Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

A good reminder thread, read the whole thing!

Every now and again I think that it would be fun to post a semi-regular roundup of ideas proposed by Matt Yglesias, along with my level of agreement or disagreement. Not in terms of arguing the details, just a simple expression of agreement or disagreement. Maybe on a one to five scale.

But then I slap myself in the face and tell myself to do something more useful with my time, like count the bristles on my toothbrush, or polish the fire hydrant in front of my house, or learn how buggy whips were made.

Apropos of nothing, I do tend to think that "American transit agencies should prioritize ridership over other goals."

#blog #politics #transit #SlowBoring #MattYglesias

Wikipedia has launched a new page design, and like all new designs, it is being poorly received by a number of people who can't understand why they even bothered, why they made everything worse, or why anybody would want this rather than the old design.

The old "vector" design was made the default in 2010, so "every 13 years" doesn't seem like too often for a design refresh. That said, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a new design should be objectively better in some way, rather than just change for change's sake. So let's compare:

Old skin, minimum width: https://ibb.co/Pcvn7VP

New skin, same width: https://ibb.co/PgxF8hf

Old skin, maximum size: https://ibb.co/WsptkCY

New skin, same size: https://ibb.co/x8NmgZq

In both cases, more article content is visible and line lengths are more readable. I'm sure there are some edge cases in which things have objectively gotten worse, but it's also easy to keep using the old skin, or any of a few alternatives: add `?useskin=vector` to the end of any Wikipedia URL for the old skin, or log in to set a default for yourself. There's also a bookmarklet available on the Wikipedia page for skins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin

Old or new, Wikipedia remains a good resource that I use frequently. Kudos to the design team on the new look.

#blog #nerdery #design #wikipedia

It would be nice if there were a lightweight ActivityPub server that is easily deployable as a docker image without being built first.

It's also possible I'm just not good enough with docker.

I could deploy mastodon using docker, but that seems like overkill for what would be a single-user server. I did find a doc on installing WriteFreely, which involves only two docker images rather than mastodon's three. Oh! And then I found a related guide that involves a single container!

https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-writefreely-sqlite-on-your-synology-nas

I might try this out.

I fiddled with Epicyon briefly a couple of weeks ago and didn't find satisfaction. Perhaps I gave up too quickly, though. That repo does include a Dockerfile.

Between WriteFreely and Epicyon, I'm going to try to get something up and running this weekend.

#blog #nerdery #mastodon #WriteFreely #epicyon

Statista's Chart of the Day is often fascinating to me. Today's is about the oldest people in the world.

https://www.statista.com/chart/8978/the-oldest-people-on-earth/

As the linked article says, all are women, and most are born in Japan or the United States.

Although born in the United States, María Branyas has lived most of her life in Spain. I'm still a bit surprised at how many of the women on the list are from the United States, though.

#blog #infographic

I'm not surprised to read this today, although I think those of us who limit ourselves to a single cup of coffee each day are in the minority.

Single-use coffee pods have surprising environmental benefits over other brewing methods
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/the-surprising-environmental-benefits-of-single-use-coffee-pods/ar-AA16tnBr

K-cups strike the right balance for me, but might not for everybody. Instant coffee would apparently be even less impactful on the environment, but other than trips to Asia and New Zealand, I try to avoid that stuff. It just doesn't taste like I want it to.

#blog #coffee

Since a previous post alerted me to the idea of an AI art model generating images of Buddha statues without having "Buddha" as an input, I decided to test it, so I prompted MidJourney with "cree, pasadena, ish, informal, preview, lindo, kids, potential, statue, calcutta, phenomenal, sigma, chero, heh, âľĵ, kier, bourdain, anjali, ori, displa"

The first time I forgot I still had the "anime" filter turned on, so I switched to MidJourney model v4 and re-ran it.

I'm not seeing Buddha in my results, although I do see statues. Then again "statue" is one of the words in the prompt, so nothing magical there.

I'm including both results because I guess I want to spend a long time writing image descriptions. 😀

#AIart #midjourney

This site presents "both sides" of at least one aspect of AI art by displaying the content of a current lawsuit over AI art on the left, and via fair use, a response or rebuttal on the right.

http://www.stablediffusionfrivolous.com/

(Replace frivolous with litigation in the URL to get the original site.)

I'm obviously a fan of AI art, and occasionally post it here. I'm also very far from a copyright maximalist, although I'm *not* in favor of abolishing copyright altogether. I agree with the right side of the site on at least two points:

1. Copyright law doesn't apply here.
2. The suit dramatically misrepresents, I think because Butterick doesn't understand, how latent diffusion works.

That said, while I overall agree with the critique, I think I'm more sympathetic to the complaint than the rebuttal writers are.

There's something truly disconcerting about adding an artist's name to an existing prompt and seeing the result change to be much closer to something in line with previous works of that artist.

I can understand that statements about how latent diffusion works fall flat after seeing that. No, there are no images stored in the model, not even textual representations of images. And yet, there's something, right? It's not nothing. There's some sort of minimal association of given names with a given set of characteristics, more so for some than for others, and the effect is often uncanny. The example of what seems like an arbitrary series of words consistently producing Buddha statues is a good start to counter that, but it doesn't quite seem adequate.

Overall, I think there are serious ethical issues with how art is being sourced for training the current generations of AI art models. However, I don't think there are legal issues; copyright certainly isn't being violated.

More to the point: the primary users of these tools currently seem to be artists. In that sense, it really does seem like the advent of photographs, or the advent of photoshop, and it will likely be quite a while before we will know how these issues settle. In the meantime, anybody using these tools to try to mimic a particular artist is probably missing out.

#blog #AIart