asukii's recent activity

  1. Comment on A pat on the back statistically improves free throw numbers in basketball in ~sports.basketball

    asukii
    Link
    My first thought on this is, how much is correlation over causation - like is it really the touch that's making the difference, or is it being in a supportive team that makes a difference (and...

    My first thought on this is, how much is correlation over causation - like is it really the touch that's making the difference, or is it being in a supportive team that makes a difference (and supportive team members are more likely to give you a friendly pat on the back)? I wouldn't be surprised if the premise of the article is true, but that's one thing that jumped out to me immediately.

    8 votes

  2. Comment on Slay the Spire 2 | Reveal trailer in ~games

    asukii
    Link Parent
    They've confirmed on the official discord that they plan to!

    They've confirmed on the official discord that they plan to!

    3 votes

  3. Comment on Slay the Spire 2 | Reveal trailer in ~games

    asukii
    Link
    I'm equal parts extremely hype about this, and extremely nervous that it either won't live up to the original or will feel too similar to be its own game. Trying to keep expectations tempered....

    I'm equal parts extremely hype about this, and extremely nervous that it either won't live up to the original or will feel too similar to be its own game. Trying to keep expectations tempered. AFAIK, the original slay the spire game had a years-long beta test period with tons of regular balance patches throughout, so on day 1 of early access in 2025, it def won't be a fair comparison regardless. But hey, the original game is still outstanding and isn't going anywhere, so what do we have to lose?

    2 votes

  4. Comment on Is there an easy way or app to find songs based on bpm? For my workout playlist. in ~music

  5. Comment on Stability AI announces Stable Diffusion 3 (currently in the early preview stage) in ~tech

    asukii
    Link Parent
    Maybe a controversial take, but - for the most part/beyond a basic foundational level, I think the idea of "AI safety" is relatively pointless in the first place, beyond being a PR move. Bad...

    Maybe a controversial take, but - for the most part/beyond a basic foundational level, I think the idea of "AI safety" is relatively pointless in the first place, beyond being a PR move.

    Bad actors can and will find a way around pretty much every attempted wall you put up. Strict filtering harms the average user more than anything, by limiting either the range of prompts that will work at all (dalle 3 filters out an annoying amount of totally innocuous prompts for unclear reasons), and/or by limiting the quality of the end result by over-curating the training data set. And even if that's somehow not true and the walls are actually up high enough this time, the fact of the matter is, the cat is so firmly out of the bag at this point anyway. People have the tools they need to train their own specialized models, and since this is the internet, there's already a huge proliferation of models for things that the average person would likely consider unsavory.

    And beyond that - all AI image generation is doing is lowering the barrier to entry, anyway. There's nothing you can do with AI here that you couldn't already do with photoshop, and we don't ban or heavily legislate the use of photoshop tools either. The rush to tamp down on AI in particular so hard strikes me more as a fear of the unfamiliar than anything else.

    Please don't get me wrong, I'm by no means a "free speech absolutist" or whatever the equivalent of that would be in an AI space. Some amount of attention to safety is of course necessary - if for no other reason than to stop the model from generating objectionable outputs to otherwise innocuous prompts, or to bar the creation of select truly illegal content like child pornography. But beyond that? It reads to me as an endless arms race that we won't win, which just limits model capabilities with little to no substantive gain for society as a whole. We let people buy kitchen knives without a whole song and dance around it, even though they could be used to stab someone. Why not treat AI the same way?

    14 votes

  6. Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative

    asukii
    Link
    I've been working on a set of high-effort song parodies based on the game Slay the Spire. Just finished my latest one, which had a very ambitious vocal line - had to pull out a whole bunch of...

    I've been working on a set of high-effort song parodies based on the game Slay the Spire. Just finished my latest one, which had a very ambitious vocal line - had to pull out a whole bunch of exercises from back when I used to take singing lessons, haha, but I'm actually quite proud of the final result!

