SpudNoodle

Boil ‘em, ~~mash~~bake ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew…

Ours is Loretta cause that’s what she looks like. My mom named hers Mavis for similar reasons.

This didn't go where I thought it was going... in the best possible way. I love the positivity and genuine goodness in this post and these people. Thank you for restoring a little of my faith in humanity.

Hey I just found this community and your post. I love this picture, although the location of the shifter made me laugh… my first road bike that I commuted on had downtube shifters. A Univega (named Vegas, what else) that was a handmedown from a cousin. I felt so fancy when I eventually got indexed shifters on the handlebars!

Unpopular opinion maybe, but my peeve is when men stand to pee. It gets everywhere and is so disgusting. Every weekend when I’m bleaching the walls and everything in the “splash zone” it irks me that guys won’t also just sit to pee.

Because it’s not a traditional forest, it’s a desert. We had a wet winter here, which allowed non-native invasive plants/grasses to grow abundantly. Those grasses are dead, dry fuel now, allowing the fire to burn hotter than it would normally, which makes it harder for individual specimens to survive the burn. The intense fire heat also changes the nature of the soil itself, causing more water to run off rather than being absorbed. Desert topsoil in this region has a unique, delicate balance already, even footsteps or tyre tracks can disturb the biome for decades.
Compounding that, climate change has already shrunk the area where slow growing Joshua Trees can even survive. The trees lost in this fire will not grow back. You can still easily see burn scars from the 90’s in Joshua Tree National Park, which is adjacent to the Mojave National Preserve.

That mallard is legally occupying that parking space, and secretly enjoys when people pull up thinking it’s an open space only to find it occupied. Duck facts.

One giant drop stitch is a good description for the fabric, with maybe some macrame in the middle there...

I guess a third hand would make it easier to deal with working directly from the skein?? It kinda reminds me of all the cheap product listings where knitting needles are pictured with crochet fabric/being modeled like crochet hooks (& vice versa)...

I thought about that also! In a proper lace weight yarn it would look like a web made by a spider on drugs. Halloween decoration, maybe?

Oh wow yeah, that’s pretty bad! (Although your stitches are gorgeous) Did you finish making it?

Another pic here

Remember SkyKnit? The hilariously bad attempt at generating knitting patterns with a neural network? (link on Ravelry)

Well, ChatGTP is here to remind us all that AI is still terrible at knitting.

I asked it to generate a couple patterns for me, and it did indeed spit out some patterns that didn't look terribly off... The needle size and stich counts looked okay for what appeared to be a toe-up/gusseted sock pattern. I'm not a super fast knitter, and can't exactly bang out a sock just to see what happens, so I asked for something simpler. How about a lace pattern over a 12 stitch by 8 row repeat?

I got the following:

Row 1: k1, yo, k2tog, k2, ssk, yo, k1, p1, k1, p1; repeat from * to * to end of row. Row 2: p1, k1, p1, k3, p3, k1, p1, k1, p1; repeat from * to * to end of row. Row 3: k1, yo, k2tog, k1, ssk, yo, k3, yo, ssk, k1, k2tog, yo, k1, p1; repeat from * to * to end of row. Row 4: p1, k1, p1, k2, p5, k1, p1, k1, p1; repeat from * to * to end of row. Row 5: k1, yo, k2tog, yo, ssk, k2, k2tog, yo, k3, yo, ssk, yo, k1, p1; repeat from * to * to end of row. Row 6: p1, k1, p1, k1, p7, k1, p1, k1, p1; repeat from * to * to end of row. Row 7: k1, yo, k3tog, yo, k3, yo, ssk, k2tog, yo, k3, yo, k3tog, yo, k1, p1; repeat from * to * to end of row. Row 8: p1, k1, p1, p9, k1, p1, k1, p1; repeat from * to * to end of row.

Aside from the fact that I hugely prefer charts over written instructions, that didn't look too bad, so I happily cast on a couple dozen stitches to see what AI lace would look like. And almost immediately realized it was much worse that it looked. Here's the breakdown I ended up with:
Row 1: 11 sts in the repeat
Row 2: 13 sts
Row 3: 16 sts
Row 4: 14 sts
Row 5: 17 sts in the repeat, and an extra YO that isn't balanced with a decrease (+1 st every time the row is worked)
Row 6: 15 sts
Row 7: 19 sts
Row 8: 16 sts

In the sample I ended up working, I just worked the repeat as much as I could until I got through 24 sts for each, and then worked 4-5 repeats of Rows 1-8. I cast it off, held it up to the light, and burst out laughing. It's chaos.

(In an unfortunate misstep, my partner said it looked pretty good, "like the stuff you usually make." I did forgive him for this.)

It is a short repeat lace in the end, so there is a regularity to the pattern, and it did seem like the AI understood that YOs and decreases are often near each other, but it just couldn't organize into anything pleasing.

I tried again a few days later, spending some time to confirm that ChatGTP understood the knitting terms and the concept of stitch counts before asking for additional lace patterns. It never got there. Stitch counts continued to fluctuate wildly. Turns out, the large language models are really, really bad at math.

There are definitely parameters to lace patterns, and with some specified rules it seems like it should be easy for AI to come up with something workable. But it can't, because AI doesn't actually think. It doesn't even know how to count.

Knitting patterns are often compared to programming - both are just lines of instructions. But what makes knitting as a hobby so wonderful is the human element. Someone somewhere sits down and comes up with a pattern, arranges it into a series of symbols (or letters if you insist on written instructions), and then I can come along and create something out of that with my hands. The item doesn't exist without my effort, and it's clear that AI doesn't have any place on the other end of the deal.

So that's it. AI still can't knit. We're still safe from SkyKnit.

(It's ironic in a way that I'm posting this here on the Fediverse, instead of the site which shall not be named, due to changes that were in part blamed on LLM/AI data scraping. It's also been fun to explain to my fellow engineers that I don't trust ChatGTP's "technical" answers very much because it can't knit.)