delphi's recent activity

  1. Comment on Anyone interested in trying out Kagi? in ~tech

    delphi
    (edited )
    Link
    I got those three invites too, so if you're interested, just reply. It sounds silly to pay for a search engine in a post-google world, but trust me, Kagi is so much better it's honestly...

    I got those three invites too, so if you're interested, just reply. It sounds silly to pay for a search engine in a post-google world, but trust me, Kagi is so much better it's honestly embarrassing for Google

    Edit: Gave my three invites away!

    9 votes

  2. How has your industry changed in the past decade?

    ~life Ask
    The other day I had to get new glasses, and I braced myself for my lenses to be incredibly thick and expensive to boot again - but then I had them made, they look normal, and they barely cost me a...

    The other day I had to get new glasses, and I braced myself for my lenses to be incredibly thick and expensive to boot again - but then I had them made, they look normal, and they barely cost me a Benjamin. Clearly, the optometrist crowd has made some major developments in the past decade or so, which leads me to ask - if you're working in an industry most people don't really think about, what's happened in your space in the past ten years?

    55 votes

  3. Comment on How did you do on the AI art Turing test? in ~arts

    delphi
    Link
    I just took this test myself and was surprised to only get 34/50. Yes, these examples were cherry picked, and many of them deliberately fool you, but still - as someone who's been playing with...

    I just took this test myself and was surprised to only get 34/50. Yes, these examples were cherry picked, and many of them deliberately fool you, but still - as someone who's been playing with diffusion and image generation since the mid 2010s I was surprised to see how... not good, but high-fidelity the technology has become.

    That being said however, the pictures here aren't really representative. They were generated, usually, by people that knew what they were doing. Were cognisant of "AI Tells" and tried to remove them. Knowing my way around the tools of the "trade" as well, I can absolutely guarantee some of these images got at least three passes in the inpainting mode to fix hands or details, and while that's valid as an artistic choice, it's not very representative of the AI generated "slop" that will clog up your google images and pinterests.

    Side note: I personally believe if you go so far as to put in the actual effort to touch the piece up, either with Inpainting or Photoshop or literally printing and painting, you're sort of collaborating with the machine, making the piece AI-assisted rather than AI-generated. I think AI assistance is a perfectly valid technique and superficially no different than the clone stamp tool in Photoshop, so arguably to me those wouldn't qualify as "AI made" anyways.

    What was even more interesting to me was that there were pictures in there that I could tell were generated, but still appealed to me on an artistic level. Notably, the Paris Scene one was genuinely quite enjoyable, and even knowing it was made with a machine learning model, I would have little trouble hanging it in my home and enjoying it. Maybe interpreting it like a human-made piece of art would defeat the purpose, sure, but just for decoration I think it's great.

    What does this leave me with? Conflict, mainly. I know that this technology is neutral, as I've stated many times before, but the accessibility makes it easy for corporate ghouls to just bury us all in a goulash of extraneous fingers and nonsense greeble. I don't think AI art, whatever that means, is a threat to human creativity. That's ridiculous, and the same argument that game up when photography and later photomanipulation hit the scene. But I'd be lying if I said that we as a society have nothing to worry about.

    11 votes

  4. Comment on Where does your username come from? (Following up on last year's thread) in ~tildes

    delphi
    Link
    I participated in a study once, and when the paper was released, everyone’s names were changed. The participants all got normal names - Alan, Jim, Hannah etc - and for some reason I got Delphi....

    I participated in a study once, and when the paper was released, everyone’s names were changed. The participants all got normal names - Alan, Jim, Hannah etc - and for some reason I got Delphi. When it’s not available, I go with 1612elphi (pronounced Sixteen Twelphi) as a reference to a Vulfpeck song.

    6 votes

  5. Comment on Understanding the leftist that didn't vote: "Everybody else gets one, but not me" in ~society

    delphi
    Link
    I've had this conversation with my American partner many times, and I could never ever consider "not voting" to be an actual option. You're not going to win here. Not you, not the leftist that...

    I've had this conversation with my American partner many times, and I could never ever consider "not voting" to be an actual option. You're not going to win here. Not you, not the leftist that realises both options in the election will continue to support Israel. Not the leftist that wants high speed rail and universal healthcare. That's simply not on the table. It sucks, but you play the cards you're given.

    Voting is like public transit. It's not going to get you to your destination, but you'll take the option that gets you closest. And even if it doesn't by much, I still think it's your democratic duty to move as much in the correct direction as you can.

    13 votes

  6. Comment on The Browser Company announces Arc Browser will no longer be their flagship product in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    It's still rough around the edges, but it is the only browser insane enough to allow Firefox and Chrome extensions simultaneously, on iOS. That's unheard of, especially because it uses neither of...

