rogue_cricket's recent activity
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
rogue_cricket (edited )Link ParentI also think that people who denigrate abstract art as "low skill" say that entirely as an assumption. They just imagine that it's easy because the outcome is simple or chaotic-looking, but that...I also think that people who denigrate abstract art as "low skill" say that entirely as an assumption. They just imagine that it's easy because the outcome is simple or chaotic-looking, but that doesn't mean no work or thought went into the final piece. Just because a layman observer can't recognize where skill and knowledge were applied doesn't mean that they weren't applied.
I feel like it's a generally accepted truism that many things that look easy aren't. There are often tons of little choices that someone gave thought to that most people would have trouble picking out, but that they can catch the overall "feel" of... when you do something well enough, people don't notice because it just seems natural and cohesive and inevitable.
We often in other fields say "so-and-so makes it look easy!" when we want to say they are particularly good at something, or "if I'm doing my job well, you won't even notice". But apparently when it comes to visual art, we don't feel the same way. :)
I'm not saying that it's always the case and every abstract art piece has some massive hidden depth, but for abstract art to be good, thought and craft and skill and knowledge do in fact have to go into it.
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
rogue_cricket (edited )Link ParentBut... the fact that they're "merely" abstractly representational of concepts is admitted right in the description you gave: you used the word "imply". To be less abstract would be to use familiar...But... the fact that they're "merely" abstractly representational of concepts is admitted right in the description you gave: you used the word "imply". To be less abstract would be to use familiar noises directly; a crying boy, a gunshot, a beating heart, the sound of a spoon scraping the bottom of a stirred pot. But then, is that music? Or is that sound?
I'd argue that definitionally music is an abstraction of sound just like art is an abstraction of visual phenomena. In both cases the goal is to play within a particular sensation; hearing or seeing.
And heck, it's not like the idea of "keys" and "chords" and even "notes" are naturally occurring, they're of course entirely human artifice. We assign the names to the frequencies and the names to the relationships between the frequencies to abstract the physical reality of sound and create a kind of shared language in Western music, but these facets of music are not hard rules.
This is just to say that there are absolutely cognitive and cultural associations we have to make in music, and there are absolutely musical artists who experiment with challenging the form and ideas of music and people who are interested in playing with our assumptions about what music even is the same way that there are visual artists who work more abstractly. It's possible to play with the underlying language and form itself within it in both mediums.
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Comment on I made a satirical AI detector in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentThe fact that AI can spit out text faster than any human can means that its patterns and biases will always end up coming off as overused clichés eventually. There is no way for an AI to produce...The fact that AI can spit out text faster than any human can means that its patterns and biases will always end up coming off as overused clichés eventually. There is no way for an AI to produce notable writing over the long term because everything it does will inevitably have every last bit of uniqueness milked out of it by virtue of its ability to mass produce.
It's basically this. It fundamentally cannot appreciate the art or nuance of a culture, its only copies it (to/by) (exploit/exploiting) it, and that's primarily what people pick up on.
(I also kind of roll my eyes when people use "I get mistaken for AI!" as a kind of humble-brag about their own writing style because I think that for the most part it writes badly. If I ever got that comment on any of my shared writing material I would see it as a direct criticism of its poor quality, not an indication of any kind of technical mastery.)
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Comment on I made a satirical AI detector in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentFrankly I don't care if this indicates AI or not, I just think it's often an obnoxious phrasing on its own and if the writer uses it I probably won't like the rest of their stuff even if they...Frankly I don't care if this indicates AI or not, I just think it's often an obnoxious phrasing on its own and if the writer uses it I probably won't like the rest of their stuff even if they handcrafted it one keystroke at a time.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
rogue_cricket Link ParentRight now I have a blog up and a splash page parked, but the splash page is pretty bare so I haven't put it out there much yet. I plan on adding demos for squishing and for another feature...Right now I have a blog up and a splash page parked, but the splash page is pretty bare so I haven't put it out there much yet. I plan on adding demos for squishing and for another feature (racing) before I start doing much sharing/promotion, but that'll involve some light porting.
