samflir

[samflir]

I finally (got help) slapping Wordpress into shape and Runaway to the Stars is now releasing as a public webcomic! Thank you so much for your support over the years, and sticking with me while I'm slowly chewing my way through this book. I'm very excited to share this story! It'll be updating every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday thanks to the massive Patreon backlog. Patreon will continue to update as I finish pages, which happens on a sporadic non-schedule.

If you experience bugs with the site report them to me. Some things may occasionally break, as coding problems tend to be a very "whack-a-mole" affair; and I'm still getting used to the interface.

[samflir]

AI art has existed for long enough that i'm no longer extending patience to people who are really angry about it but fundamentally don't know how machine learning generally or image generation specifically work on a fundamental level. if you don't know the very basics of how the thing you hate works i'm not going to take you seriously

[samflir]

also obviously making fun of british food is not the same as white people being racist about food from the global south but sometimes it feels like it goes well beyond like light hearted jokes and into trying to like, invent food phrenology and i just think that seriously applying moral and political dimensions to the aesthetics of national cuisine is a silly and abd route to to go dwon. lots of countries with vibrant and exciting and popularly appealing food cultures had brutal religious repression and built colonial empires on the backs of slavery and genocide too

[samflir]

A totally different kind of calculator

My latest purchase for The Collection, a Calculated Industries ConversionCalc Plus, was mainly to further diversify my collection, as I now want to get calculators from as many distinct manufacturers as possible. As the name suggests, it's a calculator that is entirely dedicated to the task of converting between different measurements.

I picked the conversion calculator because it is by far the least specialised of all of CI's calculators and just about the only one I could imagine being actually useful to me.

After getting it, it's one of my favourite calculators ever and it goes on my desk rather than on the drawers with most of the calculator collection. I use it whenever I have unit conversions to do because it's so much more convenient than opening a new tab and typing conversions into Google, especially because Google converts to feet with a decimal point by default, instead of feet and inches:

Look Google! It's how people expect feet measurements to be formatted!

Most unit conversions are two button presses away because there's no need to type out their names or dig through menus, everything's at the base or shifted layers of the keypad. I would never use my other calculators for this purpose because they don't prioritise it enough to be faster than Google. It's faster to type "1435 mm to ft" into Google than find the conversions menu in my fx-9750Gii and use submenus every time to slowly type out "[mm] -> [ft]":

After all that effort, it still won't present it in feet and inches!

It of course works as a normal calculator, but has some odd limitations, such as lacking cubes and cube roots. Squares and square roots are elegantly integrated into the unit conversion system. Squaring a metre value will turn it into square metres, and taking the square root of an area will show you the side length of a square with that area, automatically changing from square measurements to linear ones. But none of this can happen with the cubic measurements. Oh well.

Unfortunately, this calculator doesn't support the UK imperial system. All imperial units are the US versions. This is not a huge problem for me as the vast majority of the time I use this calculator will be for communication with Americans.

Converting between units never loses precision. If you convert a number into a new unit, all of the digits of the original unit are retained no matter how many conversions you do afterward. This even applies to entering fractional amounts of inches, which has a special "/" (that is, not the usual divide symbol) button on the calculator. Fractions automatically get converted into a fraction with a power of 2 denominator, but when shown as a decimal value, are clearly still their original value rather than rounded. This is really impressive.

Another great part of the calculator's interface is the unusual number of edge cases built in to display as many digits as possible at all times. If needed, the calculator repurposes its scientific notation/fraction digits into a bonus pair of digits after the decimal place:

I thought this was a bug when I first saw it!

It also has a fourteen-segment display to the left of the main seven-segment display, the first calculator in my collection to feature one. This is used for some of the measurements that don't have dedicated segments in the LCD. But it can also display the minus sign, so MILE ends up dropping the E in sufficiently long negative numbers:

Notice here that it's also using the uppermost segment of the last digit as a minus sign for the scientific notation digits. This seems to suggest that these are not intended to show scientific notation and were originally designed to display inches with fractions, and were then repurposed for scientific notation:

In general, the interface shows an incredibly creative approach to using the LCD panel that I've never seen on any other calculator. Looking through CI's range, some of their other calculators seem to feature a similar or possibly identical display, which suggests it's a standard one that they reuse for all of their calculators.

