Did you read those papers you signed when you started your job? You probably agreed to this there as well.

Wait til you find out about the pilonidal cysts!

On a certain level, privacy always was a luxury. Through most of human history, you lived bumcheek to jowl with othet people. The trick is, now it’s a different beast. Corporations have the ability to be much more powerful in their invasions. As for your specific situation, there are some VPNs that try to hide that you are using a VPN. I think proton has something like that. I forget what it’s called. And you could technically go VPN on VPS and get a much easier time but you’d have to switch it out all the time if you wanted anonymous-at-server browsing, and you’d have to pay for the privilege which comes back to privacy as luxury.

Probably dying at age <1.

That one goes there. That one goes there. And that one goes there.

I hadn’t really considered the sex of the authors in what I’ve read, but looking at my shelves and picking some feminine names in the genre:

• Jacqueline Carey’s Godslayer duology (Absolutely amazing. Plays with themes of morality, religion, and war with a deep lore to bring it to life) I’ve only read the first two of her Kushiel’s Legacy series but I’ve enjoyed those as well.
• Trudi Canavan’s Highlord’s Apprentice trilogy (not the hardest or heaviest read but quite fun)
• Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman’s Death Gate Cycle (7 books, massive story with woven storylines and a wild lore creating a world with its own redefined science)

Your username in YELLING CAPS combined with the mundane comment made me chuckle.

Already started. Revolt seems like it could be a near 1 to 1 replacement soon.

I didn’t even know about it until I read this comment, but now I’m one of the salty.

Agreed. Role queue was dumb. I liked having the ability to look at how things have been going and say ‘They’re doing X. I’ll swap to this character and screw up their plans.’ The thing I loved most about OW was that it wasn’t locked into the left click first competition. Their Widow is causing trouble? Lucio>wall climb>drop in>boop them out of their safety bubble and get them shredded. Distract them behind a shield to the left so someone on the right can sneak up on them. Or go Sombra and do an invis run/tele to magdump into their head at point blank. Or go monkey and pig meatwall to get close enough to ruin her day. Whatever. Just something with more intelligence than left-click and die repeatedly.

I miss Mayhem too. People complained that it took too long to die/kill but that was what was amazing about it. How many games can you say have ever felt like you were in an epic fight where every thrust, parry, twist, duck, and swing mattered? Where you don’t win by the luck of a single shot but have to tactically manipulate enemy attention so you can change the angle of attack so it favors your healer over their Junkrat? Battles won or lost by the timing and precision placement of a Zarya hole catching the targets thrown by a Lucio boop to hold them just off the payload just long enough to get to the next checkpoint?

Man, I miss that game.

Might sound odd to some, but Overwatch.

Early Overwatch was great. Then some updates made it better. The only things wrong with it were design choices that were made for financial reasons. Then they made it much worse. Then they made it worse. And worse. And then they made 2, which turned it into just another ‘left-click on the target’ game, because those make more money. It saddens me that it died.

Don’t forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.

Playing Receiver in Receiver 2 was a fun surprise.

I do, but I am slightly discouraged from doing so by the drivers in my area. People are always so terrified of not being the first waiting at the next red light, they see a turn signal as a warning to ‘speed up and go past this car before they can get ahead of you.’

…unless it is. Tipping points could mean that there will be a certain level of emissions, which we may already be too late to avoid, that will take the earth out of the expected ranges and put it somewhere we can’t predict. I can’t say, but more informed people than me have suggested it as a real worry.

The question of ‘What is the purpose of government?’ is simultaneously deeply important to society and yet rarely, if ever, addressed in a useful context. I have watched people argue about multiple policies, speaking past each other the whole time, just because they had different baseline assumptions as to the purpose of government and couldn’t even see their opponents had a different definition.

A ways back, I saw an article about how the French were rioting because their retirement age was being increased from 62 to 64. I remarked that it was interesting to see the French rioting against a change that wouldn’t even quite bring them to parity with the US but Americans can’t be bothered to riot for almost anything. A Frenchman said they didn’t want to even be more like the US in any way.

