Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

My daughter texted me urgently today, asking for help in art class. As someone who attended school before the advent of cell phones, this entire concept threatens to derail me, but I'll focus for her sake. She wants examples of abstract art, and wants me to help, and I quote, "Using your uhm ai art thing."

I happen to have the Wombo.ai Dream app installed on my phone, and haven't used it very much, so I started there. That app heavily leans into models trained in different styles, one of which is "Abstract," so it seemed like a good bet. For the first prompt, I supplied an input image, which I said should heavily influence the result. Avid fans of anime might guess from the result that the image was fan art from "Assassination Classroom," which was also the text prompt. For the rest I supplied no starting image, using only text prompts to steer things. Unfortunately, I didn't keep notes at the time, and worse, I foolishly didn't "Finalize" any of the results, since I was just looking for samples to influence my daughter's art on paper. So I don't remember what words I used for the other three examples, my favorites of the eight I generated for her.

If I can generate image description alt text for abstract art, it should be easy for anyone to generate image descriptions for anything.

#AIart #wombo #abstract #AssassinationClassroom

This is real talk, with McSweeney’s saying what the folks responsible for laying off tens of thousands of people won’t.

So far, Apple has chosen to cut Tim Cook’s pay rather than engage in mass layoffs. So far, the company I work for has avoided mass layoffs, too. In fact, they acquired yet another small company, but that’s another argument for another day.

#blog #politics #BigTech #capitalism

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-have-made-it-impossible-for-me-to-want-to-pay-you

Gong hay fat choi!

Since I don't want to actually publicly engage with Matt Yglesias or his fellow subscribers, and I keep talking myself out of my one-to-five rating system, it turns out what I do instead is discuss some of his articles at length with one of my brothers, where one of us takes the pro and the other takes the con on a given issue until we find common ground.

That way you don't have to read the whole conversations that end with one of us saying things like "I would *love* to live in a world where housing permits were like gun permits: shall-issue rather than may-issue."

#blog #politics #SlowBoring #MattYglesias

The more I dig into GoodReads exports, the more I realize how utterly broken they are, almost to the point of uselessness.

Assuming I manually edit the CSV file to eliminate the corrupt data from the GoodReads database, I'm still left with a file which contains "date completed" but not "date started," and nearly every "date completed" is wrong. Usually off by one, sometimes by more.

I'm not sure which is worse, the missing data or the wrong data, but both require me to manually look up each book. Which I wish I had done *before* the very-recent rollout of the new book page, because I seem to recall both dates being visible directly on the book page, while now they require scrolling, clicking, and clicking again. It's possible the new book page is more usable for people who want to keep using GoodReads, but it's abysmal for people trying to leave and realizing the GoodReads export function is no good.

On the positive side, it's easy to add missing books to Bookwyrm, and some have turned out to not be missing, just missed while importing.

#blog #Bookwyrm #GoodReads #amazon #nerdery

Bookrastinating update: I imported my completed books from 2021 onward, 269 books. Of those, 35 items failed to import, and a few more are missing cover images. 12 of the 35 which failed have ISBNs, so those failures were somewhat surprising, although most of them are either very old (first published in the 1920s), or clearly Amazon-only (the entire Hollywood Alphabet series by M.Z. Kelly makes up 20 of the 35).

For all of the faults of GoodReads, I'm not sure I've ever tried to add a book to my library that it didn't already know about, other than the book I wrote myself.

It is in the nature of open platforms not owned by corporate behemoth's to require a bit of effort, so I'll add cover images for the books missing them. I'll also poke around this weekend to figure out how to add the 35 books it apparently doesn't know about, which I note includes a book by Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason series of books. It's not a Perry Mason book, though, it's another series of his.

#blog #Bookwyrm #GoodReads #amazon #nerdery

Image is Einstein holding a piece of chalk and gesturing to a chalkboard while young Black men in suits listen and watch him.