sndwnm

I don't think you are disagreeing with me. I also mean by "expressing yourself" that the artist is trying to communicate with the community and be of value to them.

I'm saying AI does not allow anyone to easily make games and comics, at least not for a some while. Currently AI allows you to easily make still pictures, maybe a written chapter of a story. It does not yet compete with artists who do larger pieces of work like a book. And I'm not sure AI ever(?) will make "complete" works because it doesn't have full human background required to have "something to say". It only "mimics" in a manner that many artists focused on technical ability find threatening. So yeah some "artists" will be out of work because of AI, but it will not be a big loss for the community if they are merely replaced.

The surface area of "art with message or meaning" within "all art AI can randomly generate" is so vanishingly small that it doesn't matter. Humans will be in control of the message, and thus in control of art for the foreseeable future.

When the AI finally is smart enough to have something to say, it will be an AGI and humanity will quickly be enslaved to it. No point thinking that far.

Seems pointless to learn to make singular highly detailed visual art pieces? Maybe. Maybe it always was pointless.

But most visual art is not just single pictures in a vacuum. Say you want to make a game with 2d still-art, or say a comic. You will need dozens or hundreds of images and they will have to be tied together by a common design — characters and style that look similar in the different images, and most of all you have to have a story to back it up. This is not something AIs can do well, not for a long while, but a human artist now may do significantly better than before with help of "dumb AI", such as the featured Krita plugin.

Finally, most artists don't think like you. It's not "pointless" to do something that can be technically repeated by other humans or AI. You do art because you want to express yourself.

Parent's late response to good sibling comments that no one will read:

Many people here seem to think that because one is good at programming they are necessarily bad at everything else like visual art, music, and story-telling. However I think many of such programmers would actually be in a great position to pick up one or even two such side competencies and do amazing things. Many of the old good games probably had programmers doing things outside their core competency. | Especially with the recent advent of AI, I think programmers should no longer think of themselves as narrow specialists but something like directors or conductors.

I have never been able to fathom how people put so much effort into remakes of old games instead of, say, creating new games. It doesn't mean you have to do commercial "indie" games. Old games are cool, but what would be cooler is new old games.

I never downvote and almost never upvote. Having spent time on 4chan and other imageboards, I have seen discussions work just fine without any ranking mechanism, and as such I have become skeptical of the usual upvote schemes.

When there are no ranks (or even usernames), you need to use your own thinking to evaluate the posts. Even if it requires more scrolling, it's worth it. If you are looking for the hot parts of the discussion, you can use the number of replies to a given post as a proxy — it could be considered a UI issue of HN that it's not shown very clearly here.

I find modern games are often superior to the old ones, so I would disagree with the "anymore" part of "no good games anymore".

But I disagree with the sibling comments in that I'm quite sure it's a fact for a lot of players that there are hardly any good games left in the sense that they have grown and their tastes have reached levels where pretty rehashes of old mechanics and ideas will no longer cut it. AAA games don't innovate much these days, and the indie game with one cool new idea is rarely fun to play because the execution as a whole is so lacking.

To be honest, I think the average HN user does not play games that much. Or watch films, listen to music, read fiction, etc. Which is probably a good thing, but means they have less taste, both in the subjective and objective sense. But go to different internet forums, say 4chan, and you'll find people definitely have huge problems with quality creative content being so rare.

If I had been posed this question I could imagine it having gone two different ways. First, I could approach it as remembering, maybe not a car I saw yesterday, but a generic idea of some type of car. For example if I thought about a Japanese pickup or a Lamborghini, I would probably answer the following color question with "white" and "orange", because for me those are stereotypic colors that "come with" the memory. Perhaps many people think in this way and thus assume the color obviously is there.

The second way would be to abstractly build a car in my mind. Start with four tires, put a rough shape of a frame on it — lets make it a sedan. If I proceed this way, I probably would not choose a color, at least not early on. Like many in this thread, this is how I usually imagine things, as "wireframes". The color/texture is not there because I have not assigned it. I can't vividly see the things I imagine, but they can still have color just like they can have shape.

I've been journaling since 2015, one text file per day and have not missed a single day. However, quite often the daily consists of the single word "Working.", so the bar is not exactly high. I usually write about what I spent my day on, and impressions about the media I'm consuming. I also collect interesting quotes and links. The longest dailies occur when I try to analyze my direction in life, progress with personal projects, the frustrations of a day job, and such. I originally started journaling as a form of brainstorming to help writing fiction, but I since moved that content elsewhere because its format clashes with the rest of the journal.

I sometimes read old entries randomly, but rarely find it enjoyable. However, every New Year's Eve I skim through each daily from the previous year and make a list of "all the things I forgot I did this year", and the list always surprises me very pleasantly with lots of things I totally forgot about. Honestly this alone makes it worth journaling — I feel really bad about not being able to reliably recall things I did prior to 2015.

Looking at the entries from the earlier years, my writing has definitely improved a lot. I always write in English although it's not my native language. I also like to write on paper but it makes organizing the documents a pain.

To answer the question, yes it has improved my life and I don't plan on stopping journaling.

Maybe not very practical, but to combat targeted writing analysis on the internet you could try running such analysis software on your own writing to find out what makes it stand out. Work to make the writing as "bland" as possible, perhaps with aid of software translators or filters.

This. The author is obsessed, but that makes it fun to read. I've been using i3 exclusively for close to a decade and never used a window placement other than 1-3 windows in a horizontal row; switching to tabbed layout when I want something fullscreen; and rarely, for specific applications, a floating layout. Rather, I use a lot of workspaces (16) and put windows in those that I expect to find them.

My point is, you don't need to use a WM/DE like others are using it, but how you prefer to use it. i3 is flexible enough to allow many styles, so choosing to use it might be mostly about whether you think it can cover your preferences.

For this to actually work you probably need to put the original text away, try to recreate a piece of it from memory, and repeat until you get it close to right. AKA the Benjamin Franklin method.

Just like anyone can trace or copy a picture drawn by a master, copying text won't grant understanding. What actually matters for a creator is the ability to produce content from higher level ideas, eg from whatever mental representation you used to hold the writing or drawing in memory.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I'll look into terms you pointed out.

I had indeed noted experimentally that picking hues using regular spacing from the common color wheels doesn't work so well, at least not without varying the other components of color. I think for my purposes it will be enough to start with a Munsell-like group of distinct hues and tinker manually from there.

Excellent! Thank you.