familiarity breeds contempt

chatting casually into the void

[fictionyoubelieve]

You can call me Fyb (pronounced fib) for short, because I think that's a funny play on my blog url. I'm an adult millenial and any neutral pronouns are fine. I reserve the right to reblog NSFW stuff, though I don't do it often. I try to tag common triggers, but no promises.

I tend to be chatty in tumblr replies, but I'll stop doing it on your posts if you ask!

Side blog and tag list below the cut:

Side blogs:

@artyoubelieve is where I reblog visual art

@punklovescute is for cute fanart, especially #bubbline

@novelgazing is for #tlt stuff

@dreamingmachines is for playing with AI image generation

Tags:

These are now mostly reblogged to @artyoubelieve:

#art - anything I want to see when I look at my #art tag, which mostly means visual art

#comics - Comics or links to comics

#comic art - 2D art by comic artists, or in styles I associate with comics

#animated art - animation (as videos or gifs) or the stuff that goes into it (like 3D modeling or storyboards)

#clay - mostly ceramics and polymer clay, but also some 3D modeling or other sculpture work that reminds me of clay art. Used in conjunction with the #art tag, unlike everything above.

Other tags:

#or discussion thereof - for meta; usually paired with one of the above

#misinformation - used mostly for posts that have wrong or misleading information at the top which is corrected further down

#new addition - used when I reblog something I've reblogged previously because there's been more added to it

#gender - anything I vibe with genderly

#leedle - cute small things; small cute things

#birb - cool or cute birds (mostly photos and videos)

#AI art discourse - exactly what it sounds like

#save - stuff I'll want to find later, since tumblr search doesn't work

#writing - cool fiction or fiction concepts

#game dev - stuff related to game development, mods, suppermariobroth

#game design - stuff that doesn't quite fit #game dev because it's more conceptual or about tabletop gaming

#software development - the curse

[verminfang]

I've based a ttrpg characters design on the hedgehog's dilemma in the past so I understand its a compelling metaphor, however, every time I hear it referenced I am driven to look up images of real hedgehogs getting close to reassure myself that its not an actual problem they have to face

[batboyblog]

you know its telling how few people on the internet actually spend time outdoors in general and around actual gay men in particular

because to hear even Tumblr the "gay gender website" talk people only wear harnesses while strapped into a sex swing while being fisted

but the reality is that the harness, both leather and spandex, in gay male world is like stiletto pumps, a bright red lip stick, a short skirt or push up bra.

sure some people are wearing those things because they're about to get laid or hoping to. But lots of people wear them just to feel sexy, confident or powerful. And there's nothing X rated and "shouldn't be seen in public" about any of that.

lots of gay guys wear harnesses to bars or clubs not because its a sex thing, but because its a sexy thing, they feel attractive and confident.

I get that gay men feeling attractive and confident terrifies people, but if you're at Pride and a guy walks past you in jeans and a harness, either shirtless or over his shirt, he didn't violate your civil rights or do a sex thing in front of you, he's wearing a totally appropriate outside that makes him feel confident and powerful.

grow up, deal.

[maggotwithanf]

I own this exact harness and I wear it to play Beyblade. unironically

[vrumblr]

And you do indeed look very cool and powerful playing Beyblade

[gay--dog]

i loveee. da computer 💻️🖥️

[dragongirlsweetie]

the thing is that some of the most brazen and clear-cut cases of art theft—cases in which an artwork is actually, concretely taken from the creator—are not only not stopped by copyright law, but actively enabled by it (think tupac, disco elysium, record labels who own a cover of a song copyright striking works with the original, etc.)

[fictionyoubelieve]

The thing I’ve found is that, when you drill down into exactly what most people find unfair about these kinds of situations, it’s still about treating ideas as exclusive property; they just have different ideas about how it should work, which tend to line up with how they feel about other types of property. And that’s not remotely a settled question, politically, so it doesn’t help clear up the situation at all, or suggest solutions that a majority could agree on.

Like, the DE creators can still make DE stuff, they just can’t make money off of it—like any fanwork. So what was taken from them? Well, the right to make money off of their creative contributions, which they effectively sold to the company when they signed on to work as creatives.

