¿Por qué no los dos?

Naked moletaburrasaurus.

I switched a few months ago, and I’ve honestly been so impressed with how far Blender has come since the last time I tried it (more than 10 years ago, probably).

I don’t work in creative industry anymore and I haven’t had a ton of time to noodle around and actually try out the tools I’ve seen demo’d, but it was mindblowing discovering how many different software suites I had used to do stuff that Blender has been incorporating into their one package.

Maya? Obviously does most of that. ZBrush? Yep, pretty comparable. Marvelous Designer? Holy shit, yep. ToonBoom? Also that.

By far the worst part has just been trying to retrain hotkey muscle memory and learn minor (but fundamental) differences, and that’s not as small a thing as a lot of people make it out to be - it does add a lot of cognitive noise and you really can’t just hop in and flow right from the get go (depending on what you’re doing).

Absolutely worth it to get away from Adobe though, and not having to bounce between programs while working on a model is very, very pleasant.

The challenge is convincing c-suite to greenlight the work.

I know this is an anarchist instance. It’s part of the reason I assumed that anti-capitalism would be a given and I didn’t need to bang the drum about it before stating my arguments. I am anti-capitalist.

It seems like your faith is much higher than mine that people are vetting the AI tools they use, or that they exclusively use their own works as training material.

From what I can tell, our stable diffusion art communities make no distinction between training sets, nor do they require that shared images be trained on public-domain or user-owned data only. Given that, I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable that people are equating stable diffusion users with users generating their content on the big models that were indiscriminately fed the entire internet. There’s no way to easily tell.

And outside of capitalism and industry, there are interesting philosophical discussions that need to be had around generative AI that I don’t see enough. Here are a few of the topics I think need to be examined more, both by human society at large, and by AI-art communities especially:

• What does “good artists borrow, great artists steal” mean when the artist in question is modulating their output by inhuman means - parsing millions of images in ways that are physical impossibility? I think that’s worth interrogating.

• What say do living artists get in who uses their work in training sets, and how should that be respected? Is ignorance of publicly-stated wishes an acceptable excuse? How should this be moderated?

• How do we assign value (cultural, economic, personal, sentimental, or any other) to creative works? I think arguably that both human-created and generative AI art are the product of thousands of years of human creative output, but they’re vastly different in terms of the skill, types of knowledge, and time required to create one piece.

And it worries me that a lot of people seem pretty inclined to dismiss criticism of AI use as frivolous or reactionary, or couch it as a base refusal to adapt or learn new technologies. Especially when the people driving policy around the largest implementations of that technology are the ones who are the least principled in its deployment.

I know that this is a small community. I know that the proportion of people here who use custom stable diffusion models is almost definitely much higher than many other forums on the internet.

But I worry that if we don’t have this kind of discussion here, where people are (maybe, optimistically/flatteringly) more judicious in their use of AI than elsewhere - if we don’t have clear, principled guidelines, then the prevailing attitudes are ultimately going to wind up being those of Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, or fucking Grok.

For now though, unless I know that someone is using models trained on their own work, or at least public-domain works, I feel like I’m crossing a picket line, and I don’t like that.

Sorry, what exactly do I need to tone down?

Pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever commented on the issue here or elsewhere on Lemmy.

I see anti-AI sentiment all over the fediverse, but nothing in the original post that would indicate that these users are exclusively targeting db0 communities, just that the admins here have chosen to address it; and I agree it’s a good way to handle the situation.

I think there are good and valuable use cases for AI, including generative AI.

But I also think a lot of the costs are hidden because the tools are free and easy to access, and because those coats often pretty abstract and wide-ranging so as to be difficult to observe, quantify, and attribute to an emerging technology. So I think there are a lot of really valid reasons to question casual use of those tools because they do not exist outside of capitalism.

The point of my earlier post wasn’t meant to be that all use of AI is bad or that somebody using it to make a meme or art of their big-titty anime waifu is directly putting artists out of work, but I also don’t think that those things are entirely separable, either.

And since I was replying to a user whose comment made a blanket claim implying that casual use of generative AI is trivial, well… no, I don’t think it is.

I’ve done all sorts of art in my life. Sometimes as a job. And it’s personally pretty disheartening to see comments like “it just looks like AI, human-made art doesn’t look like that” because yes, it sometimes does, even if the poster has never seen human-made art like that.

But I’ve also spent the last few years watching dozens of friends and former coworkers lose their careers and their livelihoods en masse for no reason other than naked greed.

I think that making art more accessible through AI can be a really cool and pretty liberating thing for a lot of people, but as it’s being employed by the big corporate players, it does have big serious negative externalities for working artists and for cultural products writ large, and I think that’s worth bringing up.

