DeltaAro

Looks great! Subaku? The sword reminds me of the Buster Sword from Final Fantasy.

AFAIU this wasn't about a legal ban and instead about losing all disability benefits if a disabled person marries. Aros who find this funny are aspiring aro Dr. Evils, of course. The official "logic" behind it is: "You get these new benefits of marriage, so we take your old ones".

Sorry for my long last post. What I mean is: for whatever reason, alloromantics really like to compare romantic love with madness. While paradoxically believing that love is what makes you human! Both ideas are deeply entrenched in our culture, and aros feel forced to react to them. Of course, this harms neurodivergent people again. But you would have to teach aros that they should not agree to the ideas of alloromantic mainstream and just interpret them differently. E.g. gleefully agreeing that love is madness. Or the "I assure you, I'm not a psycho because I experience this other type of love xy" groveling. Instead, they should reject those ideas completely. Obviously, this is not going to happen tomorrow. I belong to the 10 %. 😇 Who knows what emotions are, correlation doesn't mean it is the thing. Lightning isn't thunder. I don't know what those aros are up to here. It's perhaps a reaction to mystical ideas like "soul mates" which exist for romantic love but not for other emotions like friendship. So saying "it's just chemicals" could exactly mean that romantic love is not fundamentally different from other emotions. I don't know.

Romantic love was traditionally compared to madness, so it's not something aros came up with. This goes all back to Plato. He stated that four types of madness are divine gifts: prophecy, mysticism, poetry and love. Plato praised love as admiration of the Form of Beauty, which our soul had "seen" in another life. It makes the soul remember and long for the realm beyond the heavens (the forms). So the source of "love is madness" is actually exclusionary to aros. And while I'd say romantic love in the acute phase can involve altered states of consciousness, this is temporary and something most people experience (and therefore accepted or even expected). Romantic love may involve negative feelings, but overall it's more positive or at least a mixed bag, which is not typically true for mental illnesses.

"Essence" means the underlying nature of a thing, a concealed quality which makes it what it is. Essentialist thinking is believing in essences and that there are natural categories which depend on them. For example, the idea posted here, that the essence of art is the "creative expression of emotions", that AI generators lack. They don't express anything, don't have emotions, and instead just produce their images according to fixed logical rules and calculations. You see, this supposed "essence of art" isn't directly observable. E.g. "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" was assumed to be human-made and even won a prize, but was unknowingly AI generated. "Muse in a Warzone" is the opposite story, wrongly suspected to be AI-generated. If they can replace artists, they'll be used as such. 😐 It's even advertised that way. I agree that it feels like artists are profited off. But it's a conundrum... While overfitting may cause the AI model to partly reproduce images from the training set, that's the exception, not the norm. And without a concrete similarity, whose rights are infringed? It would normally be impossible to prove that a particular image was used in the training set. So it needs a special law that makes the training sets explicitly opt-in.

Except for outsider art, human artists also learn art from other artists and are inspired by them. No permission is needed, because training on other people's art is neither stealing nor plagiarism. AI image generators do something resembling learning and abstraction, and generate the image on multiple layers of detail. They don't just collage together existing works. The AI doesn't have the database of the original images anymore - the "only" thing left are the millions of parameters in the nodes of the ANN. OTOH, the trainings sets needed are extremely large. No human artist has to look at 50,000 images to paint competently, so here the comparison falls apart. This sounds very essentialist. Also, this: 100 % essentialism. So, we maybe rethink our attitude towards essentialism a bit? Personally, I never thought it was unequivocally bad. If we discussed this in a universal basic income utopia, it would be much more relaxed.

🥱 yes ... *yaaawn* yes... very fascin... ZzzzZZzzzZZzzzzz

To put it in a bon mot: AI could automate menial work, so that people can engage more in uplifting pursuits like art. Instead, it automates art, so people can do more menial work. Is capitalist greed behind this? Difficult question. It could also be the Moravec paradox in action. Also, the bon mot above comes from a privileged perspective. If a person's job gets automated away, this is always bad for them in the short term. Even it was dull and unpleasant, it was their source of livelihood. Automation is an average plus for society, but without wealth distribution, it may leave some people much worse off. PS: You certainly hit a nerve with this thread. 😀 Very interesting topic.