My collection is now at 19 calculators and I have every major type of calculator:

Standard

Financial

Programmer

Scientific

Graphing

I would consider this another category from all of those, the "unit converter" calculator type. Just as scientific calculators often include programmer functionality in their BASE-N modes, this is definitely not something that this calculator is uniquely capable of, but it is something it's uniquely capable in. It is to unit conversion what my DM16L is to BASE-N arithmetic and logic.

Having a totally new kind of calculator is rare and exciting with a collection my size, which is why I've found the CI converter calculator so much more interesting than my other recent additions, which have been scientific and graphing calculators.

It ticks boxes for my calculator collecting, is genuinely useful to me and has a very unusual set of capabilities and user interface. Love it when that happens!

Calculated Industries website

#calculators #collecting

[samflir]

the bingo card template ^^

(breakdown of each box under the cut)

IP brain: several arguments against AI art hinge on IP and copyright law: e.g., accusations of plagiarism or copyright infringement, navel-gazing wrt "ownership" of art, etc. this means nothing to anyone who doesn't believe in the virtue of copyright lol

all art is hobbyism: anti-AI types frequently pretend that all art is something done solely for fun and/or personally meaningful to the artist and/or not labour

the hands/teeth!!!!: a common argument against AI art is that the hands or teeth look uncanny or unrealistic (even though that's one of the coolest things about AI art lmao)

we NEED overworked animators. To Save Human Artists: many argue against the use of AI to automate more menial aspects of creative labour (e.g., background art in animation), even when the work in question is famously backbreaking. (animation is only an example, and this box can apply to other art-related jobs)

art requires intentionality: a bizarre and common argument--"AI art isn't art because real art is 'intentional'." ignores (a) that there are intentional aspects of AI art (even setting aside the formation of prompts, the decision to choose a generated result and share it publicly is an undeniably intentional one) and (b) that several other art forms (photography, documentary, collage, etc) also preclude artists from having that flavour of foundational "every-brush-stroke" control over the piece

art requires a financial transaction: "it's only real art if someone got paid for it" (in other words, the opposite of the all art is hobbyism argumetn. thank god for the consistency of the anti-AI movement o7)

hyper-conventional conception of what makes "good" art: the manner in which opponents of AI target perceived flaws in AI art (blurriness, spatial abnormality, "count the fingers!", etc) tends to betray deeply reactionary values wrt "good" art as art that pursues representational realism.

"techbros": "-bro" is a commonly used, ill-defined pejorative that generally means "any person the speaker doesn't like." opponents of AI tend to cast what they call "AI advocates" as "techbros" interchangeable with NFT shills. besides being implicitly gendering, it's also hilarious--which side in this debate is closer to saying "i own this image so you can't right click it"?

"soul"/"humanity": there are frequent pseudo-spiritual appeals to art (even corporate art, apparently!) as having an essential "soul", "humanity", or even "godliness" that AI art lacks. this is of course meaningless to people who don't see any value in spiritualism

motte & bailey/strawman: opponents of AI frequently switch gears whenever they get cornered--when they realize that "we need stronger copyright law" is an indefensible position, they say "well REAL art requires effort!!", and when they're defeated on THAT front too they switch to "well AI is making artists lose their jobs!" and they keep doing this ad nauseam instead of acknowledging the flaws in their arguments. really it's less motte & bailey and more bailey & bailey & bailey & bailey &

ableism: people critiquing AI frequently choose to be ableist for some reason. the most common trick is inspiration porn (i.e., "so-and-so disabled person learned to paint with their teeth, what's your excuse?!")

