Is it?

Researchers discovered the skeleton of a young Neanderthal man who was about six years old when he died. Although researchers were not sure what the child’s gender was, she was named Tina.

I can only really guess whether they’re talking about one or two subjects here. In one sentence they call a six year old a man and gender them male, then in the next they gender them female and call them Tina. The pronouns keep switching back and forth.

Scientists noted that Tina’s survival to the age of six indicates that her team provided the necessary care for the child and her mother throughout this period.

Her team? Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?

That all reads like bad AI writing to me.

That’s horrible. Haldol is like a punch to the brain. They’re going to turn these poor kids into chemical zombies.

Nah, it’s a subscription service, but it’s got a few notable YouTubers and they tend to drop extra content there. PhilosophyTube is on there, 12Tone, a bunch of people. As a platform it’s a lot less bullshit, but it’s also obviously less content.

Though now I realize you actually have to get referred by one of the other members in order to start posting, so I’m not really sure they stand to benefit that much. It kind of explains why the content has been lacking. It certainly won’t ever have the diversity of content that YouTube has with that approach.

Honestly learning that it’s more of a market stall than a garden makes me less enthusiastic. It’s there to curate what’s already on YouTube without YouTube’s limitations, not to create a better alternative that’s actually sustainable.

uBlock Origin works fine for me on youtube. Just make sure you keep it updated and don’t run multiple blockers.

This could honestly be really good for Nebula.

You have literally no idea who I am or what I do.

I used GIMP to make a mock-up of a sign for a restaurant just yesterday. Is it going to be the tool I use for the final product? No, because that’ll be in vector, but it’s a lot easier to slap something together in than Inkscape or Krita.

‘Killer apps’ are meaningless in comparison to useful apps. I’m an artist who needs usable tools for her work. GIMP qualifies. Personally, I find it way easier and more intuitive to navigate than Krita, Inkscape, or any of Adobe’s suite. It may not be for you, that’s cool.

But what isn’t cool is to pretend you know about other people’s lives and what they need. Speak for yourself, you are perfectly capable of doing that. If you don’t like GIMP’s UI, that’s great. If you think GIMP’s UI is absolutely horrible for every user and nobody would ever use it for professional work… you’re literally just completely wrong.

This is a repost. Also, like, do we need to keep spamming Beehaw’s tech section with headlines that reference rape as like, a casual way to say that a company did something dishonest? Cause I’m not really into it.

Like, seriously, is there a creepier version of this headline?

It would be nice if companies like this came out with a budget model so more people could participate in supporting their products. Lotta poor folks into FOSS.

5-7-5 is pretty stable tbh.

“Here I was, trying to burn down a building, and in swoops fucking Russia! Do prdele!”

Headline reads like the PM is annoyed that Russia botched the arson.

It really seems like humanity’s feelings about who constitutes ‘us’ has been expanding significantly in the past century or so. It makes sense. Global communication went from being non-existent to a few bits of broadcast media and specialist communication to a massive information network spanning the entire planet, capable of instant communication with negligible latency inside of, what, three generations?

When I was born none of this stuff existed. You had like, dial-up networks like Genie and Prodigy and that was about it until I was like 8 or 9 or something. I think the first time I got on the Internet i was like 10 or 11. By the time I graduated high school, literally everyone was online. By the time I was 30, most people had a device in their pocket connected to the Internet with a speed and power (if not versatility) that beat out anything we had in high school. Now pretty much everyone has it. It’s literally easier to get an Internet connection than it is to have somewhere to live.

That has a lot of implications. It’s hard to hide injustice and bullshit when everyone has a video camera in their pocket and can connect to the Internet instantly. We know what factory farming looks like, we know that exploitation looks like, and we know the scale of our destruction of the environment in a way we didn’t before.

Probably most importantly, we’re learning, gradually, that what divides our interest is less and less national borders, physical appearance, or our different ways of living, but the hoarding of wealth and power. There’s some push back, to be sure, but the Overton window has shifted substantially from where it was at the beginning of this global communication phenomenon and it’s continuing to move that way a little at a time.

When we learn compassion for ourselves and the people around us, especially the people we were once taught were so different, it makes sense that we’d begin to generally become more practiced at compassion, empathy, and careful observation that is less and less rooted in our starting biases.

