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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: May 24th, 2021

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  • That video!! Yeah, I don’t believe it either. Sort of reminds me of doing Kung Fu as a kid. We’d do public demonstrations and would sometimes ham it up a bit for the audience. I wonder if that’s what’s going on.

    Have you practiced push hands? There’s a neat effect I can only describe as sort of being able to bounce off the other person. You can get some decent air with it! I also wonder if there’s a bit of that going on with a lot of exaggeration.


  • I agree with you about the “weird stuff”. I teach Tai Chi and I’m very careful about the words I use, especially when it comes to describing mechanical forces. I’ll often mention that I don’t mean some notion of “life force” but rather the physical Newtonian force that your body is subject to while performing the movements.

    I find Tai Chi to be deceptively complicated with deep physical and psychological components. I have a hard time articulating what it is to others since it’s not really a martial art, and it’s not really meditation, and it’s not just a bunch of movements or calisthenics. But it does have very real effects and I love it!

    It sounds like your experience is quite similar to mine and I’m happy you found a good teacher and are enjoying the practice! 😀








  • It doesn’t really bother me, but like you I am bored of it and I generally ignore it, or block communities if I’m seeing too much of it.

    It is really cool that the models can generate fairly detailed images, but they’re all so similar and… boring. I once saw someone describe it like corporate art. It just tries to imitate something popular in a very mediocre way. You can keep re-training it, but it can still only imitate.

    Still, if people are into it then that’s ok too. I have used it at work on occasion to create stupid little icons for internal tools I’ve built, so I guess there’s some little bit of utility.

    My guess is that it’ll be used for a while for cheap and low effort branding, but soon companies will want to hire real artists again to differentiate themselves from the ML spam.






  • Clearly you’ve never read Hacker News. :)

    Every point I’ve made has several threads on pretty much every Hacker News post about Mozilla or Firefox.

    I was using Firefox when it was still called Phoenix, and I switched to Chrome briefly about 10 years ago when it was actually a bit better than Firefox. At the time, most people I knew in the tech sector were using Firefox. It’s Firebug extension was a major boost for development. Chrome was a bit better and their dev tools were even better than Firebug at the time.

    I switched back to Firefox when I saw the direction Google was taking it, and I know a lot of other people did as well. Still, many people stayed with Chrome. There’s no shortage of comments on Hacker News about “I dropped Firefox because X” or “I tried to switch to Firefox but X”, where X is one of the things I mentioned.

    Chrome got to where it was in no small part to us “computer people” saying it was good. And now not enough of us are saying Firefox is good. It breaks my heart to see so many young and smart developers choosing Chrome.

    We’re heading back to the bad old days of IE dominance, with proprietary extensions, playing fast and loose with standards, and market dominance pushing for things that only benefit one company. ActiveX still gives me nightmares.