Unfortunately, there's still that one guy in the comments trying to say that hypothetical, largely unproven solutions are better for baseload than something that's worked for decades.
I mean, perhaps in the most general sense that is technically true. For example, there have been cases about this that have come from parents taking pictures of their kids in the bathtub, even if the charges were eventually dropped. If that particular court case had gone differently, it might've set a very destructive precedent that served only to rip apart families.
Still, 99% of the cases that produce this material are done so in an exploitative and abusive context; definitely not arguing with that. No idea what Aaron was talking about in that particular link, but this is the one counterexample that I think of that is valid, assuming it went a different direction in court.
Since I was revisiting some of my attempts to use AI in my work, here's perhaps my very first attempt at combining vaporware with text-to-image generation. It's super messy and not really all that spectacular, but it's pretty cool to think that we've come this far in only two years. I mean, this (VQGAN+CLIP) was already impressive back in 2021, and it looks absolutely weird and incoherent next to even the first official public release of Stable Diffusion (from August 2022). This piece is one of those that I tend to ignore in my portfolio, as it's not all that great on its own, bit in with context, it helps to highlight the march of technological progress and changes to how I approach art in general.
This was one of my first attempts at using a repeating base pattern to create a more complex model. In other words, I basically folded a bird base in four smaller sections of the paper, which left me with several little subsections that I could fold in a way that added a more sculpted look. Since I was coincidentally using black and white paper and realized that I could fold the rear portion to look like a tail, I decided to try to fold a very oversimplified Orca. It has no dorsal fin, no anatomically-accurate underbelly, and little in the way of intrigue. Still, this is essentially my second design, and I think it's an interesting concept. I'm still not super happy with it, so I think I'll scrap it until I can create something better. Still, it's fun to share photos of folds like this, even when they aren't perfect.
~~I believe I posted the revised version of this piece a while ago, but this is the original version.~~ I checked, and it doesn't look like I directly posted this anywhere. There's another version I made using img2img with my dreambooth model that is marginally better. I'm always trying to combine ideas in new ways, and this one was more of a visual metaphor of how the appreciated aesthetics of vaporwave have changed over time. It feels like the indie photobased charm has largely gone away, save for a few places like our Reddit counterpart, r/vaporwaveart. The larger subreddit, r/vaporwaveaesthetics, has an affinity for glossy renders that are often a bit too clean and polished for my taste. I appreciate it when people try new things, and aren't afraid to stick with an art style they like, even if it isn't the most popular thing in the world. Still, vaporware has been around for long enough now that the true beginnings of our visual aesthetics are essentially long forgotten.
Well, framework has one cool side-effect of their repair-friendly approach: their laptop mainboard can be used as an SBC. I've seen a few projects use it in this way, and I believe they even sell an official plastic case for it. It's a well-documented piece of computer hardware that is regularly refreshed and can be fitted easily into slim chassis.
Oh, and another cool thing is that their screens have magnetic bezels. ThinkPads are a PITA to fix if you just want to replace an LCD panel; framework makes it trivial to keep the upper chassis and only replace the part that's actually broken. That's the real pitch with Framework: replace anything easily and upgrade your computer for only the cost of the mainboard or socketable component. Some of their newer devices have a socketable PCIe expansion bay, which could be used for things like socketable GPU upgrades.
FreeCAD Linkstage - RealThunder's fork of the FOSS CAD package is less buggy, has improved rendering, and is much easier to use.
PrusaSlicer - A snappy alternative to Cura for slicing 3D models for printing. A lot of awesome features and it's constantly under development.
Blender - I've done a little here and there with Blender, but Cycles works great for product renders. It's such a vast and amazing program that can accommodate so many different use-cases.
LMMS - An FL Studio-like DAW with a simplified workflow and robust features. Lackluster plug-in support out of the box, but the addition of a VST host and waveform editor make it a fully-featured way to make music.
Element - Fully open-source VST host with support for VST3. Also works as a standalone application, which means you can create plug-in chains without touching your DAW. You can also save presets of those chains, and do crazy signal routing with the two-dimensional geometry nodes-esque UI.
Vital/Vitalium - It's literally FOSS Serum. You can follow Serum tutorials, and have them turn out. A wavetable synth that's so darn easy to use, you'll never want to use anything else. This is the quintessential FOSS future bass producer's synth.
Dexed - DX7 cartridge manager and emulator. It sounds like an awesome 80s FM synth; what can I say? Must-have for synthwave and noodling around with new sounds.
Sforzando/SFZ - An open standard and a free player for said open standard. Allows for what are essentially lossless, unzipped soundfonts.
VSCO/VSCL - A few decent symphonic instrument libraries based around SFZ. Both are CC0.
Freepats - A decent place to find more SFZ instruments. A few classics like a dry Tele and a few CC0 pianos live here.
Audacity- The only FOSS waveform editor worth using. It's extremely flexible, has a ton of useful built-in effects, and makes for a great companion to LMMS when you need to make more in-depth edits to samples.
Cardinal - FOSS fork of VCV as a VST, which enables you to create crazy virtual eurorack creations and play them with MIDI. You can also use it standalone, and the sheer number of built-in plug-ins basically guarantees your dream of automatic music generating machines are only a few clicks away.
