The thing, which anyone who's ever done any type of art realizes, is that 99% of the time, there isn't really such a thing as a high fidelity image in your mind's eye.
You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.
While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.
That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.
A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.
And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.
Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.
But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.
>Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing.
Yes, it is. I say this as someone with a BFA. The feeling of a happy accident from a slip of the tablet pen and a "mistake" in the generation is the exact same: "I wasn't expecting that, but it works." Same when it's an unhappy one: "That's wrong, we need to fix that."
I don't care to spend time antagonizing you with speculation on why you have this wrong, but I can say this with certainty: at the high level of determining if something that I am willing into being, through interfacing with a process and tools outside myself, aligns with my vision and taste, there is no substantive difference between gen AI and traditional methods beyond that which exists between any two given traditional methods.
I don't really have anything to say other than the fact that you both don't thing there's a difference between using AI and actually creating something yourself, and that you also don't care for explaining why those are the same thing to you, but you also still feel the need to nevertheless reply anyway... It's fitting, is all.
It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
At least in urban areas I've seen it's almost always better to define the sidewalks separately. The routing for pedestrians is often significantly different than for vehicles. This matters when the data is fed into Strava or Garmin for running routes.
Same! Somehow I had never heard of this. Will have to try and visit someday!
Also, lol @ the name of the river near that site. (For the gringos: "Rego Grande", "rego" officially means ditch/trench, but nowadays it's much more commonly used as slang for butt crack. So, it's the Large Butt Crack river. Which I guess tracks for Brazil :P)
Respectfully, his graph does not need 3 dimensions because it's a personal spreadsheet he uses just for his own training, so he can just display the data for his exact body weight.
Hah, that's very interesting to learn. I've always thought the little flag was lifted by the mailman, so that the homeowner could tell from a distance that they got mail. Cool that it's actually the other way around.
I think that's mainly because the mailman might not notice that the mail in your box is not your mail being left over from when he dropped it off the day before. The flag lets him know what's remaining in the box is to be delivered. He could read the addresses but they have very busy routes!
The vast, vast majority of websites never see anything even close to that, so it's a safe bet unless you have some specific reason to expect it to reach that kind of traffic, or you are dealing with workloads that SQLite really does not handle well, e.g. many concurrent writes. And if your workload is mostly reads, then you probably can use a cache layer, which allows SQLite to go further still.
Adding a cache layer to keep using the wrong database is an architecture failure - if you use Postgres from the get go you will not need the cache until way way later on anyway. (Side note, I’m team MySql but the same point applies)
My favorite three aren't in there. All Dexter's Lab themed, now that I think about it.
One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.
And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.
If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.
I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)
From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!
The games you mention are Dexter's Laser Lab, Dexter's Labyrinth and Dexter MixMaster, by developers NetBabyWorld. Those games were originally their own game without the Cartoon Network branding. Labyrinth was based on Ninja Girl 1 and 2 and Dexter MixMaster was originally Tune Inn (that's why this one felt a bit off).
Since they were Shockwave based games they're not playable on modern browsers but they're playable with the Flashpoint Archive project. Huge timewaster, be careful. Better look for the games on YouTube :)
Hah, that explains the out-of-left-field theme! I had no idea they were reskins of exiting games. Interesting how child me managed to unknowingly zero in into the games of a single developer.!
And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p
This Dexter's Lab laser game was the first flash game I had ever played, and one of my first actual experiences with the internet. I remember seeing cartoonnetwork.com on the TV, understanding that there are games I could play online, and trying to figure out what the funny phone noises meant with AOL. Someone helped me go online using dialup and I ended up on the website somehow (probably struggling really badly to type as a kid) and it took forever for the flash game to load. At first I had little understanding of what I was looking at, felt very hard to understand websites. I also remember the Samurai Jack one really vividly, even took a note down of the game cheatcode on the TV and hid the note in a drawer after we moved and didn't have a PC anymore, because my parents said I'd have to wait "until I was a 18" to ever have an internet connection again. I was so little, I certainly lost it or someone tossed it, but we got a computer so I did end up enjoying the game a lot! I also really liked the HiHi Puffy Ami Yumi flash games, like the vacation one.
What a shame CN took their classic game sites down, when hosting flash games isn't even all that resource-intensive. An archive by them would've been nice. I recall every couple of years, older games slowly got removed which made me sad, until eventually flash died completely.
My goodness, I've come so far now in life. I know what tools to use to decompile flash games and look at the assets and logic, it's crazy to look back on how much games inspired me to learn about programming because I wanted to make my own.
To anyone who worked on these, thank you SO MUCH for having built them; you've definitely had a positive influence on countless people who were mentally stimulated and learned about how to use computers more in an effort to play them.
You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.
While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.
That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.
A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.
And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.
Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.
But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.
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