Cool cool, now just need to wire it up to every common command and make a custom best-effort fallback so I never have to think about it (except for when it inexplicably breaks in 6 months and I need to fix it again).

Gonna get down voted to hell for this, but it’s my main gripe with daily driving Linux: to get a semblance of QoL you either monkey patch a brittle solution or dedicate your finite time and memory to learning the song and dance of each tool.

I know it’s not fair to gripe about freely supported open source software, but dev tooling has advanced an incredible amount since the old hackathon days. We need better efforts around modular integration and UX to really get widespread adoption.

My dyscalculic ass trying to remember what 50% of 6 is

…and it will be valueless

What are you on about? Who are you to tell people what they can and can’t find value in?

You’re a hack who wants to pass other’s work off as their own

You’re making a hell of a leap here.

1. Who is the other? What work? A model trained on 50,000 artists might have a fraction of a contribution from each, and produces something in combination that none of them approached individually. How could any of them have a claim to something they didn’t make or envision?
2. There’s no requirement to pass anything off at all. The result could be interesting or thought provoking or just pleasing. Sharing that makes you a hack?

What is a tire or sheet of paper trying to express?

Could be any number of things. An extreme attention to detail, a production process with a political message, an innovative use of materials, etc… Putting artificial limits on which human creations are allowed to be fulfilling and engaging is foolish.

Also, desirable results require effort

Nothing about the use of AI or any other technology/tool/process precludes effort. A vast majority of pictures taken in the world today are disposal trash, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make meaningful art with your iPhone.

you don’t actually want to be an artist

My eyes are rolling out of my skull 🙄

They never claimed to want to be an artist, much less fit your definition of one. A movie producer might “make art” but they just care about the output and not using their job as a creative outlet.

That makes sense wrt redistribution, but the original comment limited itself to the ethical problem and not the legal problem. I just don’t see how it makes sense in that context because it’s entirely unclear who owns the work, that’s the nature of the technology.

If I train a model on the work of 1000 artists each of them contributes some fractional amount to each weight. When that model generates an image, it’s combining a pseudorandom human token input with the weights and some random seed info.

If I provide a prompt of my own making, am I stealing 1/1000 of the content from each artist? Is the result 1/3 mine from my token input? Is the result 100% the property of whoever trained the model? Do we need to trace the traversal of the weights and sum the ownership of each artist based on their contribution to that weight? Is it nobody’s due to the sheer number of random steps that convert the input intent to the final result?

What a weird distinction. So if I get a prompt to make a particular scene in a particular artist’s distinct style: not stealing. But if I share that prompt (and maybe even some seed info) to a friend, is that stealing? If I take a picture of the generated content, stealing? If someone takes it off my laptop without my knowledge are they stealing from me or the artist?

My viewpoint is that information wants to be free, and trying to restrict it is a losing battle (as shown by Ai training). The concept of IP is tenuous at best but I do recognize that artists need to eat in our capitalist reality. But once you make something and set it free to the world you inherently lose some ownership of it. Getting mad at the tech itself for the economic injustice is silly, there are plenty more important things to worry about in our hell scape.

You could also look into community gardens. Not as convenient or simple as a home garden, but still pretty nice.

Again, I pointed out and fully admitted to the foreign media bias. However there’s a difference between dissecting the validity of reports and wholesale discarding them because of their source. If you do that (like our friend above), you’ve abandoned your unexamined received wisdom for a different flavor of the same.

The number one thing I see on the .ml instance is a total incomprehension of how China operates and is organized domestically. I know multiple close friends who went through a full childhood education and only left as adults. I also know a few who have split experiences, growing up in America + China. I’ve also personally been and have talked to people who’ve lived their whole lives (60+ years) there.

The one common thread: it is truly a different world, especially from a political and media landscape. For the amount of shit Western countries get about whitewashing history and controlling media narrative, the Chinese government has it down to a science.

Here are just a few verifiable examples.

• The Chinese air quality index is vastly inflated vs America’s. I’ve been in a Chinese city with a thicker orange smog haze than I’ve ever seen in America categorized as only light/moderate. Conversely, Chinese visitors have specifically commented on how good America’s AQI is vs the Chinese equivalent.

• China’s lock down of VPNs is already broad and growing faster, you can find dozens of threads like these. I personally struggled with this during my visits (Mullvad failed) and only my friend’s private work VPN had access. A local we were staying with asked to borrow our access because there was no way he could get a working VPN otherwise.

• The Chinese GPS system is a controlled black box and not compatible with the global standard. Your local map provider probably won’t work there unless they feed their data to the Chinese system to align their coordinates.

• The government has multiple official arms of censorship that have no parallel in the west. The imagined censorship of simply taking down every government criticism is naive; the system is careful calibrated and monitored to track and suppress collective action. Though I know many will dismiss the research due to country of origin/funding, I would encourage you to read the findings on this just because it’s really interesting.

