• 5 Posts
  • 185 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Generating art with the same style - HelpEnglish
    8·
    8 days ago

    You’re probably better off asking on !imageai@sh.itjust.works.

    If you want to try there, I can throw some ideas out.

    Asklemmy, despite the oft-confusing community name that generates a lot of these sort of things, isn’t really intended as a general “ask any question” community, but for “thought-provoking” questions. Their Rule 5 excludes stuff like this.

    The mods tend to delete stuff like this; I’ve had a few questions that I’ve spent time answering and then had the post deleted with the answers, which is kinda frustrating if you’ve put effort into an answer.

    If you ask there, I’d suggest indicating which system you used to generate the image, as it’ll affect the answer.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are some excellent YouTube channels you recommend?English
    9·
    12 days ago

    I’ll second a couple of other things that people have mentioned, like SmarterEveryDay and CGP Grey.

    Hmm. What would I consistently watch new material on?

    General-audience military history. It’s not especially flashy, and you’ll see typos and such, but it consistently shows maps, which is somewhere that I think a lot of military history stuff falls over. And the guy has read the material for the stuff he covers, at least the stuff that I’m reasonably familiar with. There are much larger military history channels out there, and much blingier ones, but I’d rate this well for actually helping someone accurately understand the material covered. He does a good job of highlighting what I think decent books on the subject matter consider the important, salient bits. I’d say that he’s probably reading – and understanding – the major recommended books on a battle prior to doing a video on it. I’d recommend his videos on battles over any commercial documentaries that I’ve seen.

    There are other military history channels that I do watch, but I think that of them, that’s probably the one I’d recommend being worthwhile as a watch the most.

    Drachinifel – does naval history, especially gun-era stuff and British stuff – but while Drachinifel is pretty prolific, I wouldn’t rank his output as highly; he’s basically taking some high-level stuff from a quick read and putting it in video format. He’s not doing all that much reading per video. But he’s got a lot of stuff.

    The Operations Room also favors maps, but I feel like they tend to pull more of their material from personal accounts from individuals than I’d like.

    Kings And Generals has covered a lot of different conflicts, is flashier, also puts stuff on maps, but I’ve definitely seen stuff on there that I’d call erroneous. I’d watch something from them due to the scope of their material, but take it with a grain of salt.

    Hmm.

    I don’t really follow channels much, repeatedly intentionally come back to anyone. Like, to have a Web analogy, there are websites out there that I like, but very few to which I’d subscribe to an RSS feed, because even for places that have good content, I rarely want to watch a high proportion of anything that they’ve done.

    I can’t think of anyone that does software that I’d recommend watching (or, honestly, in general, video for that). I haven’t been all that blown away by video for international affairs stuff, not to the point that I’d explicitly recommend someone.

    • theslowmoguys does a lot of well-filmed very slow motion stuff. I wouldn’t go back to see something just because they’ve put it out, but they’ve got some of the better slow-motion footage of different things that I’ve seen. Fun watch.

    • Oh, forgottenweapons. This is pretty well-known in the firearms world, so it’s probably not a huge surprise to people who are interested in firearms. It originally focused on unusual firearms mechanisms, but I think that they’ve done a video on darn near every firearm out there now, so it’s kind of a nice place to get a video overview from an informed person of most firearms, short bit history, highlights unusual mechanisms of the thing. I definitely would not go out and try to watch through this whole thing unless you are some kind of absolutely rabid firearms mechanism person, but it consistently has good-quality, informed material. There’s a !forgottenweapons@lemmy.world community on the Threadiverse.

    • PerunAU is also probably pretty well-known. Guy in defense economics, good for a level-headed, high-level look at the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Shows a series of Powerpoint slides. If he comes out with a new video, I’d watch it; he generally doesn’t waste viewer time, and insofar as my knowledge extends, the information he puts out is pretty solid. I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the validity of his opinions, but he’s pretty good at explicitly stating that something is or is not his opinion. There’s been a lot of people making a lot of videos on the conflict, and I think that he’s one of the more-worthwhile people to pay attention to.

