In the Forest. Fedoskino laquer painting, artist Scherbakov (Russia, 1972).

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I feel like the big push for AI is starting to flag. Even my relatively tech obsessed dad is kinda over it. What do you even use it for? Because you sure as hell dont want to use it for fact checking.

There's an advertisement featuring a woman surreptitiously asking her phone to provide her with discussion topics for her book club. And like... what. Is this the use case for commercial AI? This the best you could come up with? Lying to your friends about Moby Dick?

One of the big pushes tech companies are making for AI is entirely in the tool of convenience. Take Gemini for example, one of Google's really big pitches for it is in features like Help Me Read and Help Me Write, which are like the lowest tier use case for deep learning models but are also the two AI features that the average consumer will actually care about. Sure they advertise the GenAI stuff Gemini Advanced is able to do, but they've woken up to the idea that the average consumer does not care about GenAI and non-AI Bros fundamentally loathe GenAI.

Every company with a language model got sucked into the venture capital pitfall of AI and now have to market the one set of features the general person actually cares about.

I work in advertising and the culture shift surrounding AI even from January until now (end of March) has been drastic. At the beginning of the year, the company I work for was using AI to design most of their assets. Clients started coming back and requesting that we no longer use AI generated images or videos for copyright liability reasons. Basically, there's no way to tell whose art or photography was scalped to make an image, so as companies who are trying to make a profit using potentially stolen images, it puts them in a gray area, legally.

Also, companies do look at their comment sections. Anti-AI commenters on social media ("this is not a real image" "I don't trust companies who use AI" etc) are seen by higher ups of a company. Basically, keep bullying brands who use AI, it's working. Now my company uses almost no AI for deliverables, which is a huge win.

RIGHT??

the urge to write is like a cat meowing for dear life for someone to open the goddamn door, who then shows utter disinterest in said open door

In order to maximize confusion, American football will be changing its name to American soccer

this is an incredible map

one hyperfixated tumblr mutual has the power of six hundred thousand ad campaigns

thinking sooo intently about this Gerard Donelan comic on this beautiful wednesday afternoon

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Someday I'm gonna write a book like Suttree or The Fool's Progress where I take all my youthful misadventures and give them to a fictional character who's more sympathetic than me

She'll die at the end and never get around to starting a blog

I guess my brand is short, mean women with black hair and tragic backstories

Someday I'll commission an artist to draw the death commando, the warrior nun, and the space pirate hanging out and playing cards or something. And who knows, I might make up even more short, mean women with black hair and tragic backstories further down the line.

Some character names are "I researched saints' lives and Medieval flower symbolism and etymology for ten thousand years to come up with the perfect name that has a hundred billion layers of symbolism" and other character names are "I just think it sounds nice :)" and 99 times out of 100 readers will neither know nor care which is which but somehow it's still very very important on the writing end

Right now it is of great allusive importance that the character has a disyllabic name with an initial S and a terminal emphasis. Don't ask why, just go with it.

[Image description: Fifteen photos of beeswax candles in various styles, laid out on a decorative background with fake ivy. The first nine photos are of undyed yellow beeswax candles, and the final six photos are dyed candles in rainbow colors.]

It took us way longer to restock than anticipated, thanks to massive maintenance issues in our apartment and general lack of spoons, but Candles & Cantrips is back, baby! Stock is a little low on the dyed candles, since we had limited quantities of dye to work with for our first batch, but more are on the way soon!

Check us out on Etsy -- each purchase supports a household of disabled trans folks in Florida! <3

Someday I'm gonna post the character playlists for the Monstrata thing and, because some of the characters' names are adjectives, some hapless esperantist is gonna see it and read it as "Here are the songs I've categorized as Happy and the ones I've categorized as Bad, the two things songs are"

And of course many of the Happy songs will be very sad indeed, possibly engendering further confusion

anyways here's some of the Feliĉa songs