I think people know, they just don’t give a shit because they think they’re entitled to have art and artists are arseholes for not giving them exactly what they want

When you put something out there, you allow for the possibility that people will see your work and incorporate it into their mental catalog of art and artistic process

…except when a person is doing it, they’re doing their own thing to it. They take an idea or two and filter it through their own lens and stylise it

Think about it like this - when you do data scraping, you’re still interpreting the results. You’re looking at the data and going ‘ok from this I can draw X and Y conclusions based on this and that’. AI art is like if we removed you from the process - we just shoved all the data into a black box and it goes ding “X is Y”. If you asked it why that’s so, it wouldn’t be able to tell you. You can’t see how it works so you have no idea if it’s reasoning makes scientific sense. It would not be admissible in a paper.

If you pirate shit then you have no ground to stand on for complaining about AI training.

…don’t most people kinda agree you don’t pirate from small artists where piracy is actually hurting them? There’s like, honour along thieves when it comes to piracy, and this is stepping all over the little guy who’s actually hurt by this just to get your grubby little hands on something you think you’re entitled to

The closest thing to what you’re talking about is grafting, but that’s a specific thing that only works on certain species and I don’t think can “glue” two entire halves of a tree back together, maybe just a branch at the most if you’re very careful and lucky

It’s why if you plant a seed from a random apple from the supermarket, you’re very probably not going to get a tree that produces that apple. Most commerical fruit trees (including ones from your local garden centre) tend to have a bottom half that’s hardy and resistant, and then a top half which was “glued” on that actually provides the fruit you want. The bottom half controls the genetic material in the seed, but the top half controls what the fruit will look like.

On the other hand, you can totally glue a snapped cactus back together, provided it hasn’t been too long and the two halves aren’t too damaged.

Congratulations you’re now a snake

Yeah if you live in like, Germany or France

More like Europe: sorry we don’t ship there lol. Oh we do? Hope you like paying twice the price for shipping that takes two weeks if you’re lucky

My great grandad got a couple of cockatoos when he was in his 20s right after ww2 and they still managed to outlive him. Only by a few weeks mind you - poor things starved themselves to death out of grief after he died. He told us not to worry about rehoming them because he knew they wouldn’t be able to take the loss of loosing him at such an age.

He only had them because he took up conservation work and they’re just, native to Australia. They lived out in a big aviary he’d built with trees and bushes and even a water feature along with other birds he ended up aquiring. I adored those birds, but I genuinely can’t understand how or why you’d keep such a big beautiful intelligent bird as a pet in a cage on the other side of the world and it always weirds me out when I see these birds I grew up watching roam free eating all our damn lemons in someone’s house as a pet. It’s like if you an American saw someone keeping a racoon as a pet.

A cheap fountain pen like a Lamy safari. Maybe some brightly coloured ink too.

Growing up I loved pens and my dad had some vintage Watermans he used all the time which were unquestionably Cool Pens but also really “fancy” so I wasn’t allowed to touch them, and we just didn’t know that way cheaper and less fiddly fountain pens existed because all of his came from the op shop with ink from borders and not an actual pen store. 8 year old me would’ve been estatic that not only do easier to use cheaper options exist, they’re bright yellow and also you can put any colour in them, not just boring black.

…I feel like everyone answering “Powerball numbers” or “apple stocks” is completely missing the spirit of the question

Nearly - a single bacteria is a bacterium. There’s some Latin rule going on here but I’m not sure I’d reccomend going into those weeds

This doesn’t sound like they’re charging extra if you’re over a certain weight, which is what a lot of people here seem to be assuming. Its data collection for future designs.

People are aware that you get charged for overweight baggage for health and safety reasons, right? Anything over about 20 kilos is too heavy for a single person to safely handle so they have to get two people to do it, which costs more time and money. I would be very genuinely surprised if a few dozen more kilos from overweight baggage and people would be enough to seriously impact a plane’s flight unless you’re on a small town hopper

…the overweight baggage charge is because of health and safety, not plane weight. Anything over 20 kilos is too heavy for a single person to safely handle so they have to get two people to deal with it, which takes more time

You on the other hand aren’t being handled by anyone. You’re not a health hazard.