    It's still rough around the edges, but it is the only browser insane enough to allow Firefox and Chrome extensions simultaneously, on iOS. That's unheard of, especially because it uses neither of those as web renderers, and it does make at least iPad browsing much more desktop-class.

    When it comes to the Brave partnership, they walked that back in January, as far as I can tell. They use Brave's API sometimes, for what they claim is around 10% of search queries, but there's no exchange of money to Eich or his company.

    4 votes

  7. Comment on The Browser Company announces Arc Browser will no longer be their flagship product in ~tech

    delphi
    Link
    In my opinion, the Browser Company has completely lost the plot. The only reason they were so talked about when they came up was that Arc was sort of the only browser that did what it did. Before...
    • Exemplary

    In my opinion, the Browser Company has completely lost the plot. The only reason they were so talked about when they came up was that Arc was sort of the only browser that did what it did. Before the GPT revolution, mind you. The idea was that it had easily sortable vertical tabs and viewed browser windows as static, not disposable. They wanted you to have one browser window, not however many you wanted. To some, especially to those who work mostly in web apps online - think Google Docs, Slack, Office, Airtable, Notion and all the other ones - this made sense. In fact, there was an app called Station a few years back that did the exact same thing, but I don't know or care to check if they're still around.

    Then the GPT revolution came, and everyone wanted to be first to introduce Al features. Not many of them succeeded, and I think I can confidently say that we're sick of this corporate dick-measuring by now, and Arc was no different. Arc Max, their free addition to the Arc browser, included things like summarising web pages, renaming downloaded files and open tabs, and an "enhanced" Cmd+F that doesn't just search for text in pages, but answers questions. Having used Arc for more than two years before switching to something else, I can say that those never worked properly.

    Their product stack sort of broke as a result. People wanted Arc on mobile, and on windows - not particularly because it worked for their workflow, although it did for some of them - but mainly because it was the shiny new thing with the cool design and all the hipster cred. Most people don't even use the stand-out features that made Arc special, like Easels, Notes and Split Screen. They were just sick of Chrome.

    Course, Arc is just Chrome with dipping mustards. And when the Arc Companion for iOS released, not many people used it. It was only when they announced Arc Search, a seperate app (So we're at three now, well before this annoucement) that people started to care. And guess what: Arc Search is Arc in name only. It doesn't do any of the productivity features like Easels or Tab grouping, it's a wrapper for yet another Al-powered chatbot search, in a pleasing visual style. That's it.

    So when they say that Arc isn't their flagship endeavour anymore, I can't really say I'm surprised. I think if you asked the Browser Company directly and asked what Arc is supposed to be, right now, they would have a hard time answering. Should it make browsing easier through Al slop? Should it make productivity easier through the features it shipped with? Hard to say. It's unfocused now, and that's a real shame because there are obviously skilled and talented engineers and designers at BCNY.

    I guess I don't have much hope for the "next Arc", or whatever it will be called. Arc wasn't good. Arc can't be good, in part because it doesn't know what it wants to be but also in part because it can't be something greater than the sum of its barely functional parts.

    Use Orion, or Firefox. Don't bother with this.

    42 votes

  8. Comment on 2024 United States election megathread in ~society

    delphi
    Link
    I can't believe it. Gonna be fun to see how this plays out in other countries that also stand on the precipice of fascism. Looking at you, Germany.

    I can't believe it.

    Gonna be fun to see how this plays out in other countries that also stand on the precipice of fascism. Looking at you, Germany.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on What the hell is a Typescript or: Creation ideas above my skill level in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    https://rmv.fyi/notes/pictoclash-design-document-abridged Here you go, I threw together an abridged version, along with an MVP outline at the bottom. When it comes to web tech, I hear a lot of...

    https://rmv.fyi/notes/pictoclash-design-document-abridged

    Here you go, I threw together an abridged version, along with an MVP outline at the bottom. When it comes to web tech, I hear a lot of good things about Rails, but considering that I'd be learning either of the major frameworks, I suppose it doesn't much matter.

    I dm'd you my email, if you'd like to move this conversation there I'd be super grateful for your help!

    1 vote

  11. Comment on What the hell is a Typescript or: Creation ideas above my skill level in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    I'd love to shoot you a DM, thank you so much! The basic premise is as follows: PICTOCLASH is held over winter break, between around 20 Dec and New Years. That way, it doesn't conflict with Art...

    I'd love to shoot you a DM, thank you so much! The basic premise is as follows:

    • PICTOCLASH is held over winter break, between around 20 Dec and New Years. That way, it doesn't conflict with Art Fight's june time slot and gives all the artists a chance to try out all those supplies they got for christmas. The time frame of 10-14 days is also a lot more manageable than the month of Art Fight.

