AlexanderESmith

I disagree with the overall substance of your argument.

Sure, if you’ve already designed something on paper and want to feed numbers in and get a part, CAD is clearly superior. I don’t work that way.

I will use (and recommend) the tools that have the least friction for me. I would not increase the time and headache to complete a project just because someone else thinks another workflow is better. I don’t need CAD because 3D printing tolerances are not that tight. Some people need/want CAD because that’s the only kind of tool they’ve used to make 3D objects, and that’s low friction for them. That’s cool too.

I’m suggesting Blender here in case someone (OP or a passer-by) hadn’t considered it, and didn’t realize that it’s up to the task of creating 3D printable objects. It definitely can, I’ve done it dozens of times, even with matching measurements against existing parts (which - it occurs to me now - is most of what I’ve done).

Also, I exclusively use Blender VSE for video editing. Mostly because it’s the best free/open-source option I’ve tried, and I don’t need to add another tool to my workflow. I never really liked the Adobe suite, and most non-adobe tools try to cosplay as them. It’s a lesser form of a thing I already didn’t like.

Unless you have a graphics background and no CAD experience. In which case, Blender will be far easier.

I was just posting in another thread about how I remade the armrest of my Traveler Guitar to be more comfortable. The one it comes with is super uncomfortable to me, so I redesigned it to be shaped more like a Squier. Images here .

All I really needed was some cardboard, some calipers, and Blender. Though, to get the measurements just so, I had to make a bunch of little virtual rulers (the yellow strips). In CAD, you wouldn’t need those since the measurements are described directly in the process of making the part.

I know that there is a large difference between CAD and general 3D modeling, but I’ve designed all my custom 3D printed parts in Blender and have had zero issues with fitment or scaling.

There are absolutely online stores that do that, but they’re usually gamer-focused, so there’s three issues;

Note: I’m taking about laptops, because it’s all I’ve bought for the last decade or more;

• The non-gamer focused stores rarely (if ever) have the option (Lenovo, Dell, Microsoft, etc).

• The gamer focused stores usually sell hardware that runs Linux like shit because the hardware needs extremely specific drivers (which isn’t necessarily an issue for Linux, but if it doesn’t exist yet, you’re either building them yourself, or waiting for someone else to do so).

  • Note: Most Clevo systems - that are private-labeled by the likes if IBuyPower, OriginPC, etc - run Linux really well. Some of these sellers make custom hardware, or sell other private-label systems, so your milage may vary.

• The gamer focused stores are usually patroned by people who are all in on Windows gaming, because they don’t do much else with the system, so they don’t experience the kinds of annoyances that power users would gripe about (which is why the above point doesn’t compel those sellers to do anything different).

  • And before someone corrects me: Gamers are not inherently power users, they just have powerful systems. It used to be that powerful systems were only buildable and maintenable by power users, but that hasn’t been true for years. If all you do is install and click “play”, you aren’t a power user.

As for desktops, I really couldn’t say. Haven’t been paying attention for years. It’s possible that you could buy a system without a hard drive, never mind an OS.

I may be spoiled in that I don’t play AAA multiplayer games, but I do play AAA single player and indie single/multiplayer (usually the type where one of the players is also the server, e.g. Terraria).

Been running Linux on my systems for more than a decade, and - especially since Proton/SteamDeck enchantments made their way upstream - I haven’t had any major ssues (except having to wait a while to play RDR2-PC in Ubuntu because of a weird game-specific graphics card driver issue, but even that was fixed in due course).

Fuck Windows, and fuck the assertion that it’s the only way to run games.

Usually they just over-pay for their computer because you can’t really buy a system without Windows pre-installed (unless you build it).

I have so many computers that came with Windows installations that I never even booted into.

I mean, my first reply to OP literally said the same thing, but sure, it’s me moving the goal posts.

And I’m not talking about private as in “who owns and has ‘rights’ to the data” because “discord is s private company with TOS” (which offers zero protection, since scrapers don’t care about TOS, even when the scraper is a major company - See StabilityAI, Google, et al).

I’m taking private as in “not any random person can log in and see it”. Private discord servers and DMs don’t appear to be included. That’s the “private” I’m taking about.

@admin

Imagine having private conversations in private.

This data was apparently scraped from public channels.

I understand the vector, I’m just saying that maybe if people had conducted themselves responsibly, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Hiding behind a moniker to do things you would normally be shunned is bad for everyone. It allows trolls to thrive, reduces or removes the impetus for broader social change/evolution (offline, that is), and fosters echo chambers full of people who have zero responsibility to regulate what they say for the sake of sanity (because fuck it, who’s gonna call them on their bullshit, right? And even if someone does, “they’re” not being judged, “their profile” is, so they can separate themselves from any criticism without doing any self-reflecting).

If you want to post something (text, art, etc) and you have to stop and think about your reputation, that’s a good thing. It means you should either not do something stupid, or you should stand behind your actions, and give support to others to do/say that thing.

The other option is to post behind a fake name knowing that there are no consequences, and just call it a day (which is why the opinion of the average post is so easily dismissed at “some random person on the Internet”).

And if you really do need anonymity (because the thing your discussing is super difficult or dangerous for you)… maybe don’t fucking have that conversation in a public discord channel?

criminals could use that kinda data for blackmail.

Maybe… don’t say shit on the internet that would embarrass you if associated with your real name?

Who uh… cares? The information is publicly available, that’s how it was scraped… Who would /buy/ this?

And what would they do with the knowledge that Fartknocker72 posted sonic slash fanfics?

