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phantomrose96 · 1 year ago

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The conversation around AI is going to get away from us quickly because people lack the language to distinguish types of AI--and it's not their fault. Companies love to slap "AI" on anything they believe can pass for something "intelligent" a computer program is doing. And this muddies the waters when people want to talk about AI when the exact same word covers a wide umbrella and they themselves don't know how to qualify the distinctions within.

I'm a software engineer and not a data scientist, so I'm not exactly at the level of domain expert. But I work with data scientists, and I have at least rudimentary college-level knowledge of machine learning and linear algebra from my CS degree. So I want to give some quick guidance.

What is AI? And what is not AI?

So what's the difference between just a computer program, and an "AI" program? Computers can do a lot of smart things, and companies love the idea of calling anything that seems smart enough "AI", but industry-wise the question of "how smart" a program is has nothing to do with whether it is AI.

A regular, non-AI computer program is procedural, and rigidly defined. I could "program" traffic light behavior that essentially goes { if(light === green) { go(); } else { stop();} }. I've told it in simple and rigid terms what condition to check, and how to behave based on that check. (A better program would have a lot more to check for, like signs and road conditions and pedestrians in the street, and those things will still need to be spelled out.)

An AI traffic light behavior is generated by machine-learning, which simplistically is a huge cranking machine of linear algebra which you feed training data into and it "learns" from. By "learning" I mean it's developing a complex and opaque model of parameters to fit the training data (but not over-fit). In this case the training data probably includes thousands of videos of car behavior at traffic intersections. Through parameter tweaking and model adjustment, data scientists will turn this crank over and over adjusting it to create something which, in very opaque terms, has developed a model that will guess the right behavioral output for any future scenario.

A well-trained model would be fed a green light and know to go, and a red light and know to stop, and 'green but there's a kid in the road' and know to stop. A very very well-trained model can probably do this better than my program above, because it has the capacity to be more adaptive than my rigidly-defined thing if the rigidly-defined program is missing some considerations. But if the AI model makes a wrong choice, it is significantly harder to trace down why exactly it did that.

Because again, the reason it's making this decision may be very opaque. It's like engineering a very specific plinko machine which gets tweaked to be very good at taking a road input and giving the right output. But like if that plinko machine contained millions of pegs and none of them necessarily correlated to anything to do with the road. There's possibly no "if green, go, else stop" to look for. (Maybe there is, for traffic light specifically as that is intentionally very simplistic. But a model trained to recognize written numbers for example likely contains no parameters at all that you could map to ideas a human has like "look for a rigid line in the number". The parameters may be all, to humans, meaningless.)

So, that's basics. Here are some categories of things which get called AI:

"AI" which is just genuinely not AI

There's plenty of software that follows a normal, procedural program defined rigidly, with no linear algebra model training, that companies would love to brand as "AI" because it sounds cool.

Something like motion detection/tracking might be sold as artificially intelligent. But under the covers that can be done as simply as "if some range of pixels changes color by a certain amount, flag as motion"

2. AI which IS genuinely AI, but is not the kind of AI everyone is talking about right now

"AI", by which I mean machine learning using linear algebra, is very good at being fed a lot of training data, and then coming up with an ability to go and categorize real information.

The AI technology that looks at cells and determines whether they're cancer or not, that is using this technology. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that can take an image of hand-written text and transcribe it. Again, it's using linear algebra, so yes it's AI.

Many other such examples exist, and have been around for quite a good number of years. They share the genre of technology, which is machine learning models, but these are not the Large Language Model Generative AI that is all over the media. Criticizing these would be like criticizing airplanes when you're actually mad at military drones. It's the same "makes fly in the air" technology but their impact is very different.

3. The AI we ARE talking about. "Chat-gpt" type of Generative AI which uses LLMs ("Large Language Models")

If there was one word I wish people would know in all this, it's LLM (Large Language Model). This describes the KIND of machine learning model that Chat-GPT/midjourney/stablediffusion are fueled by. They're so extremely powerfully trained on human language that they can take an input of conversational language and create a predictive output that is human coherent. (I am less certain what additional technology fuels art-creation, specifically, but considering the AI art generation has risen hand-in-hand with the advent of powerful LLM, I'm at least confident in saying it is still corely LLM).

This technology isn't exactly brand new (predictive text has been using it, but more like the mostly innocent and much less successful older sibling of some celebrity, who no one really thinks about.) But the scale and power of LLM-based AI technology is what is new with Chat-GPT.

This is the generative AI, and even better, the large language model generative AI.

(Data scientists, feel free to add on or correct anything.)

#chrissy speaks

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its-always-nightshift · 18 days ago

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This is the official design of Sun for my Theater AU!! I love him so much and I honestly need to draw him more. He’s so character.

Click for more information about the AU:

What is the Theater AU?

A fic currently in the works which takes canon Sun & Moon and plays with the concept of them being theater bots before being transferred (unwillingly) to the daycare! Half of the story revolves around when they were theater bots, and the other half is about the daycare. The drawing above is Sun when he was a theater bot! Sun in the daycare looks very close to canon in design with a few different details. And by theater, I mean they had some very cool acts. Moon has my favorite performance in the story so far.

Is there a y/n for the Theater AU?

No, you follow along the story of a nonbinary oc named Roy who dabbles in software engineering. You can, however, imagine that Roy is the pizzaplex’s nickname for y/n and pretend as such! Either way is fine by me, but the fic will be tagged as oc insert.

Have you written any chapters/made any art for the Theater AU yet?

Very few, but that’s only because I have to wait until summer to flesh it out properly. I do, however, have many bullet points for the storyline written down already as well as a couple of snippets and have a very good idea of how I want the fic to play out.

What kind of personality does Roy have?

Roy is a very down-to-earth, analytical, logic-oriented type of person. Roy has a lot of patience and I think Sun sometimes needs that kind of patience because of his jitteriness and overall bouncy personality. They’ve known the boys for a while and always took an interest in the way they work. They might even be the reason Roy went into software development and specialized in AI.

Can I use your art/writing for AI?

Absolutely not. That is not what AI should be used for. Thank you for your cooperation.

How technical will the fic be?

I want to mix my own experience as a computer scientist into the story a little while also making the explanations easy enough for anyone to enjoy and maybe find their own technical passion out of it. I will still mention some fun comp sci technical jargon for the purpose of enunciating Roy’s professionalism. On the robotics side, my own experience lacks, but I will try my best to get as accurate as I can by studying the canon boys.

Does Roy get to smooch the boys?

I’m still debating this, honestly! Maybe in some sequel story or side-comics, but the main fic is meant to focus on the characterization of Sun & Moon, so we’ll see. The boys can’t move their faces similarly to canon, but they would happily accept a smooch on the cheek.

Who do you like more, Sun or Moon?