    • During the clash, seven checkpoint dates are picked. The dates are kept hidden from the players, but are roughly equally spaced, with the exception of the last checkpoint which marks the end of the event.

    • The clash begins, players begin to draw and send their strikes, and scores for the teams accumulates.

    • Once a checkpoint is reached, the scores are tallied, and the higher one wins that checkpoint. That result is public, but the points total is kept in percent. Members of the winning team are awarded bonus PictoCash currency they can spend on digital goodies in a store (brush packs, digital stickers, wallpapers, etc made by partnered creators for PC)

    • The final checkpoint is the end of the competition. The scores are then tallied up, and whoever has the most checkpoints wins. The exact numbers are then released later as a blog post, along with a little awards ceremony held online that honours specific outstanding contributions, awarded with extra PictoCash. The end event is also when the next themes will be announced.

    There's a lot more to this, like I said I have a large design document outlining specific details and how scoring should be calculated, how the store works, how discoverability works, how users are sorted etc. If you'd like to help, I'd be super down to collab!

    2 votes

  12. Comment on What the hell is a Typescript or: Creation ideas above my skill level in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    Thank you! I might get back to you on that one - and yes, all the research, design and writing is done. Theres over 20 pages of design considerations that I haven’t shared on the website, it’s...

    Thank you! I might get back to you on that one - and yes, all the research, design and writing is done. Theres over 20 pages of design considerations that I haven’t shared on the website, it’s really just about the development now.

  13. Comment on What the hell is a Typescript or: Creation ideas above my skill level in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    In Art Fight scoring is done through the honour system. You type into the system how much effort you put in, if your lines are clean, how you used colour and shading, and then it calculates a...

    In Art Fight scoring is done through the honour system. You type into the system how much effort you put in, if your lines are clean, how you used colour and shading, and then it calculates a value. Would work similarly in my variant, because using computer vision to score art is 1. very expensive once we hit the issue of scale and 2. just a bad way to think about art in general, so I think i'd keep a similar system, albeit with more granularity and a focus on variety (multiple submissions with similar characteristics would be penalised, to encourage artists to try something new, which to me is what Art Fight should always have been about).

    2 votes

  14. Comment on What the hell is a Typescript or: Creation ideas above my skill level in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    Back in school I actually had my first encounter with programming be Ruby, albeit off Rails. RPG Maker, I think. Good call, I'll definitely check it out, although I do have opinions on DHH and his...

    Back in school I actually had my first encounter with programming be Ruby, albeit off Rails. RPG Maker, I think. Good call, I'll definitely check it out, although I do have opinions on DHH and his work. Willing to try anything, though.

    2 votes

  15. What the hell is a Typescript or: Creation ideas above my skill level

    ~tech Ask (advice)
    I'm a graphic designer. I've been working in the field for nearly seven years now, two of which in an actual agency. One afternoon I started on a project that was born of more or less pure spite -...

    I'm a graphic designer. I've been working in the field for nearly seven years now, two of which in an actual agency. One afternoon I started on a project that was born of more or less pure spite - I love the annual art trading game Art Fight, but absolutely loathe how the game is run, how it comes completely crashing down every year due to people trying to access the site all at once and them not having any contingencies in place, and how the leadership there is apparently only concerned with donations and little community outreach. If you're unfamiliar, artists get sorted into one of two teams, upload their original characters with reference sheets and then draw characters belonging to the opposing team's members. It's great fun, and I tried volunteering for them, but the fact that I'd've to sign an NDA just to be a moderator is just a step too far. For those unaware, the Art Fight team was also caught embezzling donations in one of the last fights, 2022 if memory serves.

    So I did what I do best. I started drafting user stories, did UX research, sketched, drew and designed what I'd think would solve all the problems with Art Fight. The result I called PICTOCLASH, and while the process to make and prepare the design took me about four weeks from start to finish, I knew I couldn't actually make the thing work. Disregarding the fact that the Art Fight platform is anaemic and runs on outdated PHP, has no optimisations for image storage or user content and does not buffer or queue database interactions, it's still a massive lift. We don't have numbers on how large AF is, but suffice it to say that it's far larger than any hobbyist project can be without VC involvement.

    I was convinced, though, that if one just... approached the problem differently, maybe with modern technologies, the Next.JS I kept hearing about from my web design peers, maybe a shiny new database like Postgres, state management, all the things I know next to nothing about, this could work. My project could work. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be impossible. With a team of developers, all believing and contributing to the project in an open-source way, that's doable. Eminently realisable, even.

