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?

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."

if you're going to manage ANY ecosystem

The premise is that the customer (the person who owns the computer) has said "No thank you, I would rather that I (and my agent, F-Droid) manage it myself. Your interference is unwanted." That's what the owners are doing when they decide to install F-Droid.

I wonder if convicting some Google employees and everyone above them in the management tree of CFAA, might help remind everyone who is allowed to break whose computers.

You really think dudes wouldn't use a computer called "Amiga," or name their favorite gun "Vera," or their favorite baseball bat "Lucille?" Captain, please don't refer to the Enterprise as "she," or Cayenne8 will think you're .. "progressive!"(?!?)

"TX has ... far more corrupt state politics..."

Oh, you lost me there. I live in CA and couldn't disagree more. CA wins on that -- from the money holes of public schools, infrastructure spending, costs to actually build anything and homeless spending, money just vanishes.

Also the current and recent governments have just refused audits or direct "blue ribbon committees" to investigate. Hell, LA Mayor Bass in the great and broke city of LA spent several million$ of dollars on a team of private lawyers to prevent her from having to testify on where $2 billion (with a "B") in homeless spending went and her relationship with the head of LAHSA (appointed by Bass).

CA has spent the last 15-20 years blaming the oil companies of being greedy and getting rich of the backs of Californians -- which frankly is a damn lie. Our own Governor has appointed several "blue ribbon" committees to investigate (which, btw, aren't free or cheap) with no results. The "nutshell" version is that those oil companies are making so much profit that they keep shutting down and leaving CA. We're about to hit a wall of not enough production in CA to keep pipeline pressure enough to move crude through pipes to the few refineries we have left. That means moving crude by truck -- expensive and far worse for the environment, bring in crude or even refined gas from countries that don't have our standards. Apparently pollution doesn't blow across international waters. But ever "green" attempt gets HUGE amounts of tax payer funding and there are too many failures to list. The Ivanhaw Solar plant among the most recent. North of $2 billion wasted -- but many a CA union employee made out well during construction and leadership appointed by the state had insane salaries got rich. So... Go figure.

So, we're looking at north of $8 a gallon in the near future and our "hate fossil fuels" Governor is running around trying to find a buyer for one of the refineries -- and even offering to PAY Valero it's operations costs to stay (they aren't).

Texas is a piker next to CA.

That used to be one of the more popular ones, but everyone's boycotting it now, until reality shapes up.

p>Google should go fuck themselves.

I should be in control of my personal computer. Is that really so hard to understand? Who the fuck is so retarded that they think people shouldn't have any say in what their PCs run?

Google isn't really retarded. They're just evil.

There can be and it's a really great idea! I currently use the CookieAutoDelete extension, and while I hate its shitty UI, it does what I want: unless I have whitelisted the domain, any cookies it offers get deleted a little while after closing the tab. So if I want long-term cookies for someone (e.g. slashdot.org, to stay logged-in all the time), I got 'em. If I don't go out of my way to whitelist a site, whatever cookies it sent, go away in a few minutes.

Web browsers ought to be able to do that out-of-the-box by now, as well as all the things uBlock Origin does, too.

Our web browsers kind of suck. At least Firefox has usable extensions, but these basic things should be totally mainstream and built-in by now. We've had decades to get this right, but I think the big browser teams have conflicts of interest over money (e.g. Google funding Firefox). Websites shouldn't be asking for consent; our browser preferences/settings ought to be handling that, with "consent" managed through the enforcement of our chosen personal policies.