I'd give strange new worlds a pass as being better than Orville, but yeah, it's definitely the exception to the rule.

I actually had some thoughts about this and posted this in a similar thread:

First, that artist will only learn from a few handful of artists instead of every artist's entire field of work all at the same time. They will also eventually develop their own unique style and voice--the art they make will reflect their own views in some fashion, instead of being a poor facsimile of someone else's work.

Second, mimicking the style of other artists is a generally poor way of learning how to draw. Just leaping straight into mimicry doesn't really teach you any of the fundamentals like perspective, color theory, shading, anatomy, etc. Mimicking an artist that draws lots of side profiles of animals in neutral lighting might teach you how to draw a side profile of a rabbit, but you'll be fucked the instant you try to draw that same rabbit from the front, or if you want to draw a rabbit at sunset. There's a reason why artists do so many drawings of random shit like cones casting a shadow, or a mannequin doll doing a ballet pose, and it ain't because they find the subject interesting.

Third, an artist spends anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours practicing. Even if someone sets out expressly to mimic someone else's style, teaches themselves the fundamentals, it's still months and years of hard work and practice, and a constant cycle of self-improvement, critique, and study. This applies to every artist, regardless of how naturally talented or gifted they are.

Fourth, there's a sort of natural bottleneck in how much art that artist can produce. The quality of a given piece of art scales roughly linearly with the time the artist spends on it, and even artists that specialize in speed painting can only produce maybe a dozen pieces of art a day, and that kind of pace is simply not sustainable for any length of time. So even in the least charitable scenario, where a hypothetical person explicitly sets out to mimic a popular artist's style in order to leech off their success, it's extremely difficult for the mimic to produce enough output to truly threaten their victim's livelihood. In comparison, an AI can churn out dozens or hundreds of images in a day, easily drowning out the artist's output.

And one last, very important point: artists who trace other people's artwork and upload the traced art as their own are almost universally reviled in the art community. Getting caught tracing art is an almost guaranteed way to get yourself blacklisted from every art community and banned from every major art website I know of, especially if you're claiming it's your own original work. The only way it's even mildly acceptable is if the tracer explicitly says "this is traced artwork for practice, here's a link to the original piece, the artist gave full permission for me to post this." Every other creative community writing and music takes a similarly dim views of plagiarism, though it's much harder to prove outright than with art. Given this, why should the art community treat someone differently just because they laundered their plagiarism with some vector multiplication?

Hoo boy, it's a toughie. On the one hand, Trump would still be around. He also wouldn't be in as much legal peril as he is now (it's likely there wouldn't have been an appetite to prosecute him over the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, and the classified documents case would have never happened to begin with since he wouldn't have had access). But he almost definitely WOULD have tried to pull off another insurrection similar to Jan 6th--he was foreshadowing that he wouldn't accept the results if he lost even back in 2016, using the same language as he did in 2020 before he launched his coup attempt.

The world where Trump doesn't attempt a coup isn't very interesting, at least for this thought experiment--he slinks off, continues shitposting about Hillary on Twitter, but likely doesn't try to run again (or loses in the primary because he's a sore loser). Everyone ignores his hush money payments in the interest of "statesmanship," and at best he becomes a minor kingmaker in the party apparatus. MAGA withers on the vine, and we largely continue with the late Obama administration status quo.

The world where he attempts a coup is much more interesting. The real question is, what would have changed after the failed insurrection attempt? It's highly unlikely it would have succeeded or even gotten anywhere as close as it did, since a lot of the original plan relied on access to the levers of power (I.e. being able to withhold security to let the rioters overrun the Capitol). But how would everyone react to it long-term? In this timeline, Republicans genuinely distanced themselves from Trump and Jan 6th at first, likely out of shock over the realization that they were actually in danger and the very real fear that they could end up hurt or killed. But as the shock wore off, Republicans started shuffling back to MAGA as the propaganda machine did its work to downplay and normalize the failed coup, and they realized that their base saw Jan 6th as a good thing.

In a theoretical timeline where Trump tries a coup in 2016, it depends on how far Trump gets before he fails. If he's thwarted to the point where he doesn't (or can't) hold the rally that stormed the Capitol, then nothing really comes of it at all--it becomes a footnote in history that is only cared about by political historians, pub trivia enthusiasts, and people who like to talk about politics on the internet. If he gets to the point where he holds a rally, but the rally is prevented from interfering with the certification process (complete with provocative images of cops in riot gear swinging at MAGA rioters), it's likely that this downplaying and normalization would have been ironically amplified by virtue of the coup attempt being less successful. Without the visceral fear of hiding from rioters, Republicans would have no reason to distance themselves from the attempt, and they would almost immediately start using it as fodder to attack the new Clinton administration. In short, the hypothetical coup attempt would become another Benghazi scandal for Clinton--something that she had little real involvement in and largely wasn't her fault, but that she gets blamed for anyway. Trump, meanwhile, would remain largely in the same position as in 2015--the dominant force in the party.

Aside from that, the court wouldn't be as openly corrupt as it is now. It'd be filled by a moderate Clinton appointee if democrats have the 51 votes to abolish the filibuster for supreme court appointees (or held open by McConnell otherwise), and when RBG dies her replacement is decided by whoever wins the 2020 election. Roe v. Wade would still exist, the chevron deference would still be the law of the land, and we wouldn't have the terrifying prospect of legally sanctioned presidential death squads.