MusicGen - A recent ML tool by Facebook that can be run locally; essentially SOTA on few-shot text-to-waveform music generation. If you have a somewhat-high-end GPU, it will probably work for you. A great tool for sampling into weird ambient tracks.
RVC - A recent tool that is fast to train and provides extremely realistic voice-to-voice conversion, especially for vocals. Ever see those AI SpongeBob singing memes? This is probably how they did it.
PhotoGIMP - While I'm still using Photoshop, PhotoGIMP is an add-on for GIMP that attempts to port the Photoshop UI to... GIMP. It's mildly successful, and potentially can ease the pains of transitioning to a new program. I'm honestly too lazy to switch at this point, but it looked promising when I peeked the last time.
Inkscape - I suck at vector anything, but this program proved to be useful on occasion. I believe it's a serious competitor to Illustrator if you bother to learn how to use it properly.
A1111's Web UI - Now totally FOSS, this absolutely insane piece of software integrates with so many different useful plug-ins to accomplish basically any conceivable image generation or AI-with-images task imaginable. You can literally do anything from normal text-to-image generation to upscaling or colorizing, and even img2img; it's multi-modal to no end.
KiCAD - Hands down the best EDA package I've used. Granted, it's the only one I've used. Still, this is how FOSS software for engineering purposes should be designed. I wish they would send their UX people over to help FreeCAD out. If you need to design a PCB for anything at all, use KiCAD, period.
NodeJS - The sole reason JavaScript is worth learning for more general computing tasks; with the sheer variety of packages on NPM, it feels like you can do anything.
VSCodium - All of what makes VSCode worth using, and none of the creepy MS telemetry.
7zip - The one program to conquer all archive formats. It works, and it's absolutely tiny. I've even installed this on Windows 2000, and of course it worked fine.
LibreOffice - Occasionally buggy, but certainly the best FOSS office package currently available. LibreOffice Writer and Calc are especially usable and work great.
VLC - Is there anything this traffic cone can't play? Superb video and audio codec compatibility, although it won't play a MIDI unless you feed FluidSynth a soundfont to atone for your sins.
Strawberry - For when you want to listen to tons of music, but you hate the clunky nature of other audio managers. Strawberry basically doesn't use a DB, and instead edits metadata directly. It will also instantly update when you add new songs or change metadata, so you rarely have to restart it. It's the fastest way to manage tons of music I've found.
PCPartPicker - A website, but still worth mentioning. This is basically the only tolerable way to part out a PC, and it makes sharing specs of your recent projects trivial.
Rufus - Someone else mentioned this one, but it's basically the only tolerable way to create bootable installation media. Works well, and it's FOSS.
Manjaro KDE - The closest you can get to SteamOS's desktop mode. Based on Arch, like SteamOS, and the same DE as SteamOS.
ZorinOS - Tolerable derivative of Ubuntu LTS, especially for Windows natives.
Quadrapassel - Best Linux Tetris clone ever conceived. It's in my Steam Deck library, for Pete's sake.
Yuzu - Pairs well with a PC handheld and a "screw Nintendo" attitude. The Switch emulator that is often marginally faster (and often slightly less accurate than) Ryujinx.
OpenRCT2 - RCT, especially the first two games by Chris Sawyer, are some of the best tycoon games ever created. OpenRCT2 is a faithful reimplantation that is going places.
Similar to The Gaze, this is a parody of Caleb Worcester's once-steadfast affinity with his formulaic art style that was designed to maximize revenue. Somewhat ironically, it seems that this art style is driving some traffic to this community here on Lemmy. I'm not saying I hate this art style, but I do think it's funny that even the first major public release of Stable Diffusion could nail it without much trouble. I think it goes to show you how unoriginal Caleb's stuff used to be. Heck, I even made a post ages ago on Reddit detailing how he had even failed to properly credit people when he used their CC-BY 3D assets. From what I can tell, though, he's straightened up his act and is really starting to produce some unique stuff, all in Blender.
In any case, this piece was one of a few initial tests I did with Stable Diffusion, even before the weights were made publicly available. I've since grown to love how it integrated tightly with my existing Photoshop workflow, and it's allowed me to amplify the kinds of public-domain-licensed artwork I'm able to create.
My goal is to share basically the entirety of my public-facing art portfolio; I think we might be close to the halfway mark. This is another experiment in minimalism from a few years ago; I believe this was from the summer of 2021. Nothing too crazy here, but I do revisit variations on the theme of flat colors and bold lines now and again.
I believe this is my most recent piece (as of 7/13/23). A classic mismash of vaporware tropes into a basic composition.
Gentoo with a custom tiling window manager written in x86 assembly in my free time.
Just kidding, I use Windows.
ChatGPT: Your argument is invalid because it doesn't change the legal reality of things.
Me: The legal reality needs changed.
The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.
Lemmy is pretty fun to host. Doubly so if you host a private instance with low latency; you'd basically be defederation proof.
I'm down, Spez. What's bad for Reddit is good for us.
Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
People were expecting Twitter to go to shit because of bad moderation, but it turns out Elon is much better at adding infuriating features that drive people away in the first place.
To be fair, the comments and posts you leave are technically being collected for display across the lemmyverse. In that sense, there's never going to be a zero data collection Lemmy client. Still, Liftoff currently has my vote. A decent little FOSS fork of Lemur, I believe.