Well, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. It horrid to set up something, and then watch disappointing delays happen time and again. I’d hoped I’d be penning with with a smile on my face that we were coming back in full force, but there’s no evidence that we’ll get back on stride before the month’s end – or even within the foreseeable future with the current tenor.

That being the case, we’ll reopen our original plans and chase down the remainders of the VPN processes. We actually were going to finish off one more first tier. Then get into a 2nd round to determine the winner for ’23. Way less exciting than a Linux-from-scratch buildup Distro to call our own by the nomenclature; but it’s alright. It’ll be better than nothing.

In spite of – or perhaps because of – these disappointing delays we’ll re-pivot and charge hard again into that series. Honestly, I can’t wait to be done with it; VPNs are interesting technologies – but the high level overview is killing me (give me the bit and the baud, and I’ll stay happen… all this high level software malarkey and vendors mess on that is hurting my soul).

That said, other projects that are semi-related in coding have gone well… specifically an odd dovetail between potential FOSS projects & D&D 3.5 & Pathfinder SRDs tie-ins. It’s awhile out yet, but it’ll be fairly rad once that part’s handled.

‘AI’ Imagery

I know there’s all this fury about ‘AI’ generated images and all that, but – hey – it looks cool and is Open Source for now. It’s not like I had gobs of cash to pay an artist, or the yearning to screw around with GIMP for something like this (no, I’ll stick to my code, hah!)

I mean I could if I wanted to, but I’d rather spend time typing stuff over drawing stuff, which means I’d use Creative Commons or royalty free images. Those are stiff, but with prompts and that type? Look, it’s chintzy, but it’s cool in its own way.

Oh, that reminds me of an off the wall comment I saw the other day, which boggled my mind. An accusation thrown about how these things are stealing from real artists and blah blah.

A) You might have that quandary IF they’re selling it.

B) You might have that quandary IF they were gonna buy something in the first place. Protip, small biz’s starting up with a staff of 4 folks? Probably not a great target.

Not a good look for the *vouching for the little guy* moral grandstanding/virtue signalling, either.

C) Who died and made you the ‘net police?

I do get the concern about the ‘taken our jerbs’ thing – but the intrepid artist? Well, embrace the suck. If you’re an artist you’re absolutely able to do better than the ‘AI’ at this stage.

And if you’re not, learn your craft *such that you are*. True for coders, too. This ‘AI’ is just another tool like CAD or drawing tablets.

Note on quotes around ‘AI’ and their own ‘Disappointing Delays’

LLMs aren’t truly Intelligent like this would imply – after a substantial amount of experimentation with the stuff, it’s a semblance of Intelligence, but no spark.

Not yet at least.

Touch of a different rant, but this entire ‘AI’ scare’s kinda not here yet. Oh, yeah, it’ll be – but if it’s handled right we avoid a Matrix-type future and get a happier ending. (Note: the Matrix’s original solution there is actually Utopian in my opinion considering the hows/whos/whys there. That’s a different soapbox, though.)

–Laucivol

Filed under: Uncategorized - @ 2023-12-18 16:00