Reality is Overrated
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Toph Bei Fong
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#i know people have started criticizing the#‘men are afraid of getting laughed at women are afraid of getting killed’#but this is real?
Oh, yes.
A few years ago I went to pick up a woman I met on OKCupid for a date, and a friend of hers was there. They kind of over-explained “Oh, she just showed up to say hi” and there was a vague nervousness in the air that even my autistic ass was picking up on. Her friend was playing conspicuously with her phone. I went “Ah, the safety. Need to get a picture?”
Dead silence for about a second and a half, then the friend took a picture, looked at my date, and said “Have fun” and walked out the door.
(I would ordinarily have been clueless, but I’d just been asked to be the safety the previous night.)
My advice to male-presenting folks: recognize that this not your problem. By which I mean, this sort of security check isn’t a problem for you. It doesn’t hurt you. You aren’t being insulted or disrespected. And if you treat it like what it is– a reasonable adaptation to an unreasonable situation– and just roll with it, your dates will be more comfortable, and you will have a better time as a result.
The same applies to phone calls mid-date. Let them answer the damn phone without drama.
They aren’t accusing you of being a dangerous person. The very fact that they are willing to go on a goddamn date with you means that they have extended a certain level of trust. But the fact remains that there isn’t really a way to distinguish between “a man who isn’t dangerous” and “a man who knows how to behave like he’s not dangerous.”
there isn’t really a way to distinguish between “a man who isn’t dangerous” and “a man who knows how to behave like he’s not dangerous.”
(via televisionflag)
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Fun fact: We know the size of the Pokémon world because Scarlet and Violet has framerate issues
Video games tend to do this thing called “culling,” where they don’t render things that aren’t in use. In Breath of the Wild, there’s no reason for Link to be able to see how many apples are on a tree in Hateno when he’s all the way in Tarrey Town, or know how many Bokoblins are running around Hebra Mountain. Link has a radius around himself that spawns in people, enemies, items, etc, so that the player gets the full experience of a rendered world without the game having to keep track of 850 Hearty Radishes sparkling.
This is good.
Scarlet and Violet has really AGGRESSIVE culling. The devs knew the game was framey and did everything they could up until the last possible second to save on resources.
ALTThe player has a single square that’s always rendered around them, which takes about 10 seconds to run across. Besides that, all that’s visible is whatever the camera is facing; if the camera can’t see it, it does not exist.
You might think that this would be good for performance, since the game isn’t calling as many assets constantly. And you would be right, if the things culled were ALL that the game was trying to render.
We all know at this point about the memory leak problem the game has, where it won’t toss garbage data it’s not using. This is supposed to account for the framerate drop; however, if it was ONLY the memory leak, it should start out smoothly, then decay over time until it’s unplayable.
So what gives?
ALTThis is the ocean.
It’s pretty. It’s got a tiny bit of reflection, some gentle waves, a nice gradient. A beautifully made ocean without repetitive textures is always nice.
ALTTHIS IS THE OCEAN.
IT IS NOT CULLED.
Look at the SIZE of this thing! Paldea is an ANT in the middle of this puddle. It’s rendering ALL of this, ALL its sparkles and waves, ALL the time.
Now, this is usually the part of the post where I’m like “and because we know the size of the ocean, based on the coastlines and wind direction, we can figure out how big the rest of the planet is by comparison!” like I did with Breath of the Wild over a year ago.
No.
Another video game term you might not be familiar with is a “skybox.” Basically, to give the illusion of faraway objects, clouds, mountains, etc, and to hide the black void most 3D games are built in, games will have a texture wrapped around either the level or where the player is standing. For example:
ALTThis is a level from Twilight Princess called Sacred Grove. You normally can’t see the bottom parts of this, hence why it turns into a gray plane, but the parts you CAN theoretically see by looking through the trees are colored so you think you’re looking at a sky. You can see the edge of the void down in the bottom right corner.
ALTHere’s another one from Twilight Princess. You can see the different textures that stack on top of each other, as well as the blue skybox that’s centered around Link when he’s in the area. You, as the player, FEEL like you’re in a small part of a larger world, because the devs cleverly structured together elements you CAN see in other areas into the background.
More complicated versions of skyboxes, typically semi-circular, are called skydomes.
ALTThey tend to look kind of like snowglobes, because you do not need to render anything that can’t be seen. There’s no situation in which the player should be able to fall lower than the level, so there’s no reason to render the dome into a sphere in the event that that happens.
In Scarlet and Violet, it would make sense for the skydome to end where the ocean does. There’s no situation in which the player manages to go past or underneath the ocean, so even if you wanted a gigantic ocean size like they have, you don’t need to use more sky to encompass that.
They did not get this memo.
ALTYou might be thinking to yourself “wow, that looks like the curvature of the Earth!”
ALTAND YOU WOULD BE RIGHT!!!!!
Why is this here. Why is it so big. I can’t even see Paldea anymore. What exactly was planned for this.
Clever readers might have noticed that I labeled this “Skysphere” and not “Skydome.”
That’s because it for some reason is a sphere. Paldea is sitting in the middle of a fully rendered gigantic sphere in space. For some reason.
ALTLook at Earth. Look at Spain, which Paldea is supposed to mimic.
ALTI overlaid Spain over Paldea and made them roughly the same size. Assuming the two to be 1:1, the OCEAN is bigger than Earth.
If I then take that size and apply it to the skysphere:
ALTHI. WHY IS THIS A THING.
The skysphere is bigger than the PROPORTION OF THE SUN TO THE EARTH:
ALTI will be taking this as canon sizing until the Pokémon Company comes out and either CULLS this monstrosity and stops forcing our Switches to render THE SUN, or until the Pokémon Company comes out and gives us a canon planet size.
(via dimetrodone)
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this is the first real drawing I’ve been able to finish since I got my arm fixed so it’s only appropriate that it’s Alphonse :-)
(via weirdoldmanhoho)
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hello board of education here is my proposal for a new mandatory k12 curriculum class
lesson plans include:
- “no, they aren’t putting litterboxes in schools for people who identify as cats”
- “no one unironically identifies as dreamsexual”
- “if you ignore trolls they will go away, they want you to react”
- “you should just assume troll/bad faith like 80% of the time, because even if they aren’t there’s literally no downside to blocking them and doing nothing else”
- “if an account made yesterday says something offensive while posing as a fan of something, that’s obviously not a real account”
- “you really don’t need to give your thoughts on every opinion you see online”
if you see a jackass online. block them! that’s how you show racists theyre not welcome, engaging with them in any way just invites them in even if you’re fighting with them.
(via ariapmdeol)
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Emotional support demon came in today to help me deal with a migraine. Here he is next to Boop, my teddy bear that’s older than I am. They’re friends!!
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Glaze is out!
Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?
Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.
I just learned about this. It’s in Beta. Please read all the information before using.
ALTArt thieves already hate it:
Dude, if you’re stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn’t.
The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222As links (because some of us are on mobile and can’t easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:
&
A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:
The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)
It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).
Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE–which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists–small or big).
It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.
The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing–it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).
It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)
It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)
IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).
Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)
The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)
When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers —> You and NOT Team servers <-–>You) One-way data street.
Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)
The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles
From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)
You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
(via wight-witch)
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Alphonse walks a little slower on days like these.