• China has restrictions on practicing journalism that are complete outliers from the international norm. These include mandatory registration, ethics requirements (??), education level, and arbitrary restrictions on coverage of events and topics. [As a hint, this is a big reason for the dearth of outsider evidence]

This all builds an environment where the tight domestic control and censorship isn’t just common, but expected. Certain subjects just aren’t taught in schools (for example, Mao’s handling of Tibet). Posts on the Chinese Twitter equivalent dissappear all the time with no fanfare. Current CCP politics isn’t deeply discussed online because there’s no point.

This leads to the disconnect between outsider expectations and the domestic realities. We’re so used to seeing politics, news coverage and debates blasted all over western media that we don’t apply the proper lens to our access to Chinese events.

That’s what I mean when I say I don’t have a dog in the race. You can sometimes make educated deductions between what western media says and the official CCP statements, but completely throwing out all outside sources leaves you in the dark. On a topic like the repression of a minority ethnic group in the obscure outskirts, you’ll never find the clear answer.

My point was to rebuff all these comments saying there’s no way X Y Z could happen. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence + where there’s smoke there’s fire.

The problem is you and your strawman will never agree on how much fire there could be when you’re citing CCP press releases and he’s citing 3rd parties and hearsay.

Going to reply in broad strokes here due to length:

Previously: […]

1. Re-read my comment and point out where I definitively endorsed that every single one of those things is happening. I listed what I did as examples of the ways a genocide can manifest outside of mass murder.
2. You’re citing the imperialist genocide definition, look up what Lemkin’s original definition was.
3. Just for fun and as an example of how futile these arguments are: Uyghur birth rate allegedly dropped something like 60% from 2016 - 2019 compared to a fractional drop for the general population. Plenty of sources will say a similar number and how it’s from official records but you’ll refuse to accept them so there’s no acceptable way to prove it

[Salafi terrorists]…

1. Want to be clear I’m not making any political endorsement about the moral standing of any side. Terrorist/freedom fighter, etc…
2. Any violent separatist group has a resentful seed, people don’t blow stuff up solely because some foreign government told them to.
3. Yeah, non-state belligerents are going to get foreign funding, not sure what that has to do with my point.

[Tibetan immolation]

1. More funding talk, more dismissing sources…
2. You can find images of these. I won’t post here because they’re pretty graphic, but that’s concrete evidence in my book. Feel free to equivocate on exact number and intent, but my point was to show that these extreme protests happen.

[border restrictions etc…]

1. Pointing out that a disproportionate amount of the restricted area is in these controversial regions
2. Not all countries require a permit to approach these areas, generally they’ll let you walk through with a regular visa
3. There are accounts of rural villages and obscure rural highways being sporadically restricted. Odd for obvious reasons but again you’ll dismiss and there’s no way for either of us to officially confirm the specific locations 🤷

I’m not here with any specific dog in this race, but it’s clear that these counter arguments come in with a predetermined conclusion and deflect anything that doesn’t fit as a lie. Is there any claim the Chinese government could make that you wouldn’t defend?

It’s not up for argument that this repression has happened in China’s long history, you can check any history book you like (even China’s). The modern difference is careful media control and domestic isolation, which is perfect for creating this exact vague deniability.

…a single instance of a Uyghur being killed

Genocide is more than just killing, it’s the deliberate destruction of a people including its culture and institutions. In fact, the reason you’re so focused on people dying is because imperialist powers felt the need to redefine it to allow their exploitation. Even in its more narrow definition it still includes things like abducting and re-education of children and malicious targeted actions (forced labor, restricted reproduction, relocation, etc…).

China is a massive country, and has always had issues with maintaining control over its more distant and ethnically distinct pockets. This stretches back centuries right up to now. For example: 100+ years of separatism, uprisings and violent incidents in East Turkestan. Or more recently, 160 Tibetans self immolating in protest of government repression since 2009. In this lens, there’s plenty of evidence that could support these accusations.

Meanwhile anyone can visit Xinjiang

This sounds like something people parrot only if they haven’t actually traveled China. For one, Xinjiang is massive. It’s about the size of Iran; 1/6 of China by land area. Saying you can visit it is like saying you could visit somewhere in France + Spain + Germany + Italy.

For two, foreigners require a special permit to visit ~12-15% of China (varying by year). This includes the expected restricted zones (military or government areas), but also the areas along borders (many in Tibet and Xinjiang) and “politically sensitive” areas. There’s no official list published for obvious reasons but they’ll certainly let you know if you’re not welcome.

As a disclaimer for those of you furiously typing whattaboutgaza: Yes that’s a genocide. Yes, many countries have engaged in similar kinds of repression. Yes media will amplify stories that paint rivals in a bad light, no that’s not unique to western media.

Forgive my American ignorance, but do people actually watch Eurovision as entertainment? I feel like I’ve only ever heard of it as an arena for politics/protest/controversy, never “hey listen to this great song that won”. Is the controversy part of the draw?