Ran

(In all honesty, I was first going to respond to @polishgenius went for a walk with the dogs first, and on mulling over I decided that in fact I should delete the post because it seemed a very wrong thing for someone to drag some other member's name into their post in a way that seems to me mis-guided, at best. But since @karaddin appreciates it, I'll just respond to it.) Has no one really taken aboard her views? I can see multiple posts in the thread quoting her and responding to her. Doesn't everyone here agree with her in rejecting "one-size-fits-all", a position that may not have seemed so straightforward at the start of the thread? Didn't she agree with the idea I'd noted that maybe we'll need to figure out some different metrics for dividing up competitions but that it seems a very hard problem? Like, we've had a discussion. It continues. Now replying to her and quoting her isn't enough. What is? Simply stop talking? Just agree reflexively? Turn the thread into an AMA? I really don't know what to do with this notion. I appreciate everyone's contributions, but no one has a monopoly on discourse.

Horniness and AI... 98% of AI images being produced is porn, near as I can tell -- waifu porn, anime porn, furry porn, I-can't-even-describe-it-porn, deepfake porn (the worst). AI ain't horny, but for sure most of the people who are using it are horny as fuck. Not just image generators. Local LLMs are being trained to be sex chat bots and smut fiction manufacturing bots. "The internet is for porn" can now be "The AI is for porn" ETA: Okay, ChatGPT and Suno.ai delivers

But, Kal, why is this issue in particular of particular importance to you? You're basically a sheep engaged by political marketing talking (in your view) to other sheep who are also engaged by political marketing, but you're still just a sheep, so ... why should anyone actually listen to anything you're saying? You're not an island of rationality in a vacuum. You're highly politically motivated, as anyone who looks at any random page of the US politics thread will see, so it seems you've fallen into the very trap you're tut-tutting about. It's a really strange thing. I assume you are very much aware of it, but it seems to make any discussion futile because you're now no longer in the position of someone offering your own reasoning or views, but rather in the position of someone who is repeating someone else's reasoning because their marketing has hooked you.

We've generated thousands of images with Stable Diffusion, I must admit, and only some small percentage of them were worthwhile for our purposes. We've been using them to create character images on the wiki for characters who've been around in the public literature a decade or three and never seem to attract attention from artists, or maybe there's some art out there but we haven't gotten permission to use it. It seems relatively harmless to me -- no one's been clamoring to depict these characters, no one's losing out on a job (though, amusingly, I know one of the editors has commissioned a few pieces to replace some of the images per our policy of preferring art from actual artists , which IMO was pretty cool). We have a pro artist or two who've offered to do some pieces for free, but I find myself embarassed to take them up on it when they should, rightly, be focusing on paid work. You can see a progression in the images from the early SD 1.5 to the latest SDXL variations. It's gotten better, some of it is quite poor, some is good in spots and bad in others (the Clarissa Dayne I like a lot as a composition, except the balustrade is just a mess that I should probably take [another] crack at fixing in Photoshop). Is any of it great? I don't think so. I do think a few came out rather well, but I'm sure a genuine artist would easily find faults in even the aesthetically most pleasing of them. But then, we have some non-AI art that, I admit, looks terrible to my eye, but there they are, and there they stay unless some artist tackles the same subject(s) better and gives us permission to use the piece. I should probably run some of the early ones through SDXL + Controlnet, now that I think of it. Odds are something a bit nicer may come out, anyways.

Less than two weeks from the first semi-final, and there's been a bit more movement as Ukraine has fallen while the Netherlands has climbed. Switzerland's Nemo is still being booked at 25% odds to win, but Croatia's Baby Lasagna is at second place for some inexplicable reason with a 17% chance to win. And the Netherlands has now climbed into third place with a 15% odds, leaving Italy to continue to sit at about 11%. I think at this stage, barring big surprises, the contest is between Switzerland, Croatia, and maybe the Netherlands. I don't think Angelia Mango is getting enough traction for Italy at this stage, despite well-received live performances at fan events. (Still think they should have sent Annalisa!)

They've been trying to make it for a couple of decades. I wouldn't hold my breath that they'll crack it this time, but who knows

Hah. Didn't think of that. The novel in question, after searching, was Noble House, set in 1960s Hong Kong. I didn't realize that they made a miniseries of it, too, with Pierce Brosnan in the lead.

I was just watching Davie504's latest video where he messed around with AI, and mostly on the art side it's terrible, but then he inputs the lyrics of a song he wrote as part of a collab (or maybe it was the concert) with TwoSetViolions, and, well.... the result was actually pretty impressive, IMO and all considered. He certainly seemed surprised after how dodgy the AI images had been.

There have been known doping athletes who won some, but also lost some despite their doping. The fact that they lose despite having an unfair advantage doesn't make the unfair advantage non-existent. It's still an advantage they have. I'm reminded of Oscar Pistorious and the debates over his blades, and particularly the enusing performance of other double-amputees who saw his performance, saw the rules adjusted to allow his blades ... and then went a step above and switched to longer blades because the rules allowed them to do so, which turned out to make a clear and obvious improvement on their performance by giving them greater stride length than they had had before (which Pistorious and his team complained about, rightly). And yet, how many athletes did this "really" affect? Very few! And yet ... people cared, as they should have, because these were all questions of fairness. Just as people care about doping, as with Lance Armstrong. Re: US Women's team being destroyed in a scrimmage, the FC Dallas Academy U-15 team won 5-2 (as Zorral says). Looking up the goal scorers reported in the article, only Kameron Lacey made any real headway professionally, apparently playing some games for the Jamaican national team and is now on a Division II team in the US after a year in Division III.

I read somewhere or other that Clavell wrote a later novel with a minor Japanese character whose last name was Anjin, had blue eyes, and when asked shared that the family lore was that they were descended from an Englishman who became a samurai.

Just to jog your memory.

So long as you can't copyright works produced by AIs, I don't really think commercial artists will have much to concern themselves about. Artists who have managed to make a living via commissions over the internet for fan art, RPG characters, etc., well... the internet taketh, and the internet taketh away. I think I made the point in the past that far more artists than ever exist and make a living, and nothing says this state of being was going to be eternal. I do think the genuinely good artists will adapt AI into their workflows to increase their ability to produce and perhaps push their art in directions they've never imagined. I've heard of several who've already started doing so, training AI on their own styles to speed up some of the make-work part of their jobs. As to "support artists", well, artisans used to make the furniture people sat on, the rugs they had in their rooms, the lace in their curtains, the cups in their cupboards, the paintings on their walls, etc., etc. Unless you buy only hand-made examples of all of this, you're fairly selective about which artists you support and which you don't.

Yes we did. Buntaro yells at him and pushes him away when he's asking Mariko about when they'll be back or some such, and then more recently in the 8th or 9th episode where he tries to dissuade her from... was it her suicide? By saying how he won't honor her or some such.

What BFC says. Transmen compete at substantial disadvantage in most competitive sports I can think of. Giving them trans-only events would be fairer to them, too. One place where women defeat high school state champions is the 5,000 meter... but fully adult men are substantially faster than junior/senior boys, at least glancing at the WRs, so even there I'm not sure they would have a real advantage.