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syntheweave commented on Krita AI Diffusion   github.com/Acly/krita-ai-... · Posted by u/unstuck3958
gyy52380 · 2 years ago
Because that is not what's happening. My friends that work as illustrators for PC and mobile games say it's the exact opposite. AI is used for the bulk of the creative work - composition, posing, even the general artstyle. Illustrators are then tasked with "fixing" visual artefacts, stitching together generated images and giving the final polish. They describe it as being reduced from a creative writer to a grammar checker.

It's tempting to just say that creative work that can be automated this quickly should be automated so that artists can focus on more creative challenges, but this is not how it plays out in practice. Rather, this only allows companies to cut down costs. It is already extremely difficult to find work which will pay a livable wage as a creative. AI has already caused layoffs and negative wage pressure on remaining employees. The only thing that AI has done (at least among my circle of friends) is reduce corporate costs and increase antidepressant prescriptions.

syntheweave · 2 years ago
That's actually a problem for the business model of mobile games. A consumer can - or very soon will be able to - pick up AI tools and cut out the middleman org churning out these illustrations, just like they cut out the professionals. It won't be too long before games are made that advertise "put your original characters in the game", and it won't be some complicated character creation tool - it'll be generative stuff.

There's a lot of "but wait, there's more" in what's happening around AI.

syntheweave commented on The real realtime preemption end game   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/95... · Posted by u/chmaynard
hamilyon2 · 2 years ago
I had an introductory course on OS and learned about hard real-time systems. I had impression hard real-time is about memory, deadlocks, livelocks, starvation, and so on. And in general about how to design system that moves forward even in presence of serious bugs and unplanned-for circumstances.
syntheweave · 2 years ago
Bugs related to concurrency - which is where you get race conditions and deadlocks - tend to pop up wherever there's an implied sequence of dependencies to complete the computation, and the sequence is determined dynamically by an algorithm.

For example, if I have a video game where there's collision against the walls, I can understand this as potentially colliding against "multiple things simultaneously", since I'm likely to describe the scene as a composite of bounding boxes, polygons, etc.

But to get an answer for what to do in response when I contact a wall, I have to come up with an algorithm that tests all the relevant shapes or volumes.

The concurrency bug that appears when doing this in a naive way is that I test one, give an answer to that, then modify the answer when testing the others. That can lead to losing information and "popping through" a wall. And the direction in which I pop through depends on which one is tested first.

The conventional gamedev solution to that is to define down the solution set so that it no longer matters which order I test the walls in: with axis aligned boxes, I can say "move only the X axis first, then move only the Y axis". Now there is a fixed order, and a built-in bias to favor one or the other axis. But this is enough for the gameplay of your average platforming game.

The generalization on that is to describe it as a constraint optimization problem: there are some number of potential solutions, and they can be ranked relative to the "unimpeded movement" heuristic, which is usually desirable when clipping around walls. That solution set is then filtered down through the collision tests, and the top ranked one becomes the answer for that timestep.

Problems of this nature come up with resource allocation, scheduling, etc. Some kind of coordinating mechanism is needed, and OS kernels tend to shoulder a lot of the burden for this.

It's different from real-time in that real-time is a specification of what kind of performance constraint you are solving for, vs allowing any kind of performance outcome that returns acceptable concurrent answers.

syntheweave commented on Fossil: high-reliability, distributed software configuration management system   fossil-scm.org/home/doc/t... · Posted by u/modinfo
nylonstrung · 2 years ago
Anyone know how this works with bigger files like large binaries?

I've been wanting to switch away from Perforce, but Git LFS has given us too many problems

syntheweave · 2 years ago
The last time I tested it, it wasn't performing differently from other DVCS options when pushing large files - that is, Perforce would still win hands-down. It does have a binary diff flag, but it's probably limited on a more fundamental level by being a SQLite app under the hood.
syntheweave commented on Canned food went from military rations to fancy appetizers   atlasobscura.com/articles... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
pazimzadeh · 2 years ago
Never had canned bread, but I have long assumed that most of the mushy disgusting stuff that is referred to as “bread” or “rolls” in the US must come from wartime factories that were never turned off, maybe because the population never demanded anything better.
syntheweave · 2 years ago
It's a combination of things. The "Pullman Loaf" (as in Pullman railcars) became common for sandwich breads in the 19th century and established a common target for what bread should look like in the US and UK - white, sweet, fluffy, thin crust.

Later, we were successfully marketed "Wonder Bread" as a clean(as in sanitary) and convenient product, and that set another standard, one sold to housewives. It was basically applying the same strategy that built McDonald's in its early years. At the time of Wonder Bread's introduction, many adults could still recall when products were being sold "from the cracker barrel", mixed homogenously and exposed to pests. All the early packaged foods, including the canned stuff and the sliced bread, were establishing a new norm of the manufacturer guaranteeing freshness to a sell-by date. It was PB&J on sliced bread for lunch and macaroni and cheese for dinner that got a lot of the US through the Depression years.