It makes sense that as that happens, the people controlling the purse strings and authorizing studies that might show that ‘us’ can extend further than we imagined might also gain more insight and be less defensive.

Honestly, I don’t need the tools I use to change to become more mass-market focused. Nobody wants to eat a soup designed by consensus. I’d rather use something that suits me and have it continue to suit me than need everything to be the biggest most popular thing. Popularity seems to kind of ruin things.

Wasn’t there somebody just the other day talking about Adobe’s ever-growing bloated bullshit versus GIMP’s sleek UI and consistent features? Oh. Right. It was me.

I think when people think of the danger of AI, they think of something like Skynet or the Matrix. It either hijacks technology or builds it itself and destroys everything.

But what seems much more likely, given what we’ve seen already, is corporations pushing AI that they know isn’t really capable of what they say it is and everyone going along with it because of money and technological ignorance.

You can already see the warning signs. Cars that run pedestrians over, search engines that tell people to eat glue, customer support AI that have no idea what they’re talking about, endless fake reviews and articles. It’s already hurt people, but so far only on a small scale.

But the profitablity of pushing AI early, especially if you’re just pumping and dumping a company for quarterly profits, is massive. The more that gets normalized, the greater the chance one of them gets put in charge of something important, or becomes a barrier to something important.

That’s what’s scary about it. It isn’t AI itself, it’s AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

So, just to make this clear.

The original goalpost was: “The US is exactly the same as Russia.” This being in the context of an article talking about Russian librarians being imprisoned and active extreme suppression of the free exchange of ideas being organized by the Russian government.

There are certainly issues going on with libraries. John Oliver recently did an episode going over a lot of it. But the difference there is that these are largely organized by either fringe politicians or politicians in heavily right-wing states. I don’t really see evidence of it at a Federal level, which is what would be the equivalent to what’s going on in Russia. Even where some of this stuff is happening, it doesn’t seem to yet be as extreme as the situation there.

Is it a similar and worrying pattern? Yes. Is it ‘exactly the same thing’? Definitely not.

The US is extremely different from state to state, which can make getting anything done on a wide scale really chaotic, but it also means that we get to try new things and strike out on our own as a state if there’s popular support. That’s how we got marriage equality for queer folks, it’s how we legalized marijuana in a lot of states, and it’s what makes us able to do things like pass laws that protect people from other states’ repressive laws. We can do things like provide a safe haven for people seeking abortions who live in states where it’s illegal. There are states in the US that will literally take in trans folks as refugees from states with repressive laws. On the other hand, we have Florida, where there’s actually a no travel advisory for trans people because they’ll arrest us for trying to use a bathroom or having our gender on our driver’s license.

And like, all this stuff you’re saying is absolutely true. It is a huge mess of near unchecked capitalistic greed in a lot of cases.

But at this point we’ve moved the goal posts. Because they now seem to be “the US also has serious humanitarian problems”. Which, that’s true. But it doesn’t mean the same thing as “the US is exactly the same as Russia.”

We have our own set of problems.

Cool condescension, but I’ve been using Photoshop on and off since 2005, have occasionally used Illustrator, and used to spend an absurd amount of time with Flash. In addition to GIMP, I currently have Krita and Inkscape installed.

I literally prefer GIMP’s UI. It doesn’t have extra shit, it doesn’t try to force me into a single window, and it goes really, really well with a multi-monitor setup. I don’t care that it doesn’t automatically edit non-destructively, because my workflow is adapted to it. Layers and folders are plenty.

No one piece of software is going to be the ideal solution for everyone. That’s capitalistic exceptionalism infecting the rational analysis of what tool suits which user best. Photoshop may suit you better, but I’d take the sleek usefulness of GIMP over the bloat that accompanies all that extra stuff I don’t need any day.

Why do I need an AI strapped to my tool for pixel art, pathing, and masking?

I absolutely love the UI. It’s literally a major part of why I prefer it.

It literally isn’t. Some states are pretty shit, but the US isn’t forcing people into exile for building libraries. And some states are great places where people have rights and the legislature is actually willing to protect its population from authoritarian policies.

Those aren’t gloves, they’re just weirdly soft knuckle dusters.