Oh boy, I love them both! Moon is very scary and I’d never go back to that level in security breach if I can avoid it, but he makes for such a funky character full of potential storytelling. Sun is definitely my favorite of the two though. When I tell friends about a fic I’ve recently read from any of the fantastic DCA stories, I always ramble about how Sun’s character was written whether it was sunhinged, emotionally haunting, or absolutely sweet! When I played Help Wanted 2 I was overjoyed by his character. He deserves to be a little sassy sometimes, as a treat. It is no different in the Theater AU; he has his sassy and sweet moments.

Moon’s design I am still working on, so keep an eye out for him!! Also let me know if you take an interest in my boys by asking questions about them! It helps me find their personalities better and inspires me to do more. Thanks for reading!

#fnaf moon #fnaf sun #moondrop #sun and moon fnaf #fnaf dca #sundrop #dca sun #dca moon #dca #dca au #theater au

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quasi-normalcy · 6 months ago

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I do think that the rise of fascism is directly tied to the decline of communal values.

So on the one hand, you have capitalism, which relentlessly tells you that everything is a competition, your value as a person can only come at someone else's expense, some people are just intrinsically better than others, and your position on this hierarchy is determined by what's in your bank account. On the other hand, individualist liberalism can only answer this with a sort of weak-tea "self-esteem" discourse, which at best amounts to "try your best! Do what you love! It doesn't matter!" and at worst amounts to shouting "Everyone's a winner!", a position that even children automatically view with cynicism.

Never is there any discussion that maybe value shouldn't be intrinsic to the self. Maybe your value is in how much you make life better for other people. Like, do you make a worthy and necessary contribution to society that helps other people? That adds to the net happiness of the world? Then congratulations, you should take pride in that. Someone who plants a bee garden for free is worth more than a hedge fund manager who only contributes misery to the world, even if he makes a lot of money doing it. Someone who uses their body to block, however temporarily, the export of weapons or the laying of pipeline is infinitely more valuable to society than the skilled engineer who makes his living designing them. Even simple activities like telling jokes or doing chores are worth infinitely more than developing advertising software that only makes people annoyed and parts them from their money!

Like the moral of that movie It's A Wonderful Life wasn't that the guy should go on living because he really tried his best and maybe he'll finally get to do what he wants with his life once he saves up his pennies; the moral was that he should go on living because he'd made life materially and spiritually better for his community. We need that energy!!

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saffusthings · 2 months ago

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second chances

mob boss! lando norris x reader

part seventeen: dream a little dream of me

word count: 1.6k

warnings: tooth-rotting fluff

sixteen | seventeen | eighteen

The second date should’ve felt more awkward. It didn’t.

Alex had picked a science museum of all places—not exactly romantic on paper, but the look on his face when he pointed out the replica Mars rover was too earnest to judge. He had this habit where his whole face would light up like a lightbulb the moment before he got excited about something, and Y/N had already learned to clock it like a warning siren.

“So, technically,” he was saying, hands jammed in his jacket pockets as they strolled past a massive display on deep-sea robotics, “the algorithms used for this submersible’s sensor mapping were adapted from AI software developed for self-driving cars.”

“Technically,” she echoed, teasing, “you should probably just work here.”

He looked sideways at her with a crooked grin. “I applied when I was sixteen. They didn’t take me.”

“They’re clearly still recovering from that mistake.”

He tried to play it off cool, but she caught the slight flush of his ears.

She liked him more than she expected to. Not in the way you decide to like someone—more like how you step outside one day and realize the air smells like rain and suddenly, you’re soft and open and all the windows are down. He was like that: unexpected and quiet and warm around the edges.

They made their way through the rest of the exhibits in no particular order, weaving between dwindling crowds of families and groups of students on field trips, neither of them in a hurry. He let her take her time at the forensic anthropology section, where she ran her fingers along the raised edges of a reconstructed skull, and she let him lose himself in the physics wing, where he explained, with ridiculous enthusiasm, why the double pendulum was so cool. It was there that the nickname Professor Albon was born.

At some point, he took her hand. It wasn’t a big deal. He just did it naturally, without hesitation, like it had already been a habit, and for a moment, that simple touch made her feel warm all over.

They ended the night sitting cross-legged on the floor of the museum café, long after it closed, surrounded by vending machine snacks and a half-solved crossword puzzle she’d found in her bag. The overhead lights buzzed faintly, casting a dim glow over the abandoned chairs and tables, but neither of them seemed eager to move. They laughed about everything and nothing, the kind of laughing that came from being tired but happy, the kind that made her lean into his shoulder without thinking.

"Okay," Alex said, tapping the eraser end of his pencil against the page. "Eight-letter word for ‘illuminates or clarifies’?"

As she took a moment to think it over, Alex watched in his periphery as she counted off the letters of her word on her fingers. "’Explains’ fits," she mused, popping a purple skittle into her mouth.

"Hmm." He scribbled it in. "Not bad. Maybe I should keep you around."

"Yeah, yeah," she nudged his knee with hers, grinning. "You just like me for my crossword skills."

"Wrong. I like you for your crossword skills and your terrible puns."

“My puns are great, thank you very much.” She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

He liked her brain. She liked how funny he was. They made a good pair—two academically overworked people who laughed at obscure engineering memes and played footsie under café tables without meaning to. When they said goodbye that night, he kissed her like he was trying not to smile through it. Like maybe this could really be something.

It felt easy.

And in the days that followed, it stayed easy. He texted her every night.

alex: Made the Mars rover jealous. Can’t stop thinking about you.

Y/N: did you just say that unironically. because I might have to stop seeing you on principle.

alex: Too late, I’ve already added you to my will. You get the Lego Technic collection.

Y/N: wait nvm i’m back in

They made time. Even when they both shouldn’t have.

He’d bring her coffee before her class–something with cinnamon and oat milk in it. He’d scrawl dumb physics jokes on the lid just to make her roll her eyes. She started keeping his schedule in her head without meaning to. She knew which nights he had his advanced systems class and which ones he spent buried in the lab. He’d text her when his simulations crashed at 3AM. She’d send him memes about courtroom drama tropes in return.

He had an engineer’s sense of humor—dry, sneaky, often deeply specific. It took a while to catch on, but once she did, it felt like discovering hidden easter eggs in his sentences.

“You know,” he’d murmur as they lay back in the grass near campus, watching clouds roll over like they weren’t chilly out here in the autumn breeze, “you statistically reduce your lifespan by two minutes every time you eat instant ramen.”

“Cool. So I’ll be dying a noble, sodium-rich death then.”

He turned his head toward her, smiling with closed eyes. “Hmm, a martyr.”

“A hero.”

“Buried with your books and MSG packets.”

She shoved his shoulder. He let her.

On Thursdays, she’d sit outside his lab, cross-legged on the cold tile floor with flashcards in her lap, quizzing him on his presentation slides about failure analysis and impact resistance.

“Okay, explain to me like I’m five—what is a stress-strain curve and why should I care?”

“Because,” he’d say, crouching in front of her with a smirk, “it tells you how close something is to breaking.”