    I feel kinda bad to heavily list military- or weapons- related stuff, as I certainly watch plenty of other stuff on YouTube, but honestly, while I watch other material, most of the cases where I think I’d watch new material from a particular individual falls into those categories. Like, there are channels spanning a wide range of things, that have put out great content, that I think is interesting, but they also put out a whole lot of other stuff that I’m not interested in. I might recommend a particular video, but not the whole channel.

    EDIT:

    • primitivetechnology9550. Guy goes out into the woods with nothing but his shorts and just using what’s available, constructs a “technology tree”, starting with something like a stone axe and moving up to iron production and increasingly-sophisticated structures. Pretty well-known, but I’ve enjoyed every video I’ve ever seen on there.
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoCasual Conversation @lemm.ee•Anyone else here that DOESN'T watch anime anymore?English
    3·
    13 days ago

    I haven’t watched it or much by way of movies in general for a while. Moved away from fictional TV series before that.

    I’ve been kinda tilting away from fiction for years. I like a number of fictional video games, still enjoy that, but novels or movies or such are kinda…I dunno. Just don’t get much of a kick out of them.

    EDIT: I think that maybe, part of how much you enjoy something links into how much other stuff you can mentally connect it to. So, like, maybe if you’re super-big into the Star Wars universe, say, or some big franchise like that, then new material connects to lots of things that you know about there.

    But fictional stuff tends to only tie to other stuff in that fictional universe, so in each work of fiction in a separate universe, you kinda “start over” from scratch.

    Where with real-world stuff, you can mentally connect to other things that you know about in the real world, and your body of knowledge there grows over time, so there’s more to connect to. I do definitely think that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve shifted towards non-fiction. And while I don’t have anything to quantify it, I kinda get the impression that the same may be true of a lot of older folks out there.

    Now, okay, anime is just a medium. Anime doesn’t entail being fictional. You could, theoretically, make an anime documentary on something…but it’s not usually used for that purpose.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Why doesn't Lemmy support the SVG file format?English
    10·
    14 days ago

    I haven’t looked into any actual decision process, and personally, I’d like to be able to post vector files myself, but there are some real concerns that I suspect apply (and are probably also why other sites, like Reddit, don’t provide SVG support).

    • SVG can contain Javascript, which can introduce security concerns

    • My guess is that there are resource-exhaustion issues. With a raster format, like, say, PNG, you’re probably only going to create issues with very large images, which are easy to filter out – and the existing system does place limits on that. With a typical, unconstrained vector format like Postscript or SVG, you can probably require an arbitrarily long amount of rendering time from the renderer (and maybe memory usage, dunno, don’t know how current renderers work).

    • At least some SVG renderers support reference of external files. That could permit, to some degree, deanonymizing people who view them – like, a commenter could see which IP addresses are viewing a comment. That’s actually probably a more general privacy issue with Lemmy today, but it can at least theoretically be addressed by modifying Threadiverse server software to rewrite comments and by propagating and caching images, whereas SVG support would bake external reference support in.

    I think that an environment that permits arbitrary vector files to be posted would probably require some kind of more-constrained format, or at minimum, some kind of hardened filter on the instance side to block or process images to convert them into a form acceptable for mass distribution by anonymous users.

    Note that Lemmy does have support for other format than SVG, including video files – just not anything vector ATM.

    If the art you want to post is flat-color, my guess is that your closest bet is probably posting a raster version of it as PNG or maybe lossless webp.

    Can also store an SVG somewhere else that permits hosting SVG and provide an external link to that SVG file.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's your favorite logical fallacy, mental model, cognitive bias, phenomenon, etc. Wikipedia article?English
    4·
    15 days ago

    I don’t know about favorite, but high on the mess-with-the-head factor.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion

    Capgras delusion or Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, another close family member, or pet has been replaced by an identical impostor.[a] It is named after Joseph Capgras (1873–1950), the French psychiatrist who first described the disorder.