Oh no, that precious Demon Slayer volume!!

Yummm!! Morning Couscous (with agave syrup)

When I was five years old, my parents took me to Italy, and I expected that the Italians looked like Super Mario. I was very disappointed. Italians looked so... normal. I also was very shocked to learn that Egypt is part of Africa.

Oh, yes... For me, after I got a real adult job, I still live like I lived in my student years. I'm a shareholder of a housing coop and the heating in my house is a central heating pump. So rent and heating is very cheap for me. I could even live from €500 a month, all included, though of course that would be very tight. 😬 But normally just for a 30 m² flat you'd pay €500 (without heating) in my city. So I'm glad, that though many times I wanted to relocate to a nicer flat (with a vicinity that doesn't look like from a cyberpunk dystopia [though some people might like this]), in the end I did not. Now the living costs are through the roof, and it's nice to not have to restrict yourself much otherwise. I admire you.😄I'd like to be a freelancer, but I couldn't deal with the amount of self-promotion. My boss forgot all his coding skills, but he's good at networking, putting on a suit and finishing the deals. I'm so happy that I don't have to deal with this. 😉

I would NOT say you can control OCD while you can't control tics. Or that OCD is voluntary. 😀 The difference is that OCD has obsessions which compel goal-driven behavior, called compulsions. Tics just happen without any intention or goal. And tic disorder and OCD can both be mild or severe. I don't have any tics. I imagine simple tics to be like those hypnagogic jerks, but while being awake. But more complex tics I can't image how they feel like, and they indeed seem a bit like OCD from the outside.

I wonder if you can belong to the LGBTQ community but not identify as queer. I've encountered one trans person who said she belonged to the LGBTQ community, but rejected the queer label and identified as straight because of heterosexual and heteroromantic attraction.

You have to remember that a religion isn't like a culture, where you very easily choose the elements you like and reject other parts. Instead, religions contain numerous beliefs that swing together. And if you take only a few of them out, the whole system usually becomes much less plausible. E. g. revealed religions are based on holy scriptures (in Islam obviously the Quran and usually the core hadiths - if you question all hadiths you're in a small minority), and while there is considerable leeway in the interpretation, if you differ too much from mainstream interpretation, the question arises why to believe the scriptures in the first place: Scripture is usually revered as a guide, and so it should not be something that so easily leads people astray. Also be prepared that both mainstream members and ex-members might hate on you.

No, I'm not. I also would rather live in Sweden than in the USA. Though that's not a good argument. A country can be a bad place to live in because of uncontrollable, external factors (wars, disasters, colonial exploitation, ..). The Swedish "moral superpower" narrative also doesn't say that Sweden is perfect. But that Sweden as a state is more enlightened than other nations and obliged to "spread the message" to better humankind. It's important to remind ourselves that all the supposedly enlightened Swedish positions (like the Covid strategy) weren't hotly debated domestically or are the ones that withstood all public scrutiny and criticism. There is no such thing in this country. It's just what the technocrats and experts there decide (and admittedly they had a good track record as being relatively competent and integrous - until they weren't) and the population goes with it. To get back to the topic... if we think of Swedes as individualistic, we make a big mistake. So yeah, the US is positively insane in many ways, like the 2nd amendment. But if a policy in the US is universally agreed on nationally, I'd trust it way more than a Swedish policy.

