My very first "website" I made with a friend in sixth grade while on a two weeks long school trip to the German island of Wangerooge. There was only one single computer in the entire youth hostel, so people queued to be on it as much as possible to play GTA 2, which for some reason was installed there, haha.
But when everyone else was out playing on the beach, we kind of chilled browsing the internet there, and one time we created a forum using the free German forum creator forumieren.de. It looked terrible! It had like a black and green cyber theme and a really silly name. Of course, after the class trip was over, we went back home and forgot about it. It might still be out there, but for the life of me I can't remember the name or anything else. It must have been 2010.
I think the point is to keep people from pushing threads upwards with simple replies that don't add anything to the conversation like "I agree" or responding to someone who made that post three years ago and might feel differently or not care at all; pushing the entire topic including perhaps irrelevant information in the first post onto the front page for everyone to be confused by.
If I actually had something to add, I made good experiences simply saying "Sorry for necroposting but...". Many people can accept that.
I just saw that we actually achieve a five star activity rating pretty often these days. That's the maximum level! Since I have registered here, it's kind of the first time this is happening. Seems like we are growing well!
This year my main present I got was an actually good quality electronic coffee bean grinder! I am pretty big into coffee making, but the previous grinder was a manual one that was a hassle to use and not nearly as precise. Now I can just press on and it grinds my freshly roasted beans into perfect little chunks!
Oh god!! You mean we are gonna have spent our youths explaining computers to our parents and now we are gonna have to spend our old age explaining them to our kids This is actually a serious issue!
Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't. After all, maybe our kinds of computers do actually become obsolete and knowledge in that area isn't really relevant anymore. It could be our little hobby.
I actually can't remember because I don't watch much in general, and if I do watch things, it's usually TV series I watch with my partners or friends. I think one of the last movies I actually watched was the Batman movie in cinema? Or Interstellar perhaps last year. I can't remember. Both of them were fun to watch as movies but I didn't like the messages or world views.
Apparently kids these days don't understand folders because they just save things on their phone in that same cloud "black hole".
I can confirm. I tutor young adults who are just a few years younger than me (I was born in 2001, they were born in 2004+) and since most of them never grew up around forums, old game modding, having to fiddle with drivers, antiviruses, the registry and so on, and literally only had phones, tablets and maybe a laptop, they are unfamiliar with how to properly use a file system. For them, desktop computers feel like "work tools" to them like a printer, and not like an all-rounder that you spend your whole free time in front of. They don't have a concept of a file system beyond the very basics, don't know about file types or what they mean other than "pdf is a document", and so on. Some of them even struggled to follow an install wizard on Windows!
I genuinely disagree with the idea that "skill" is something that is required for something to be art or that generating art should be banned because it's less effort than using different tools to do so. Why is it always about the path of most suffering and studying, when a picture can be beautiful either way regardless of creation method? Is relative skill of the author required for something to be valid to look at? Is music objectively more art when it's acoustic compared to digital?
I think the entire debate about stolen art and not paying artists is working from a wrong perspective. Art is a product, a symbol and the lifeblood of an entire society and its culture and should be in the public domain as a whole as a basic human right. A society functions in unity, and as I said earlier in this thread, no artist can claim a work solely as their own, for all of them are inspired, influenced and assisted by generations before them.
Of course artists deserve to survive on their art, but is it not time then that we get an economic solution on that as a whole? Why do we have to lock down our cultural products and make them stingy commodified property just so artists can get crumbs for their work by forcing people to pay for it (arguably making artistic expression into an economic act of marketing instead of a passion) when we could have a general basic income that anyone can survive on, without strings attached?
Artists could therefore be paid a living wage without restricting their works with copyright and getting up in arms about perceived slights. I believe artists are way too protective over their own works and folks "stealing" them when in reality it should be a general cultural good, a public domain to partake in. The notion that our human lives are here to produce and treat society as a potential customer base is dystopian.
I say that as a musician and a programmer who has published all their works under free copyleft licenses out of conviction. I think it is unfair to characterize anyone who enjoys the idea of algorithm assisted artistry as an evil artist hating tech bro. We don't have to draw battle and property lines over art until everything is proprietary and locked down.
Honestly, 'round these parts I probably have a different opinion about it, but I don't actually mind algorithmically generated artwork¹.
In my opinion, art in general is something that should be common property throughout society as a whole, not an individual commodity that is protected and sold by only one artist. After all, everyone, including artists, is a product of generations before them who influenced and shaped them into who they are now. Without ever having seen a portrait, would I truly have painted a portrait the same way I did now? Probably not. Every piece of art created is really the work of all the generations that came before you, including you. The colors, the tools, the canvas, they are all products of generations upon generations of working class artisans. No piece of art is truly only one person's product.
So, is it really important if an algorithm is fed with millions of images and then creates a unique result out of all these, or if an artist is influenced by the history of art over an entire lifetime and then creates a result out of them?
I can only see sad, capitalist reasons for maintaining full control over one's own art: the idea that everything we produce, everything we enjoy needs to be a commodity that makes us money and is one person's property to do with as one see fit. Sure, artists still need to be paid, but I don't think algorithmic artworks will kill manual art any time soon; and even if it does, there are plenty of professions that appear and disappear with technological progress; and it never meant to stop the progress of society.
In an ideal world, artists would create art for the sake of creating art and getting acclaim from their peers, and if someone enjoys playing around with stable diffusion algorithms to create art they view as beautiful, so be it. Life shouldn't be a competition about who put in the most effort or who suffered the most. After all, we all kind of just want to live and float through life with a happy feeling, right?
¹ As someone who works with dialogue systems and conversational "AI", I don't use the word AI for these statistical machines and machine learning, because that would imply there is any kind of intelligence or consciousness behind it rather than the stochastic and statistical algorithms they actually consist of. Same with ChatGPT et al.
I didn't actually know Matrix had group servers like Discord, I thought it was just a private messenger!
Discord does not actually have servers, you just create a room on their server that they can do with as they please if they wanted to. Matrix you can host on an actual server, so it's actually yours, including all the data.
Plus, the Matrix protocol actually has more features than Discord; unlimited file transfers, images, video, markup formatting, video conference calls, audio calls, custom emoji, stickers, full encryption... It even has a Discord-like system called spaces, where you can have many channels within a larger "space" (like a so-called Discord "server":wink:.
And, if you want, a Discord-like client called Cinny. Although Element is admittedly further along in development.
You cant ever be sure if they follow up on the privacy promise
If you can look at and change the source code, you can and should verify that. If it's closed, don't use it, because you shouldn't trust proprietary software to keep empty promises.
Honestly you can use whatever you feel comfortable with. I personally use GNU Emacs sometimes, or Mousepad, which comes with the LXQt desktop environment. Anything that has syntax highlighting is nice.
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That's the maximum level!