“And that’s relevant to your research…?”

He gave her a confused look, until it turned sheepish as he scratched the back of his neck. “I’m… not entirely sure about that bit, actually.”

She started looking forward to the moments in between—the walks across campus, the shared bag of chips while sitting on the hood of her car, the ridiculous voice memos he sent when he was overtired and delirious.

They kissed in stairwells and library corners and once,perhaps ill-advisedly, on a park bench in the middle of a thunderstorm. The rain had soaked through their clothes, cold and unrelenting, but he had just looked at her and said, "I think we should be stupid about this," right before he leaned in. It was impulsive and dramatic and made her laugh until she had to cover her mouth, their faces inches apart. Her hair was soaked, his glasses fogged up, and they almost dropped his backpack in a puddle, but the moment stuck—sharp and golden and untouchable.

They talked about future dates like there’d be dozens of them—bookstores they wanted to browse together, a tiny Thai place he swore by, a stargazing night he promised would be “scientifically optimized for romance” depending on the cloud cover. She rolled her eyes at that one, but her heart still fluttered.

They were still in the sweet spot—the space between maybe and more, where everything felt bright and possible.

It wasn’t perfect – but it was promising.

The third date was dinner—some hole-in-the-wall Thai place with flickering neon signage and laminated menus stained with old curry thumbprints. He’d gotten lost on the way and sent a flurry of frantic texts.

alex :) : I passed the restaurant. Twice. There’s a cat staring at me through a laundromat window. I think it’s judging me.

Y/N: be strong. you can beat the cat.

alex :) : Negative, Sargeant. It’s very confident.

He’d arrived breathless, slightly damp from a drizzle, and holding a single packet of Skittles “for your efforts,” he’d said solemnly. She called him an idiot. He looked delighted.

That night, they talked about things that didn’t matter—TV shows neither of them had finished, foods they pretended to like for the aesthetic, the sheer horror of Alex’s undergraduate group project from hell (“We had a guy who thought duct tape was a structural solution”).

And then, slowly, they talked about the things that did matter.

Like how she used to want to be a journalist when she was little, because she thought it meant you got to ask as many questions as you wanted and never had to apologize.

Or how he still wasn’t sure what kind of engineer he wanted to be—just that he wanted to make things that didn’t break when people needed them most.

“You know,” he said, nudging his glass in slow circles across the table, “you’re not what I expected.”

Y/N looked up. “Is that a good thing or, like, a 'you’re secretly a serial killer' kind of a thing?”

He smiled. “It’s a good thing. Really, really good.”

By the fourth week, they had a rhythm. It wasn’t just dates anymore—it was Hey, want to walk home together? and I saved you the last chocolate chip muffin, but only because I like you more than I like muffins. But barely.

It was him reaching for her hand without thinking, her resting her head against his shoulder on the bus when she was too tired to hold it up.

It was a shared Spotify playlist for when studying is ur 13th reason.

It was early Saturday morning sun filtering into her apartment while they quietly read their own books, his socked foot nudging hers on the side of the couch almost every ten minutes.

It was good.

But between the sleepy smiles and the shared muffins and the texts that kept getting longer instead of shorter, the truth was that they both had dreams. Big ones. All-consuming ones.

And no matter how much you wanted something—or someone—there were only so many hours in the day.

a/n: one of my more favorite chapters! an unfortunate lack of lando though :/ what did you think of it?

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cutehoons02 · 5 months ago

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I need a nerdy boy in my life

*pairing: Han hot nerdy boy x popolar girl obsessed with christmas

*tags: Han is obsessed with her, touching, shy boy with people but not with the protagonist, christmas trope, jealousy, kiss, smut, fluffy

*synopsis: Han always had a crush or maybe obsession with the campus influencer but it seemed that she did not see him or maybe it was just the other way around?

comments are appreciated

*word count: 4k (Tell me if you like this kind of stories:

—REBLOG if you enjoyed

The computer science department was with the economics and engineering department consisted of more men from all over the campus, guys who spent hours in front of a blue screen designing software, video games, and applications or trying to hack at illegal sites; the only course in that department with a fair percentage of girls was Communication and Social Media and Y/n was among the most popular and well-liked girls from the course, both because she had a fair number of followers in the various social platforms and tried to make friends with as many people as possible but also because she was excellent as a student.

She decided to graduate in Communication and Social Media because she loved the social and developing world that could be there. Still, she never expected her course to go from the economics department to the computer science department for her second year of university only because the president of the institute had the brilliant idea to let his nerd students know that in addition to developing video games or software, they had the opportunity to express their emotions with someone instead of being attached to the computer or saying it all the president knew that most students had "sexual repression".

The winter air mixed with that of the first days of December put me in a good mood Y/n, had a serious obsession with Christmas, in his room there were I don’t know how many candles to the various perfumes in limited edition for the holidays, Under the entrance of her room there was a small mistletoe (even if she did not go out with anyone seriously wanted to believe that sooner or later someone would kiss her under that famous stick), lights decorated the whole room and in his collection of accessories there was a section of bows to attach them to hair and he put one white with small glittering silver snowflakes.

She was simply a romantic and spent her nights watching Christmas movies with her best friend but she was extremely jealous because they didn’t seem to care about the love that you could feel during the holidays but they were only thinking of which other guy to take read especially if he was a computer science student, had received some flattery from some boys but none made her heart beat or come failles to stomach except one in particular Han Jisung, god hated him with all of herself had tried in every way to attract his attention with small gestures, let’s talk clearly he did not act like a pick me girl too because it was not in his character but sometimes he sat in front of or next to him in the library, Other times he saw him exhausted even after the library hours and brought him some limited edition coffee to drink in autumn or Christmas but always noticed that he drank a sip and then left it all in the glass, During the computer classes she had tried to make friends with everyone but he seemed not to care about her worse it appeared that she was like a ghost.

When he entered the classroom he saw with his surprise Han lift his eyes from his pc and when he saw her with a small mistletoe in hand he threw an ochiattaccia from the back of the classroom, was extremely irritable because they had spoken yes and no few times since the beginning semetre and it seemed that he hated her without having done them anything wrong, the computer class was one of the few classes where the teacher was a woman and Y/n had asked if he could cheer up and decorate the classroom a little with something Christmas and to his surprise the teacher had given him permission to put a mistletoe branch over the door so Without disturbing the very few people who had taken a chair and put it under the door and went to take the scoch and the razor wire to attach it to the branch, when she put her chair over the top she didn’t think it was so high so she tried to stand on her toes but felt the more stable chair below her and saw Han behind her holding his chair and trying in every way not to let those few male companions see their legs Discovered by the skirt slightly too short for his standards.

"Pixie next time before you try to hang something see if you can get there because in this way you’re showing off your half-naked legs under your skirt, let me attack that stupid mistletoe branch." you sundown to look at Han and have his classic nerd glasses, a black oversized sweatshirt, cargo and hair all ruffled, who knows what it would have been like to touch them and pull them slightly...

