Without doxxing myself :P

She’s the sweetest cat on the planet, she doesn’t fight at all when we feed her through the tube, she even cuddled the heck out the vets when they gave her shots.

Her surgery was to correct a cleft soft palette, basically a big hole in the back of her throat connecting to her nasal passageways. Made it hard for her to eat and meow, probably hurt a lot as food would make it’s way up into her sinuses.

Normal operation for this birth defect is to put the kitten down, but she stole our hearts so completely that it was worth it to us to get her fixed 💘

I’m pretty specifically trying to bring to mind the time it takes to hone the skill. Photography is similar in that it takes many many hours to get to the point where you can produce a good work of art.

If an artist (or photographer) spends a couple hours on a peice, that’s not the actual amount of time needed. It takes years to reach the point where they can make art in a few hours. That’s what people are upset about, that’s why nobody cares about “it took me hours to generate a good peice!”, because it takes an artist 10,000 hours.

What AI art is doing is distilling that 10,000 hours (per artist) into a training set of 99% stolen works to allow someone with zero skill to produce a work of art in a few hours.

What’s most problematic isn’t who the copyright of the AI generated age belongs to, it’s that artists who own their own works are having it stolen to be used in a commercial product. Go to any AI image generator, and you’ll see “premium” options you can pay for. That product, that option to pay, only exists on the backs of artists who did not give licensing for their works, and did not get paid to provide the training data.

If I took a few hours to make an impressive AI generated price of art, that’s still %0.0001 the amount of time an actual a real artist would’ve spent developing the skill and then taking the time to make the peice. I get to skip all that because AI stole the real artists’ works.

I’ve sat in more than a couple mortar pits in my time, and have pulled rear security for sniper teams.

There’s always technical solutions, ballistic calculators, holds for known targets on mortars, etc, but absolutely no way you’ll catch charlie or a sniper not capable of the mental math to run their weapon system.

Mortars; often they just drive around with truck mounted systems and get sent coords, pull out a map and start calculating, snipers range find and then adjust with the markings in their scopes via mental math. They don’t dial their scope to 648 meters or whatever you’re thinking. I’ll admit I’m less clear on sniper math, but they usually all have notepads with them on performance data, DOPE, of their weapons systems to make needed adjustments to their calculations.

I do want to be clear that the math isn’t crazy, and there’s often tech solutions available, but it’s definitely trained and often practiced.

And mortar men and snipers?

Not even just that. My dad didn’t go to college, he joined the military at 18. He walked away from that and landed an engineering job with no degree. Now, he’s in a position that would ask for a masters minimum making nearly 300k a year.

I joined the military and walked away with bad knees and a list of phone numbers to get a job in the trades. Don’t get me wrong, I took it, but damn I’m sure as hell not making anything near what he was at my age.

A few hundred a month less. I’m not suddenly drowning in money, obviously, but it’s interesting paying less for much more, and that money actually benefitting my net worth vs being flushed down the toilet

Less than my apartment ever was 😜

And what’s especially nice is everything I buy and repair goes to me, belongs to me.

Sure I had to buy a washer and dryer, lawn mower, more furniture, etc, but that’s all mine forever.

The only cost that’s higher at my house than my much smaller apartment is utilities.

My biggest head scratcher now that I’ve bought a house is “huh, my mortgage is locked in now, no matter what the market does… Why did rent keep going up if my landlord’s mortgages were locked in?”

I honestly don’t have a good answer, I could be looking at something perfectly explainable. But to me it seemed like they raised rent not because costs went up, but because they could. Why not. Everybody else is doing it.

My wife has suffered from post Lyme disease effects for the last decade. Yes we need a vaccine for this.

We’re kinda past the point where ONLY lethal diseases need to be prevented, yeah?

I absolutely did, at least for commenting. Partly because I want to create traffic for Lemmy, and partly because it feels just… Nicer here. More genuine interaction, less quippy one liners or insults.