https://blog.goo-grotto.com/
https://goo-grotto.com/Visual design isn't my strongest suit but I spent a while iterating on it and tweaking it. I'm going for lots of thick lines and bright colours and trying to keep it a little on the "retro" side. I looked at old Neopets and Gaia Online as inspirations for where to put things, I wanted it to feel like a "place" rather than a fully abstract interface.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
rogue_cricket LinkStill working on my slime site from last time! :) It's a pet site / creature collector / weird little in-between web thing where the main draw is that the slimes are generated procedurally and can...Still working on my slime site from last time! :) It's a pet site / creature collector / weird little in-between web thing where the main draw is that the slimes are generated procedurally and can combine with each other to form unique offspring. Last time I posted about it I had figured out how I wanted colour mixing to work; since then I've gotten shape into a good-enough state for an alpha and I need to put it down even though I have grander ambitions for it down the line. It's good enough!
(I also went on a little side quest about metaballs which I might want to return to, uh, eventually.)
For my CURRENT overengineering adventure, I'm working on biographies for the slimes. I chose to do this because I want the information on my site to be presented in a way that is fun, but a little bit obscure - think of how the Pokémon rater scores your Pokémon's IVs in an in-universe way rather than just saying "SPEED: 28." My ultimate goal is to make the slimes a little bit autonomous and to store logs of their exploits somewhere, so some of the text-framing work I'm doing now will probably tie into that as well, but for now this is just a fun way to communicate the slime's qualities.
The thing is, the idea of just going through and making phrases like "this slime is very big. this slime is very wet. this slime is clingy." all in a row absolutely would not work with the whole vibe of the site. Instead I've decided to extract meta-tags from the slimes that I am calling notability points - like if a slime is particularly big, wet, or excitable. I also have a big list of phrases that match to different combinations of these notability points. I have a greedy algorithm grab the most complex phrase-set, removing them from the slime's notability pool, and then go through and repeat that process until only singletons are left.
So now instead of a big, sticky, clingy list, it might say something like "It likes to cuddle, but after it does you might need to rinse off. It is also very big."
This is called a weighted set cover and it's pretty computationally expensive, but I plan on making sure I'm only refreshing the bio very, very rarely. Fun to come up with different phrases for different combinations of underlying traits.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
rogue_cricket Link ParentThat's an interesting approach and kind of what I was going for with the harmonic series! The slime is a circle, I applied transformations based around periodic functions to the outline, and the...That's an interesting approach and kind of what I was going for with the harmonic series! The slime is a circle, I applied transformations based around periodic functions to the outline, and the final expression was a finite Fourier transformation of the harmonic sums. (I also provided a "floor line" to them to make them look like creatures rather than just "splats", gave them eyeballs). It could produce cute slimes, but unfortunately also produced a lot of weird-looking slimes that I couldn't see anyone being excited to have - and sometimes there was no clear throughline of "this slime has aspects of both its ancestors", which is important to me. I suppose that is the risk of making things more free and procedural in general!
But yes, right now squishing them together is more akin to breeding them than to FULLY combining them. Just curling them together computationally rather than starting with periodicity as a requirement could potentially allow for more interesting ways of combining them in more of an "amalgamate" way than a "breeding" way, which I kind of like! I'll definitely keep it in my back pocket, if not for the breeding mechanic directly, then for some kind of something down the line. Maybe getting rid of unwanted slimes can smush them into THE GREAT AMALGAM.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
rogue_cricket LinkWelp, I got distracted and now I guess I'm working on a retro virtual pet site based around combining slimes. It's written in Rails 8 because I am familiar and comfortable with the framework. I am...Welp, I got distracted and now I guess I'm working on a retro virtual pet site based around combining slimes.
