People keep meaning different things when they say “Generative AI”. Do you mean the tech in general, or the corporate AI that companies overhype and try to sell to everyone?
The tech itself is pretty cool. GenAI is already being used for quick subtitling and translating any form of media quickly. Image AI is really good at upscaling low-res images and making them clearer by filling in the gaps. Chatbots are fallible but they’re still really good for specific things like generating testing data or quickly helping you in basic tasks that might have you searching for 5 minutes. AI is huge in video games for upscaling tech like DLSS which can boost performance by running the game at a low resolution then upscaling it, the result is genuinely great. It’s also used to de-noise raytracing and show cleaner reflections.
Also people are missing the point on why AI is being invested in so much. No, I don’t think “AGI” is coming any time soon, but the reason they’re sucking in so much money is because of what it could be in 5 years. Saying AI is a waste of effort is like saying 3D video games are a waste of time because they looked bad in 1995. It will improve.
I’m using https://alexandrite.app, aside from the fact that it’s very clean it lets you open posts without leaving your feed which is awesome. I spend most of my time on mobile though, and for that I use Liftoff.
PayPal. Oh god, PayPal. They shut down my account over a misunderstanding (from their end), and did nothing but spam me with pre-written corpospeak every time I begged to talk to a person. I would send a ticket explaining EXACTLY what happened and I would get the same copy-pasted response from the human representative that literally ignores everything I said and says now that my account is flagged, I should stop using Paypal and there’s nothing I can do about it.
I’m not kidding, that was the response they kept sending me. If your Paypal account gets tagged as suspicious they literally tell you to bugger off and stop bothering them. I’ve never seen anything like it.
After a few weeks of insulting and attacking them they finally decided I was more trouble than it’s worth, allowed me to close my account and make a new one. It only took like 10 tickets of getting the same pre-written “good luck trying another service” response. By far the worst company I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with, but unfortunately I need it for work.
This is also a good place to say, never store any money on your PP account. This isn’t an uncommon story, if you look on Google there are tons of cases of people getting locked out of their account for virtually no reason.
I make games and stuff. Let me tell you, it’s pretty hard to get noticed on the internet. There comes a point where whatever you’re selling will be popular enough in a closed circle that it spreads through word of mouth but before that you need to get an audience. That means some shameless advertising in social media and maybe buying some ad spaces. If you don’t get that momentum whatever content you’re making might be dead on arrival. A lot of people and companies making ads don’t actually like annoying others with them, but it’s really hard to get anyone’s attention now that there’s like a billion new things releasing every day.
I don’t have anything that important to say but I will say that Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is one of the worst movies I’ve seen this decade and somehow it has an RT rating of over 90% for both critics and audiences.
Imagine a murder mystery that takes over half the movie’s runtime for the murder to happen, a script that sounds AI generated, a plot centered around a plot point that makes literally no sense, and probably the stupidest ending I’ve ever seen in a movie. Yet every time someone talks about that movie online goes on about how fun it was, I swear everyone has to be a bot because I can’t believe that many people liked this hack of a movie.
College exams. Life after graduation has its own stresses but nothing was more stressful to me than having 6-7 exams coming up and having to spend so much time and effort preparing for stuff I don’t care about that much.
At some point it got so bad I’d wake up a few times at night drenched in sweat a day before exams. Yeesh. I guess it was partly my fault for taking it too seriously but I couldn’t switch that off.
There are quite a few websites for hosting webcomics but the issue is that AFAIK all of them banned AI related stuff whether it be because artists dislike it or them being seen as low effort spam. That’s going to be the hardest part of convincing others to give your comic a shot.
For programs I suggest Krita, professional artists use it and it even comes with comic templates to get you started with panels.
I haven’t used it at all. The fediverse can communicate with eachother, sure, but every website has its own ways of browsing and listing posts. Websites have to make a bridge to another website so you can actually interact with them in a way that makes sense, like how kbin has its own way to interact with Mastodon.
Unless someone makes a super app that lets you browse each implementation with one account, I think the Fediverse will mostly stay split with limited cross-app communication.
Plenty of devs think it’s easier than it is. A ton of games are built on proprietary tools, and then you get into legal hot water on whether you can even give away things like the soundtrack or assets you bought like stock sound effects.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they looked at it after the petition and thought “wait, I actually can’t open source this”