Oct 262022
 

It’s a long video, but it’s interesting to listen to an artist rail against AI text-to-image art generators. The guy knows that his field is as endangered as a factory workers; even if AI never get *quite* as good as human artists (doubtful), the sheer volume of art – images, music, videos, whole movies – will simply overwhelm the pitiful output that a finite number of humans can produce. Hell, my “War With The Deep Ones” stories, currently something like 400 pages, could be overwhelmed by ten thousand pages of adequate AI-generated content on the same subject in a matter of seconds. Once AI “writers” are there, I stand no chance of making a dime off fiction. I suspect it won’t be too long before “US Supersonic Bomber Projects” could be written and fully illustrated by an AI, with a thousand-page tome full of readable, factually accurate descriptions and beautiful general arrangements and inboard profiles and full-color 3D renderings. Humans like myself have some current advantages due to the fact that most of the archives are not scanned and available online… but *that* probably won’t last long. On the other hand… as AI start taking history-writing jobs away from humans, these humans will have neither the incentive nor the funds to go to archives or pay archives to scan stuff. So it may be that a number of archives end up closing the doors and turning off the lights due to lack of interest. And thus history that *could* be written won’t be.

Hmmm.

 Posted by at 7:25 pm
Oct 252022
 

So, antiAmerican American Brittney Griner was arrested a long time ago trying to bring illegal substances into Russia. This is not really a debatable point; Griner admitted it. You can argue whether or not its appropriate that hash oil should be illegal or not, but in Russia, it is. And it’s not a profoundly stupid law, like “no wearing purple on Tuesdays” or some such; prohibitions on drugs are virtually universal though the specifics vary. I believe it’s illegal to simply transport it across state lines *within* the United States, so taking it internationally was either profoundly stupid, or profoundly arrogant in the “those laws don’t apply to me, I’m too important” form. Well, she was arrested, put on trial, convicted, sentenced to nine years and just had her appeal denied. So, sucks for her, but at least she doesn’t need to worry about being subjected to the US National Anthem for a while. So that’s nice for her.

Listen to the news piece below. One thing I’ve noticed in the coverage of Griner over the past couple years is you don’t hear her speak too often. Gee… I wonder why.

Huh.

 

 

 Posted by at 1:16 pm
Oct 242022
 

Posting delayed due to “issues.”

Bad day for someone… but not as bad as it could  have been. And probably not as bad as he had set out to make it for someone else. Interesting how cleanly the vertical stabilizer came off.

UPDATE: This incident seems to have occurred in June, well inside Russia, after hitting a power line (note that the vertical stabilizer seems to have been cleanly sliced off).

 

 Posted by at 7:52 am