You know, it only now occurs to me that - in 20 years of setting up fairly complicated spreadsheets (for everything from finance to asset management) - I’ve never used a macro.

I honestly don’t know why you would, since per-cell functions update automatically. I certainly can’t imagine why it would need to make system calls. Whole thing seems like a massive security issue with no benefit.

Didn’t say it was the only way, just the best way. Most effective attacks are still against humans, not computers.

In no particular order;

• Detecting “installed” software is iffy. Linux can have all kinds of things running on it that aren’t “installed” as-such (same as Windows with portable EXEs, Linux has AppImage/etc). Excepting things like that, you can detect installed apps through the package managers (apt/pkg/yum/snap/etc).
• OS updates in Debian-likes and Redhat-likes are controllable out of the box, but I’m not familiar with a way to prevent a user from doing them (other than denying them root access, which might make it hard for them to use the system, depending on what they need to do).
• I’ve had a lot of good results with OpenVPN.
• lol antivirus. Not saying Linux doesn’t get viruses, or that there arent antiviruses for Linux, but the best way to avoid getting them is still to just avoiding stupid shit. Best thing I can offer is that if you have some kind of centralized storage, check that for compromised files frequently, and keep excellent backups. And make sure your firewalls and ACLs don’t suck.

Good, fuck 'em. Stop ressurecting dead people with shitty inaccurate software hacks.

@admin

It was a hypothetical, I was just using myself as an example. Here’s one that’s not hypothetical:

I’m already a practiced in 3D modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, lightning, rendering, compositing, etc. I could recreate a painting, pixel for pixel, in 3D space.

If I just hit render, is that my art now? It took a lot of research to learn how to do this, I should be able to make money on that effort, right?

I can do that millions of times and get the same result. I can set it on a loop and get as many as I want. It’s the same as copying the first render’s file, it just takes longer.

Now I decide to change the camera angle. Almost the entire image is technically different now, but the composition is the same. The colors, the subjects, relative placement in the scene, all the same, but it’s not really the same image anymore. Is it mine yet?

I can set the camera to a random X,Y,Z position, and have it point at a random object in the scene (so it never points off into blank space). Are those images mine? It’s never the same twice, but it still has the original artist’s style of subjects and lighting. I can even randomize each subjects position, size, hue, direction, add a modifier that distorts them to be wobbly or cubic… I can start generating random objects and throwing them in too, let’s call those “hallucinations”, thats a fun word…

At what specific point in this madness does the imagery go from someone else’s work to mine?

I absolutely can generate millions of unique images all day. Without using machine learning, based on work I recreated with my own human hands, and code I write uniquely from my experience and abilities. None of the work - artistically - is mine. I made no decisions on composition, style, meaning, mood, color theory, etc.

You may want to try to write these questions off, but I can tell you with certainty that other artists won’t.

@burliman

You can prompt an image genrater to just spit out the original art it trained on.

Imagine I had been classically trained as a painter. I study works from various artists. I become so familiar with those works - and skilled as a renderer of art in my own right - that I can reproduce, say, the Mona Lisa from memory with exacting accuracy. Should I be allowed to claim it as my art? Sign my name to it? Sell it as my own?

Now lets say we compare the original and my work at the micron level. I’m human, there’s no way I can match the original stroke for stroke, bristle to bristle. However small, there are differences. When does the work become transformative?

Let’s switch to an image generator. I ask for a picture of a smiling woman, renaissance style. The model happens to be biased to DaVinci, and it spits out almost exactly the same work as the Mona Lisa. Let’s say as a prompt engineer, I’ve never heard of or seen the Mona Lisa. I take the image, decide “meh, good enough for what I need right now”, and use it in some commercial product (say, a t-shirt). Should I be able to do that? What if it’s not the Mona Lisa, it’s a work from a living artist?

What if it’s not an image? Say I tell some model to make a song and it accidentally produces Greenday’s Basketcase (which itself is basically just a modified Pachelbel’s Canon), can I put that on a record and sell it? Who’s responsibility is it to make sure that a model’s output is unique or transformative? Shit, look at all the legal cases where musicians are suing other musicians because the chord progression is similar in two songs; What happens when it’s exactly the same because the prompt engineer for a music generation model isn’t paying attention?

You might have noticed that I haven’t referred to this technology as AI. That’s because it’s not. It’s Machine Learning. It has no intelligence. It neither seeks to create beautiful, original art, nor does it intend to rip someone off. It has no plans, no aspirations, no context, no whims. It’s a parrot, spitting out copies of things we ask it for. In general, these outputs are mixtures of various things, but sometimes they aren’t. They just output some of the training data, because that’s the output that - statistically - was the best match for the prompt.

As an artist myself, I don’t fear machine learned models. I fear that these greedy fuckin’ companies will warehouse any and every bit of data they can get their hands on, train their models on other people’s work, never pay them a dime, and rip off the essence of their art without any regard for what will happen to the original artists after some jackass execs tell all their advertising/webdesign/programming/scriptwriting/etc departments to just ask the “AI” to “design” everything.

You can already see this happening with game studios. Writers went on strike over it.

@fubo

It’s been suggested that AI art created without human input cannot be receive copyrights;

https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/

@Macaroni9538

I’ve been using Clevo laptops for years. Large user base, lots of great Linux support. I just run Ubuntu, haven’t had many issues (and no critical issues).

They usually get rebranded, and I’ve gotten them through IBuyPower, Origin, and… can’t remember the other one. My most recent one was just straight up marketed as a Clevo, got it on Amazon.

You might have one or two odd issues (like having to install custom code to configure the RGB key backlights), but there are plenty of users to ask for assistance on various forums and repos.