Continental Europe was simply less interested in this genre of bread - they had competition from other varieties of grain, and different kinds of bread dishes.

syntheweave commented on ChatGPT has entered the classroom: how LLMs could transform education   nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/rntn
keiferski · 2 years ago
I generally find LLMs to be useful, but I think these kinds of proclamations are a bit overblown. Many students do not want the kind of introspective, solo learning experience that a chatbot on a laptop provides. They want a social experience or a physically active experience, not one that requires them to sit quietly in a chair for 8 hours a day. And honestly, a classroom of students staring at screens talking to AI bots sounds like a dystopia to me.

All of the best educational experiences I've had in high school and college came from a passionate teacher that conveyed excitement to the students. Or (especially in college-level philosophy courses) they were small discussion groups that went on for hours. Neither of these things is going to be replicated by talking to a chatbot and most of these applications are just further extensions of a (in my opinion) broken industrial educational model.

That aside, I do think LLMs could be useful as a supplementary tutor, especially when your teacher isn't up to par.

syntheweave · 2 years ago
Well, then just have the class communicate with the chatbot in study groups, taking turns to type, if "social" is what you're after. The way class time is currently used reflects the need to keep that grade level engaged with appropriate activities, and only as you get to the older ages does it converge on that kind of solo self-study. But it has to, eventually. You don't do research without figuring out how to do it. The flaws in leaning on LLMs are just another form of "precision vs accuracy" - GPT is always precise and not always accurate, just in the verbal domain instead of the numeric one. But we do have many tools like that in the numeric domain. The limitations can be learned.

If the LLM gives a solid three-star "fast food" education, that is actually considerably better than letting it all fall on the shoulders of the babysitters that currently serve in many classrooms.

syntheweave commented on Blender 4.0 release notes   wiki.blender.org/wiki/Ref... · Posted by u/TangerineDream
danShumway · 2 years ago
Krita isn't on the same level as Blender, but it's not on the same level as other Open Source projects either. I'd put it in the same camp as projects like Ardour, and arguably above projects like Godot (although I'm sure some people would debate me on that).

It's an exceptional drawing tool that is well-suited for professional work and is headed in a really promising direction. It's got a couple of weaknesses (vector layers) but it really shouldn't be discounted as a professional-level tool.

Unless you're claiming that Inkscape is in the same position and has gotten a lot better than the last time I used it, which :shrug: could be true, I don't know. I'm not trying to bash Inkscape here.

syntheweave · 2 years ago
I can vouch for Krita and Inkscape pairing well as vector art programs and even doing things that CSP, whose vector layers are pretty well liked, can't match. The issue is that drawing in Inkscape is a little bit broken(it can be done, but the current UX is death by papercut) - thus I approach it through the other program, which is basic but consistent.

So the workflow I end up using for digital inks is: Open both programs, sketch in Krita, copy-paste the vector data into Inkscape, stroke->path, then use tweak tool to sculpt the lines. This adds line weight in seconds-to-minutes. Alternately, I can apply path effects instead of stroke->path, if I want a more programmatic design. If I want to paint, I can copy-paste the shape back into Krita.

syntheweave commented on Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?   librearts.org/2023/11/rad... · Posted by u/sacrosanct
IshKebab · 2 years ago
The worst is Inkscape. They somehow manage to put every option in the last place I look.
syntheweave · 2 years ago
Inkscape has a lot to work on as a "content creation" app, while in terms of being true to SVG, it's done a lot of things the way you'd expect.

And I think that's most of the disconnect in the UI, which the devs have gradually gotten over by adding shadow XML data in the SVG to support Inkscape features while always presenting a rendered result.

Still, the drawing tools aren't consistent about the units they use yet. There is a lot of stuff there, and some of it is just papercuts.

syntheweave commented on Python environment setup seems complicated and unsolvable   stackoverflow.com/questio... · Posted by u/belter
spott · 2 years ago
Part of the problem is that nix takes an opposite stance from where python seems to be heading…

Poetry, pipenv, etc are all about building dependency tree solvers into python package management.. so if you have package a that depends on package c >= 2.0 and package b that depends on package c < 2.5, you will get package c installed in version 2.5…

Nix basically says “Python packages are lying when they say they need this specific package version. Ignore that and install whatever version is in nixpkgs”.

