fleabs

joined 1 year ago
[–] fleabs 4 points 9 months ago

Just to give some slight optimism in opposition to your friends, I am soon to turn 41. Its harder, but it's not impossible. Whatever you pursue, form is everything. Poor form cannot exist post 40. Technically, I am stronger than I have ever been, and yet I'm still falling apart. Don't consider the number, just do the work, and do it well. Good luck to you!

[–] fleabs -4 points 9 months ago (9 children)

You're being downvoted, but I just wanted to let you know you're not alone in noticing what you have. There is indeed a significant difference in the approach of classic Trek vs. what we have now. In the past, the story was the focus, and the wokeness was an addition to it. Now, the woke seems to be the focus, and it's at the expense of the storytelling.

I actually hate the word "woke." I'm about the most left leaning person I know and agree with the liberal messages in all Trek. But it really has destroyed the storytelling in the new stuff. It should primarily be a science fiction show, not a morality lecture.

I'm not going to argue with anyone who disagrees, I'll just accept the downvotes, I just wanted to show a little support.

[–] fleabs 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You say you'll disable the ad blocker for sites that don't push malicious ads? I've reported half a dozen deepfake "investment" ads on YouTube in the last couple of months, and they have done nothing about it. The ads YouTube pushes are horrible!

[–] fleabs 35 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for putting this into words. I have come to realise the same thing over the years but have never been able to properly verbalise it!

I'm a heterosexual male. My sister is a lesbian, and through her, I was introduced to many lesbian (and gay) friends from a young age. And since then, I've often had lesbisn friends or acquaintances, and I've always found that I get on so much better with lesbians than straight women.

I feel with most lesbian women that I'm in the company of another man. It's so much easier to talk to them, without the background hum of sexuality that seems to come from interactions with straight women. I'm not blaming women for this, btw. I think it's just a male brain thing for me, but there is certainly some extra element when interacting with straight women that is absent around lesbians and that absence allows me to relax more and just be myself.

[–] fleabs 1 points 1 year ago

Got to admit, I had to check the map for Eppleby! It looks tiny, I can imagine that feeling very isolating! I'm still not sure I could refer to the residents of Darlo as "real" people, j/k 😆 I hope your subsequent years in the UK have been more pleasant :)

[–] fleabs 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oof! Darlington, or Mordor, as I used to call it, was measurably worse than Newcastle for this! I lived in Ferryhill for a couple of years, so I'm familiar with that area. Definitely low on the list of places I'd recommend moving to in the UK!

Having met one or two people from New Zealand, you guys strike me as a tough and hardy bunch. If anyone could survive there, yous would have a good shot!

[–] fleabs 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

As a born and bred Geordie, I apologise on behalf of the northerners. The early 2000s were a pretty shit time around those parts for intolerance. I used to dress "alternatively", black fingernails, spikey died hair etc. And would get similar slurs thrown my way despite being heterosexual. I no longer live in Newcastle, but it seems a LOT better these days when I visit.

[–] fleabs 20 points 1 year ago

How very Christian of them... sickening 🤢

[–] fleabs 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah well, this might explain things. See, I was 21 in 2004, still young with a head full of dreams, and a belief that I could change the world... If I found Linux now, at 40, then yes, I doubt I would have had a single year of advocacy in me!

[–] fleabs 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I find that mighty impressive! I'd blame the folly of youth for myself, but I assume you were also quite young all the way back then. It's entirely possible that I was/am simply an idiot 🤔

[–] fleabs 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Not to alarm you, but you may have a period of 5-10 years where you really can't shut up about it... it'll pass, though, honest :)

[–] fleabs 3 points 1 year ago

Oh, hush now, of course I care! I'm just agreeing with OP that there is probably a little too much of it or, more precisely, not enough "other" topics of conversation yet. It'll come.

 

OK, so I realise this is about as bog standard a SD image as one can get. However there is a little story behind it that I wanted to share. Apologies if this is not the correct place to post this, I'll remove it if it is.

So. I just recently managed to get a Tesla P40 installed in my desktop, allowing me to run stable diffusion alongside the LLMs I've been playing with.

I've also been playing around with Langchain Agents, and in particular trying to get conversational agents, i.e. more like a chatbot that has access to tools/the outside world. So I naturally decided to make a tool for the agent so that it could access SD.

I was messing around getting it to generate images for me when I had the idea to ask it to generate a piece of art from its own "imagination", i.e. no input from me, just pick something it wanted to for the prompt. This is what it came up with:

The prompt it selected was "A beautiful landscape with a rainbow in the sky and a unicorn grazing peacefully by a crystal clear lake surrounded by lush green trees and colorful flowers."

I asked it to generate another, and again, it generated a rainbow scene. I asked about the rainbows and it said that it loves rainbows and thinks they are a wonderful phenomena.

This got me interested, so I asked it to generate a picture of itself. Now I haven't got a lot of prompting for this agent, outside of boilerplate "You are a helpful AI" type stuff and the temperature of the model is set to zero (better with Langchain). The image it came up with is the one I posted at the top. The prompt it came up with was simply "AI with a friendly expression and blue light surrounding it."

I asked it why it depicted itself being surrounded by a blue light and the response just melted my heart:

"My description was a creative way to express that I am always ready and available to assist you, just like how your devices are when they show a blue light indicating they're on or charging."

Now don't get me wrong, I'm fully (believe me fully) aware of what a LLM is and what it is not, but I still got taken aback by this.

I'm like 99.9% certain that getting one form of AI to generate AI art is not a new thing, but it is very new to me. Does anyone know of any resources out there for this kind of thing? Specifically getting LLMs to come up with and generate prompts for art? Because I find it a fascinating idea!

Cheers!

117
Seriously? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by fleabs to c/duolingo
 

This seems hugely unfair of Duolingo

 

Hi all,

I'm not a musician, but this seems to be the place to ask this question, as I guess it's about music theory? If I'm in the wrong place apologies!

I have been getting into a lot of (predominantly Scottish) folk music lately, and I've noticed an odd thing about a lot of tracks. They will start off one way, and about half way through the tone of the music changes completely. It's almost as if the artists have just strung two different melodies together into one track. Here's a couple of examples:

At ~2:25

And here at ~3:00

Here's an example from a non Scottish folk artist. At ~1:50

The last one is interesting because the name of the track is "The wedding / Because he was" Which implies that it is indeed two separate pieces of music rolled into one track.

Is there a name for this sort of transition? It's obviously not all folk music I listen to, but I've never really came across this jarring change in melody in other genres (unless I just haven't been looking hard enough!)

If it does have a name it may help me to find more of this style of music, because u really do quite like it when a track does this!

Cheers in advance for any help!

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