"stolen"/"theft": two of the three favourite words of the anti-AI crowd. even if you accept the fundamental IP-brain premise (which, to be clear, you shouldn't), a baseline knowledge of how training datasets work should still make claims of theft fall flat.

reactionary BS (free space): arguments against AI tend to rely on several foundationally reactionary concepts, be they luddism, copyright, or the ~essence of humanity~

(in)directly insults collage/readymades/photography/etc: a massive portion of diatribes against AI include arguments that also lock several other mediums (the above plus music sampling/covers, choreography, film direction, etc) out of "counting" as art. frankly, a massive portion of them are indistinguishable from the reactionary outrage against duchamp's fountain

"you know it's not even ACTUALLY AI right??": people love to point out that "AI" is a buzzword and that computer programs are not actually sentient, and then pretend they've done something

AI artists are immoral/lazy/etc: several pejoratives tend to come out. see also: stupid, talentless, heartless, abusive, etc

"collage": the third favourite word. to be clear, AI image generators are NOT "collage machines", and if they were, that would be a good thing

classism: another thing that jumps out frequently. right-wing ideas about labour and poverty abound

art requires effort: another bizarre idea--the implication that more effort = better art. surely by this logic the amount of labour hours behind Avengers 16 must make it the ultimate opus

"just commission an artist": an annoying adage

stealing jobs from artists: same argument as self-checkouts

childish insults directed at AI: lots of people love making juvenile jabs at the AI. there's no sweeter irony than seeing someone write a diatribe about how AI is Not Really A Person then act as if they've just humiliated it

petty bourgeois artists = underdog: a lot of commission fanartists are convinced that aligning themselves with (petty-)bourgeois interests is going to help them in the long run

acting like AI operates independently: everyone seems to think that no humans are even involved in the process and that AI generators just sit in a dark room operating themselves, spitting images into the void

no understanding of how machine learning works: self-explanatory. opponents of AI don't seem to even know the bare minimum about the subject they argue about

(also yes i do consider diagonals to be a bingo, i dont care if it's not proper lmao)

[samflir]

the most frustrating thing about AI Art from a Discourse perspective is that the actual violation involved is pretty nebulous

like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross

but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory

by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:

Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)

No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)

Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)

it's extremely annoying to talk about, because you'll see people straight up gloating about their Intent To Plagiarize, but it's hard to stick them with any specific crime beyond Generally Scummy Behavior unless you want to create some truly horrible precedents and usher in The Thousand Year Reign of Intellectual Property Law

[samflir]

There's a difference between Stealing and Inspiration, AI is flat out Stealing, And the feelings that You have are complicated in an ever changing world, Please never forget that human beings are supposed to inspire one another and create Love, You are not Stealing anything other than your own peace of mind by comparing yourself to robotic programs made by billionaires. Which will never create anything original compared to Your Beautiful Artwork, Or anything that any living being can make.

Take care.

I disagree that there is a difference between stealing and inspiration, because I struggle with the very concept of ownership and property concerning art. You see, I’m what the kids would call a “commie”

I agree that humans are inspired by each other and love each other.

I disagree that I can’t be compared to a program or computer—I’ve never felt like a “real” human. Maybe in an otherkin way or Matrix way or capitalist alienation way or being discriminated as a kid way, but I digress. Humans can absolutely be like machines.

I agree any living being is capable of creating beauty and I like the sentiment.

Thanks for the nice message.

[samflir]

How exactly do you advance AI ethically? Considering how much of the data sets that these tools use was sourced, wouldnt you have to start from scratch?

a: i don't agree with the assertion that "using someone else's images to train an ai" is inherently unethical - ai art is demonstrably "less copy-paste-y" for lack of a better word than collage, and nobody would argue that collage is illegal or ethically shady. i mean some people might but i don't think they're correct.

b: several people have done this alraedy - see, mitsua diffusion, et al.

c: this whole argument is a red herring. it is not long-term relevant adobe firefly is already built exclusively off images they have legal rights to. the dataset question is irrelevant to ethical ai use, because companies already have huge vaults full of media they can train on and do so effectively.