"Nerd nobody asked you for your help and don’t call me Pixie you’re not that much taller than me, if you can’t look at legs with socks it’s not my fault if you’re perverts." You felt the chair slightly flutter and Han had moved away that little not to hold the chair anymore

"Pixie seriously even if you stretch a little with the tips of your shoes you will not be able to stick it, let’s finish this show, and let me get on this chair, quiet is not among my hobbies to watching your legs half naked"

It was a serious lie every time you wore those fucking gowns like a good girl He would have wanted to put one of his big hands on your thighs and let everyone know that you were his property but he was too shy to do so

"I already told you not to call me Pixie i am Y/n and you know well what my name is, if you insist so try to put it otherwise i will call some other guy"

you went down from the small chair and Han put himself on the chair, ok he was slightly taller than you, and surely for him, it was a breeze to hang that stick, stretched slightly, and from the sweatshirt you saw come out a piece of leather you knew that Han had a passion for tattoos and had one on his chest but you didn’t think he had another, a slight hint of musk and poo invades you and you look carefully Han hangs the stick and swings it a little to see if he held the small knot that he had made, with a small jump Han got down and you found him a few centimeters from you and lowered slightly at your ear.

"Next time wear jeans, not skirts Y/n because you never know maybe I will start to look at your legs even if they are covered by socks like all the other perverted guys of this course!".

It was exactly a week since that episode in the classroom and most of the kids, when they walked into the classroom, smiled when they saw the little mistletoe over the door instead the only one who didn’t care at all was Han, you had arrived slightly earlier to the computer class and i put you between the last benches in the back of the room, you had to edit a vlog that you had made with your friends last weekend so you were focused on the computer without paying attention to what was happening around you until you saw next to you a computer of the latest generation and a case of glasses, you sunflower and next to it was Han who watched carefully how you were dressed and a slight grin formed when he saw that you wore jeans with small tears and a slightly over red Carharrt sweatshirt that matched perfectly your bow you wore to hold Tie your hair.

"I didn’t think i had so much effect on you pixie, it’s since i told you that i preferred to see you in jeans that i haven’t seen you with a skirt on campus" you raised your eyes and kept editing your video.

"You do not affect me Han, the temperatures have dropped and i prefer not to die of cold with skirts maybe it’s you who are obsessing about me if in all these months you rarely spoke to me and looked if now you notice every time how i’m dressed."

You felt the chair approaching you and leaned awkwardly to the table to be closer to your ear.

"Who said i didn’t look at you? Maybe you were too busy making friends with all these idiots that you never noticed the glances i threw at you"

"Stop teasing me Han, i see how i don’t like who knows how nice and the glances you throw at me when i make a presentation or when i’m in the company of others"

The professor came in and started to explain something about computer security but you already knew that so you kept editing the video until you felt slightly cold fingers coming into contact with your skin under the small tear you had in the jeans near your thigh, You watched Han’s slightly venous hand squeeze your thigh and then make some light circles going up as far as he could and then come back down and squeeze your thigh again. Fortunately, you were on the last bench so no one could see you but you felt the temperature of your cheeks rise more and more and you watched the profile of Han slightly relaxed while with the other hand he took notes, how he could be so casual if his hand was inside your legs and every time he tried to go higher he even left you little pinches with his long fingers.

Just a few minutes before the end of the lesson, the teacher said that you should go ahead with the person sitting next to you to study the chapter that she hadn’t finished explaining and write down what you thought was right to introduce on safety inherent technology artificial intelligence.

Han immediately took his hand from your thigh and approached as before with his body pressed close to yours "I never made fun of you Y/n, i always looked at you and maybe too much for my standards and maybe i have a serious effect on you if before every time i touched your thigh slightly you would decrease in the chair and blush. Luckily you had jeans because if you had the skirt of last week i would have touched you slightly higher and maybe I would have made you moan in front of the whole class" Have you watched Han take his stuff and get out of class, how much did you hate him as a nerd if he behaved that way to you? He had no shame if he thought to pottery you moan or even touch your pussy in class...

The city was full of Christmas stands along the main street to enter the university, you and your friends had arranged to go for a little ride and then go skating all together but someone else had other plans in servant for you and to your surprise, you found the group of friends of Han in front of the stand where they sold freshly fried melles over the cinnamon and an impromptu craving for food made you approach the stand and the group of 8 boys, You looked at him for a moment before you stood in line and saw a boy with blond hair smiling to you and I did the same, he was a nice guy but your eyes stopped on Han’s back for a few seconds and you were slightly happy that he didn’t see you, Two days before the next computer class and you had not yet taken up the courage to write him to find you studying. You acted as if you were the loser of the situation and not him, you had thought that you wrote instead you had not received any message but you always displayed the stories among the first people and even when you posted a photo were always among the first to like.

<<Isn’t that girl with the white bow and the mutton, Hannie that girl you’re obsessed with watching every story and vlog on YouTube?>> Han when he heard these words coming from Felix felt his cheeks turn slightly red and looked in your direction and saw you taking pictures definitely for your ig at the apple stand.

“Don’t tell me you brought us to this Christmas village just because you saw his ig stories on his profile," said Chan, laughing and pinching his cheeks slightly, Han gave a slight tap to the big hand Chan and began to approach you but saw that you were in the company of your friends and his shyness was imposed, god because I wasn’t extrovert like Felix or Chan?

Felix gave a slight push to Han and he found himself next to you and looked at the Australian boy.

“Pixie didn’t think I’d find you in the Christmas village don’t tell me that you’re following me and missing you already!"

You were in the head and next to you was Han, He wore a jacket of The North Face and cargo, It was strange not to see him with glasses but unfortunately he was even more beautiful gave him that area of the boy next door and no longer the nerd who spent hours on hours in front of the computer.

"Maybe you’re obsessed with me Han, I saw that you were among the first to view stories and fatalities find you in my place.”

"Why should I be obsessed with you Y/n? I have other things to think about and it was a fatality if I watched the story just put on ig"

You laughed and the line started to go ahead in front of you there was a nice guy and he immediately smiled and passed his hands through his hair while paying for the two fried apples, Before you left the stand you heard the cashier talk to you and give you a small sheet of paper but I did not now open it that with one hand Han took it and put it behind a pocket of jeans.

“Seriously Han what do you want from me? You tried to leave but a slight grip on Han’s hand made you stop and you looked at the nerd in front of you with an interrogative look.

