Wander

For me AI generated images are double-edged sword. As a non-artist I find that these are an amazing tool that allows me to create the specific type of Yiff that I really enjoy. However, I can definitely empathize with the concerns voiced by artists.

To be honest, I have to say that I don't believe that learning or training from publicly available artwork is immoral, especially if it's not for profit, I am worried that many of the popular models seem to be clearly 'over-fitted'. Over-fitting happens when you train a model so much that it ends up reproducing content that seems almost copy/pasted instead of merely being able to reproduce certain concepts present in the prompt.

The second concern I have is related to mediocrity and saturation of AI imagery. I believe that in upcoming years many of us will grow tired of seeing AI imagery as a replacement of stock images. The truth is that most images generated aren't really that good and people will quickly grow tired of seeing them pop up everywhere. It will become a sign of mediocrity or poor quality.

However, I also think there's a silver lining: AI images have the chance to drastically increase the amount of visual support that any type of content has. This could lead to us growing into a society in which images and other forms of visual representation such as mascots might become more and more popular (as it is in Japan, for example). And, as a consequence, this could increase the demand of quality artwork produced by real artists.

In regards to the furry fandom, I think it's a good idea to separate AI images from artist-drawn artwork. Not only because of the controversy, but also because of the potential for massive amount of low-quality an low-effort content.

The Hot timeline becomes stale if the lemmy server isn't restarted every 6 hours or so, which takes 10 seconds but can't be done on larger instances such as lemmy.world because it kills the queue of outgoing activity.

This is a known bug and is being worked on. For the time being you should try with "top 6 hours" and "top 12 hours" sorting.

Sorry for the late reply. If you're interested in music, you could give both javascript or C# a try. C# works integrated with the operating system and is not sandboxed by the browser, which means that you could do nifty things like actual sound processing and interact with sound devices etc.

In general you will want to start with a console application that receives user input, does something and even prints the output. Let me give you an example of playing an audio file in C#

LINE 1: System.Media.SoundPlayer myAudioPlayer = new System.Media.SoundPlayer(@"c:\mywavfile.wav");

LINE 2: myAudioPlayer.Play();

In the first line we are calling a pre-existing blueprint (library) that knows how to create an audio player. This blueprint can be located in System > Media > SoundPlayer within the collections of libraries. We are giving this virtual audio player a name and called it "myAudioPlayer". Then, after the "=" sign we are giving it the instruction to be created with a preloaded file that would be found in "C:\mywavfile.wav".

In the second file we are commanding our newly created virtual audio player and telling it to play the file. Please note that this audio player would not have a visual interface yet. You would hear audio coming from the speakers but no way to pause. Fortunately C# / .NET (.NET are the pre-existing libraries that you can use), has a drag-and-drop way to create windows application interfaces with buttons via the "Visual Studio" editor, so you could potentially create a drag-and-drop interface and bind a button with a Stop symbol to the instruction "myAudioPlayer.Stop();"

This is just a very very basic example, but object oriented programming often boils down to this: create virtual representations of something and then command them to do something.

If this has peaked your interest check out this playlist of a full complete programming course in C# which is what I used to learn programming years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umAcMO3d9_E&list=PLFqasLx4-AErVMCWiIyJe9uA3yQMPBukG

In the end it's all about creating a series of instructions that the computer will follow. The trick is to learn what these instructions mean and to not be scared by their syntax, because behind every scary looking syntax there's just an instruction that can be explain in human language.

Oh, that's actually not a bad idea. I should skim a few of the top threads to get ideas. Thank you, I hadn't thought of that!

I have very mixed feeling about /r/RealFurryHours. On one paw it really is the type of community that I'd love replicating here on reddit, on the other paw what I've seen from it was often some sort of echo chamber where differing opinions where downvoted without really fostering real discussion or debate. IMHO, Mastodon is probably a better place to host that type of group / community since it does not have downvotes or even upvotes.

I could very well be mistaken, though, and it would work better on here. I'm not sure I'm fit for moderating it though. Maybe it's something that can be hosted on Pawb?

If you visit their homepage. You can fetch your local post if you take that url from their homepage and paste it in the search page of your instance.

Thanks!

Wrong community?

Oh I had to zoom in before I got hit. Hell no.

Oh yeah, apologies for the above comment. C# is definitely a good option, especially if you use windows and love messing around with the OS

I'm not sure I fully agree with that approach for most people since C++ resources and tools seem to not be the user friendliest but then again if it worked for you that is amazing.

Try "the Odin project", which has an amazingly active community.

But before you try too much, once you've learned to set up any programming tools, just use them to have fun. Find a way in which you can use programming in relation to your hobbies.

With JavaScript you can manipulate any webpage you see or create your own interactive webapp. Even if it's just a few ugly buttons and text fields, you could make an app that calculates good builds for a videogame you like, for example.

If you want to interact with a windows operating system you can't go wrong with C# using visual studio. This will literally allow you to manipulate files, folders or automate anything you want from the operating system.

Try to find something that is fun and just enjoy yourself with small apps before you try to go too fast.