Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?

No, it's well ascertained that EVs are fine for almost every civilian use case these days, but lets also remember that this probably doesn't apply for you specifically, because so much as having an app on your phone for your car (EV or not) is too much for you to handle.

Well, yes, you do, because the BMS keeps track of that.

A gas car, on the other hand....

And I'm never 'caught' with low charge in the first place, because I start every day with a full charge, so....?

Gas cars lose comparable range in cold weather, so...?

https://www.energy.gov/energys...

And when you mix in 'you can preheat your cabin while still connnected to your charger,' EVs lose *less* range than gas cars.

Not really. If social media causes stupidity, kids should stop using social media, cuz it'll make them stupid.

If stupid people use social media, kids should stop using social media, because it obviously isn't making them smarter, while other activities just might.

Well, back when I was a kid, 'autistic' meant, 'screaming and flapping your arms when somebody turned on the light wrong.'

"Rain Man" was a movie about what was, at the time, considered a high-functioning autistic.

Most of what we would nowadays call 'ASD' was just 'quirky' or 'weird' or 'shy.'

Go find a copy of the 1980s nuclear war film Testament. Watch the scenes with the sons. One son, the youngest, has several scenes with things like 'running the TV, a radio, and a record player at the same time,' 'being told that he can't only eat bananas,' 'wearing ear muffs at the dinner table' and so on.

Nowadays, that's clearly stimming, sensory restrictions and ARFID, and probably ADHD, and he's be labelled 'AuDHD'.

Back then? He was just being a kid.

But nowadays, 'doesn't look people in the eye "enough"' means you're ASD, and 'looks people in the eye *too much"' means you're ASD.

Given that we don't even know what 'Autism' is, we ascribe way too much to it.

Hope you're up on your Sumarian antivirals because I'm gonna Snow Crash your ass.

You're still alive, I see. Yes, it's true, the lethal payload mentioned in the above video isn't actually included within it. I knew there was little danger in linking to this video, but don't you realize it could have been much worse?

Doesn't removing the artist's signature usually reduce the value of a work?

That this isn't the case for Sora 2, tells me something about Sora 2's reputation.

In a slightly perverted sense, I think these are sort of expert systems too, but their expertise is this: "What has been said, and how can I sound like the people who said it?"

And we wouldnÃ(TM)t have to deal with the enshitification of the iPhone and the Mac.

I won't say it about the Mac but it definitely applies to the iPhone: it came pre-enshittified and Jobs was definitely personally responsible it. The iPhone was a terrible regression in the history of PCs, where we somehow went from personal computer revolution of the 1970s back to the IBM-decides-what-you-run of the 1960s.

It would have been good for Jobs to have left the computer world a decade earlier than he did. He didn't need to die, but everyone would be much better off today if, in the early/mid '00s, Jobs had opened a tire shop or restaurant or gorilla costume rental business. Anything but handheld PCs. It's been nearly two decades (!!!) since Apple out-Nintendoed Nintendo and we still haven't recovered. If anything, things are getting worse.

OTOH the modernization of Mac OS to Mac OS X was done very well, and IMHO the word "Mac" would now be a semi-obscure 20th Century historical reference if Jobs hadn't brought in NeXT and made that happen.

Yeah, for what they're charging, they can afford to go the extra mile and have the wifi offer a default route to the internet!

The problem with the police station scene in The Terminator, was that the cops shot back. Now we realize, they wouldn't do that. "Well, no I can't stop you from seeing Ms Connor because you're not a human, so I guess go right in there and do what you need to, mister, uhrr, clanker skin job."