I mean…

I can imagine how artists struggling to make ends meet might be angry that work they’d spent years learning and honing their skills to produce was and is being crawled by tools made by a bunch of silver-spoon-chomping techbros who are marketing their products to businesses who employ artists as a way to employ less artists, and pay peanuts to those they do hire to wrangle prompts and fix AI mistakes instead of actually getting to make art.

And I can imagine how frustrating it is to see people minimize that struggle when it often benefits oligarchs and C-suite ghouls.

I took two years of Norwegian in university, and in my first-ever class, tthe prof, a lovely woman originally from Sweden, brought us cookies.

One girl didn’t make it to the second class because sis could literally not say ‘småkaker’ without bursting into laughter.

Also, the shifty-looking cow in Mass Effect that would pickpocket your credits if you turned your back on it after interacting with it.

thwipthwipthwipthwipthwipthwip

I reread Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

Obviously the second time around I didn’t get to experience the same burning curiosity about the setting, nor the joy of piecing things together, but I still really enjoyed it.

Also currently about halfway through Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism. Looking forward to his new book in a couple weeks.

We do deserve librarians.

For people dealing with or processing systemic trauma, this directory isn’t a luxury or a stretch goal feature, it’s an essential accessibilty feature.

There are a few things I’d add to that list, like burnout, disability, and neurodivergence, but it’s a good start.

We gotta raise the bar, it’s been in hell for too long now.

It has to do with the US because this particular project is largely US-funded, driven by Peter Thiel, and also, according to this pretty good article, owned by a US-based company.

“Honduras Próspera, the Delaware-registered company that owns the startup city…”

This is not the only such US ancap exclave project in the world, either.

When he was first chosen as LPC leader, I hadn’t even realized that he was a party member. I suspect he was chosen for the name recognition, and while I don’t like the idea or existence of political dynasties, I didn’t care because I wanted Harper out.

The Proportional Representation Bait-and-Switch

One of the LPC’s central campaign promises in 2015 was the end of First-Past-the-Post. He reneged on that promise as soon as the committee he’d empanelled recommended a referendum between FPTP and PR, but did not include his preference (ranked ballot). He took his ball and went home. This was deeply impactful on me. I had no great trust in politicians as a rule, but this was the final nail in the coffin for my faith in my country’s electoral system.

A few months ago he went on MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s podcast, and this was one of the topics they discussed. As one of the “FairVote” people the party was all but explicitly trying to bait into voting Liberal, I find his arguments to be insulting and patrician, though unsurprising. My most generous interpretation of what he says there is that he and I have a values mismatch when it comes to what we think democracy can and should be.

Strike Breaking

Early on in his PMship in 2016, the Trudeau government threatened to follow Harper’s 2011 precedent and table back-to-work legislation against legally striking Canada Post workers. In December 2024, after saying they wouldn’t force striking postal workers back to work, they did. By my count, this marks the third time in 15 years that our Posties have been prevented from improving their pay and working conditions, twice by Trudeau’s government.

“Affordable” Housing

About a year ago, his deputy PM came under fire for touting an “affordable housing” development for low- and middle-income people where the rents started at $1700/month for 330sqft, and $3315/month for 816sqft.

Again, deeply personal for me, as I live in the metro area with the worst rents in the country and have suffered 7 years of housing instability as a result.

This was a completely headassed publicity stunt from a woman who is not low- or middle-income, and definitely does not struggle to afford rent; it is archetypal of the “arrogant and out-of-touch” Liberal, from a woman who had previously been lionized by legacy media (most of which, incidentally, are majority US-owned - see PostMedia).

I have not seen any indications from the party that it sees the financialization of our housing market to be a concern for them, which I don’t find surprising for any liberal party, but is nonetheless concerning to me as a renter who would like not to have to spend the rest of my life at the whim of a landlord for my use of what my country officially considers to be a human right, my housing.

Truth and Reconciliation Weaselry

His government’s stated commitment to truth and reconciliation has repeatedly been shown to be all hat, no cattle. The have repeatedly fought court battles to get out of making any actual material reparations, most recently to mind was this absolutely galling stance from government lawyers that Canada has no legal obligation to provide First Nations with clean water. They’ve also wasted millions fighting residential school survivors in court.

Influence Peddling for a Criminal Business Conglomerate

SNC-Lavalin. The PMO tried to influence the Attorney General/Minister of Justice to decline to prosecute SNC-Lavalin on charges of bribery. The initial story by the Globe & Mail (which I cannot find, sorry) claimed that she objected, and was then “shuffled” from Minister of Justice to Minister of Veterans’ Affairs. The ethics commission report did find that the Trudeau had contravened the Conflict of Interest Act, and found that Trudeau had “continued to engage both with SNC-Lavalin’s legal counsel and, separately, with [then-AG and Justice Minister] Ms. Wilson-Raybould and her ministerial staff to influence her decision”, after she met with him and expressed her concerns that the PMO was inappropriately trying to interfere politically with the AG in a criminal matter.