That’s because it’s actual cult propaganda. As in “it’s literally made by the church of Scientology, based on the founding literature of Scientology as written by Scientologist leader L Ron Hubbard, by Scientologist actors”

In a vacuum? Yeah it’s cheesy sci fi. With context? Hoo boy…

You could probably back this up by looking at the alcoholism rates in Scandinavia (especially Norway and Sweden)

Scandinavia had their own prohibition and still to this day have a strict 18/21+ drinking age with booze only being sold during very specific hours (and never on Sundays or religious holidays), with anything above I think 12% only available at the government run bottle shop

Hey as someone who kinda grew up in that scenario, I really reccomend you show your kid what a windows dual boot is

Your kid doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They have friends and inevitably your kid’s going to be in a situation where their friends are like “hey, want to play this game with us?” And they can’t because it’s got a kernel anti-cheat that doesn’t work with Linux. They’re going to try and get into a hobby, only to find that the software everyone uses doesn’t work on Linux and the alternatives that do are badly maintained and frustrating to work with. They’re going to encounter a programme they need for school that just straight up does not work on Linux.

Sure you might be able to find a work around to all these things but like, can your kid? Because I speak from experience when I say that feeling like you have to be constantly running to your dad every time something doesn’t work doesn’t foster a sense of mastery, it makes you feel like you can’t do anything on your computer because you’re too small and dumb.

The teacher probably isn’t “afraid” of the Linux box, they’re probably frustrated that they don’t know what’s going on and can’t help if something goes wrong. The programmes they’ll probably teach your kid aren’t a perfect 1-to-1 match to their Linux alternatives and they’ll be left sitting in the back confused and upset while everyone else is learning about stuff in word and excel that you can’t do in libre Office. You’re not going to be known as the cool hacker dad, you’re going to be put in the same category as the crunchy mum who doesn’t let their kid eat sugar and needlessly restricts something that’s just so petty to the layman.

Demons are real and they live inside your computer delivering your emails and internet. Before computers they used to screw around with physicists and mathematians and break their theories but now they’re too busy to do that anymore.

Not religious in the slightest, my dad just saw me asking what Beastie on his BSD machine’s screensaver was and decided to fuck with me when he realised I didn’t know what a demon (in any sense of the word) was

It’s one of those things that feels really obvious if you cook a lot of east/south Asian dishes - shrimp sauce and mushroom soy sauce have a pretty similar aftersmell to them because they’re so concentrated

Niche hobby website from the 90s that’s both really useful and still updated (somewhat) - the Parker pen penography. Look at all those pens! Genuinely the most useful source of info on the topic of old Parkers that isn’t a big hefty coffee table book. Most of it probably isn’t too interesting to non-fountain pen people, but there’s some articles about the history of Parker and their decline that might be interesting if you like economics and buisness (like the one about the Itala

Because the entire point was that the character in question is genderless and this was the early 80s and also French so more modern gender neutral terms didn’t exist yet, and “let’s just smash the two gendered endings together” was his attempt at one (I’m guessing emperoratrix comes from a literal translation from French, where a female emperor is an imperatrice, and -trice is -trix in english, so imperatorice -> emperoratrix) The book also uses s/he as a pronoun instead of they.

I mean hey, it’s much more gender neutral than just defaulting to the masculine like say Le Guin did in left hand of darkness

Fine fine, then Emperoress instead. It’s what the actual English translation of The Incal uses

English should absolutely do this you’d end up with some really cool words. Also because Jodorowsky was absolutely right - emperoratrix is a fucking kickass title

Idk if this is true for the US but where I live in Scandinavia red is a common house colour because historically it was a cheap colour you could get from mixing red ochre and oil, so red barns aren’t uncommon. Then again the US midwest does have a lot of Scandinavian immigrants so it might’ve bled over culturally because there’s lot of farms up there?