This all used to be a Protomen reference

@pandavalkyrie this is what your stepmom thought she was making when she gave you that "cat menorah"

stjohnstarling

The reason most indie novels are written like the author is terrified of doing something wrong is because the overwhelming majority of indie novelists get their start by networking in the violent panopticon of the social media indie publishing community, which favours the people who are able to win at the social policing game.

3s-are-green

Okay so this comment got me googling because I hadn't heard of Isabel Fall

And if you also hadn't heard of her go read this because uhh... Holy Shit

headspace-hotel

I had heard of the whole messed up situation with this story, but I hadn't ever read the synopsis of the story before, and WOW

This story sounds like it could have been a brilliant exploration of gender and warfare and violence but instead it was attacked by people who didn't know how to confront a story that made them uncomfortable, and the author faced horrible consequences.

It's so important to be able to deal with stories that give you uncomfortable feelings in other ways than just attacking it. Being shown new perspectives sometimes has feelings of discomfort because it's an unfamiliar way of seeing the world.

mickpin

You can read it Here

anik

i love this guy

Kept waiting for this to turn into an SCP story.

planet4546b

im currently completely losing it about the great stalacpipe organ. are you fucking kidding me they made an organ out of a CAVE???? IT TAKES UP THREE ACRES??? i legit am about to lose it

planet4546b

this is a comment left on a recording of moonlight sonata played on an organ that is literally made out of a cave and its making me so emotional its not even funny

[image id: a youtube comment that reads ‘wonderful…and the moon has never shone there…’ end id.]

marlynnofmany

All that and no pictures??

According to Wikipedia, it works by hidden rubber mallets on the naturally-musical stalactites that tourguides have been knocking on for over a century. The guy who made the organ may have gotten the idea when his son whacked his head on a stalactite.

Here’s a video. It is hauntingly beautiful.

spirit-pyrite

In case anyone is looking, here’s the link to the video op mentions.

https://youtu.be/HsKUUn29tSs

One of my favorite places.

rocketbirdie

i present to you: a non-exhaustive compilation of voice clips from dan green's role in Temptation, a two-episode hentai from 2005. this is not his only performance in such a genre but it is by far the silliest. i would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to @seekerbr for bringing this to my attention.

audio is HIGHLY nsfw, you've been warned. enjoy

THAT WAS A FUCKING HIT AND RUN YOU BITCH

Visit Original Link

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This is a nice sign to look at. 10/10 for composition.

he looks so confident

don’t give me ideas

some design concepts

minor arcana concepts

Yes, the aces are zeros. Deal with it.

I'm nearly done with the first draft-- I just have to figure out what the face cards should be for the swords

I think I should write a guidebook to go along with it.

I know nothing about tarot, so it'll just be giving the names of the symbols, giving explanations of what the symbols literally mean, and giving examples of symbolism-rich objects/substances they could apply to

YOU CAN NOW PURCHASE THE PRINTABLE PDF ON ITCH.IO!

WARNING! These cards are dangerously cool!

No guidebook yet, but hopefully I'll get around to it.

Please make me aware of any errors you encounter while printing so that I can fix them!

baybelletrist

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Become ungovernable.

spacepsychologist

Check out my new IUD

C'tan Shard of The Deceiver; Warhammer 40k

#pizza #pupatella

pandavalkyrie

The panda cub is at a development point where he supposedly understands 50 words or so and a few basic commands. He definitely does understand when I say some things. When I say water cup he grabs his. He knows car, kitty, outside, shoes, ball, night night, and book.

But I think my favorite of his known words is cheese snack, because if I say it he will stop whatever he's doing and bolt to the fridge where he'll proceed to smack the door. You know in case I forgot where string cheese lives.

boxheadpaint

parkchanwoohoo

pandavalkyrie

Posting My Favorite Songs from Ben's Record Collection 2

Album: Happy Families

Artist: Blancmange

Song: God's Kitchen

To have a computer reliably recognize a picture of a red-winged blackbird the computer must first imagine the universe.

I am having complicated and frustrating thoughts on AI again (as always).

I don't know if I've expressed this but part of the thing that has been making me bugfuck insane about discussions around AI image generation is knowing people who have worked with computer vision for decades.

I should fire up my 2005 macbook with CS2 installed on it and edit a photo entirely with "AI tools."

This is a 1980 computer science master's thesis by Ellen Hildreth on computer image recognition and creation. (Link downloads PDF)

The paper demonstrates the development, training, and testing of the Marr-Hildreth algorithm for edge detection in digital images.

Every time I'm gearing up for a good academic rant on this subject I further entrench my hatred of copyright.

Look. I understand that people are concerned about training models. I really do get that, that people have intense feelings about their photos or drawings or image being used to train AI. I even kind of get wanting to weaponize copyright against that because you don't know what else to do with those feelings.

I am currently building a multi-decade chain of papers on computer vision and image generation to have this discussion, and I would like to do so in a moderately calm manner.

Unfortunately if I want to cite a journal article from 1983 in a tumblr post, the copyright holders of this article about image restoration and pixel randomization want $248 per section of excerpted text (<500 words).

So the calm has now gone away.

Anyway. The flesh pit guy appears to be an asshole but I'm very frustrated seeing people react to photoshop compositing tools as an unethical use of AI tools that undermines the craft or artistry of a project.

This is a 2024 paper by one of the Adobe developers who worked on those compositing tools going over how the tools work. For the record, this model was trained on licensed and public domain images only and the tools are run on device, so the copyright and environmental complaints that people frequently make about AI don't apply to these specific tools.

That paper uses research from this 2015 paper on AI detection of composited images. That paper uses the ImageNet dataset.