It's written in Rails 8 because I am familiar and comfortable with the framework. I am experimenting also with Stimulus/Hotwire, but honestly kind of flying by the seat of my pants with it. The DB is postgres chosen specifically for JSONB making things nice and easy for me.
The slimes are currently modelled with a Genotype object, which consists of Locus objects of varying types. Two slimes squished together produce an offspring that combines the genetics. I initially conceived it as being more "purely" genetically-oriented but kept running up against the tension between "simulation" and "game", and I think I decided to fall more on the side of "game."
Colour was hard to figure out for a multitude of reasons, but I believe I have a pretty good grasp on it now. I'm currently working on the shape of the slimes, which I suspect will be VERY hard.
Each slime is actually a radial function, basically, setting out N points which are then joined by a Catmull-Rom spline. While I have a variety of set body types I have been experimenting with ways to modify them based around individual inheritable characteristics - for a little while today I tried to actually model different loci as harmonics in different combinations, but it became pretty clear pretty quick that if I did that people would just immediately try to make their slimes look like buttplugs (because it's the first thing I did).
So as interesting as that was, back to set shapes for now. I have a debug toy where I can lerp between them to get some interesting midpoints, which I might do something with.
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Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech
rogue_cricket (edited )Link ParentI felt the author addressed this pretty directly within the article and made it very explicit the problem isn’t just one of quality. The problem is quantity and homogeneity, and that’s a problem...I felt the author addressed this pretty directly within the article and made it very explicit the problem isn’t just one of quality.
AI is a bad writer, but that’s not even close to being the whole problem. Let’s say it wasn’t. Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.
The problem is quantity and homogeneity, and that’s a problem that is essentially unsolvable from a technical perspective. AI is like a factory that is mass-producing something resembling cognition. When people take their homespun thoughts and replace or filter them through this factory, whatever is extruded will always have some artifacts that perceptive readers will see over time through sheer repeated exposure. This is a natural consequence of the AI being easy to use and able to quickly produce text on a massive scale autonomously.
It’s like dropshipping but for art and music and writing. Different storefronts, maybe slapping a logo on it here and there, but ultimately the products are all coming from the same factories. When it comes to many forms of art the value IS the uniqueness, which is fundamentally always going to be washed out by mass production via AI.
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Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative
rogue_cricket LinkWell, figure I might say something here - I am working on a prototype of a game where the premise is that you're a bee doing little bee dances to help your hive find flowers. :) It's been a while...Well, figure I might say something here - I am working on a prototype of a game where the premise is that you're a bee doing little bee dances to help your hive find flowers. :) It's been a while since I've done art and that's definitely the most intimidating part for me, but I have a very clear idea of what I want everything to look like and I don't think it'll require a high amount of skill to pull off, frankly. So that's nice!
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Comment on Health Canada approves 1st generic version of Novo Nordisk's Ozempic in ~health
rogue_cricket (edited )LinkThis is going to be so good for me. Ozempic has been awesome for helping me manage my diabetes, but coverage is challenging because when my A1C starts to look good (BECAUSE of the ozempic), they...This is going to be so good for me. Ozempic has been awesome for helping me manage my diabetes, but coverage is challenging because when my A1C starts to look good (BECAUSE of the ozempic), they stop wanting to cover it. Massive pain.
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Comment on miki - ça pik un peu quand même (2026) in ~music
rogue_cricket LinkThe title translates to “it stings a little bit though”. Thought it was a fun track and the animation has a great energy too!The title translates to “it stings a little bit though”. Thought it was a fun track and the animation has a great energy too!
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miki - ça pik un peu quand même (2026)
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Comment on Trans Day of Visibility in ~lgbt
rogue_cricket LinkI hope it's OK for a comment from a cis ally here too. I spent some time that day looking for cool new trans artists to add to my list (this year the standout new-to-me artist was Octo Octa, a DJ...I hope it's OK for a comment from a cis ally here too. I spent some time that day looking for cool new trans artists to add to my list (this year the standout new-to-me artist was Octo Octa, a DJ from New Hampshire whose vibes are immaculate) and sent a few messages to my trans friends. I used to have a silly little tradition of sending them $20 each, but could no longer do so because in the last two years my employment situation has been a trash fire (which is bad) and I have made MANY more trans friends (which is great).