    So I started. I began reading documentation for TS, Next, React, Prisma, Postgres and all the other things I'd need to read up on. This was maybe half a year ago. But damn, programming got hands. Even the Me-ChatGPT-Dream-Team wasn't enough to have me wrap my head around so many concepts here. I'm a front-end guy, that's for sure. I got my ass handed to me, and in a month, I barely have a login system, and looking at GitHub I could have just went with any of the many pre-rolled solutions.

    Which just led me back to my original point. I have three hundred-odd lines of barely functional typescript that holds up an incredibly slow login system. I'm not cut out for this project, and I need to accept that. I'm a designer, I know PHP, I can write valid JavaScript, but... application development? That'll forever be a realm locked off to me.

    And of course, the easy way out would just be to look for developers. But I can't do that, at least not without significant risk of falling into the "I had an idea for an app, you wanna make it?" brand of parasite. I'd feel dirty doing that, even if I know that I could more or less to front-end and every visual component by myself. In fact, I have done that. It's just the app part that's missing, and that's unfortunately the major lift.

    How do you people cope with this? Because it's not been the first time this happened to me. I keep putting off learning 3D modelling out of exactly that reason, that I could just hit a wall no matter how hard I try. It's frustrating, and looking back how easily I picked up other disciplines in university it really makes me wonder if there are some things my brain just can't learn. I don't think I'm ready to accept that.

    Edit: For anyone interested, I uploaded the abridged design document to my website.

    20 votes

  16. Comment on Anthropic announces New Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3.5 Haiku and the Computer Use API in ~tech

    delphi
    Link
    I've yet to fully test its limits, but from a cursory trial, New 3.5S (someone call the branding police) is indeed way more capable when it comes to text, especially paraphrasing naturally and...

    Today, we’re announcing an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and a new model, Claude 3.5 Haiku. The upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across-the-board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding—an area where it already led the field. Claude 3.5 Haiku matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, our prior largest model, on many evaluations for the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku.

    I've yet to fully test its limits, but from a cursory trial, New 3.5S (someone call the branding police) is indeed way more capable when it comes to text, especially paraphrasing naturally and recreating text styles. It's also just more enjoyable to talk to. Can't see myself going down to the new 3.5H, cause 3.5S is simply cheap enough, but time will tell.

    We’re also introducing a groundbreaking new capability in public beta: computer use. Available today on the API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do—by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first frontier AI model to offer computer use in public beta. At this stage, it is still experimental—at times cumbersome and error-prone. We're releasing computer use early for feedback from developers, and expect the capability to improve rapidly over time.

    Now THIS is a feature I can't wait to tinker with. It looks to me like giving Claude the ability to use a computer through the HID layer is way more in line with what Microsoft wanted the original Windows Copilot to be, and the demos are - even if they're very early - extremely impressive and promising.

    9 votes

  18. Comment on Controversial opinion: I don't like "cosmetic armor" being an option in games in ~games

    delphi
    (edited )
    Link
    I also don't like the option to turn down the volume in games, because in real life I can't do that either. I also never save and if I die, I never touch the game again. Respawning just completely...

    I also don't like the option to turn down the volume in games, because in real life I can't do that either. I also never save and if I die, I never touch the game again. Respawning just completely ruins the balance of a game.

    I kid, but level with me here. You don't have to use this system, in fact, no one forces you to. You can play Horizon without using the transmog system (which is what this is called in games generally), just like you can play Skyrim without using fast travel if you feel like it. It's completely up to you. I don't much care about looks when I play a game personally, so I don't use it either, but I'd never campaign for removal just because it's not for me. If we went like that, I'd also have to remove... hm, let's see... Alchemy from Skyrim, the Ice Monkey from Bloons, Freighters from No Man's Sky, Windblast from Dishonored, Fishing from Stardew Valley and about half of Persona 5. I'm glad that's there regardless, even if I don't much interact with any of those systems.

    53 votes

  19. Comment on Elevator pitch your favourite book! in ~books

    delphi
    Link Parent
    There's moments, especially because it's a murder story, but overall I think it's very restrained. Nowhere near Perdido St Station.

    There's moments, especially because it's a murder story, but overall I think it's very restrained. Nowhere near Perdido St Station.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Elevator pitch your favourite book! in ~books

    delphi
    Link
    A murder happens a town over, and our noir detective main character needs to figure out what happened. Only problem: Both cities are in physically the same space, seperated only by the collective...

    A murder happens a town over, and our noir detective main character needs to figure out what happened. Only problem: Both cities are in physically the same space, seperated only by the collective decision to ignore what happens in the other one.

    The City and The City by China Miéville

    18 votes