• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I don’t really care? Is that allowed? 🤷‍

    I’m old enough to remember when computers started to be used for art, and how traditional artists were complaining about how soulless the end product would be, and how unskilled people could ‘fake’ being good artists because the computer does most of the work for them. I mean the undo function of a computer on its own is putting incredible creative power into the hands of even the most useless digital artist, power that da Vinci himself would have creamed his little loincloth over. And the copy & paste function - and all of the other everyday functions all PC users depend on - cut down the production time by orders of magnitude compared to traditional painting/drawing. This isn’t even getting into the incredible transformation tools on offer in Photoshop (or even MS Paint 1.0).

    Remember matte painters who painted incredible photorealistic chunks of the screen in films? Do Photoshop users of today feel any qualms about having extincted the fuck outta those people? Would they have even entertained the woes of those artists if they were around at the time? Would they have been calling for government intervention to prevent non-traditional matte painters from taking those jobs?

    What about sculptors and stop-motion pros? Movies have been riddled with worse-looking CGI replacements for those things for half a century. Any shits given about those artists who spent their lives perfecting their craft only to be supplanted overnight by a cunt with a Pentium who produces objectively worse results?

    AI is just the latest sabot-magnet disruption, and it won’t be the last, despite the apocalyptic language around it. Either find a way to live with it and exploit it, or lay down in the Artists of Christmas Past mass grave and pull the clay in over yourselves. Or, you know, go ahead and try to uninvent it or whatever it is you’re proposing 👍 And if you really wanna go hardcore, uninstall all of your digital art tools, get yourself an easel and see what you can do in the “real world” with your “real talents” without recourse to time-saving, labour-deleting, instantaneous bespoke-brush-manifesting technology.















  • Analogue clocks, particularly clock towers in towns, but also just basic clocks on the wall in your home. With smart devices everywhere, it seems like they’re not needed and probably old-fashioned. The circular 12-hour clock face probably feels like the floppy disk icon or the rotary telephone, in terms of how ‘of another era’ it is, but it’s still a fantastic and resilient form factor for the purpose of visualising the passage of time. Digital is great, but analogue will be with us for the foreseeable future (and I’m including in that the representation of analogue in a digital form, e.g. on smartwatches that provide a classic clock face graphic).




  • If you’re in debt and it’s affecting your mental health and making you contemplate ending it all, don’t worry, there is a way to get your life back again. The following info is about the UK and N. Ireland, but it is highly likely similar info is available wherever you happen to be:

    StepsChange is a charity that acts as a middleman between you and your debtors. The charity will negotiate reasonable and specially-tailored monthly payments for your debtors, which - depending on your income and savings and all that - will not cripple you every month. You can pay off what you owe and still have money left to live your fuckin’ life. Yes it’s a charity, but they don’t give you free money, you pay your own debts, but you just do it in a way that isn’t ruining you.

    I’ve seen this work with multiple family members, so I can 100% vouch for StepsChange and the dream-like positive change it made in their lives. It takes what amounted to many hundreds of pounds a month and reduces it to like 30. It’s insane how much they can help you. Please contact them if you’re in financial trouble.

    Similar charities must exist elsewhere, so look into it if you’re not from these parts. There is always hope.



  • 58008@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux, openSUSE ready for Everyday Users
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    7 months ago

    I love that Linux exists, but I really don’t appreciate the bullshit PR speak about how regular users can switch from Windows with little-to-no friction. The second something doesn’t work as expected, even a minor thing, they’ll be at a complete loss about how to even investigate the issue, let alone correct it. Windows competency doesn’t transfer to Linux for even the most basic under-the-hood stuff. The less honest you are about that, the fewer people will try Linux a second time, and the more people will write off the entire endeavour as being the domain of computer experts/enthusiasts.