    The next one I have in mind will be an extra challenge for me in particular, because the style is one I've never really been good at. I gravitate towards softer jazzy vocals, maybe with a bit of belting, but the next song I've got my eyes on is an upbeat pop song with a ton of sass to it. Feeling a little out of my depth right now with it, to be honest, but hey - challenges that push you out of your comfort zone are always a great way to grow, and it's not like the stakes are high either (it's still just a silly song parody at the end of the day). It's kind of tough to know where to start with it, though, other than the obvious "sing it a bunch, record yourself, listen back, compare to the original, make tweaks, rinse and repeat". That always works well enough I guess, but I kind of feel like there are a bunch of pop singing fundamentals I'm just straight up missing right now, and you don't know what you don't know. If there are any pop singers here on tildes who know of any good resources to point me towards, I'd be all ears! 🙏

    13 votes

  7. Comment on An AI-generated image of a Victorian MP raises wider questions on digital ethics in ~tech

    asukii
    Link Parent
    Anecdotal, but I immediately saw it as a crop top before reading any of the text in the article.

    Anecdotal, but I immediately saw it as a crop top before reading any of the text in the article.

    4 votes

  8. Comment on An AI-generated image of a Victorian MP raises wider questions on digital ethics in ~tech

    asukii
    Link Parent
    Generative fill tools can sometimes change some of the adjacent parts of the source image, for what it's worth.

    Generative fill tools can sometimes change some of the adjacent parts of the source image, for what it's worth.

    4 votes

  9. Comment on An AI-generated image of a Victorian MP raises wider questions on digital ethics in ~tech

    asukii
    Link
    The short version: Nine News airs a photo of this MP edited to look more sexualized, with enlarged breasts and a crop top to show her midriff. After backlash, they claim that it was an honest...

    The short version: Nine News airs a photo of this MP edited to look more sexualized, with enlarged breasts and a crop top to show her midriff. After backlash, they claim that it was an honest mistake, because they started with a more tightly cropped version of the photo and used photoshop's Generative AI fill tool to imagine the rest, meaning that it was AI making the sexualizing edits - but whose responsibility is that really in the world of journalism?

    9 votes

  11. Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative

    asukii
    Link Parent
    Tysm, I'll definitely check it out!

    Tysm, I'll definitely check it out!

    1 vote

  12. Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative

    asukii
    Link
    I recently started getting back into pixel art. I'm aiming to do one new small canvas scenescape each day - here's one so far that I'm particularly happy with! On a related note, if anyone knows...

    I recently started getting back into pixel art. I'm aiming to do one new small canvas scenescape each day - here's one so far that I'm particularly happy with!

    On a related note, if anyone knows of any good forums or other online resources for getting good feedback on pixel art in particular, I'm all ears. I'm entirely self taught through trial and error, and would love to find other experienced folks who could give constructive criticism/otherwise point me in the right direction.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on Why AI writing is inherently coercive in ~creative

    asukii
    Link Parent
    When autocorrect replaces what you tried to say with the wrong word? Yeah, I hate that too. The difference, imo, is agency. In the autocorrect sense, I'm trying to write something on my own, and...

    Personally, I get completely furious if some algorihm replaces my words with autocorrect.

    When autocorrect replaces what you tried to say with the wrong word? Yeah, I hate that too. The difference, imo, is agency.

    In the autocorrect sense, I'm trying to write something on my own, and the machine decides to interfere with that process where it's not wanted or needed. The computer has the agency here, and I have to put in extra work to fix the edits I didn't like.

    In the "AI as collaborator" sense, I keep the agency. Say I have an idea in my head that I want to express, but I can't quite think of the right words offhand. I might ask ChatGPT for a few ideas/options, and if I'm lucky, it suggests a word, a turn of phrase, or a longer piece of writing that I like and that represents what I'm looking for. I'm deciding exactly what generated output I want to use (including none of it), and the AI is never actively interfering with my process - only supporting it, and potentially saving me time/headaches.

    Human experience is messy and complicated, and I'd wager pretty much everyone has had the experience of feeling some kind of emotion that's difficult to put into words. People have always looked outwards for inspiration in those cases, finding things like song lyrics and such that help them express those very real sentiments. Imo, the emotion being conveyed is no less authentic just because you weren't the one to string together those words yourself: you still sought them out, found them, resonated with them, and made the conscious choice to use them to describe your own experience. Why should that hold any less true when those words come from AI vs from anywhere else?

