FaceDeer

And for years people have insisted to me that there’s no use to be had from fully decentralized DNS alternatives like ENS.

These things are like backups. You need to start using them before you discover that you need them.

https://archive.is/pc7ly

I’ve noticed that Firefox just recently added “search this image using Google Lens” to the right-click menu. Google Lens then OCRs it, and lets me copy and paste the text. So here it is as text, courtesy of AI:

But here’s the twist: they weren’t anti-technology in general - they were against the way it was being used to exploit labor and devalue craftsmanship. In modern slang, though, Luddite has come to mean anyone who resists new technology or feels uneasy about its social effects - the person who grumbles about smartphones, Al, or self-checkout kiosks. In truth, the Luddites were early critics of technological displacement - a theme still echoing today every time a robot takes a job or an algorithm replac an artist.

and

Ah, the Luddites - a wonderfully rebellious bunch from the early 19th century! They were groups of English textile workers who, around 1811-1816, rose up against the industrial machines that were threatening their livelihoods. Imagine skilled artisans who had spent years mastering hand-weaving, suddenly finding themselves replaced by noisy, automated looms run by factory owners who could churn out cloth faster and cheaper.

I do much of my image work with local models, at least when it comes to trying to get something specific. All audio transcription is done with a local model, and a lot of the summarization and categorization of those transcripts is also local models.

The comment where I explained this all got downvoted too, though, so yeah. Still a lot of “AI=bad” regardless of self-hosted or not.

You think I have them captive somehow? Your assumptions are getting weirder and weirder.

We all have other groups we play with too, this is just the “core” group that’s been together longest.

We’ve been playing together for ~20 years, since long before there were any AI tools.

Once again you’re making some wildly inaccurate assumptions.

I haven’t been getting downvoted as much as I used to these days, at least. I think more people have started to actually experiment with AI and see what it’s good at, and are finding it to be not the Great Satan that popular opinion paints it as.

Major applications I use AI for:

• Art, obviously. I generate lots of illustrations of the characters and other things they encounter. These days image generators have become good enough that I usually just have to describe things well in the prompt and get usable results, but if I need to edit the images to get them closer to what I need I run ComfyUI locally and have lots of models for that as well.
• I use producer.ai to generate custom music. Sometimes it’s diagetic - in the previous campaign the party encountered an NPC that loved to sing about important plot developments in-universe - but mostly it’s either background soundscape or supplementary songs (consider them like “theme music” that plays during the intro or credits). Producer.ai closed down new subscriptions a while back but I’ve also used Udio and Suno and they’re both good too.
• I record the sessions and transcribe them using WhisperX. I feed the transcripts into NotebookLM and have it generate summaries and notes about the events of each session. It can also generate “overview” videos that work great as a 5-minute catch-up players can watch before the session if they’ve forgotten what happened last time.
• Since NotebookLM has all my campaign notes in it as source documents, as well as PDFs of the rulebooks, it’s great for quickly whipping up stats for creatures when the players do something unexpected. It’s also been a good brainstorming assistant, and it “knows” the names of every random little NPC or village we’ve seen along the way.

I’ve been experimenting with the Wan2.2 video model lately. It’s not quite up to snuff for generating videos of meaningful length, but it’s still pretty neat to be able to put a character portrait in and have a 5-second snippet of them just “being alive.” I think it’ll be a neat addition to having static portraits.

Aside from producer.ai, all of these tools are free. Though the WhisperX transcription program I use is a custom Python script, I’m not sure what would be a good solution for a non-programmer to spin up.

Edit: Downvoting me isn’t making any of these tools less useful.

They have every opportunity to tell me they’re not liking what I run. Turns out I know them better than you do.

I don’t make computer games with AI, but I do create tabletop roleplaying adventures on a regular basis. I use AI for a lot of it. You have no idea what the workflow is. It’s not hell, it’s an enormous boon.

The risk I try to avoid with this sort of wording is the religious connotations of “belief.” When people believe in a religion they generally do intend that to mean “with no chance I’m mistaken” so I don’t want anyone to mistake me as having a religious belief in an objective reality. It’s not like that.

So do you believe in an objective reality, or not? You said a couple of opposite things there.

I don’t think I did say opposite things. I don’t believe in an objective reality because there’s no way to prove it. But it does seem like a very useful concept, and well supported. I generally behave as if there is an objective reality and I’m not sure how I’d manage if there wasn’t one.

It’s the same as how one shouldn’t say the “believe in” any particular scientific law, because it’s always possible that evidence will come along later that disproves it. I suppose you could say I believe it’s the best idea I know of, but I don’t like getting that sloppy with terms like this when actually discussing the concept of “objective reality.”

That happened to Conservapedia too. It’s a poster child for Poe’s Law, none of the editors over there really knows whether any of the other editors are true believer lunatics or highly creative trolls making up nonsense in the style of true believer lunatics. For all we know the true believers are a minority at this point and the whole thing is mostly trolling, there’s no way to tell it apart from genuine lunacy.

Reminds me of various old sayings, such as: “The truth is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” And “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

I don’t necessarily believe in a purely objective reality, personally. I don’t know for sure that there is some kind of platonic ideal structure of all things that exists apart from observers and always has and always will, it’s a hard thing to figure out how to even start to prove. But there sure does seem like there is one, some kind of underlying pattern to reality that everyone who makes honest rigorous measurements seems to be measuring the same way. So if you just do straightforward science it seems like you automatically end up participating in a single common shared worldview.

Whereas if you just make shit up based on your beliefs, you end up with a worldview that’s divergent from everyone else who’s also making shit up based on their beliefs.

It gives an inherent advantage to the reality-based people. They end up working together and supporting each other even if they have absolutely no way to communicate with each other. Physicists doing experiments on opposite sides of the planet with no awareness of each other can produce results that, when they’re later brought together, click into place as if the two of them had directly collaborated all their lives. It’s awesome.

My hope is that they’ll sell off all the smaller IPs to make money fast, hopefully setting some of the ones I like free.

And why sometimes when a writer becomes immensely successful the quality of their output suffers - they become “too big to edit.”

The Star Wars prequel trilogy is a case in point, IMO. Back on the original trilogy George Lucas had people who could tell him “no, that’s a bad idea.”

You can tell the voices aren’t right, the pictures are soulless, the prose is stilled and often self-contradictory.

And you can’t tell when the voices do turn out right, the pictures are fine, and the prose works well.

This all reminds me a lot of how people railed against CGI in movies, claiming that CGI scenes or actors would always look “uncanny valley” and that they’d always be able to tell. Many people continue to claim that to this day, unaware of just how much CGI is in each frame that they don’t recognize as CGI. Or worse, they look really hard for things to complain are bad CGI and end up accusing non-CGI shots of being CGI.

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,”

And screw those people who make a living washing dishes in restaurants or doing maid service in hotels, their jobs aren’t special like mine are.

This headline could be so easily flipped on its head; “Clients rejoice as custom art becomes cheaper and more accessible for their projects.” But we’ve put artists on a pedestal for so long that such views are incredibly unpopular, and so those headlines don’t get the clicks and views like it get crushed out of social media.

Those places aren’t public places, so of course I’d turn it off or leave.

If I was in public and someone told me to stop recording, I’d likely say “no.” Hasn’t that been a major point of pushback against police demanding that we not record them, for example?

yeah, no, we still disagree.

Okay, then, we’re in disagreement. But I’m still able to use it, so.

Call it creepy if you want, that’s fine, that’s your opinion. It’s not infringing anyone’s rights.