you can cheer all you want that the artist-job-eating-machine made by adobe or disney is ethically sourced, thank god! but it'll still eat everyone's jobs. that's what you need to be caring about.

the solution here obviously is unionization, fighting for increased labor rights for people who stand to be affected by ai (as the writer's guild demonstrated! they did it exactly right!), and fighting for UBI so that we can eventually decouple the act of creation from the act of survival at a fundamental level (so i can stop getting these sorts of dms).

if you're interested in actually advancing ai as a field and not devils advocating me you can also participate in the FOSS (free-and-open-source) ecosystem so that adobe and disney and openai can't develop a monopoly on black-box proprietary technology, and we can have a future where anyone can create any images they want, on their computer, for free, anywhere, instead of behind a paywall they can't control.

fun fact related to that last bit: remember when getty images sued stable diffusion and everybody cheered? yeah anyway they're releasing their own ai generator now. crazy how literally no large company has your interests in mind.

cheers

[samflir]

How computer memory should be measured

I now have a conversion utility for going from old units to new ones! You can find it at my website here: https://samflir.neocities.org/newmemory

The problem with the current units

2^10 has no significance to modern computers using 8-bit bytes. 1000 has no significance to any binary computer. These reasons alone should've ruled out the current units having ever been used. They're horribly arbitrary, and although 2^10 is a marginally better option, it's still terrible.

To make an analogy with a unit we're all fine with measuring in non-metric units, we didn't redefine a year to be 1000 days long because it looks nicer. Years are still 365.25 days because time is fundamentally not base-10. Divisions of a day could go metric and in fact should, but you could not hope to make time metric beyond that. Yet this is what computer scientists have attempted to do to computer memory.

The better option

If you're familiar with the 8-bit microcomputer programming scene, you may have heard the first 256 bytes of the 6502 processor's address space being called the "zero page". This is because the most significant byte of its addresses are all 0.

From this we get the page, the fundamental grouping of bytes under the new system. For very small amounts of memory, measuring in just pages and bytes is fine. For example, the ZX Spectrum had exactly 192 pages of RAM at launch (48KB).

A page of memory is defined as the number of memory locations that can be addressed using a single byte. (2^bytewidth bytes) Note that this could vary wildly with different byte sizes. People think of a byte as strictly a grouping of 8 bits today, but byte sizes varied in early computers. The virtual computer series uses 16-bit bytes, so its 65,536 total memory locations are still only 1 page of memory. To know exactly how many bits are in a page, you need to know the byte size first, which is almost always 8 bits in modern systems.

Extensions

Obviously measuring the vast amounts of computer storage used by today's Big Data™ in units of 256 bytes is hopeless. That's where Lojban digits come in. Instead of needing to make up arbitrary prefixes as required like in the current system, just prefix a Lojban number that acts as a power to the number of pages specified.

Lojban digits are no, pa, re, ci, vo, mu, xa, ze, bi, so for 0-9. Pages could be called papages but are not, as they are a reasonable exception to the number pages as the default.

Lojban digits string together like phone numbers to form bigger numbers, so 10 is pano, 112 is papare, etc.

In an 8-bit byte system, 1 repage is 256^2 bytes, or 64KB. The Commodore 64 having 1 repage of RAM demonstrates an elegant aspect of this system, of maximum possible addressable RAM sizes being units themselves, rather than multiples of units.

8-bit addressing = 256 bytes = 1 page (MK14)

16-bit addressing = 64KB = 1 repage (Commodore 64)

32-bit addressing = 4GB = 1 vopage (32-bit processors)

If a computer has 1 unit of memory in total, the number in the unit tells you how many bytes are needed to address all of memory. If it doesn't have exactly 1 unit, then the number of the biggest unit tells you how high the most significant addressing byte will ever be + 1.

This system is extensible as far as practical purposes could ever require, and allows a reader to instantly calculate how many bytes any arbitrarily-large unit is, provided they're familiar with the Lojban digits used. It also clearly shows the underlying structure of how memory in computers is organised.

