like simple tracing at 12 fps would produce bad results, without substantial error correction (which is where traditional wisdom like arcs, simplification etc comes in).
Readit Newsmeebob commented on Let's talk about animation quality theorangeduck.com/page/an... · Posted by u/ibobev
This website fills me with nostalgia! I used it many years ago to make a tiny 8ft yurt, which was a fun little project. Putting up a yurt is really satisfying- the way the lattice walls flex is very cool, and seeing the way tension works across the structure is fun.
The first example is a junior level social worker -- that's fine, but come now: we all know that social work is not a high-paying industry.
The second example is a lady with 76k in debt, who has managed to pay down nearly 70% of it. Somehow this doesn't qualify as savings to the author.
The third woman actually makes a lot (they won't say how much) and has "achieved financial stability" (thus undermining the thesis of the article), but sends "the majority" of her paychecks to her family.
Finally, by the fourth example: someone with three jobs, who still manages to save $200 a month! I do feel for her, though. (Note to author: why in the world would you bury this example??)
The fifth example spends on expensive exercise classes and "also likes to go out to dinner with her friends"...but still saves $600 a month.
For the very last example, we have a 28-year-old man, earning well below average in NYC (90k a year), who nonetheless saves $2,000 a month. I'm sensing a bias here.
This is a ridiculous article. It should be titled: "These 20-somethings mostly manage to save despite difficult life choices and low incomes, and so can you."
The title has two parts, both of which you've provided ample commentary on, but only one explicitly. In Their 20s, Struggling to Save... and Tired of Being Lectured About It. "Ridiculous" and "and so can you" come down on one side of the question of, how should we morally judge people about their savings?
meebob commented on Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists? vmst.io/@selzero/10951255... · Posted by u/dredmorbius
It should be an improvement for people to get a career in something they enjoy, instead of what pays the most money.
What we're talking about here is the immanent arrival of it being impossible for a very large number of people to get a career in something they enjoy (making images by hand).
It's fair to suppose (albeit based on a very small sample size, i.e., the last couple hundred, abnormal years of history) that all sorts of new jobs will arise as a result of these changes- but it seems to me unreasonable to suppose that these new jobs of the future will necessarily be more interesting or enjoyable than the ones they destroyed. I think it's easy to imagine a case in which the jobs are all much less pleasant (even supposing we all are wealthier, which also isn't necessarily going to be true)- imagine a future where the remaining jobs are either managerial/ownership based in nature or manual labor. To me at least, it's a bleak prospect.
meebob commented on Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists? vmst.io/@selzero/10951255... · Posted by u/dredmorbius
No one is in programming to "do programming". They're in it to get things done. I didn't learn C++ in high school to learn C++, I learned it to make games (then C++ changed and became new and scary to me and so I no longer say I know C++, possibly I never did).
If an AI will take care of most of the finicky details for me and let me focus on defining what I want and how I want it to work, then that is nothing but an improvement for everyone.
I would point out that many (most?) people are in programming to make money, rather than get things done per se.
If an AI were to make it impossible to make a living doing programming, would that be an improvement for most readers of this site?
meebob commented on Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists? vmst.io/@selzero/10951255... · Posted by u/dredmorbius
I'm mostly seeing software developers looking at the textual equivalent, GPT-3, and giving a spectrum of responses from "This is fantastic! Take my money so I can use it to help me with my work!" to "Meh, buggy code, worse than dealing with a junior dev."
I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can do.
[0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has JPEG artefacts.
It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their walls.
I do appreciate that the way in which a piece of code "works" and the way in which an piece of art "works" is in some ways totally different- but, I also think that in many cases, notably automated systems that create reports or dashboards, they aren't so far apart. In the end, the result just has to seem right. Even in computer programming, amateur hour level correctness isn't so uncommon, I would say.
I would personally be astonished if any of the distributed systems I've worked on in my career were even close to 95% correct, haha.
meebob commented on Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists? vmst.io/@selzero/10951255... · Posted by u/dredmorbius
I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?
The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...
Animators are even more out of a job I guess, but really have been for quite some time I think, almost no animation is entirely hand-drawn anymore.