"Individualistic" is multifaceted. Most societies are individualistic regarding certain aspects and collectivist in other aspects. Sweden is very individualistic on a personal level (the lonely cottage at a remote fjord or lake). But when it comes to the state, it's consensus driven. Even for very important decisions like the Swedish COVID strategy or joining NATO the lack of debate is... surprising. And the trust in institutions, oh dear... state surveillance in Sweden is unprecedented for a democracy. In 2020 a law was passed without opposition that allows law enforcement to hack into electronic devices to turn on cameras or microphones, on a mere suspicion and without a warrant. To the US left it's a kind of a paradise. To be fair, Sweden has health insurance, welfare, consumer-friendly laws, etc. Given the over-shelteredness (one word: Systembolaget) of the population and naive trust in institutions, it makes me wonder how stable the whole thing really is. There are certainly cracks showing in Swedish society (like the success of the Sweden Democrats). Sorry, this devolved into a rant about Sweden. Normally, I wouldn't criticize foreign countries. I just don't like their 🇸🇪 "Moral Superpower" narrative. Just as I don't like US exceptionalism. If you claim to be better or more enlightened than everyone else, then please live up to it!

There is this pipeline: Scientific study (often questionable) about a statistical effect => delivered without context and over-simplified by science journalists => clueless overgeneralized interpretation by laymen I mean, statistical difference between genders is one thing. It's just baffling how people then conclude "ALL women are like X". It shouldn't take a genius to think "maybe it's like with height: it's not like all men are taller than all women".

I never understood the need to lay out one's romantic problems before a huge audience of strangers. And not even in a "pity me, I'm so miserable" way, but in this brazen "I deserve better" way. There's an article ‘My husband used to be hot. If I met him now, would I still fancy him?’ in The Times (wasn't this a quality newspaper some time ago?). It's behind a paywall sadly, but I read the full article since a friend sent it to me. If you think that this is just a clickbait title and the actual content is more self-aware... no, it's not.

So you can draw directly on the tablet? I have a Wacom Intuos and that's non-display, so it's kind of difficult to get the hand eye-coordination compared to directly drawing on paper... (a display tablet of that size would be very expensive). But I guess I would learn it if I put the same time into drawing as I put into gaming. 🥲 Let's say I do "naive art". I use Krita and this does some good antialiasing. So doesn't Kleki have AA or did you disable it? Of course, if you use the bucket tool and the like, you can get very funny results with AA. In such cases where precision is needed, I'd just work at twice the resolution and disable AA and then scale down to 50% with interpolation, which gets you nice AA. Or I just use Inkscape.

In God of War: Ragnarök, I've now reached Alfheim, where there's a desert with a sled drawn by creatures called "Gulons": When I saw those, I thought: "Cats vs. Dogs? Why choose when you can have both!" But the color, yeah, no. They should be green!

Every community has/had those ... accusations? Problems? Let's say "issues". So the personal question is, does X do more harm than good? Stay and change X, or leave? Aplatonic is a hot button issue, because contrary to romantic relationships, you have some non-optional relationships, like with your parents. So that's the logic behind it for those aros to fundamentally distinguish aromanticism from aplatonicism and regard the latter as a character defect. Generally, we live in a time when everybody presents themselves as absolutely, firmly believing the right thing, without even a shred of doubt, and then frame their opinions in a language of victimhood. E. g. just browse J. K. Rowling's Twitter posts. So there is really serious contradiction, but no accepted meta-theory to settle those disputes. You can use history as a guide. But that's obviously imperfect since we live in a globalized world, while the history of societies differs greatly. TW: very flame war prone material Also, some issues simply lack any historical precedent. Maybe we should just all be more reticent and less judgmental. OK, I start with this now... This is one of the post that I regret posting, though I have much more material. For a whole book... 😆

Yum yum! Vegan* Çiğ köfte? * as by law it is served in Turkey (though the original recipe isn't vegan)

Like this famous thread, but vegan! 🪴 Post Yum or Ewww depending on how you like the food in the post above, and then name another vegan food. I'll start: Onigiri with Peanuts & Avocado

Very relatable. It's normal to like attentive gifts. I dislike February 14th as a date, I always feel so excluded on this day. Though I got chocolate and even a rose (which I declined, but took the chocolate 😄) today. But this was just promotional gifts. Which is not the same. But if you find yourself really yearning for romance and pining at all happy romantic couples and being envious, we have an orientation for it: cupioromantic.