"Would you like to go to my house and get on with the project? I know it’s Saturday afternoon but tomorrow I have to go to training and on Monday I have a class at 20”

"I don’t go to a stranger’s house even if you are in class with me and you are my age you could be a serial killer, let’s go to my house where i feel more comfortable than surely there is some roommate of mine"

"Yes, sure, I didn’t even think about it, sorry if I was too hasty to say immediately go to my house if you feel more comfortable we can also go to the library" Han was slightly eating the skin off a fingernail and at the same time he was also snapping his fingers for embarrassment or maybe anxiety? You took one of his hands and put it in your pocket with

"We can go to my house there is no problem, if you are okay and if you feel comfortable staying in a room full of Christmas stuff and basic girl fond of music, make-up, and shopping"

Han laughed lightly and looked until you arrived at your date and shared the hand braided to her inside the pocket of your mutton.

"Should I seriously be afraid of what I might find in your room or can I just sit still or some killer puppet could eat me alive if he sees a boy of the opposite sex in your room?"

"There’s no killer puppet in my room just a teddy bear that will be like a few years younger than the two of us" Han walked into your room and a little whistle came out of his lips, you had the view of the mountains of Seoul and the light sunset contrasted with the cream-colored walls of your room, there were a lot of albums of old and new artists and obviously above the door was a light mistletoe branch.

"Pixie i understand that you like Christmas so much but also in your room you have to find this branch of mistletoe. I read on the Internet that if you kiss someone under mistletoe love will last forever between the two lovers and it is a plant that brings luck and that drives away the difficulties and pressures between the couple"

"Who’s the obsessed Han? I sure don’t, if you research my favorite things!" You saw him blush slightly and sat in the big gamer/ youtuber chair that you had, instead, you sat in your comfortable bed and for almost two hours you studied with him, You weren’t surprised that while studying he was representing exactly the nerd you knew and that nothing was distracting him or maybe there was something or someone who could distract him and that was you.

You got up from your bed and you sat on the armrest of the comfortable chair next to him to make them understand that you were tired of studying but it seemed that he did not care what you were doing, then slowly sundown the series and you found him with a light smile and grin looking at you.

"Who is it now that needs the attention?" You were afraid to make a first move with Han also because you didn’t know him at all but he had put his long fingers for almost an hour and a half inside that little slit in your jeans and told you that if you had a skirt she would touch you so who cares if thought you needed him. Without taking your eyes from your face you sat between his muscular legs and felt his big hands between your hips "You want what treasure? Where is the popular girl who talks to everyone and wants to be at the center of attention all the time?" His words were provocative for the silent nerd who was in class, you spread your legs a little put over his length and tried to kiss him but he moved and a grumpy took possession of your lips

"Baby i need words who is now the shy couple?" a slight grin took possession of his lips and began to look at your lips as if it were a challenge only between your two worlds.

"I want to kiss you Han but don’t get too excited."

"Pixie fuck is since i saw you first come through that fucking classroom door i dreamed of hearing you say. But where is the romantic girl who wants to be kissed under the mistletoe by his beloved before Christmas?

"I think that before to make me kiss under the mistletoe i need to feel how it is to kiss you"

"You’re saying that you need to have a nerd in your life but you need to figure out if this nerd is the right one for you?"

You felt slightly more comfortable and you slammed your lips with hers and a slight taste of sugar invaded your tongue, He was fucking good at kissing and after a few seconds, you felt slightly biting your lower lip and a little moan came out of your lips and put his tongue into your mouth and at the same time began to gently touch your spine with his hand's cold ones that contrasted with your hot skin. Han had dreamed of this moment for months now and now that he held you close if he did not want to scare you, felt Han away from your lips to take a breath.

Han’s fleshy lips moved in your neck and began to give you a gentle kiss trail between the neck and collarbone.

"You’re perfect baby, your taste is driving me crazy. I always hated these sweet flavors that know from Christmas but i can make an exception for you" The feelings that you felt only with little kisses and lollipops were sending you off your head because this guy was called a nerd and what do you know about kissing?

You felt his cock swell more and more when you moved slightly above its length to feel the atrium between your jeans.

"I hate you because you have two Han personalities? How is it that in class you are perfect and then you are like this with the girls?" You felt the light laugh of Han in your neck and began to bite your neck until you felt his name come from your lips and at that moment he understood that you would be forever because no other name should and could come out of your lips if it was not his.

You pulled off his sweatshirt and a chest carved with around a small compass tattooed made you lick your lips so you returned the work he had done on your neck kissing her neck, her collarbones on display, Going down to his chest and with your hands caressed the ridges of his abs and you began to kiss his chest "Pixie moves into bed" You didn’t care about the uncomfortable position you had sitting between his legs while kissing and licking his abs.

"Pls Y/n" When you heard your name begging you got up from his legs and threw it into your comfortable bed and put yourself on him and watched him with his perfect tattoos and short of breath for the pleasure you were giving him, You wanted to let everyone know that the nerd not looked at by anyone had filled you with suckers and almost came in your pants without even touching you.

#han x reader #han jisung #han jisung x reader #han jisung x you #han jisung hard thoughts #han jisung smut #han jisung stray kids #stray kids x you #stray kids x reader #stray kids scenarios #stray kids imagines #bang chan hard hours #bang chan x reader #felix x reader

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kaunaz · 2 years ago

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hey. so. i need the Ultrakill community to understand something, in case Hakita doesn't say anything about it.

Unity, the company, has decided to begin charging developers that made games with their software, once they meet a certain threshold. if a game earns $200,000 within 12 months, and 200,000 installs of said game happen total, the devs will be billed a flat rate of 20 cents per install. RETROACTIVELY. which is already a major blow to everyone who's ever found success with Unity (hint: Ultrakill is made in Unity).

to make this worse, the company is not planning to use tracking software to figure out how many installs have happened, like we THOUGHT they might, and aren't doing a good job of clarifying what an "install" even means. instead, they have stated that they'll be using a "proprietary data model" to determine this number per game. translation: they're making up numbers with AI. they don't even care. it's basically robbery and we're pretty sure this is mad illegal.

these changes are being finalized by January 1st of 2024.

game developers have the following options:

1) pay the bullshit fee.

2) port their entire game into another engine and re-release it in said engine.

3) cancel their Unity subscription and remove their game from all stores.

i don't know what this means for Ultrakill. maybe Hakita can pay the fee. maybe he'll try to port into Godot or Unreal. or maybe he will just decide it's not worth it to keep going. i don't know. i don't know what sort of person he is.

no matter what happens, PLEASE try to enjoy the game while you can. if development continues, expect delays. lots of them. above all, DO NOT GET ANGRY AT HAKITA IF THE GAME NEEDS TO BE DELAYED OR SHUT DOWN. THE BLAME FOR ANY PROBLEMS GOING FORWARD LIES SOLELY ON UNITY'S CORPORATE GREED.

Hakita, if you're reading this, please just do whatever you think is best. it's your game, your life. we enjoyed everything you've done so far, and for me, that's good enough.