This law is absolutely the now-classic American attitude that kids can watch violent movies all day, but if they’rEXC exposed to one female nipple, you gotta shut it all down. Is France turning into America now, following Britain down the red, white, and blue path?

…when I use AI generation, I have an idea or specific image in my head and I do my best to come up with a prompt that will produce what I want, or more usually, I use photoshop…

Therein lies the difference. You have an intended target and use tools to create it. The artistry is in the skill and effort put into communicating your internal concept. To my knowledge, people generally aren’t saying AI is useless in a creative process, just that typing in a few words and hitting ‘generate’ until you get something cool, or just running a filter over an image to make it look like a drawing, isn’t artistry.

…there are AI models for specific tasks, say generating human faces, that co trolled experiments have found that people can’t distinguish between the AI content and the real thing.

I failed to communicate my idea clearly enough. I’m not talking about the artefacts that sometimes make images look weird. I’m talking about the deep brain sense that one can develop that can tell the difference between someone acting vs emoting, singing vs lip synching, etc. An ingenuous performance has a different character to it that can be said to fall into the uncanny valley.

There is also plenty of traditional art that hits the uncanny valley or simply doesn’t look right, but that doesn’t make it any less art, does it?

That depends. If hitting the valley is intentional and done using skill, that’s just normal art. If it has intent but not skill, it’s incomplete art. It’s failing to communicate as intended, much like I failed with words above. It’s part of becoming good at something to screw it up, though, so it’s to be expected sometimes. If it has skill but no intent, that’s craftsmanship rather than artistry. Craftsmanship is great but has a subtle difference in how it is experienced.

there’s still a barrier between the type of art miyazaki is fluent in and AI art.

That’s not so good as an analogy. AI imagery isn’t art by itself. Even in your example of your own work, it’s materials, at best. Saying AI image generation is artistry is like saying hiring someone else to paint a picture makes you an artist. Even ‘prompt engineering’ at its finest makes one an artist as much as project management makes one a programmer. So, the general argument comes from the pretense rather than the tool. Bringing your sentence closer to the mark would be something like ‘There is a barrier between art, which Miyazaki is experienced in, and this particular type of tool one can use.’ It’s an apples to oranges comparison, like comparing the field of astronomy to a camera.

Should we take him as an expert on art and view digital art as less than traditional art? Or should we just roll our eyes at the stubborn old man stuck in his ways?

That’s an obvious false binary. People are perfectly capable of being right about one thing and wrong about another. You give his words weight because of his expertise. That doesn’t mean you have to take them as gospel, but ignoring all of an expert’s opinions because you dislike some of them, or some implications of them, is a terrible idea as well.

Actually, yeah, that’s a bad metaphor from me. Comparing benchmarks would be comparing AI models.

He’s not comparing benchmarks. He’s comparing results, so it’s more about maybe error rate than processing speed.

I guess it’s like comparing the result of an approximation versus an explicit computation. GenAI makes an approximation of art. It very quickly spits out something that looks a bit like the intended answer. It even gets you close enough to be totally satisfactory for some purposes, in the same way 3 can be a usable approximation of π for some purposes. However, the picture is not the full purpose of creating art. Art is a form of communication, transmitting something from one mind to another using indirect means because telepathy isn’t available. AI is not trying to communicate anything. It’s just an approximation of something someone could say.

Miyazaki is someone with years of experience in creating art so he understands the ‘language’ of art better than some. He has ‘fluency.’ AI images hit the uncanny valley for artists because they are attuned to the difference between what an art is supposed to look like vs what the imitator approximates. They have the fluency to spot the fake the same way you might be able to spot someone speaking your native language as a mother tongue vs out of a phrasebook. Because he is ‘fluent’ in art, people take his words on art seriously, just as one would generally take a born-and-raised German’s words seriously regarding German grammar.

Happy to help.

There are a lot of things in human society you are expected to ‘just know,’ which is silly. Human social dynamics is so complex psychology, sociology, and their various related fields are possible doctorate fields, but when someone says 'How do I know the difference between, ‘love’ and ‘love love?’ people will just say, ‘You just know.’