Windows definitely isn't the solution for all use cases. There are some use cases for which it's completely ineffective. There is no one operating system that's perfect for all use cases.

I emailed the dev who makes Solaar less than a month ago after my most recent attempt. They said clicking and holding would be on Logitech's end, in their firmware. As the firmware stands currently, it's not possible to rebind those particular buttons and click and hold them unless you rebind them to other buttons already on the mouse. Works in Logitech Options + on Windows, does not work through Solaar on any Linux distro.

I attempted to contact the Logitech devs, but there doesn't seem to be any open avenue for doing so. I tried talking to Logitech support, but they weren't able to put me in contact or even forward a message.

So yes, I have tried this recently. And literally the person who makes the software I'm trying to use has told me that my use case is not currently possible without some sort of workaround.

Th s is hila ious. Wait, w t’ ap e i g? c n’t ead y r p st!

Are you here to repeat that nonsense about file transfer being lossy?

Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it’s the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.

We’re actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it’s become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.

Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that’s no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?

They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn’t. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.

Piracy is a pretty great backup system for everyone. You’re welcome.

Why does the use of AI to modify art require justification?

We seem to have this general culture of people who don’t make things coming after those who do. Every decision of design, methodology, or artistic preference treated as though the creator has an obligation to please every single person who posts their opinions on the internet.

The reality is that this simply isn’t true. Art that spends all its energy fretting about whether people will like it ends up being some bland bullshit produced by committee. Art that allows itself to be what it is doesn’t need opinions and suggestions to flourish.

If the author of that article were remotely interested in their process or what the actual practical implications of using AI on a project are, they could have had something worth reading.

Instead they went into the interview looking to push a position and badgering without listening rather than making even a passing attempt at something resembling journalism. Because ultimately they don’t care about AI, or art, or games; they care about rage clicks.

They can be binding in the sense that they can govern the licensing or potentially ownership of submitted assets. So like, for example, a ToS could have a bunch of clauses that carry no legal obligation for you, but could also include a clause that grants the company licensing to use your likeness or things submitted to the server or interaction with it. The same way any ToS can license the use of your metadata for sale to 3rd parties.

That doesn’t have any particular legally binding requirements of you, but it can serve as a shield in the event of a lawsuit if, say, Facebook uses your profile photo in some advertising materials.

It can also be useful if you’re running a small project like an independent game server. Even if there’s literally no money in it, it can be helpful to clarify who owns what in the event of something like a false DMCA. If a developer who once was doing work with you suddenly decides to take their ball and go home, some sort of agreement that outlines your ownership or usage rights surrounding code submitted to your mod can protect you when they turn around and send Steam a DMCA.

But yeah, nobody’s going to get sued for using a service in a way that the ToS prohibits unless it’s already illegal, like theft.

Artists aren’t lawyers and don’t want to be. Except for the ones that are. But that isn’t most of us.

Artists make art. If you want to look for the people who like to make policy, look to the jackasses in suits who sit around having meetings about meetings all day to justify scalping the work made by actual artists. The same kinds of people who fund stories like this blatantly uninformed hit piece.

Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

At some point the line will have to be discovered, because the use of AI for art isn’t going away. Suits can whine about it all they want. Art doesn’t really care.

AI art of any reasonable quality still requires significant human input. I don’t just mean prompt engineering, I mean actually having an artist using more traditional techniques to make adjustments or provide a base for the AI work. The output of raw AI art on its own can be impressive at times, but it’s not consistent enough to maintain a style for any sizeable piece of work.

If you want to be able to create a bunch of assets that look like they were designed for the same project with AI, somebody still needs to do some art.

What AI does do, though, is give those artists the ability to exponentially increase their productivity independently, with no particular need for the sort of labor-hour organization that a corporation provides.

It should be telling that the corporate media spin on this is to attack it and to publicize voices that criticize it, but never those that express nuance. That’s because it terrifies every useless corporate lackey who understands its actual potential to empower independent artists of all kinds.

You’d be making a mistake there. AI elements can’t be copyrighted, but human-created elements can. There’s also a line somewhere at which point AI generation is used as a tool to enhance hand-made art rather than to generate entire pieces wholesale.

Like, let’s look at this Soul Token for my Planescape themed Conan Exiles server (still in development).

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1097400802764664843/1110453997413867560/image.png

I went into GIMP, drew a simple skull based on a design I found on google image search, slapped it on a very simple little circle, and popped it into NightCafe for some detail work. The end result is something I composed myself, with the most significant visual elements created by hand and spiced up a bit essentially using a big complicated filter. The result saved me hours and gave me one of many little in-game items to mod into my server that I never would have had the resources to produce in bulk otherwise as an independent developer.

Who owns it?

Well, I drew the skull after training myself on google image search data, but presumably my hand drawing of a fairly generic object still belongs to me. I drew the circle that makes up the coin itself, but NightCafe added some nicely lit metallic coloring, gave it a border, and turned my little skull into a gem. This, of course, requiring some prompt engineering and iteration on my part.

So is adding a texture and a little border detail enough to interfere with my ownership? Should it be? If I didn’t hand-create enough of the work to constitute ownership, surely there’s some point at which a vanishingly small amount of AI detail being added to the art doesn’t eliminate the independent creation of the art itself. If I were to paint an elaborate landscape by hand and then AI generate a border for it, surely that border shouldn’t eliminate the legitimacy of my contributions.

At some point, the difference between the use of AI and the use of a filter in an image editor becomes essentially non-existent. Yes, an AI can create a lot more from scratch, but in practical terms it’s much easier to get it started with a bit of traditional art than it is to spend hours engineering prompts trying to get rid of weird extra eyeballs and spaghetti fingers.

I’d love to see a more elaborate discussion on this topic, but so far all we get is some form of ‘AI bad!’ and then some artists dropping a little bit of nuance without it really seeming to go anywhere.

This technology has the potential to elevate independent artists to the sort of productivity that only corporations, with their inherent inspiration-killing bureaucracy, could previously achieve. That’s a good thing.

People who haven’t used this tech really have it backward. This enables indie artists to create stuff on their own without corporate oversight. This interview was an opportunity to explore that, but they decided to follow the corporate line of attacking this actually successful four person studio instead of asking about what makes them tick with any actual interest.

What a terrible interview. The interviewer literally repeatedly asks questions that they’ve already answered and shows pretty clearly that they haven’t bothered actually researching or trying AI art technology. They certainly seemed to have read plenty of articles about how bad AI is, but didn’t even bother scratching the surface of how it’s actually used.

It reads like a hit piece coming from someone who only reads what comes up in their feed.

This is a bit unrealistic. Games may work better than they did in the past, but performance isn’t 1:1 yet. More importantly, device drivers can be a lot more dicey.

Personally, the main thing keeping me from actually using my Linux partition most of the time is that my mouse buttons can’t be properly rebound. Yeah, I could find some janky work-around, but that would be eating into my workflow.

I also do, in fact, need Windows for development.

GNU is great, but pretending it’s a viable Windows replacement for every use case is just disingenuous. It doesn’t help anyone and it only makes GNU supporters seem that much more out of touch with the average user’s experience.

There are literally people who will think the internet is broken if they accidentally delete their browser shortcut or just straight up can’t find it in the sea of icons on their desktop. These are the users that Windows is protecting from themselves. The same users probably wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use the command line if their life depended on it.

There’s a place for Windows, and there’s a place for GNU. I’d love to see the place for GNU expand and the place for Windows shrink, but that doesn’t make it so.