#ultrakill #unity

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agapi-kalyptei · 10 months ago

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crowdstrike: hot take 1

It's too early in the news cycle to say anything truly smart, but to sum things up, what I know so far:

there was no "hack" or cyberattack or data breach*

a private IT security company called CrowdStrike released a faulty update which practically disabled all its desktop (?) Windows workstations (laptops too, but maybe not servers? not sure)

the cause has been found and a fix is on the way

as it stands now, the fix will have to be manually applied (in person) to each affected workstation (this could mean in practice maybe 5, maybe 30 minutes of work for each affected computer - the number is also unknown, but it very well could be tens (or hundreds) of thousands of computers across thousands of large, multinational enterprises.

(The fix can be applied manually if you have a-bit-more-than-basic knowledge of computers)

Things that are currently safe to assume:

this wasn't a fault of any single individual, but of a process (workflow on the side of CrowdStrike) that didn't detect the fault ahead of time

[most likely] it's not that someone was incompetent or stupid - but we don't have the root cause analysis available yet

deploying bugfixes on Fridays is a bad idea

*The obligatory warning part:

Just because this wasn't a cyberattack, doesn't mean there won't be related security breaches of all kinds in all industries. The chaos, panic, uncertainty, and very soon also exhaustion of people dealing with the fallout of the issue will create a perfect storm for actually malicious actors that will try to exploit any possible vulnerability in companies' vulnerable state.

The analysis / speculation part:

globalization bad lol

OK, more seriously: I have not even heard about CrowdStrike until today, and I'm not a security engineer. I'm a developer with mild to moderate (outsider) understanding of vulnerabilities.

OK some background / basics first

It's very common for companies of any size to have more to protect their digital assets than just an antivirus and a firewall. Large companies (Delta Airlines) can afford to pay other large companies to provide security solutions for them (CrowdStrike). These days, to avoid bad software of any kind - malware - you need a complex suite of software that protects you from all sides:

desktop/laptop: antivirus, firewall, secure DNS, avoiding insecure WiFi, browser exploits, system patches, email scanner, phishing on web, phishing via email, physical access, USB thumb drive, motherboard/BIOS/UEFI vulnerabilities or built-in exploits made by the manufacturers of the Chinese government,

person/phone: phishing via SMS, phishing via calls, iOS/Android OS vulnerabilities, mobile app vulnerabilities, mobile apps that masquerade as useful while harvesting your data, vulnerabilities in things like WhatsApp where a glitched JPG pictures sent to you can expose your data, ...

servers: mostly same as above except they servers have to often deal with millions of requests per day, most of them valid, and at least some of the servers need to be connected to the internet 24/7

CDN and cloud services: fundamentally, an average big company today relies on dozens or hundreds of other big internet companies (AWS / Azure / GCP / Apple / Google) which in turn rely on hundreds of other companies to outsource a lot of tasks (like harvesting your data and sending you marketing emails)

infrastructure - routers... modems... your Alexa is spying on you... i'm tired... etc.

Anyway if you drifted to sleep in the previous paragraph I don't blame you. I'm genuinely just scratching the surface. Cybersecurity is insanely important today, and it's insanely complex too.

The reason why the incident blue-screened the machines is that to avoid malware, a lot of the anti-malware has to run in a more "privileged" mode, meaning they exist very close to the "heart" of Windows (or any other OS - the heart is called kernel). However, on this level, a bug can crash the system a lot more easily. And it did.

OK OK the actual hot lukewarm take finally

I didn't expect to get hit by y2k bug in the middle of 2024, but here we are.

As bad as it was, this only affected a small portion of all computers - in the ballpark of ~0.001% or even 0.0001% - but already caused disruptions to flights and hospitals in a big chunk of the world.

maybe-FAQ:

"Oh but this would be avoided if they weren't using the Crowdwhatever software" - true. However, this kind of mistake is not exclusive to them.

"Haha windows sucks, Linux 4eva" - I mean. Yeah? But no. Conceptually there is nothing that would prevent this from happening on Linux, if only there was anyone actually using it (on desktop).

"But really, Windows should have a better protection" - yes? no? This is a very difficult, technical question, because for kernel drivers the whole point is that 1. you trust them, and 2. they need the super-powerful-unrestrained access to work as intended, and 3. you _need_ them to be blazing fast, so babysitting them from the Windows perspective is counterproductive. It's a technical issue with no easy answers on this level.

"But there was some issue with Microsoft stuff too." - yes, but it's unknown if they are related, and at this point I have not seen any solid info about it.

The point is, in a deeply interconnected world, it's sort of a miracle that this isn't happening more often, and on a wider scale. Both bugfixes and new bugs are deployed every minute to some software somewhere in the world, because we're all in a rush to make money and pay rent and meet deadlines.

Increased monoculture in IT is bad for everyone. Whichever OS, whichever brand, whichever security solution provider - the more popular they are, the better visible their mistakes will be.

As much as it would be fun to make jokes like "CrowdStroke", I'm not even particularly mad at the company (at this point - that might change when I hear about their QA process). And no, I'm not even mad at Windows, as explained in the pseudo-FAQ.

The ultimate hot take? If at all possible, don't rely on anything related to computers. Technical problems are caused by technical solutions.

#crowdstrike #cybersecurity #anyway i'm microdosing today so it's probably too boring to read #but hopefully it at least mostly made sense #to be honest I wanted to have more of a hot take #but the truth is mundane

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photomatt · 1 year ago

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What do you consider to be the role of quality engineering and quality engineers in the overall software development process?

Super important, if there are bugs, lagginess, crashes, it confounds all other metrics and tests, and frustrates users to the point of using another app. Everything else on your phone is a click away, we really have to earn the right to have your attention. Maybe I'm cursed, but I seem to run into issues a lot more on our apps across Automattic than I do on others that I use on a daily basis. We'll get this right, though, it's core to our values and user promise.

#tumblr #qa

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nyxtickled · 4 months ago

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I kind of can't get over you studying freakin' *robotics engineering.* Now I'm picturing you as the cool engineer on some sci-fi show. Whaddaya think? Star Trek? Something with giant robots? Maybe something grittier and more cyberpunk?

Maybe this is making too light of what you're working so hard for. Follow-up and/or substitute question: what's one of your dream projects or goals? What kind of robot(s) does Nyx most want to create, or work on?