It feels unfair that anyone can work on a creative enterprise like that for years, shape it in meaningful ways, and then have no rights to it as soon as they leave the company (willingly or no)—but is that categorically different than any other kind of hired labor? The construction workers don’t get to live in the homes they build. Many of the workers producing cocoa beans have never tasted chocolate.

This all isn’t to say that it’s wrong to point out the unfairness. Just worth considering which criticisms are actually about IP and which are about property and labor generally.

[faggotfungus]

[pavizi]

clock king

[feminine-gurl9]

[eightyonekilograms]

Man.

[txttletale]

obvsies i thought relentlessly hounding artists because of genAI use in art or writing was a pointless waste of time to begin with but getting mad at indie game devs for using claude code or whatever is just completely unsustainable lol you are asking dev teams who already have less money and resources to fully swear off a de facto standard element of every modern professional coding workflow

[thestockmarketphotos]

[girldraki]

kind of harmonically beautiful

[funky-insanitear]

[pocketss]

distressing things to say to your friends

[self-loving-vampire]

There are legit reasons why you might not want to use or at least overly rely on generative AI, such as the fact that if you cultivate your own expertise you can catch it making mistakes (same way you would when consulting a human really), or the fact that even when it has good comprehension it can't always grasp your actual intent so you need to wrestle with it to get it to do what you want.

But nuanced discussions about the capabilities or use cases are difficult to have here. The mere mention of it seems to immediately mind control a lot of people into becoming loud and uncritical IP lovers.

[self-loving-vampire]

For example, Claude has been genuinely helpful in explaining programming concepts to me and especially when debugging code (may have seriously saved me at least 6 hours of frustrating work so far). Ever since I started consulting it on a friend's suggestion I have been learning much faster through a personal "tutorial project" than I did through online courses, but I have been using it as a teacher rather than just offloading all the work onto it because I want to understand the subject and know what I'm doing and why it should be done that way.

Which is exactly how I interrogate human teachers too.

And this turned out to be a good approach because more than once I have caught it suggesting things that would have created issues if I had implemented them, or plan out designs that are worse than the ones I thought about even though I am far from an expert and am really just learning as I go.

It also means I am not completely helpless when the machine is unavailable because I am poor and not paying for unrestricted access.

The key is to treat it like any other tool or resource: You don't just accept what it's saying uncritically. You try to gain a deeper understanding of the topic, think about the things you hear, ask questions, and verify if it is actually correct (again, same way you would with a human teacher).

[markovchaingang]

undergrads don't actually "think". they're just machines designed to identify patterns in data and apply those patterns to new data

[torschlusspanikattack]

anthropic being framed as doing smth wrong for trying to make a database of every book and being stymied by ip law is p silly

[andmaybegayer]

Unfortunately I guess because of the precedent of the Google Book Search case they can't even try to appease people by saying they'll make the scans available!

[andmaybegayer]

I've been writing and rewriting this post for like four months and it isn't getting any shorter because I keep adding justifications so here it goes:

I do not generally believe that """they""" are trying to take personal computing away from you. This is an increasingly popular chant among the Computer Hardware commentariat, that """they""" want you to use cloud storage and cloud gaming and cloud apps and that the high prices of computer hardware are an attempt to squeeze you out of owning and into renting.

There's a lot wrong here. If there is any truth, many interest groups want more control over what you do on your devices. Music producers, authors, movie studios, game developers, often want to make sure you pay for their thing, and so they add onerous DRM and demand streaming-only releases and online-only features. Apple, Google, Microsoft all want you to be bought into their specific ecosystem of stuff so that you're locked in to wherever you've uploaded a decade of photos and files. Banks and storefronts want to know that you are who you say you are for fraud and marketing and compliance reasons, and will use the integrated security systems in modern devices to verify that.

There was no Glorious Past where really good computing technology was widely available and cheap. The idea that """they""" are oppressing you because the newest shiniest GPU is $800 is crazy. A defining experience of the young tech idiot is scavenging around for hardware that's five years out of date and barely compatible to scrabble together a system. Your Dad in 1986 buying the latest 386 PC was looking at spending literally thousands of (period!) dollars to satisfy whatever strange impulse makes dads buy PC's in 1986.