    In a 1990 paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, psychologists Hadyn Ellis and Andy Young hypothesized that patients with Capgras delusion may have a “mirror image” or double dissociation of prosopagnosia, in that their conscious ability to recognize faces was intact, but they might have damage to the system which produces the automatic emotional arousal to familiar faces.[21] This might lead to the experience of recognizing someone while feeling something was not “quite right” about them. In 1997, Ellis and his colleagues published a study of five patients with Capgras delusion (all diagnosed with schizophrenia) and confirmed that although they could consciously recognize the faces, they did not show the normal automatic emotional arousal response.[22] The same low level of autonomic response was shown in the presence of strangers. Young (2008) has theorized that this means that patients with the disease experience a “loss” of familiarity, not a “lack” of it.[23] Further evidence for this explanation comes from other studies measuring galvanic skin responses (GSR) to faces. A patient with Capgras delusion showed reduced GSRs to faces in spite of normal face recognition.[24] This theory for the causes of Capgras delusion was summarised in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2001.[2]

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What does being in a calorie deficit feel like?English
    12·
    16 days ago

    I’ve fasted – like, just water and vitamins – for a week before.

    I found that I was hungry, especially for about the first two or three days, but that I mostly ignored it after that, though I did find myself paying more attention to food ads and stuff like that than normal.

    I was significantly cooler. I assume that the metabolism cranks down. I needed to wear heavier clothing than normal to feel comfortable.

    I felt like I had less energy to effortlessly run around. Like, I could get up and go somewhere, wasn’t weak, just felt more like something you’d think about doing before doing.

    Don’t need to hit the toilet much. That’s neat. Do need to stay hydrated, which I found to be surprisingly easy to forget about without sitting down for a meal.

    I wasn’t trying to push myself physically while doing that, though.

    I’ve also tried running a long-run calorie deficit where I wasn’t fasting, but also wasn’t eating much – something like 500 calories a day or less – for a longer period of time, for months, and then did a ten mile bike ride a day – there are calories coming in, but they’re considerably less than what you’re burning just living. I found the biking to be kinda rough. It just yanked all of the sugar out of my blood. Had a couple times doing that when I had my vision start to gray out at the end of my ride, needed to stop and get my head down. Was kinda like a zombie after my ride for a bit. Also was colder, just as when fasting. While it’s doable – I lost a bunch of weight doing it – I have to say that I think that it was rather harder than just outright fasting and not doing the exercise. Every time I ate, I felt like it kicked me back into “being hungry mode”, and it was only really physically a strain during the bike ride.

    I had a harder time mentally concentrating on things when I’m doing that. Haven’t tried quantifying it, but I’d say that I was less-productive while doing that.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's your favorite small portable speaker?English
    4·
    16 days ago

    I rarely use speakers, as my environment is one where I might bother others easily. On the rare occasions that I do, I use some small old USB Logitech speakers from ages back. I have a surround sound speaker setup with subwoofer and such sitting around, but don’t bother to plug it in, since I’m just not going to use it.

    I mostly use headphones, though I’ve got an elaborate mass of mixers, sound interfaces, headphones, and multiple clock-synchronized powered mics hooked up to the computer.

    I will say that small speakers have come a hell of a long way since the 1990s, when I remember them consistently sounding kind of tinny. They pretty much all sound great to me today.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's the biggest room in the world?English
    7·
    21 days ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae

    Another specimen in northeastern Oregon’s Malheur National Forest is possibly the largest living organism on Earth by mass, area, and volume – this contiguous specimen covers 3.7 square miles (2,400 acres; 9.6 km2) and is colloquially called the “Humongous fungus”.

    Uses

    The species is considered a choice edible.

    Hmmm. Apparently in national forests in Oregon you can harvest up to a gallon of mushrooms for personal use at one time, no permit required, though you’re not allowed to sell or barter it.

    …that’s kind of amazing that anyone can just go out and eat part of the largest organism on earth.