🥹🤭 awww jeez don’t make me all fricken bashful on main i’m supposed to be tough !!!! CYBERPUNK PLEASE AAAAH

ok ok but to answer seriously, so far in my academic career i’ve worked on autonomous cars (1/10 scale autonomous racecars built essentially from scratch, a full size autonomous EV gokart, and i’ve even been fortunate enough to work on a fully autonomous indy 500 car…essentially the most advanced autonomous vehicle in the world. shit was one of the most mind blowing things i’ve ever been a part of), i’ve worked on some cool solar stuff (solar water heater for an orphanage in Tijuana, solar carport concept design for a nonprofit who wants to propose the idea of charging EV cars while they’re parked outside at work all day and distributing leftover power to the building), and my personal favorite was this project i did for a class i took where i designed an autonomous campus rideshare prototype on one of the 1/10 scale cars that was able to use facial recognition to identify the student who requested the ride and would essentially drive itself to the drop off location!

the last one was the most fun for me bc it was the first time i really got into the programming side of robotics. the car would have a starting location where it waited for ride requests, then when you submitted one it would drive itself to the location using LiDAR for collision avoidance and GPS path training. but the real doozy was the pickup stage bc i had to develop the facial recognition code to be able to scan the student’s face upon arrival with computer vision in live time with a camera that was attached to the car, and then match it to a photo of the student that was stored in a database, and then try to match the name of that student to the name of the student who requested the ride! if it matched, the screen would be like “rider verified! hop in!” and proceed to the next stage of driving itself to the drop off point. if it didn’t, the screen would read “sorry, we couldn’t verify your identity with the ride request” and drive itself back to the parking spot where it would wait for the next ride request! and the database of faces would basically come from your student ID picture, cuz the rideshare service would be around campus for students only!

god it was so fucking challenging but i had so much fun with it. so uhhhh to avoid writing 18 more paragraphs about all the cool robotics shit that i’m obsessed with, i would say my dream project is definitely something that combines machine learning software, robotics operating systems programming, and mechanical design all in one. something that could take the technological advancements that we have made and turn it into something useful for everyone. fuck i’m such a nerd i’m sorry i did NOT mean to go on like this ahahahahaha

#nyx.answers #uhhh anyways…#do u see why i crave venomous all-consuming tickle torture #i need my brain turned to mush by something that is not engineering in order to survive lmao

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beesmygod · 8 months ago

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perhaps foolishly throwing my hat in the ring here about cohost developers making 90k/yr (as someone who used cohost for like five minutes but does work in software. although I'm not even close to making SWE-level money lol): depending on your stack, experience, location, other benefits, etc., that's genuinely in the bottom twentieth percentile for engineer salaries at your average startup, if not lower. especially for a "founding engineer who does literally everything"-type role. idk how much experience these people have or what their stack is, but just to guess, at your average seni-marture startup they could easily double that salary, and at a big FAANG company or whatever stupid acronym we're using now they could probably quadruple that, plus or minus whatever part of your comp package is stock instead of actual salary.

there are a couple interesting/relevant reasons I bring this up: (1) at really really early-stage startups, where you only have four guys and a couple hundred grand in the bank, having bottom-twentieth-percentile salaries is normal *because they make up for it by giving you a shitload stock options that will theoretically be worth a lot in the future*, if things ever take off, although of course they rarely do. in cohost's case, it doesn't seem like stocks and shit were part of their long-term plans (which, fair enough, not trying to say they should've been), so in theory the cohost devs were making a lottt less than your average early-stage startup devs, even though overall comp at an early-stage startup is mostly monopoly money.

(2) the other thing is that if the pay is uncompetitive, which it obviously was, then attracting worthwhile talent is really hard. again, idk these devs, they could all genuinely be very good at their jobs. and cohost was clearly a passion project for them. but it makes me wonder if *some* (not all) of their problems stemmed from technical or even positioning/market issues that having more people or more experienced people would've solved, and they just weren't able to hire them. especially since they were doing design work and moderation and other shit in addition to plain old engineering!

I guess my angle here is that unless you see how the sausage is made, it's really really easy to underestimate just how much money (and human labor!) it takes to build anything, and that most projects only manage to pull it off for as long as they do thanks to a near-bottomless supply of venture capital funding. even not-for-profit community projects (which I was considering whether something like cohost could survive as, but even then I'm unsure) rely on corporate sponsorship and free labor from people who are getting paid a lot of money at their day job. so like many of you I am not at all shocked that they're folding—easy to say in hindsight but I definitely say this coming, although maybe not so quickly lol.

but like, even most VC-funded startups fail despite having way better odds and a shitload more money. legit kudos to them for trying anyway, because the only way we get cool shit is if someone's willing to take a risk and maybe fail. that said as a *user* there's still no way I'd hitch my wagon to a fledgling startup unless I was totally okay with that wagon falling into a gulch within 24 months, because that's usually what happens

interesting insight. thanks boss. much to learn about this world that, as an outsider, seems uniquely annoying and stupid to try to navigate

#i think the idea of trying to make a twitter killer was dead on arrival tbh

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wip · 2 years ago

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Hello! Would you ever consider bringing back different post types, especially audio? I appreciate that audio posts now display the artist, song title, and album name, but unfortunately newer audio posts don’t play in Tumblr-based music players like egoisticalgoat.de or robinpx.github.io/boombox because they’re read as text posts. Thank you for reading!

Answer: Hey there, @stepintomusic!

Sadly, the answer here is no. We’ve been moving away from legacy post types and towards the Neue Post Format—a format that allows multiple types of media in the same post—for many years. The new features available in NPF basically guarantee that we won’t ever switch back to the legacy format.

(If you’re interested in peeking behind the scenes here, there are a few posts about NPF over at @engineering.)

Now, to get into the meat of the issue. While it would be amazing if we could support every third-party tool forever, the reality is that we can’t. We’re a surprisingly small team to begin with, and even if we weren’t, that support would come at a cost.

To start, there’s the development tax. Now, would it have been cool to ensure all third-party tools (and all custom themes) worked 100% perfectly with posts stored as NPF before releasing NPF to the public? Yeah, it would have been… for third-party tools and custom themes. For us, it would have meant delaying NPF (and all the features it brings with it) for months, possibly years. Imagine a 2023 where Tumblr still doesn’t have polls: that’s the alternate future we’re talking about here.

And then, there’s our maintenance tax. The engine that powers Tumblr themes is already incredibly complicated—complicated to the point that we’re already finding it difficult to maintain and add things like, as you mentioned, NPF audio metadata. If, every time we found some third-party tool that doesn’t play nice with the latest changes, we tried to make an affordance for it… the engine would just become even more complex. And it would do so quickly, and complex to the point of being impossible to keep up with as a maintainer.

There’s a great article here by a former Mozilla developer about the pitfalls of prioritizing a third-party ecosystem over your own software. Did you know that Firefox was essentially a single-threaded application until 2018? This meant it would still visually lock up when saving files to disk, or collecting crash data. Chrome launched in 2008 and was multiprocess from the start. But it took Firefox ten years to catch up because supporting all existing third-party add-ons was seen as necessary. (Spoiler alert: in the end, they had to drop support for those add-ons anyway.)

My own recommendation around third-party software like this is: get in contact with its developer! If something in their software isn’t working, there’s nobody more qualified to update it. (Or, if they’ve abandoned the project but had made it open-source, maybe someone else could step up to maintain it. Maybe you! You never know until you try.)

I talked about the maintenance tax from the first-party side, but let’s talk about it from the third-party side, too. As a theme author and add-on developer myself, I have long accepted that the cost of maintaining these things can never be zero. When your software interacts with an online service, and that online service is being actively maintained, your software also needs to be maintained.

