No? There’s a pretty good reason every criminal used telegram. I’ve never seen any attempts at combatting anonymity much less censorship.

Likely TG got unbanned in Russia for cooperating with LEOs there, but while awful, that doesn’t really matter if you’re a westerner, even Ukrainian armed forces used it, and for the average substance enjoyer it was still much safer to use than any Five Eyes app due to its intentional highly decentralised complexity, and unlike Signal it actually works and is pleasant to use. Now they are straight up handing data over to British cops.

No, I have literally never heard of Haveno-reto. Most people back around the shutdown were just saying everyone should use atomic swaps. Thanks for the heads up.

Dream come true. Finally some good news for us substance enjoyers. With localmonero gone and TG selling out to the glowies, it’s good to see not all is lost.

This. Hell you can generate literally endless wallpapers for free.

Damn. Big shame. GPL violations are far too fucking common.

Yes exactly, but which parties? Who actually violated the GPLof Duckstation?

Which GPL violations is he referring to?

Bruh 💀

Oh no I totally understand that I’m privileged as all hell.

That said I also learned a helluva lot more outside of my degree during said degree and after.

Formal teaching is really like YouTube and it’s meant to introduce you to what you don’t know more than anything, and as I said that’s a good thing as an introduction, but the vast majority of content is written, and you learn far more from it.

Too expensive for what it is, no £1k or so for the game with all DLC? Bit of a ripoff. Even DCS is cheaper.

I have a BSc in CompSci and an MSc in Cybersec & Dig. Forensics and I’m actively employed as a mid level engineer in the field on a fully employer-sponsored Skilled Worker Visa, doing everything from vulnerability management and triage to GRC for ISO27001 to advising product and engineering teams on implementation details for best practices and compliance for a multinational org to DR&BC tabletops etc etc. I think this counts as IT.

Perhaps even more impressively though: I use Vim btw (to program in C).

I am not necessarily trying to brag very much, only to establish my own perspective, I don’t consider myself particularly talented or intelligent or successful - otherwise I’d have gone into research, but I am currently (and kinda always) studying to improve my skills and stay up to date.

Just recently I decided to take a look into pentesting to learn the l33t side of things more as my education only ever briefly touched on it, I started in August as something to keep my brain sane during studies for the settlement visa (Life in the UK) test, and I’ve made it to Hacker Rank on HackTheBox a week ago or so. I think I watched a grand total of one Ippsec video, the rest of everything I read.

I don’t know where you got the “game show hosts” from my comment, and I’m not aware of this if it exists as some broader trend. I don’t see YouTube shorts it’s all long blocked for me since release haha.

Yes YT tutorials and whatnot are good, but they are only good as broad introductions to a topic, personal opinions, or a particular historical narrative (Dr.Chuck on C’s history for instance). Those are few good nuggets between an endless sea of scams selling you a course or some other grift.

At a certain point you should start going a bit more in depth and reading - actively engaging with the material, move beyond simply knowing or purely copying and pasting terminal commands and understand why things work the way they do.

You don’t become an electrical engineer or something by watching electroboom, you learn what it’s about yes, but the rest you learn by reading and making, even basic arduino/breadboard projects will teach you more.

The best thing about YouTube is how good it is as background noise.

This is the way. Let those content creators sucking up your time be the background noise they were always meant to be.

Or just call them Content creators, recognize they don’t really produce value for anyone but YT’s grab on the attention economy and start living in the real world.

Show women/men sounds like a 70s porno “medical” exploitation film

Bruh that dude is a CONTENT CREATOR, not a filmmaker 😂🤣🤣

His internet videos are colourful animations meant to serve ads while capturing attention and summarizing Wikipedia articles giving some thoughts on them, and I love them, but it’s called content for a reason.

Bruh like I’ll give em any money

Guess what though? That’s literally all of history, dodgy AF, featuring an intrepid cast of characters more awful the deeper you look. That doesn’t make the art or music worth writing off though.