This is not to say that computers haven't gone up in price lately, they have, but certainly not enough to ruin the promises of personal computing. If you want to work with mega-scale 4D Gaussian Splats for film-studio level 3DCG, you need a monster workstation and a server farm, but it's not like that level of computing was once available to us and has been snatched away, it's always demanded a render farm of dozens of high end servers. If you want to Play Videogames, you certainly don't have to spend more than $700 even if you plan to get everything brand new. If what you want to do is make the movie Flow, you can do that on basically any workstation desktop you can get for $2000.

It has never been the case that most people buy the latest shiniest hardware full price and go "ah, that's lovely and reasonable" no! We all bitch and moan about how the R9 290X is too expensive and then we scrape together a PC from a CPU we found in a dumpster and a GPU that was top of the line two years ago and memory from four different kits, jammed into a system that used to be a Dell office PC whose side panel doesn't close because the new PSU you put in there is too big.

The accessibility of computing is amazing now! You can just go buy a whole entire x86 laptop with a processor as fast as the one I had in my gaming laptop in 2016 for like $250 brand new, inflation adjustments will show you that's under $180 in 2016 dollars. You can use it to write programs and edit images and record podcasts and do all the other things computers do because fundamentally we've plateaued in many ways! Editing 4k video was a feat in 2013, you can cut together 4k videos on a budget phone these days. Even with the skyrocketing price of storage, a 1TB drive is still the kind of thing you can sling around in a backpack to sneakernet movies to your friends.

There has been a slowdown in performance gains but it comes along with a slowdown in performance demands. 16GB of RAM has been "a decent budget gaming system" for over a decade, meanwhile in 2006 you would have been hard pressed to fit 8GB of RAM in a consumer system, and in 1996 a desktop would hardly have had sixteen megabytes of memory if you were lucky. The increasing cost of the best hardware is partially a response to this, an outstanding GPU now can't rely on technological improvements as much, it also just has to get bigger, more memory, more transistors, bigger dies.

I also think some of this is just Money Illusion and a significant increase in what top-end consumer part performance gets you. Like, the Nvidia 80-series GPU's used to be high-end but reasonably practical premium GPU's, it was not a crazy thing for a high earning gamer to buy a GTX 780 or 1080, but a new RTX 5080 is a total monster, way way overspecced for almost any game you can run today , the 5070->5080 gap is colossal. The inflation adjusted price of a new 5070 12GB is pretty much the same as a GTX 980!

At the same time the market for ultra-budget cards like the 750 Ti and 1050 is mostly gone, but that's because it has more or less been eaten by mobile and console gaming, to say nothing of plentiful cheap old hardware and high end integrated graphics found in laptops and handhelds. And I mean, the RTX 5050 is a bad deal but it is about as fast as an RTX 2080! The RTX 2080 remains no slouch, the idea that you could have held on to a PC from eight years ago and still be having a pretty good time in modern games simply was not a thing, we live in a different computing landscape, people who who want to game cheap and who aren't enthusiasts now will just play Fortnite on their phone or get a Switch Lite.

If you were used to the rapid rate of change of the 60's to the 2000's then I think I can see why you'd think something is being hidden from you. You're so used to the idea that in five years your new computer will completely obsolete whatever you had, and it'll be cheaper, and more efficient, and smaller. That hasn't been true for a while, and the gains being made recently tend to come with greater increases in cost.

I don't like the current state of the hardware market, it is genuinely squeezed by a lot of speculative and messy AI buildout. Some hardware companies are struggling to deal with the slimmer margins and slower movement, while others are the cause of those slim margins and are earning record profits. There are real impacts on hardware affordability, but there's no conspiracy to steal computers from us and they aren't significantly less accessible than they've ever been. Hell, even if you're an enthusiast, I don't think it's that much less accessible, what, was it a sound financial choice to throw money at Intel's HEDT systems back in the 2010's?

There are companies who want you to use their product and who put a lot of design work and marketing into making it easier and more reliable than DIY, and there are groups who want to have more control over what you do on your computer for intellectual property, surveillance, and marketing reasons, but they don't have to take your computer away to make that happen.