307 karma · joined December 6, 2022
You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.
While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.
That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.
A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.
And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.
Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.
But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.
I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.
But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
Also, lol @ the name of the river near that site. (For the gringos: "Rego Grande", "rego" officially means ditch/trench, but nowadays it's much more commonly used as slang for butt crack. So, it's the Large Butt Crack river. Which I guess tracks for Brazil :P)
Though that's an interesting point: some games were localized on the Brazilian CN website! Not all, but it's cool that at least some of them were.
And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p
One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.
And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.
If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.
I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)
From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!
But for the people on the edge of homelessness, that $500 rent could be the difference that prevents them from going down the death spiral of homelessness, lack of options, drug addiction, etc.
Case in point: just the other week I was trying to get Rocksmith (a guitar game where you plug in an actual guitar with their custom USB cable) working on windows, and I could not do it. The latency was too high for it to be usable.
The community has many workarounds for it, but most involve getting an audio interface and connecting through that. But that really, really shouldn't be needed. I used to play this game on MacOS, and it worked perfectly. It's ridiculous that Windows fails at this.
So making Mac-like hardware with Windows/Linux software is very much a great value proposition to many people.
I've always pictured the boats moving right, sliding down, as if surfing the wave.
The mirrored version makes it clear that, no, they're going against the wave, which makes it that much more of a scary situation!
Now, having noticed that, I see how the position of the rowers in the boat would be enough to deduce that. But still, it goes to show that (at least for me, personally, in this specific case) the mirroring really did bring a more intuitive feel for what the artist was trying to represent.
When the mangaka is creating the layout, they're conceptualizing the flow not only of the panels, but also of the text inside panels, to be RTL.
Translating the text into a LTR language without mirroring the image, makes it so that your eyes have to zig zag around a bit more, going RTL panel wise, but LTR text box wise.
Compared to the problems that mirroring the art brings, I still think that's best compromise of the options, but doesn't mean it's not an actual impact on the experience, even if a subtle one.
I have wondered before, though, about how had might it be to learn to read mirrored, RLT english. Might be a bit of a challenge at first, but would enable you to read translated manga RTL with no compromises (other than the inherent lossiness of language translation in general).
_Nothing_ is actually infinite. Everything has limits.
"But X terabytes is functionally infinite for 99.99% of users"
Cool, then advertise that you offer Xtb of storage. Infinite means infinite, and if you offer anything less than that - and you do - then you shouldn't be allowed to say otherwise.
And as a bonus (for the website owner), they're also much harder to automatically block!
That said, the software on my current phone has become bad enough (lack of updates only a couple of years after release, auto installing of bloatware every so often) that I had vowed that my next phone would not be a Motorola, probably I was going for a Samsung (Pixels are too expensive where I live).
But this announcement might just be the thing that keeps me on the Moto train. I'm really hoping this works out.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100148
That's fair, I didn't notice that.
> I compared the nickels video instead, to the worst ID system in America, and they seemed to be similar levels of embellished slideshow.
He still has videos that are simpler. But back then he had nothing that came even close to those big productions he releases from time to time.
> I thought you meant paid access stuff and it's easy to see a list of those. If you're suggesting secret videos then uh maybe but that's kind of a weird assumption.
I'm suggesting he may work on stuff other than videos. Like non-general public facing/non personality driven businesses. Like Cortex Brand, and the Standard stuff before it. He obviously talked a lot about the Cortex Brand stuff, but he kept Standard on the down low. I don't cite Standard as a reason that he is not putting out videos right now, I cite Standard as evidence he isn't necessarily shouting from the rooftops every time he creates a business. So it stands to reason that he may have had other similarly "secret" ventures over the years.
> That might be the answer but it seems like a waste of his productivity potential.
I don't consume their products (they seem nice but they're far too expensive for my third world salary), so selfishly I'd also prefer if he focused more of his time on the videos. But that's an entirely different conversation from "he just pretends to be productive and actually gets next to nothing done".
When they said "It's the appearance of productivity, not actual productivity.", that does very much sound to me like an accusation that he is pretending or trying to deceive you into thinking he's a super productive person.
> And do they work? If he's failing or fooling himself then a big chunk of his podcasting is wasting everyone's time.
I'm afraid I'm not close enough to Mr Grey to be able to confidently say one way or another. Everything seems to indicate that he is a fairly successful individual, as a YouTuber with a big following and founder of at least two companies that seems to be going pretty well. So unless he is incredibly lucky and keeps failing upwards, if I had to guess, I'd say he has had at least some success in making himself work on stuff from time to time.
> I looked at a video from last year and one from eight years ago and they're pretty similar in production value. Lengths seem similar over time too
Really? I mean, let's look at some concrete examples. His latest video [1] features many unique drawings, extensive animations, even some 3d stuff with the rotating globes, and almost every scene has an actual drawn background layer.
Meanwhile, one of his biggest videos from 9 years ago [2] is pretty much just a slideshow, with no animations, and most of the video features a static generic white background.
The overarching style (i.e. stick figures, no elaborate textures) is the same, and I guess this is a partially a subjective point, but I think it's a bit crazy to say the visuals in these two videos are of similar quality.
For an example of stuff other than just the animation itself, he put out the Rock Paper Scissors video [3] two years ago, which had a pretty insane huge scope (though that might not be obvious at first glance)
> I can see he's done three members-only videos in the last two years, in addition to four and a half public videos. Is there anything else?
By definition, I'm not aware of stuff he's not made public. I just know that there is stuff that he chooses not to talk much about (he never once mentioned the Standard stuff on his podcast, for example). He also handles a good portion of the backend stuff for the Cortex Brand line of products (I think managing/planning logistics/inventory?). I'm not a member of his channel or his Patreon so I can't tell you how much he invests in exclusive videos, or if there is some other work he discloses over those channels that he doesn't in others.
[1] https://youtu.be/HSRmfNDk87s?si=lORnzazCWoe2X4Xa