I hope all this has been enlightening! Thanks for your question, and please, have a great day.

—April

#feature #posting #audio #backend #your suggestions

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therabine · 10 months ago

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We've got some new cover art and as someone who works in digital media and deals with AI content on daily basis this new cover for Troy Saga set off an alarm in my brain. Naturally I sank into an analyzing spiral, because that's just how my brain works.

"Looks like an AI art with repaints on top" I thought to myself, but to be sure I've checked it with different AI recognizing software (remember kids, if you use AI to generate your art, other AI can reverse engineer the process and identify it!). But so can a human eye most of the time. Pay attention to the combination of these identificators:

- weird blur

- different lines of horizon in one image

- bonkers anatomy/construction errors

- high contrast

- a lot of nonsense happening in the background

The results of AI checkup on the new Troy cover art were mixed

"Okay, let's check out the original Troy Saga cover, I like this one"

Yep, it has no out of place blur, the wooden horse's anatomy doesn't weird me out, the backgrounds look nice, deliberately painted with attention and care, I can make sense of the individual strokes. Good to know that my eyes are still good for something.

"Just to be sure, let's check out the Cyclop's Saga"

Okay, now it's proper weird. Maybe the Hive is off caliber? Wait five minutes, let me make a quick AI Thunder Saga cover art.

Nope, still works. What about other covers?

Fascinating! To be honest Circe Saga cover art doesn't look like Ai to me (all three animals are drawn with nice proportions and the lion is probably drawn with the help of Symmetry tool in Procreate, AI is surprisingly shitty at doing perfect symmetry).

Maybe it's the style of the artist that's confusing to the AI detector? Zwist seems to be particularly fond of whirlwind designs in all of her artwork (bad AI art often does weird stripes and whirlwinds, especially when you're trying to generate something which doesn't have a lot of references for it in the dataset that AI is trained on). Let's run Hive on her original artwork with a lot of whirlwinds and a wonky tree.

...okay. Now that is weird.

Look, I'm not saying that Zwist is a bad artist or something, using Ai isn't against the law and she clearly can paint better than I do. She is talented, go show love to her original artworks that are not Epic related. Hell, I can't even prove with 100% certainty that AI was used at all. Just because I don't like the new Troy cover art doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy it too.

But the whole situation is fascinating to me. A lot of people on insta ask if the new Troy cover is AI, only to be shut down by fans who scream "no, that's just her artsyle and X confirmed that it's not AI, you are just haters".

YOU ARE NOW IN THE UPDATED PART OF THE POST

Special thanks to the people who shared the link to the new Troy Saga cover art speedpaint for erasing my doubts and providing a respectful conversation in the comments.

Watched through the speedpaint a few times, trying to figure why the end image became unsettling enough for a lot of people (myself included) to assume it's AI.

My guess is that Zwist has developed for herself an intricate decorative style, but isn't very familiar with so called 'academic' art.

Why do I think that? Well, I wanted to see how artists of the past depicted the wooden horse, and do you know what image you see when you type up 'Trojan horse' into Google? That's right, it's the giant prop from the movie Troy (2004). And you know, no shame here, using references to draw something you've never seen before is good, I'm just shocked I didn't recognize this design sooner it's very cool. What I really like about it is that it really looks like it's been made rather fast from the scraps of the broken down ships and yet it still resembles an actual horse. Look at the cute pointy ears! Look at the mouth of it! This gorgeous posture!

What's even better, it still exists somewhere in Turkey (well maybe not the actual prop, but the full size replica of it), so there's a ton of photos from different points of view. My best guess is that Zweist used this one as a reference for the new Troy Saga cover:

And here's a problem - this is a very complex structure to draw. Not only that, but Zweist also uses two light sources - moonlight from above and the light of the fire below, which means that we have two different sets of shadows emerging from these light sources.

Unlike all other covers that are very decorative in nature, this one is attempted to be very realistic, almost cinematic in its use of lighting. With all that extra complication it's easy to set yourself up for failure and get too much in the details while losing the larger shapes.

Unfortunately in her simplification of the original reference Zweist completely neglects all the intricate shapes and planes that make up the wooden horse. She forgets that wood cannot bend in circles like that, or that unpolished wood is a low-reflective surface (which means that even the lightest spot lit up by the firelight will be darker than the light on the sand/marble/metal coming from the same light source). It seems like she doesn't analyze the shape of it at all, so we lose the majestic posture and the shape of the horse head.

Just for the fun of it I used 1,5 hours of my time to photobash the reference photo into the original Zweist background. It's very rough (I literally painted everything using nothing but a standard Photoshop round brush and a computer mouse), but I think it gets my point across.

I'm too tired to redo the background and this post is already ridiculously long. But I think that it suffers from the same problems - lack of research and care. Those are just some random shapes taking up space. I get that it's supposedly a burning Troy we see around, but does it look like anything to you? I mean really? Again, it's just a shapeless mess. And all of that could be avoided with a bit of extra research and analysis. There's more to the ancient ruins that the same set of columns over and over.

So, what is can we learn from it? What is the conclusion?

Zwist is a talented young artist, but painting "realistically" isn't her strongest suit. You may like her style, or you may not, but I think there is a difference between "doing it your way" and "trying to succeed and failing". She may try to learn from this situation in two ways: 1) work around her stronger sides making the next covers with simpler designs and less intricate lighting or 2) practice the more realistic style and get better at it.

I don't know the exact reasons why the AI recognizing software flagged some of her work as AI generated. But I think that if it's not just your audience who starts to wonder if you used AI, but you somehow manage to confuse the very program that detects AI, then you've got a problem with your art.

If we want to beat AI companies in their game and stay relevant as professional artists we can no longer produce mindless art. We can no longer afford to produce sloppy work. As sad as it is, within next 10 years there is going to be a large shift in understanding and producing art as we know it. If the art we create can be easily replicated by AI or will look like it's been made with AI, then no one would bother to commission art from you. We have to adapt, to find new ways of exploring our creativity, perhaps even to create a new visual language of expressing ourselves.

In the end of a day human art always beats AI art. You know why? Because AI is not really Artificial Intelligence. It's just a very complex algorithm that is good at recognizing patterns. That's all it is. It doesn't have a conscience, it has no context for the human experience, it cannot think, and most importantly - it cannot invent.

So I want to end this post on the hopeful note - the art will survive. The artists will survive. And if we can learn anything from this situation is that kindness and open dialog is the vest way to deal with confusion. Once again I want to thank everyone who was kind enough to comment on and engage with this post. It grew out of love for something that is deep and personal to me (Epic) to a larger discussion of the changes in the world of visual art (something I love and care for even more). Hope this update spawns more nuanced and respectful discussion on the topic!

#epic #epic the musical #I hate this timeline (but slightly less now)#troy saga #thank everyone for sending a link to the speedpaint #read the post if you want to watch me gradually lose my sanity over unimportant stuff I guess #ai art

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