CoderKat

I don't think that's necessarily a dead giveaway. Because there's been controversy about AI art that added watermarks. The controversy being because it implied the AI was scraping images that it definitely wasn't allowed to use.

Hands are only a give away for bad AI art. There's no shortage of examples with great hands (especially when using features like Stable Diffusion's ControlNet, which allows you to give hints to the AI for the shape that something should match). Just so many people posting AI art generate once or twice and post that. If you're more selective and selectively regenerate, you'll be able to get much more believable results.

This is also a rapidly changing area, with the most cutting edge AI being way better than something from even a year ago. Used to be that no AI could do even remotely believable text, but in recent weeks, I've been seeing many examples of AI art that got small amounts of text perfect.

I only guessed a single one as generated by AI and I was wrong on that (the mouse in the boat drawing felt like unusual shaping and shading for a human). I really could not identify any telltale signs of AI in any of them, so answered entirely honestly that none of the others looked like AI generated.

To be honest, I expected that. The telltale signs people often talk about are only problems for bad AI art. Well done AI art really is indistinguishable. Stuff like weird fingers, faces, and teeth are only problems if the prompter is lazy and just picks the first thing generated (and doesn't selectively regenerate). If you're selective, you can get AI art without the things some people claim make AI art easy to recognize.

It's like photoshop or movie CGI. Anyone can detect a bad photoshop and we're used to seeing those. But well done photoshops by experts can be near impossible to detect (short of careful pixel level inspection, which doesn't really apply to AI art). Yet, a lot of people are over confident in how well they can spot photoshops.

I wonder if this will change anyone's mind? I've always wanted to do this for a few topics, including AI. I've also wanted to do this for trans vs cis people (so many transphobes claim they can "always tell"), movie CGI vs practical effects (see also: Captain Disillusion videos), and for various kinds of food and drink (so many people are elitist that something tastes better -- simple example that I've actually seen disproven is the various kinds of eggs, including store bought vs locally sourced).

High speed is a big thing. And actually high speed, at that. A massive number of trains are very slow and even a number of "high speed" trains are not even remotely as high speed as they could be, with proper investment. It's hard to replace planes when we're talking at least twice the travel time.

I'd love to have more train options in Canada. There is a train that spans the width of Canada, but it is so slow and deprioritized that it's not actually a viable means of transit across Canada. You can fly Toronto to Vancouver in a little over 4 hours. So maybe 6 hours with the airport overhead. By train, it's 4 days. That's something you'd only do for the experience and it'd be a significant part of the trip (one person I know who did it said that they wish they utilized more stops along the way, because by the end of the trip, they were getting pretty sick of it -- despite the fact that they recommended it glowingly). With a high speed rail, that could become less than 1 day trip, making it a lot more feasible (a lot of people already view the day they fly as a day spent only on travel).

And that's an extreme. Getting around southern Ontario is far more common and practical (it's an extremely population dense area). But the trains we have for that are very low speed and have mediocre schedules (sometimes only good for commuting). Even though a train is an option, I often find that the bus is actually the fastest way to get to my destination, cause the train is so infrequent and really not fast.

At the very least, it should be illegal to use the misleading tactics they use for things like seats. Not sure if airlines in the EU differ (I'm Canadian), but seemingly every airline here tries to make the seat selection seem like it's mandatory. While I've never fallen for that, I wonder how many people pay for their seats simply because they didn't realize it's possible not to?

And Flair here in Canada is the budget airline whose whole thing is that they advertise prices that don't include a carry-on (which is standard with every other airline in Canada). But if you want a carry-on, they'll charge so much that their flights are often roughly the same price as the competition (and they push bundling carry-on + checked bag so that people will pay more than they need). Flair is great if you know what you're doing, since a backpack fits the "personal item" size limit and is all I need for short trips, but many people don't realize how it works and think they have to pay for the carry-on, plus Flair gets their listings to show up higher in search results because they will list the base price. Google Flights makes it clear that there's no carry-on, but it still shows those flights first and someone without familiarity with Flair won't expect carry-ons to cost as much as they do.

I think that breed is known as "cutie".

Even if we did develop fusion, how long would it take to switch to it and would it even be economical? A ton of places still use coal and other fossil fuels simply because they're cheap or were already built. It's hard to make assumptions about how much fusion would cost when we still don't have it. Nuclear fission's fuel is cheap (cause so little is needed), yet nuclear is still insanely expensive because building the plants is a difficult task mired in red tape and the general public is afraid of it (on that note, I'm not sure how many people even have a concept of fusion beyond perhaps what Spiderman 2 made them believe).

There's also the divide in the world. Even if the rich western countries got fusion, would everyone? The west also got covid vaccines early while much of the rest of the world had to wait. And further drawing on the covid analogy, some countries pretended there wasn't an issue, which already is going on with climate change.

5. The backslash goes before the dot, not the number. 5\.

The car is hot because we turned the AC off. And while some of us want to turn it back on, there's a bunch of people ardently insisting we should do nothing cause god will be back any minute to turn to the car back on.

Some of these I get, but I don't get the T9 thing. T9 was so bad! It took ages to type many words. Today's predictive keyboards are miles better.

Also, no software updates? Sure, every now and then there's a shitty update, but most updates are great. New features and especially bug fixes are amazing. Used to be that if something had a bug, you just had to deal with it. There's no guarantees it'll be fixed today, but many companies do fix their bugs at least eventually. The ability to iteratively develop is huge for software quality. These days, unless you're developing something that absolutely cannot fail (like a mars prober or radiation therapy machine), it's widely agreed upon that iterative design is superior to "waterfall" design of trying to plan it out all ahead of time. Part of why is so you can get feedback continuously instead of only after you've committed to months of tech debt.

Bash is so bad. I literally use it every day and have written many Bash scripts, yet I'm constantly having to search for how to do things in it because syntax is so bizarre and difficult to remember. Need to do a for loop over lines in a file? You can bet I'm googling the syntax for it. I have a general idea for what it looks like and know what to search for, but no way in hell can I write it correctly in the first few tries.

String manipulation is the absolute worst. Have fun getting to learn the unreadable syntax of most sed and awk programs (the only thing most people have memorized is find and replace). Stuff like "split a string of comma separated ints and add them up" are way harder in Bash than in Python, despite the fact I often need to do stuff like that in Bash. Well, in the terminal anyway. Sometimes I'll just use Python, but Python's weakness is executing programs and getting their output, which is nowhere near as convenient as it is in Bash.

Side note, isn't it weird that for a language where flags like --foo bar are so commonly used, there's no built in or standard tools for accessing flags?

The most recent C++ thing I worked on (not that recent, like 5 years or so ago) was a fairly new project and the people working on it were really passionate about C++. But it was C++ code that ran as a Python library and was using the official Python C bindings. Not sure why we didn't use one of the unofficial C++ libraries, but the usage of that C library (and such a fundamental one) held things back. We wrote was was modern C++ (at the time), but big chunks would be a completely different style.