I do think the positives of image AI just aren’t really there right now. Outside of maybe DLSS.

A new exciting package that can only be obtained through my touchpad drivers would be mildly concerning

Not necessarily disagreeing with you here, but I will point out that Photoshop can and probably has been used to create non-consentual pornography and scams as well

Intuition

I tried searching "civetta scintilla" -beamng, google does what I want but I don’t think duckduckgo implements the - operator

(the civetta scintilla is a fake car from the game beamng drive, so most results have both in them)

I usually end up switching to google when I can’t find things for this reason

although google does insert a “videos” section at the top of the list which does completely ignore the - operator

lol I found someone on facebook marketplace with screenshots from the game trying to sell it as a real car https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1083690136569890/

Only half of a toaster (in the US at least)

It’s a nice easy unit to compare against because all of the ones I’ve seen draw basically exactly 1000 watts

It’s also less than double what my desktop draws (11700k, rtx 3060) and (those aren’t particularly demanding components, and I only get 16 threads) (that’s basically exactly 6x more power draw per core, although the cores themselves perform differently ofc)

It is slightly silly to have that many cores tho. I guess the main reason to not just use a gpu would be because pcie doesn’t have enough bandwidth, or if you need a ton of RAM? For a pure compute application I don’t think there are many cases where a GPU isn’t the obvious choice when you’re going to have almost 400 threads anyways. An A100 has half the tdp and there’s no way the epyc chip can even come close in performance (even if you assume the cpu can use avx512 while the gpu can’t use it’s tensor cores, it having about a third of the memory bandwidth isn’t exactly encouraging about the level of peak compute they’re expecting)

If you’ve seen that blue-ness in the sky you’ve seen air.

I know some people are suspicious of fedora specifically because of its ties with IBM.

Arch also can absolutely be installed just as quickly as any other distro if you use the archinstall script. I used it recently to install KDE plasma onto a Chromebook from 2017 and everything worked exactly as expected, I haven’t had any issues with stability so far. Can absolutely be done in under half an hour. It ofc doesn’t come with the advantage of understanding exactly how your system is set up, like you would if you did it yourself.

The last time I did that (slightly different setup with xfce) though I broke it somehow and ended up with if freezing often when booting, although I’m still not sure if that was a hardware problem or not, but it doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. I also broke something with the audio jack somehow around then during an update, but chromebooks have weird audio drivers and you need to use this script maintained by (afaik) one person in their spare time. Anyways I would expect a framework laptop to handle it better as it’s newer and more common hardware.

I think the whole community is marked nsfw, so that might prevent you from seeing the posts

AMD has done a bit of open source driver and software stuff, but their chips aren’t any more open AFAIK.

it’s what the little puffy bit at the end of the smooth section of breath in that clipart represents

I was thinking about this a bit yesterday and I think the most feasible way would be to suspend a glass sheet above the lake, and then give people harnesses with magnets on the top that attach to magnets on the other side of the glass sheet. Then just put ball bearings on both sides to reduce friction.

You could try to use magnetism or something tho, although that means you’d only be able to walk on specially prepared lakes

Unless there’s force coming from somewhere other than buoyancy, you can’t get better than than 1.29 kg per cubic meter of lift in air at stp.

I agree, I think generative AI is insanely cool technology (and if a new local one comes out I’ll probably play with it for a bit) but I can’t see image generation at least ever being a net positive for humanity until we get some sort of welfare state.

Currently the negative effects are mitigated by it being relatively easy to tell ai images apart from real images, and since ai images take almost no effort to make, they have naturally become an instant sign marking low effort content wherever they are used. When people stop being able to tell ai images apart is when it will start to become a problem.

Well, air weighs a little bit more than 1 kilogram per cubic meter, and those balloons look a little bit smaller than a cubic meter

The theoretical best lift from a balloon that size is about 1 kg I would estimate

Well, if we used a pure vacuum, you’d only get about 17% more efficiency than just using helium I think

Any amount of water contact introduces a fair amount of drag. There may be an ideal point somewhere in the middle, but I think if you take this to it’s natural conclusion you get a zeppelin.

I did a little bit of math and I think that to lift the payload capacity (including fuel and crew) of a modern day Panama canal ship you would need about a tenth of the peak U.S. helium reserve (a cube about half a kilometer long on each edge, about 1.3x longer than the long dimension of the ship)

I don’t think you’d get the best fuel efficiency going upwind lol

Anything smaller would come with proportionally less downsides and at least proportionally less benefits. I doubt it could ever be a net positive in any useful metric.