Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?

MTBF is useful information, but I think it would be more useful in conjunction with factors like active spinning time, total spin up/down counts, cumulative head seek time, total IO, etc. Presumably time-in-service affects the MTBF more than the age of the drive, but to what extent? Is a NIB drive that's two years old going to be as reliable as one that's only a month or two old? So many variables....

It sucks, eh? LOL

What else can you do but laugh in the face of certain destruction? You can see it coming, but you can't do anything about it. You could reduce or entirely eliminate your own footprint and it wouldn't matter in the slightest compared to the industrial output and the imposed need for personal transportation.

It sucks, eh? LOL

American cars have provably been shit since the 1970s. It is no surprise that China has surpassed the USA with vehicles. The real surprise would be that China has surpassed Japan or Korea for quality vehicles. It appears they may have done so; however, I have not seen one myself, so I can not verify.

The problem with DEI is that in order to practice it, you have to pay attention to skin color, gender, age, etc. The whole point of DEI is to NOT pay attention to those things. It is a logical paradox to employ DEI. That is why it is a disgusting thing.

It is impossible to force those who don't want to treat everyone equally to treat everyone equally. Furthermore, it is impossible to tell what a person really thinks; therefore, you can not be certain that a group of Indians are not discriminating against everyone else by hiring only Indians even though there are only people from India working there. (I chose India because it is relevant enough and because in most of these discussions, it is 'White' men discriminating against everyone else).

I do not want racism, sexism, gender, etc to play any role in hiring; however, I do not see a way to completely ensure that outcome without some draconian and inflexible rules that violate the spirit of why they were created.

There are ways to encourage hiring for merit, and that is the best we can do for now.

Voice control takes a cognitive load off of your own brain. You do not have to fully understand something, you just mutter some words and hopefully, the computer will do what you want rather than what you say.

That is a shitty interface to someone like you or me who fully understands what it is they are doing and knows exactly what they want to do and knows how to do it.

Having an intermediary is almost completely necessary for someone who doesn't understand things directly. So, idiots will always be begging for simpler interfaces. It is why the taskbar can no longer be on the side of the monitor instead of the bottom.

+6 insightful. Land ownership needs to be rethought. There does need to be personal land ownership; however, it should not be possible to raise "rents" arbitrarily. Being able to raise rent arbitrarily ruins any desires to run a business from 'rented' property. Perhaps some sort of organization that manages commercial properties Where the landowner can get some money for letting someone else use their property? Just this year in my local area, at least 3 historic and well-known businesses have stopped doing business because the landowner squeezed them too hard. They had no choice but to rent the land because the land keeps getting passed from generation to generation within the same family. There was never an option to buy.

Ummm, why would you lie? I have a German car with decent massaging seats. A 12 hour drive feels more like a 4 hour drive with them. That car is more than 20 years old now, so it is NOT new, which gives you no excuse for lying about it. The same manufacturer also sells a version with a refrigerator in the back seat... but that is only useful for a person being chauffeured. My cars chills the beverage holder, so I don't really need a refrigerator.

You do realize that engineers are the single most dangerous group of people on the planet... right? This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. An engineer could tip the economy overnight. Lots of engineers have caused all sorts of economic disruption. Engineers represent the power of the mind over the physical.

Don't piss of engineers with authoritarianism, they will be making the drones, attaching the guns to the vehicles, etc.

The true issue is the same issue that we saw in the 70s and 80s: The executive class wants to keep what they had instead of inventing new stuff or improving their current stuff.

Well, they kept it, and they are close to losing everything because of it. Again. As long as money is the focus, everyone whose primary focus isn't money will outrun us every time.

This is why IBM died. GE died. Sears died. etc. Sure, they are still existing concerns technically, it takes a long time to fully blow through what they originally created... but GE used to be the third largest economy behind the USA as a whole and then California. And, look at it now. Greed is gross and disgusting.

I think political discussion is increasing in the USA because the USA has been troubled for a very long time and it is coming to a head. Most people want to talk about how cute cats are or what they did today, not waste time getting worked up over stupid and corrupt political shit.

The only reason these arguments against factual data hold any water is that the IPCC compromised themselves while trying to convey urgency. Once you lie, you will always be labelled a liar, even when producing incontrovertible facts. They made a huge mistake, 20ish years ago (?) and now, the whole planet pays. (don't worry, the whole planet would/will be paying anyways as nobody who has the ability to change anything has been paying attention,)

This is going to sound contradictory to what I stated previously in this subject, but, sometimes, you have to get their attention. I think it was Robert A. Heinlein that said nature gave us a way to apply pain without causing long term physical damage: the buttocks. As Robert Anton Wilson said, sometimes, pain is the only method of catching someone's attention.

Hitting a child because you are angry or upset is plain abuse. Period. Literally.

Applying some instant pressure to the buttocks can get their attention. Once you have their attention. You speak the words that you want them to retain and then you are done. If you find yourself doing this regularly, you have failed as a teacher; although to be fair, some children can be hard headed. My daughter never once required anything physical like that. My son required it something like 4 times in his whole life. The Real World is nowhere near as gentle as I was.