I feel very strongly about my trans allyship. I was raised in an extremely Christian household where it was not safe for me to come out as gay, so I grew up extremely repressed. When I escaped my home I ended up literally joining a gay circus and I met many wonderful queer people, including many trans people, who helped me navigate the entirely new world I had found myself in. They kept my baby queer ass safe with advice and general looking-out, prevented me from getting into too much trouble, and maybe most importantly showed me that it was possible to live authentically and be happy, and be loved, and to have fun, and to define success how I want to define it.
Anyway, trans rights, and trans joy, and trans love, and trans liberation - I'll do what I can to bring all of it about. The world is so much better with trans people in it. Love y'all to pieces.
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Comment on Reddit will implement human verification to tag and combat bots in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentI really genuinely think the only way to actually prevent massive floods of bot accounts is to sell accounts for like, $5. Obviously this would not work for reddit and it introduces an entirely...I really genuinely think the only way to actually prevent massive floods of bot accounts is to sell accounts for like, $5. Obviously this would not work for reddit and it introduces an entirely different monetization scheme that is at odds with advertising and personal information gathering goals, but the only sites I've seen fend it off are niche ones like this with invite systems (that could probably be exploited by an enthusiastic actor if someone had the will to, it's just that there's no will to) or ones that charge people money upfront. I'm becoming more amenable to the second, honestly.
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~life
rogue_cricket (edited )Link ParentI felt the same way. I suppose part of it is that I’m just, uh, not heterosexual, so in this I am largely an outside observer. In the gay community there’s often a kind of meme of “are the...I felt the same way. I suppose part of it is that I’m just, uh, not heterosexual, so in this I am largely an outside observer.
In the gay community there’s often a kind of meme of “are the straights ok?” which is employed when we encounter too-enthusiastic conformity to heterosexual or gender stereotypes, to the point of being unhealthy or causing distress. An example might be joking about trapping someone in an unwanted marriage or a man refusing to add anything to a black coffee that he doesn’t enjoy because black coffee is “manly”.
Anyway, reading this article (which I wasn’t big on) made me feel like these straights are absolutely not ok. I could feel the lack of sincerity in a lot of it, in the way that men and women talked about each other. It was all so, so, deeply unromantic. It would have made me pity them, if so many of them weren’t openly misogynistic and thus essentially the architects of their own suffering & the suffering of others.
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Comment on I hope you don't use generative AI - an essay about my experience offering an open-source tool in ~tech
rogue_cricket Link ParentI think I mostly agree with this, honestly, although some might say that a prompt is some expression of humanity. A lot of the the time my beef with someone saying "I used AI to produce this art"...I think I mostly agree with this, honestly, although some might say that a prompt is some expression of humanity.
A lot of the the time my beef with someone saying "I used AI to produce this art" is actually the I, though.
Like - let's say I find a webstite that allows me to create custom engraved wood signs. I write "LIVE LAUGH LOVE" in the request area, I pick a font, and then I send off my request to some workshop to get it laser cut into a board of wood. Many humans and tools alike are involved in the process of creating the product: there's me, who initiated the request. There's the creator of the font, of course. There's the maker of the application that converts the vector font into instructions for a CNC machine, there's the operator running the machine, and there's the CNC machine itself.
Is my LIVE LAUGH LOVE sign art? I am leaning on the side of "no" (though I could be convinced), but what I'm more sure of is that in this process I would not be its artist even though I initiated the process of its production. Certainly the programmer that wrote the application that converted the font is not the artist of the result and certainly the CNC operator isn't either and the CNC machine isn't. The designer of the font is an artist, but their involvement in the process of the final product is removed from it by time, and all everyone else in this stack did was leverage their existing work.