Notation

Pages are abbreviated to capital P and bytes to capital B with Lojban number prefixes abbreviated to their consonants n, p, r, c, v, m, x, z, b, s. The most significant unit is placed before the number, and subsequent page sizes are introduced with colons, before bytes introduced with a dot. Here are some examples:

431615 bytes = rP 6:149.255

12 bytes = B 12 or P 0.12

Should a byte width need specifying, add that as a number prefixed by a W to the start. The virtual computer series' RAM size could be measured as W 16 P 1.

But wouldn't non-technical people struggle with this?

Non-astronomers cope fine with our current base-24:60:60 time system and base-365.25 calendar. They'll cope fine. Non-economists also coped fine with and were resistant to changing Britain's £sd currency system and that was a pointlessly non-decimal system! The obvious benefits of the new system more than make up for any initial confusion with dealing with it. Not everything needs to be, or should be decimalised.

#measurement #computers #computer #reform #Lojban #rant

[samflir]

The worm question.

[samflir]

The worm question.

[samflir]

I asked my evil artist-replacotron to make a political cartoon based on @leonsrightarm's tags on this post by @sexhaver, and it told me that doing that conflicted with its goals of "making the maximum number of paperclips", so I should do it instead.

[samflir]

[samflir]

ok so. can something not be both the fault of capitalism and the ai shit??? can we not hate both things??? im so confused sorry

Well, I'm saying that the vast majority of what people are actually angry about when it comes to AI art is literally just assigning blame for the inherent processes of capitalism to a certain poorly-understood technology. That happens a lot. Also I think we have a lot of people who never thought that the cold logic of automation and proletarianization could reach something as sacred as art, when, no, that's actually been happening for a very long time, just in ways less obvious to your average joe. And so blaming AI art is actually misdirecting your criticism. It's at best a waste of time and at worst actually obscures the real cause of harm here. You don't want to mystify or obscure a material/political problem if at all possible.

As far as the other criticisms of AI, the broadly philosophical ones, the ones that center around "soul" or "plagiarism" or how bad and lazy it is that "a computer does all the work" I simply do not think these are real problems. I just disagree that a person or persons programming a computer to build a new model off millions of images and then make outputs from that model constitutes immoral art theft, or is in any way Not Art just because it is arguably derivative and takes minimal input from a single person. And if your definition of Real Art is that it is wholly novel, has no derivations, inspirations, ripped elements, or uncited references, requires significant effort and physical exertion, and does not overly involve non-human processes? Then we do not agree on what art is.

Furthermore, I think somebody who claims to hold those definitions does not hold them consistently or uniformly, applies them conveniently and with bias, does not examine the origins or implications of their underlying assumptions, and is straying into conservative or outright reactionary traditionalist definitions of art that simply will not stand up to how people choose to express themselves in the digital age, or even how art has been made throughout history up until now.

Art is inspiration and copying and collaging and imitating and remixing and cutting up and rearranging and yes even stealing and it always has been and always will be, and it has never ever been immune to the economic and political realities of its time. If you can recognize that, then you can build a more balanced, nuanced, and—crucially—politically useful understanding of the problems at hand.

[samflir]

"artists" really seem to believe they are a superior class of citizens in society , as opposed to just "person who makes art"

Art is either something all humans can inherently do through every facet of living as a human being, or it is a hyper specific craft that only the chosen few can understand and produce. It can't be both.

[samflir]

Hot take about hot takes (a hot metatake, if you will)

If your "AI art isn't real art" take would also rule out

-photography -collage -surrealism -dadaism -readymades -generative art

you are not making some Inspired Point about Art™, you are simply being reactionary.

[samflir]

anyway ai discourse is kicking off on my dash again and i just want to reiterate that i fully and 100% believe that "cutting up and remixing pre-existing intellectual property without prior permission" should never be made illegal and it would be utterly horrifying if the united states attempted to criminalize it.