A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them "sleepers" these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.

And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I'm not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I'd feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.

This is quite amusing in retrospect.

From the article: "Tesla began delivering the Blade Runner-inspired truck in November 2023"

Me: Fuck you. That is an insult to Syd Mead's legacy.

I hope that, at some point in the series, they reference his prized bottle of Chateau Picard that he's been saving for a special occasion.

It's important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It's just that in ages past the VC's would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder's dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.

More to the point, the company using shady means to collect the data does not need to care if the data is useful, just that it's marketable.

I always thought Troi should have been more of a goth princess. The real kind, the in-a-black-hoodie-screeching-for-snacks-writing-bad-poetry-on-the-living-room-floor kind, not the dressed-up-for-a-show-in-black-fishnet-and-lace-finery kind.

Masterful gambit, sir.

Well, the photo in question is: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberspace/53570370332/

Funny, just this morning I woke up to someone commenting on one of my pieces of art that I'd posted on Reddit that if I hadn't put in the comment how I did it, they'd have thought it was an AI generated picture.

It's super-painful to be a technologist and an artist at the same time right now because there are way too many people in tech who have no understanding of what it means to create art. There's people in the art community who don't really get AI either, of course, but since they are trending towards probably the right opinion based on an incomplete understanding of what the things we see as AI actually are, it's much easier to listen to them. If anything, the artists can labor under the misapprehension that the current crop of AI tools are doing more than they actually are.

In the golden age of analog photography, people would do a print and include the raw borders of the image. So you'd see sprocket holes if it's 35mm film or a variety of rough boundaries for other film formats. And it was a known artistic convention that you were showing exactly what you shot, no cropping, no edits, etc. The early first version of Instagram decided that those film borders meant "art" so of course they added the fake film borders and it grated on my nerves because I think it was the edges from a roll of Velvia, which is a brilliant color slide film. And then someone would have the photo with the B&W filter because that also means "art" but you would never see a B&W Velvia shot unless you were working really hard on a thing. So this is far from the first time that a bunch of clueless people on the tech side of the fence did something silly out of ego and ignorance.

The picture I posted is the result of a bunch of work on fabbing, 3D printing, FastLED programming, photographic technique, providing an interesting concept to a person and an existing body of work such that said person would want to show up to some random eccentric's place for a shoot, et al. And, well... captions on art exist for a reason, right? It adds layers to the work to know that the artist was half-mad when they painted it and maybe you can tell by the painting's brushwork or just know your art history really well but maybe you can't and so a caption helps create context for people not skilled in that particular art.

And, there's not really "secrets" in art. Lots of curators and art critics will take great pains to explain why Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko so if you are still wandering around saying "BUT IT LOOKS LIKE GIANT SQUARES" that's intentional ignorance.

Now, I've been exploring my particular weird genre of art for a while now. Before AI, Photoshop was the thing. Much in the same way as I could have thrown a long enough prompt into a spicy-autocomplete image generator, I also could have probably photoshopped it. Then again, the tutorials for the Photoshop version of the technique all refer back to the actual photographic effect.

Describing something as it's not has long been a violation of social norms that people who are stuck in a world of intentional ignorance, ego, and disrespect for the artistic process have engaged in. In the simultaneous heyday of Second Life and Flickr, people wanting to treat their Second Life as their primary life caused Flickr to create features so people could mediate this boundary. So, on one level, this isn't entirely new and posting AI art in the painting reddit is no different from posting filtered Second Life to the portrait group on flickr. It's simple rudeness of the sort that the unglamorous aspects of community moderation are there to solve for.

I have gotten quizzed about how I make my art, but I've never seen anybody go off and then create a replica of my art, they've always gone off and created something new and novel and interesting and you might not even realize that what got them there was tricks I shared with them it's so different. Artists don't see other art in the gallery and autocomplete art that looks like what they saw, they incorporate ideas into their own work with their own flair.

Thus, there's more going on than just mere rudeness. I've been doing this for a long time now and the AI companies have a habit of misrepresenting exactly what content they have stolen to train their image models. So it's entirely likely that the cool AI picture that someone thinks my art looks like is really just autocompleted using parts of my art. Except I can't say "no" and if there was a market for people making art that looks roughly like mine, I'd offer paid workshops or something.

Yah, I have to say that the appeal of a unique car, plus the appeal of the "FEATURE" license plate that was almost certainly already taken, and the possibility of eliciting violence all makes me sad that I've never owned one.

A WipeoutXL-esque hover racing game, maybe with open-world-racing-game vibes, with the deep technological complexity of a flight simulator like X-Plane.

I spent a bit of time in college tooling around with it, actually, even though it turns out that years later I'm really glad I didn't end up in the game development industry.

Way I figure it, it would require you to think about systems-level issues. It's a Formula-One styled thing so if you end up exceeding the altitude limit in competition, ten second penalty to your time. Do you want to use a lifting-body styled groundplane? Or lift-fans, knowing that that comes out of your power budget but will do a better job of keeping you away from the altitude limit, less susceptible to other people's wing vorticies, and avoid needing sturdy wheels? Etc.

As open world games have gotten more open world and popular these days, I suspect that the difference between then and now is that it might be funner with tune codes a la Forza Horizon so that you could play it without being quite as much of an expert. And maybe a lot of the more complicated mechanisms might actually be a little less intrusive when you can spend a bunch of time tooling around the landscape running into trees without the strain of competition before you actually get going.

There's a lot of flight simulator players and frankly part of the joy seems to be that, when it is really really complicated and accurate, you are learning skills that might be useless-ish but there's still that joy of learning and also of playing around with a large dangerous object that could kill a lot of people and not being worried about that when you flip an airliner upside down. And/or the "I could be an airliner/stunt pilot if the FAA wasn't so damn restrictive on the medical" vibes.

Well played.