On a late train home, a guy starts hitting on me, eventually asks if I have "a man". I tell him Im gay so he & his friend start telling me about Jesus & about how being gay is a sin. So I started preaching to them that Paul is a liar and betrayer of Christ.Good fun.

One of the fascinating problems with trying to create non-corporate social media, alternatives to Twitter etc, and online life in general is that eventually someone has to decide who gets an account. Who gets a username, a domain name, etc. That has to be controlled by someone at some level to manage bad actors. For services like twitter, masto, etc, it's the person who runs the server. For domain names, which is the basis for identity on #indieweb that's done by registrars who use the fiscal cost of registration to manage who gets what, so then it's pay-to-play or piggyback off someone else's domain and thus you're beholden to someone else again. There's no equitable technical solution. A social solution is required.

if you put a symbol on your dice that replaces one of the numbers, I will not buy or use your dice. Working out what number the symbol means is too much work when I'm trying to play a game

Perhaps it might behove us to consider AI art through the lense (no pun intended) of the last piece of technology to revolutionise art production: the camera.

The development of the camera meant that suddenly it was possible for anyone to create images that were far above the standard that the layman could previously achieve. But it was also a tool that required its own artistry and skill to produce actually beautiful results. As the technology got better, the skill required to achieve beauty lessened but mastery of the form became more complex.

Meanwhile artists continued to do the work of making art, while the work of doing simple visual reproduction of a scene was automated. The focus of the visual artist's labour became less menial and more about inspiration and skill, though those whose livelihoods depended on work on those more menial tasks lost out. Many artists took the new tool and used it as part of their process, remixing and manipulating the camera's output into something that was wholly new.

It also made it incredibly easy to make cheap copies of artist's work, making it harder to tell if something was a fake. We collectively agreed that these reproductions were less valuable than original work and placed more value on proving the authenticity of works. Many artists also used this to reduce menial labour, selling photographic prints of their work for much cheaper than the original, but allowing their work to provide products to different market segments. Copying an artist's work in this way without their consent was established to be illegal.

As the technology of AI generated art progresses I don't doubt we'll see the same patterns emerge (no pun intended) in the discourse and changing shape of art practice and industry, but hopefully with a little hindsight we can be less alarmed about it.

#screenshotsaturday Monday again for #projectWeirdLittleGuy. I've been working on a shader to make my heightmap terrains look nice. This one is a combination of a triplanar shader by @yafd and a stochastic sampling shader for unity by /u/rotoscope. I've put it up on github here: https://github.com/acegiak/Godot4TerrainShader

Sooo... I've reinstalled my blog software from scratch so you might get new follow requests from me and might need to refollow this account? I don't entirely know.