    It sounds to me like what you're really worried about is the collapse of authentic communication in a broader sense, i.e. people no longer wanting to express themselves and their emotions in an honest and relatable way. But if you ask me, that's a human nature problem, not an LLM problem. People who want to cut corners and be lazy with their communication were doing that long before ChatGPT came around. You even brought up the whole YouYube essayist plagiarism idea as an example. Yes, ChatGPT can make that problem worse for some, but it can also make it better for others. It's a tool, imo, with no inherent value judgement of its own; a knife isn't bad because you could stab someone with it, nor is it good because you can prepare a delicious meal with it. To extend the metaphor, your problem here may just be with the people who want to do the stabbing, not with the knife itself.

    5 votes

  14. Comment on Why AI writing is inherently coercive in ~creative

    asukii
    Link
    Clever twist at the end there with the disclaimer - I'll admit, you got me. I fundamentally disagree with the premise, though. The way I see it, this argument is built on a false dichotomy: human...

    Clever twist at the end there with the disclaimer - I'll admit, you got me. I fundamentally disagree with the premise, though.

    The way I see it, this argument is built on a false dichotomy: human or AI, emotion or emotionlessness, shared experiences or false facsimiles. In reality, at this stage of development at least, there's almost always still a human involved in at least some stage of the creative process. That could be as light as just deciding the prompt ("write me a story about...") and then reading and posting the response verbatim, or it could be much more of a true creative collaboration, looking for suggestions piecemeal and weaving them into the larger work as you go. In the latter case, the AI is less taking any kind of ownership over the work or its emotional content, and more acting as a slightly more helpful thesaurus and/or rubber duck to help work out compelling solutions to various narrative knots. However, even in the former case (just typing a prompt), a human is still involved in choosing the emotional undertones of the prompt itself - and much more crucially, involved in reading and "signing off on" the result. Posting the generated content anywhere is an implicit signal that the author approves of this generated content, and therefore that it resonates with them too even if they didn't write the words themselves.

    17 votes

  15. Comment on How to preserve a 9000 piece jigsaw puzzle? in ~games.tabletop

    asukii
    Link
    Look up Mod Podge Puzzle Saver - it's a type of glue designed explicitly for this purpose. It'll do double duty as both the glue and the protective coat you're looking for.

    Look up Mod Podge Puzzle Saver - it's a type of glue designed explicitly for this purpose. It'll do double duty as both the glue and the protective coat you're looking for.

    16 votes

  16. Comment on Just finished my first twitch stream in a while. It wasn't great, but for once, that's actually okay. in ~talk

    asukii
    Link Parent
    Slay the Spire, a deckbuilding roguelike game with an insane amount of depth to it. Tons to juggle and keep track of when you play on max ascension (difficulty) like I do. And thanks for the...

    Slay the Spire, a deckbuilding roguelike game with an insane amount of depth to it. Tons to juggle and keep track of when you play on max ascension (difficulty) like I do. And thanks for the congratulations :)

    I completely understand what you mean about those more relaxed streams, but that's kind of not the point for me right now - at least not entirely. I'm hoping to use streaming as a way to push myself back into that kind of "on" headspace more often and get more comfortable with it again, while still in a fun and enjoyable environment surrounded by friends with no real stakes to it. My hope is that, once I'm able to stream like that relatively consistently again, I can use that as a litmus test to indicate that I might be ready to go back to the workforce again too, at least part time. I'm not by any means trying to be super serious about "putting on a show" for my streams, or worrying about coming across as professional and polished, or anything like that - they are still largely a way to hang out with online friends - but if I lean into that relaxed hangout vibe too much, it kind of stops being the useful litmus test that I'm looking for out of it.

    11 votes

  17. Just finished my first twitch stream in a while. It wasn't great, but for once, that's actually okay.

    ~talk Text 671 words
    My head was all over the place, I played really badly, I lost the run I was playing much quicker than expected, and decided to end stream early because of it... but despite all that, I'm weirdly...

    My head was all over the place, I played really badly, I lost the run I was playing much quicker than expected, and decided to end stream early because of it... but despite all that, I'm weirdly happy about the whole thing anyway.

    One of my big goals for 2024 is to stream a lot more often. For context, I've been off work on medical leave for a good long while now, and I find streaming to be (very fun but also) draining in a similar way to how work was draining - like in how "on" you have to be, and how much multitasking you have to do, that sort of thing. And so the main reason I streamed so rarely last year is that I rarely felt "on" enough to be at 100% for all that, and I worried that I wouldn't be doing a good enough job.