ImageNet's dataset is a combination of images sourced from image searches starting in 2009 and description tags generated by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. The images are not owned by ImageNet, but were scraped from various internet sources in the late 2000s.

That project uses algorithms and processes described in this 2007 paper on the utility of a general image database and image segmentation.

This 2000 paper on image segmentation developed some of the models used in the later paper, based on a collection of 1000 Corel stock images.

That segmentation was based on statistical models in this paper from 1994, which used a small training dataset collected by the researchers.

That 1994 paper made use of the model in this foundational paper from 1984 on predictive pixel selection for algorithm-based image restoration.

That paper helped to refine the boundary-finding methods used in this 1986 paper, which was an improvement on methods from the 1980 Hildreth paper.

Both Hildreth and Canny cite this 1971 memo from the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, which describes the process of using a computer to find lines in an image.

Personally I like this note from a revised version of that 1971 memo that shows that we are still currently dealing with some of the same problems in computer vision that people were 50 years ago.

"This program has no idea what a reasonable line-drawing should look like when it represents an image of polyhedra. Instead it is very general and will find arbitrary line-drawings. Observing the particular way in which things sometimes go wrong, one quickly comes to the conclusion that higher-level understanding of the scene being analysed could greatly improve the line and vertex creating phase of this program. As thing stand now this understanding comes only after the line-finder has done its work."

Okay so what's my point?

My point is that there is a long chain of models, statistics, and research that, stretching back to the beginning of computer vision, has been centered around figuring out the likelihood that one pixel next to another pixel is black instead of white. The computers have never been very smart, they have never understood context, and the improvements we have made from the line finder in 1971 to "harmonize" in photoshop in 2026 is a very traceable chain of refining how the statistics are calculated.

They hallucinate extra elements, they don't know what shadows are.

Computers are still stupid, they just do math a lot faster than they did in the seventies.

Harmonize is apparently a new "AI" tool available in photoshop that is capable of matching lighting, texture, and other qualities in photos that are composited together. One of the things that the flesh pit guy is currently being dragged for (aside from really seeming to be a pretty tremendous asshole) is using this particular type of AI tool as a time saver on his ongoing art project.

I want to have a conversation about this, by which I mean I want to make some arguments about this.

I'm writing this specifically about the harmonize compositing tool in photoshop (and similar tools like upscaling). This is not about using grok or generating whole images or whole elements of images, this is not about whether or not the flesh pit guy is an asshole. I will grant that he is an asshole and I personally find whole images generated with AI tools like grok to just kind of look bad and be really boring.

Work with me on this, and let's accept the premise that adobe's Firefly is an ethically trained model (up to 5% of the images used to train firefly may be midjourney images that were licensed to adobe as stock images after being generated by midjourney, but adobe pays creators standard licensing fees to train data and does not train on client data), and that the tools are run on-device and do not consume any more resources than creating a 20-layer document in photoshop would.

(Also I acknowledge that training a model uses a lot of power and resources but creating a video game or an animated movie uses power at a much higher level than playing the game or watching the movie on your own machine; i've got to limit the scope somewhere so I can actually ask the question I've got)

Again, we are granting the following before you respond to the poll:

If the model was trained on ethical data and

If the tool runs locally and does not use more power than your computer uses and

The art the tool is used on is a personal, individual project and does not lead to poor treatment of workers

With that context I think those AI Tools

Are unethical and reduce the artistry of a work

Are unethical but do not reduce the artistry of a work

Are ethical but reduce the artistry of a work

Are ethical and do not reduce the artistry of a work

Voting ended onJul 20

Reblogging with corrected final question on poll.

Editing a photo with only the AI tools (predictive image processing tools developed from models trained on large imagesets) included as a part of the 2012 CS6 license (and the autofocus on my phone camera from 2020).

Direct from cellphone, Autofocus

Posterize (edge-finding like the tools in the original linked master’s thesis)

HDR Toning (photorealistic high contrast preset)

Selective Color Adjustment

Glowing Edges (again, another edge-finding tool)

Rendered lighting effects (spot, high intensity, high angle)

Color halftone

Gaussian Blur applied to the color halftone (similar to how AI upscaling works, and is based on the 1986 paper listed above)

Selective color replacement

Cutting backgrounds 100% with tools that use the AI included in my 2012 CS6 license

I think the last two images here and the edge-finding images do a really good job of demonstrating how AI/Machine Learning image processing tools are statistical tools.

The cut-out on the left was done hastily with a magic wand selection tool with a color selection threshold of 20. What that means is that you click on the image and the tool picks all of the pixels that are contiguous with the pixel you clicked on and are within the tolerance. If you broke down the image pixel by pixel you'd be able to get the exact count of what percentage of the image is what color, you could, in theory, remake the image as a barcode of just the proportions of each color using this kind of image analysis. The image is math, the computer sees it as math, the algorithms see it as math, the models see it as math.

The cut-out on the right demonstrates how the "AI computer vision" makes educated guesses (predictions) about the image. That was cut out using a magnetic lasso tool, which you guide around the vague shape of the image with your mouse. The program creates a selection line that follows color variations in the edges of the image that you're cutting out. On a very high contrast background (so if I was standing against a white wall) this can be very accurate. On a lower contrast background, there's more variation as the program guess wrong about which way to move the selection line.

The program doesn't see the photo as a picture of a person being cut out, it sees a collection of pixels of various colors and calculates what the probability is that a pixel of one color is likely to be next to a pixel of another color based on the the difference in color of the pixels.

There are very, very accurate selection tools in modern editions of creative suite - when I used the sky selection tool in my photography class in 2023 I was *stunned* by how accurate it was and how much time it saved. But all of that is just a more complicated form of the line finder in the 1971 memo that had trouble distinguishing between solids and shadows in areas of reduced contrast.