Not at all, but as an accurate representation of who felt what? Yeah it’s not the best source. Music is also specifically less so, because it’s too abstract to really be propagandistic apart from the vague aesthetic of grandiosity.

“Earnest” is definitely not the word you’re looking for.

It very much is, actually.

Earnest [adjective] - resulting from or showing sincere and intense conviction.

A sincere intense conviction in gathering a generic dataset representative of the very broad concept of “images” in order to be the source from which future researchers can train a diffuser model as a proof of concept, to create patterns represented in those images out of randomised noise, driven by scientific pursuit and uncontaminated with the subjectivity of artistic taste is about as fitting for “earnest” as can be.

Remember, I wasn’t talking about only the outputs of any given model, but the dataset itself.

Derivative, maybe, because you said it yourself, they’re reflections; and as such, they’re going to reflect what images of today are; like you said.

Yeah, the outputs definitely are, but derivative of an earnest representation of us. That makes it an interesting and unbiased account of what our images really are like.

It’s interesting to go on SD and consider an idea, a concept, and what image it conjures in your head, then proompt and see what kind of images it conjures from the model. The difference is the difference in bias. It’s an interesting reality check.

That makes them derivative

So is most human works. If anything, the randomness of noise, even by processor’s famously incapable of any such thing, is going to be far more unpredictable than the copying done by humans.

In itself though I don’t think that inherently makes either less valuable, all originality only exists as both an evolution of and in contrast to the established and accepted, and that is achieved by derivative works, perhaps even creating a genre.

If anything, part of the problem is that AI art is too original, sometimes inventing 6 fingers, or 7, the form is broken, and the idea of any image no longer resonates.

and I feel a vast artificiality that makes my heart sink when I look at the vast majority of them.

Personally I don’t. I don’t think there’s anything that makes them any more artificial than any human work.

Ultimately all are a human vision - an image generator is just a lot of fancy matrices in a file without human input, neither it nor Photoshop can make everything by themselves.

All are ultimately .jpegs, products not of some singular vision but also of the tools developed and available to the human, all are concepts so far removed from nature, labeling one artificial but not the other is splitting hairs on a head freshly and cleanly shaved by a precision engineered mass manufactured machine shipped half-way across the world in system so complex most people don’t understand it.

Choosing machine-created art over historical art is choosing a passing fad over centuries of culture.

Oh come on now. You can hate AI without resorting to delusion or ignorance.

Not only is AI art on the rise, but even a year or two ago the tools for generating images were good enough that it’s already seeing noticeable widespread use, including in the physical world. And that’s not even touching on the strides and accomplishments in the LLM space.

It’s your right; but to write off history with a wave of the hand means you’re missing out on truly expanding your horizons.

I’m not writing anything off as is hopefully evident by my writing here, it’s moreso that the value of it as I see it is perhaps overestimated by yourself.

Eh, I generally prefer paintings generated by an AI most of the time.

No u

Meh. Art history - sure! Books, writing, films, music.

Paintings though are a bit more dodgy. Most of the ‘classical’ paintings (in the renaissance and baroque periods) were created through a system of patronage by monarchs, if not for a selfish ego-boost of endless royal portraiture, then as a strategic move to enhance the prestige of the monarchy to it’s neighbours.

Of course, music is often guilty of this too. Bach’s famous struggles with securing patronage for instance, but due to its more abstract nature, it is probably a better source of information about the author than a painting about the painter.

It will hardly inform you of what the people or the world was like at the time, but rather what the monarchs wanted to project, which of course is helpful too for understanding the political situation at the time, but it’s hardly an efficient way to acquire that information, nor do the ideas gained from such exploration likely to lead to concrete conclusions.

Kind of like judging a people by their government’s propaganda department commissions.

What is interesting though is the fact that AI art, and the LAION-5B dataset used to train the models is a true and earnest reflection of sorts of what images today really are, from works of art to private commissions for furries etc to plain stock photos and other corporate graphics.

It’s an interesting reality check to compare the kinds of images your mind conjures connected to an idea and the kinds of images stable diffusion produces instead, it’s revealing of one’s biases in a very unique way.