    Today was the 1 year anniversary of when I first started playing the game I'm obsessed with these days, so I really wanted to do a special "anniversary" stream today, which for obvious reasons couldn't really be rescheduled. My brain did feel kind of fuzzy going in, and if it were any other day, I definitely wouldn't have decided to stream at all... but I'd been hyping up this idea to myself for a while, and knew I'd regret it if I bailed at the last minute, so I pushed myself to go live anyway.

    And yeah, like I started this off by saying, the stream definitely wasn't perfect. I didn't play super well, made a bunch of boneheaded decisions, caught myself mentally drifting off every so often and not either playing the game or talking to chat or just being an engaging streamer at all. I lost a run that I for sure could have gotten further with if I played a bit smarter.

    BUT!

    I did it. I did the thing, and I still had fun, and my friends who tuned in as viewers seemed to have fun too. At the end of the day, that should really be all that matters.

    I could very easily take today as a bad omen for the year to come... as in like, I'm gonna be mushy brained and keep doing embarrassing mediocre streams, because that's clearly all I'm capable of, blah blah blah. Past-me definitely would have latched onto that train of thought, hard. But right now, mostly what I'm feeling is just... proud. Proud of myself for not letting perfect be the enemy of good today for once, for actually putting myself out there, for not putting so much stock in "I have to be good at the games I play" as like part of my identity or anything (which I used to have a ton of bugaboos about, as a woman who used to play in a lot of sexist male-dominated spaces... it was kind of like, I have to be great at this game, or I'm just encouraging their sexism so much more and letting all other women down because of it, therefore I can't ever afford to be bad at games and especially not when someone else might see). I can finally feel myself starting to let go of a lot of those old toxic ideas, and while I know I still have a ways left to go with it, it already feels incredibly liberating.

    Throughout my struggles with chronic illness these past few years, I've been trying my best for some time now to accept myself for where I'm at, instead of berating myself for not yet getting back to where I want to be. Moments like these are really nice reminders that that isn't nearly as hard as it used to be. :)

    So, yeah. Thanks for reading. Here's hoping this story resonates with at least a few of you -- and here's to (hopefully) many more mediocre non-ideal streams to come this year, and maybe a few half-decent ones too if I'm lucky 😅

    32 votes

  18. Comment on How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit in ~tech

    asukii
    Link Parent
    A protest with a defined end date has no teeth, though. What incentive would Reddit have to actually put in the work required to make any substantive changes, when they could just sit tight for a...

    A protest with a defined end date has no teeth, though. What incentive would Reddit have to actually put in the work required to make any substantive changes, when they could just sit tight for a day and wait for everything to blow over?

    102 votes

  19. Comment on Marketing company claims that it actually is listening to your phone and smart speakers to target ads in ~tech

    asukii
    Link
    I'm... very confused by this from a practical perspective. Where is this "active listening" code actually getting run? Like I know for certain how smart speakers (Alexa etc) handle this, and I...

    I'm... very confused by this from a practical perspective. Where is this "active listening" code actually getting run? Like I know for certain how smart speakers (Alexa etc) handle this, and I would have assumed smart TVs and such were similar - there are two separate "listening" modes, basically. The one that's always running is comparatively far simpler, mostly hardware with a minimal software layer, and only listens for the specific combination of phonemes that it understands to be its wakeword. There's a very short recording buffer that's constantly being overwritten - none of that audio is saved permanently. Only after a match is found (or at least heavily enough suspected) does it start the "real" listening, and transmits that audio through the internet for cloud processing to determine the user's intent + an appropriate response. In other words, the data needed to do this kind of marketing analysis literally isn't even captured permanently or sent anywhere usable, which you can also verify from network activity (no data being transmitted over the internet in between wakeword activations - or at least nowhere near enough to account for all the audio recordings of peoples' ambient conversations). So - what gives?

    17 votes

  20. Comment on Laufey - Tiny Desk Concert (2023) in ~music

    asukii
    Link
    She made it to Tiny Desk!! Ugh, I love Laufey so much. Stellar performance here - that version of Promise especially, got me a little teary-eyed there by the end, wow. Very cool that she got her...

    She made it to Tiny Desk!!

    Ugh, I love Laufey so much. Stellar performance here - that version of Promise especially, got me a little teary-eyed there by the end, wow. Very cool that she got her twin sister in on the violin too :)

    4 votes