Overall, I think we would be largely in line with the status quo of 2014-2015. Not great, with a worrying trend towards fascism and an establishment largely too busy huffing their own farts to address the vast majority of problems facing us, but a LOT better than where we are right now.

Don't bother, he's one of the many trolls whose entire purpose on Lemmy is to shit on biden

There's something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can't get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can't reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can't look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability...

Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you've spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.

It's a specific form of trolling/bad-faith argument based on this comic. The idea behind sealioning is that you feign politeness and badger someone with seemingly-simple questions (that in reality require spending a sizable amount of time to answer) to get them to try to debate you. This can take the form of asking someone to elaborate a point, or provide citations to support a claim. If the victim takes the bait and responds legitimately, the troll ignores most of the message, claims any citations are invalid for some reason (biased source, misrepresenting what the article says, or just ignoring it exists entirely). The troll then cherry picks a few statements, and asks more questions about those, continuing the cycle, If the victim refers to previous posts, the troll pretends it either didn't happen or didn't actually answer their question (it did). If the victim refers to previously linked articles, the troll dismisses them and insists the victim provides "better" articles (that the troll will also dismiss out of hand). If the victim ever tells the troll to fuck off, the troll claims the moral high road and says they just "want a civil discussion" and "reasoned debate" over the topic.

The goal is something like a reverse Gish Gallop. Where a gish gallop aims to overwhelm the victim with more arguments than can be addressed quickly in the hope that your opponent can't/won't take the time to respond and walk away, allowing you to claim victory, sealioning aims to trick the victim into spending hours writing a messages that you can respond to in under a minute with a few simple questions, creating a kind of denial-of-service attack.

LMFAO "uhm ackshually guys AI art takes skill just like human art"

yeah bud, spending 30 minutes typing sentences into the artist crushing machine is grueling work

OKAY, time for some clarification as a Seattle local:

• This was NOT an isolated incident. The Cuff Complex, which was one of the bars that got raided, had been raided so many times in the past the owner had to put up a sign warning customers not to wear jockstraps because of the heavy enforcement (which ironically caused him to lose even more business because everyone was pissed at the owner for "policing bodies")

• Gay bars were being targeted disproportionately to straight bars. Remember, there are a LOT more straight bars than gay bars. Raiding 4 gay bars covers a sizable chunk of all the gay bars in Seattle, but raiding 14 straight barsis a relative drop in the bucket.

• A gay cabaret club owner crunched the numbers and found his establishment was raided 1,550% more than the average liquor licensee. The owner of the Cuff also owns another gay bar and a regular straight bar. His two gay bars are frequently raided, while the straight bar has NEVER been raided.

• The board that enforces liquor laws is the LCB. Two funny facts: First, the rule against lewd conduct was created by... The LCB, not the state legislature. Second, the LCB stands for the Liquor and Cannabis board, which means that they are already ignoring a law when it suits their purpose (the federal prohibition against cannabis).

• Finally, after the gay community collectively tore the LCB a new asshole during a board meeting earlier this week, the LCB reversed course and basically said "ah shit we fucked up" and is suspending enforcement of its lewd conduct rules. I strongly recommend this Mastodon thread from someone who attended the meeting, it's truly a thing of glory and demonstrates just how close the LCB was to getting slapped with a discrimination lawsuit: https://partyon.xyz/@nullagent/111851872885551640

I work tech support for a NAS company and the ratio of HDDs to SSDs is roughly 85-15. Sometimes people use SSDs for stuff that requires low latency, but most commonly they're used as a cache for HDDs in my experience.

One of the things that's stuck with me during my time on Lemmy is someone remarking that the only difference between a battery and a bomb is how controlled the release of energy is. Having seen what happens when you puncture a LiPo battery, I believe it 😰

First, it's important to find an instance that caters to your interests, especially if you have more niche hobbies. Once you're set up, search for and follow hashtags related to your personal interests, and use those to find accounts you like. Use hashtags in your own posts so that people can discover you more easily, and browse users that follow you to see if they'd be interesting to follow back and expand your network out. Keep an eye on the local and federated timeline for interesting posts, which includes all posts from people on the same instance and from all federated instances. Eventually, as you build up a follow list (and especially as you follow highly active accounts) your followed accounts will start introducing you to new accounts themselves through boosting posts.

It's more work since you're building the network yourself instead of having it spoon-fed to you by an algorithm, but it's overall much more rewarding, and lets you tailor your experience to your own personal preferences.

It's very user friendly in terms of tooltips, and if you don't make deliberately bad choices during level up (e.g. taking a feat that gives you a cantrip from the Wizard class... that scales off your INT score... while playing a Barbarian with 8 intelligence that can't cast spells while raging) it's fairly difficult to make an unplayably bad character.

There's a few cases where some general knowledge of D&D is helpful, such as knowing to never take True Strike because it's literally worse than just attacking twice and having some knowledge of good builds is useful, since it helps guide what you take when you level up. That said, there's also entire categories of actions in BG3 that don't really have an equivalent rule in TTRPG 5e, such as weapon proficiency attacks, so online cookie cutter builds don't capture the full extent of what you can do.