So, that's how I see generated AI content intended to be aesthetically pleasing or entertaining. It's laser-cut LIVE LAUGH LOVE sign. It fills visual space. Maybe there's some art somewhere in the process, but the artists are the people who created the original material. There is no artistic contribution from the tool itself, from the programmer of the tool, or from the person who pressed the "MAKE IMAGE" button.
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Comment on New York Times quiz: Who’s a better writer: AI or humans? in ~tech
rogue_cricket LinkI went with the premise of it (marking preference rather than trying to identify the source) and preferred the human writing in all cases. There was always something more interesting about it to...I went with the premise of it (marking preference rather than trying to identify the source) and preferred the human writing in all cases. There was always something more interesting about it to me. The closest was science writing, but the phrase “soaring feeling” won me. I thought it was more evocative.
I’ve always insisted that I dislike AI writing and often rankled at the implication that it was any good and I am glad that I haven’t made myself a liar here. People who talk about it like it is just a matter of grammar and technical correctness irritate me, there’s something about the lack of intentionality that becomes extremely apparent to me.
One thing that diminishes the value of these “gotcha” AI versus Human quizzes to me is that a lot of the problems with AI writing only become truly apparent over the course of longer passages or with repeated exposure anyway.
Is it strange that I think the fact that it can produce a mass volume of writing actually makes the quality of the writing worse, to me? I am not talking about the oft-discussed problem of it consuming its out output like a dog eating its own vomit, but rather the fact that it floods the zone with “content” generally.
A thing always exists in its context. A big part of my enjoyment of art is its novelty. By creating an environment that is saturated with writing that all reads the same the value of any individual piece is significantly diminished. So to me, anything that can produce something at this speed and volume with little human effort is ontologically unappealing. It will always create the circumstances that make it boring through its ability to produce high volume, and that is even besides the fact that the mechanism of its function is based around the averages of existing content already.
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Comment on What are your food aversions? in ~food
rogue_cricket LinkI cannot be the only raisin-hater here...I cannot be the only raisin-hater here...
Do you feel the same way about movies? Sequels? Cinematic universes?
For example, I am not really interested in Star Wars. I don't know much about it. A friend dragged me to some Star Wars movie because he did not want to go alone; I barely understood it because I didn't have the context of the movie's characters, events, or the broader cinematic universe (overall I actually really dislike the "cinematic universe" thing). It was spectacle in some ways, sure, but I was definitely missing the kind of knowledge that I would need to appreciate the film. I came away from that movie feeling neutral-to-negative. But angry? Insulted? ...
Does that mean the movie was bad? Would the movie have been better if it had been appealed to me specifically, someone who doesn't really know or care much about Star Wars? Probably not; it was targeted at the people who are already invested in the universe and aware of its previous stories and conventions. (For example, it had to be explained to me what someone's lightsaber colour implied about their character, something that fans would pick up on.)
Some things simply require a baseline of knowledge and context to appreciate. That does not make them bad. In fact it often makes them better, in my view, because when your target audience is "anyone" then you're not likely to be able to say or do anything that complex or interesting. A piece of art not being targeted at you, and being appreciated by the target audience instead, should not make you angry...
Like... someone who doesn't know how to do algebra won't be able to do calculus, for instance. There are many people who can do calculus and who speak to each other about it, who build things on top of it, who use its principles to do interesting things. People who aren't educated in math might miss stuff, but it's not like the people having these conversations are intentionally being snobby or exclusive, they're having conversations among each other where a baseline can be assumed so they don't have to get bogged down in re-explaining algebra every time they want to do something higher-level.
Some forms of creation are just as much for the creator's fulfilment and experimentation as it is for the audience, as well. It's artists in conversation with each other, looking at each others' works, learning from their processes, even just literally showing that they have solved some PRACTICAL problem like working with a difficult material or producing some visual effect in a new way. It's open source.