Means-Tested Pandemic Relief

The Liberal government tried to claw back CERB, the emergency benefit they rolled out for COVID-19. They also demanded that claimants deemed to be invalid recipients pay back the disbursements, but were (unsurprisingly) overzealous, and $246M worth of outstanding CERB “debt” has been canceled because the claims were found to be justified. I wasn’t eligible for this, but someone in my family was, and got extremely stressed when the initial talk of clawbacks started, because their work venue had no plans to reopen at that time. Stuff like that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths.

Failure to Shore Up Healthcare

And lastly, the doctor shortage. I’m honestly (mercifully) pretty out of gas, but uh… family doctor shortages everywhere, private for-profits making incursions (more than the ~30% they already have) into our system, fucking… telecoms?! somehow also doing this (although I’d have pretty much no problem with this if we nationalized them.)

Hi, hello, I’m a Canadian who agrees with the idea that Trudeau is arrogant and out of touch. (*I also think this applies to almost all politicians)

tl;dr I suspect people think Trudeau is arrogant and out-of-touch because he was born into privilege, but more importantly, has been a politician in the highest office for the past 10 years during a time of worsening prospects for the electorate (regardless of his own impact on the situation, although that is not “no impact”). Literally nothing he could say could put a shine on that.

Trudeau is a figurehead as party leader, and as PM. I mean, not only that – the PM does have significant political power as well – but it means he’s a representative of all the actions that his government takes, and not without reason. People assume that the PMO exerts its influence on party members because it does. Above-board and otherwise (see the SNC-Lavalin scandal).

In my purely vibes-based view, that’s just how Canadian federal politics be. PM stays in power for long enough, lots of little grievances build up, eventually people get fed up and want change.

This isn’t really a shocking shakeup to me - the last Liberal regime lost power amid scandal and turmoil and it seemed much messier than this (although not as messy as the UK Tories’ clown car procession).

It’s more like Liberals doing internal realpolitik. They knew they were falling out of favour with the public, and they chose to pile as much culpability on Trudeau and torch him. I’d like to say it was because the stakes are higher and this is some high-minded bid to avert our being pulled into the US’s fascist death spiral, but honestly, I think it’s more likely just an attempt retain as much power as possible.

And boy did it pay off.

The Liberals were absolutely on an express flight out of power before Trump started a trade war. And because we still have FPTP ಠ_ಠ and the NDP are toothless cupbearers to the LPC, that meant that, with an election due soon, we were locked in for a conservative government. Not just that, polls were indicating a majority.

But the cons have been playing the right-populist game, riding Trump’s coattails. Their ‘platform’ relied on the continuation of friendly relations.

The tariffs were absolute manna from heaven for the LPC, but wouldn’t have been if Trudeau had remained at the helm because his approval ratings were dropping and our (largely US-owned and right-wing-biased) legacy media have been making hay with it. Fwiw, I’m pretty sure severalmany outgoing PMs have had worse approval ratings (lookin at you, BM the PM), but their party usually loses the subsequent election.

Which is probably why Freeland knifed Trudeau – to try to distance herself from his dropping approval rating and reclaim her mantle of “PM in-waiting”.

JT’s tenure as PM lasted 10 years. During that time, housing and healthcare problems have become crises, and while no single level of government could fix these, it’s clear to me that the LPC has not done enough to address the situation. Increasing numbers of Canadians cannot afford to buy a home, rent has ballooned unchecked in major metropols, and increasing numbers of Canadians do not have access to a family doctor.

And there’s also rising xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, which is extremely worrying, and the Liberals are pro-immigration and have historically kept immigration levels high because this country depends on immigrant labour.

But when too many people can’t afford housing or find a doctor, the first thing a lot of people think isn’t that these are systemic failings that could have been prevented and remediated by good and timely policy interventions, it’s “there are too many people and they’re taking all the [house] [doctor] [jerb]!” And immigrants make a very convenient scapegoat, especially when it’s being modelled to such great political success by our neighbours.

I will also say that since you either aren’t Canadian, or are (as you admitted) unfamiliar with Canadian politics, I can see how you’d be confused by what seems like a sudden animus towards Trudeau if your opinion is based on his international relations and foreign policy. I have very little to say about either of those things. I agree, it’s largely been fine.

What I do have problems with has been his domestic policy, and there’s a (non-exhaustive) laundry list, so if you want as much granularity as I can try to give in a frankly prodigious act of procrastination, I put it in a different post because this hit the character limit.

I’ve lost out on probably more than $10k in grants and bursaries for my education because of this same problem.

It’s honestly so infuriating.

Pepper’s ghost cat, even.

I think that’s the joke. I heard this a lot growing up and it obviously didn’t help.