Which sucks! There are some badly maintained workarounds (poetry2nix and pip2nix come to mind… neither of which works for m1 macs), but the whole stance is just wrong.

syntheweave · 2 years ago
I believe, having recently installed Python libraries on it, that Debian stable has the best handle on what to do to produce defaults that a mere mortal can debug: Either use what's vendored in apt, or use venv and pip for your project's additional dependencies. Pip has been configured to be venv-only, which is good for the needs of Debian's maintainers, and clarifies what your project has to be responsible for. So, while I haven't needed it yet, I have some confidence that I can get to a reproducible dev environment with the appropriate version of whatever's needed, even if the resolution process is imperfectly automated.
syntheweave commented on Tumble Forth   tumbleforth.hardcoded.net... · Posted by u/jtoledo
guestbest · 2 years ago
As brilliant as these bootstrap efforts are, I wonder if it would be a good decision to abandon all the business and application software in a civilization collapse. Someone on the GitHub project page for collapseos made a good comment to the effect of having gone through the software and hardware limitations of the late 70s and 80s, wouldn’t it be better to get follow the best practices of the era without the patent limitations? I think as I go along, I agree more and more with mental model. Esoteric hardware aside, it would be best to come up with a base model for the era of early personal computers then figure out a way to bootstrap a freedos on top of a unix type of operating system underneath and time share on top for users to log in using terminals. But that’s just my mode of thinking. Originally collapseos seemed to follow the BASIC model then it became about forth.
syntheweave · 2 years ago
You could definitely argue that it would be better to build off of something like Contiki, a modern small-device OS that gained a lot of fame for its ports to old microcomputers, but is currently active in industry as well, with a new "Contiki-NG" version.

The appeal of Forth is mostly in a principled sense of, if you want Forth to be your interface, you have to build your own Forth, because Forth does as little as possible to structure you. And building your own Forth is not impractical; that's the whole point. It's wonderful as an exercise and can be productive in the right context.

But any highly developed or standardized Forth system gradually converges on being "just another platform." And once it's just another platform, it's an annoying dependency, and you end up demanding more structure for it to help tame the complexity, so the Forthiness habitually erodes.

syntheweave commented on You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser   berjon.com/bigger-browser... · Posted by u/meandave
mapt · 2 years ago
> Technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate. But the product view beats the architectural view every time. The question isn't "should we or should we not bundle these concerns?" but rather "given that these concerns are bundled up in actual real-world use and perception anyway, what underlying design can we come up with so that the resulting architecture makes sense?"

Visceral reaction: Outside of FLOSS, technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate because bundling them is often the first step to an over-aggressive capitalism entirely consuming their utility. The "Feed" that eventually becomes a heavy advertising venue or even a brainwashing tactic, has destroyed Twitter, and Facebook, and others as user experiences, rendered things like Youtube into potent infohazards, become a foundation for post-free-speech worlds in which the Platform is expected to Moderate Content for rightthink because the Platform is (for the sake of engagement!) deciding what to show you in an Editorial Capacity. The corruption of Google Search, or the Amazon review functionality, or then the Amazon search functionality, is a major short-term loss for human agency at least as big as the writer envisions, and it's being done because bundling different concerns provides an opening, gives the corporate board an erection during quarterly P&L briefings. Over the Possibilities.

If you care about the user experience, consider how long my grandfather's wrench was permitted to remain a wrench, rather than autonomously transforming into a screwdriver, or a brick, or a nice welcoming block of cheese, or a magazine subscription, or a bonfire, or Ebola. The owning entity only has to learn how to use the wrench once a generation; The interface does not drastically change to combine my love life, my choice in cereal, and my ability to tighten bolts. I have to re-learn some online tools once per YEAR because somebody is bundling something in a way that is in the short term slightly more profitable. I have a closet full of useful tools that don't exist on my cognitive plane any more and I'm not sure I want to investigate deeply enough to figure out what cosmic horror they became. In order to preserve my agency, I need to be able to flip back and forth between those tools and summon up capacities that I have not engaged in for several years; The state of web applications (and by extension, the browser) makes me as a tool-using ape feel like I have dementia with the number of holes that now exist in my knowledge versus my past self.

You don't need a bigger browser. You need a predictable environment that you can buy and own, that doesn't tear itself to shreds when you're not actively handing it a geometrically larger amount of money every five minutes. Most layering violations (outside of FLOSS) that you observe are trying to pick your pocket with one hand and scramble your neocortex ("The way you THOUGHT that the platform worked") with an icepick with the other.

No, my use of tabs may not be Technically Optimal. It is a way of organizing information. But it's predictable, and it's within my cognitive grasp, and it lets me do a great many things without entirely losing track of them. I don't want to have to relearn an entire means of organizing my information because you thought that my tabs belonged in your bookmark service†, or in your AI personal assistant†, or that they should be tidy and Bring You Joy. I don't want somebody to rearrange the papers on my desk; That would be profoundly disturbing because it breaks the model for how I think, how I predict things, and how I remain effective.

†Which you DEFINITELY will refrain from charging a subscription for. For a year, maybe even two, before seizing that chunk of my exocortex.

syntheweave · 2 years ago
The article is making the case for unbundling the authoring experience by bundling the browser and making it an owned environment. And that could be a win.

u/syntheweave

KarmaCake day1479December 7, 2021View Original