In my opinion, governments are going to have to tax the big tech companies hard and distribute the money to funding bodies like Arts Council. I can see a future "Tech Council" for open source software organisations to apply for funding. It'll get to the point where every OSS developer has their own Community Interest Company or join with a few other devs to create a CIO in order to acquire funding.
Of course, now you're opening a whole other can of worms. In the UK, only 1 in 9 Arts Council funding applications is successful.
For a long time I used to be able to manage my exercise with depression. Eventually, it stopped working. I literally climbed a mountain, got to the top and felt nothing.
What got me out of that place was improv comedy lessons. Highly recommend to anyone. Improv schools and theatres should be as ubiquitous as gyms.
Replace the word US in this paragraph with Nazi Germany and the issue with this statement becomes apparent. If the only way you can maintain power is via physical force over others then you're a bully and it won't be long until others unite against you. The US may have the best military in the world but it does not have the ability to take on the entire globe. It's previous status actually came from the fact people used to look up to and admire it - something that has been steadily declining for quite some time now. Growing up, I used to think the US was the coolest place on Earth. Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. Every place has problems, but you can't just shout "We're the best country on Earth" anymore and have people believe you when on a daily basis the world is seeing so much evidence to the contrary.
> Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain.
The thing is, it is not 2007/2008 any more. The US government is holding record amounts of debt and countries around the world are now trying to become independent of it. This includes its bond markets on which the dollar relies upon to give it its reserve currency status, which in turn is what gives it its power to print money and bail industries out. If something happens that requires Big Tech to be bailed out and international bond holders decide the US is no longer reliable, it could very well end up triggering the collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and the downfall of the US as we know it.
Exactly, a diffusion model can denoise the watermark out of the image. If you wanted to be doubly sure you could add noise first and then denoise which should completely overwrite any encoded data. Those are trivial operations so it would be easy to create a tool or service explicitly for that purpose.
You can literally just open the image up in Preview or whatever and add a red box, circle etc and then say "in the area with the red square make change foo" and it will normally get rid of the red box on the generated image. Whether or not it actually makes the change you want to see is another matter though. It's been very hit or miss for me.
Yeah I could see that being useful if there were a lot of similar elements in the same image.
I also had similar mixed results wrt Nano-banana especially around asking it to “fix/restore” things (a character’s hand was an anatomical mess for example)
If all you do is write, you are missing half the benefits of journalling. The key to journalling is to write, and then periodically review what you have written. The most effective way is to create a system for this periodicity.
For your daily entries, start by writing down a bulleted list of all the notable things you can remember happening that day. Then write about whatever you want - it can be a stream of consciousness, thoughts on the various events you just wrote down or it can be simply "nothing of note" if it was a boring day.
At the end of the week, create a weekly note with a heading for each day that has passed e.g 2025-01-01, 2025-01-02, 2025-01-03 etc and write down any thoughts or observations you have as you go back and read that day's entry. Then at the bottom of the page create the following headings:
### Summary of the week
### + (Positives)
### - (Negatives)
### * (Things to improve)
### ? (Open Questions)
### → (Most Important Tasks for next week)
### ! (The single most important task to focus on)
### 3 Things You're Grateful For
### . (Final thoughts)
Repeat this each week. Look back at the previous weekly entry and see if you now have the answers to resolve the open questions from before. If not, carry them over.
When you get to the end of the month, create a monthly note. For this note, write headings for each of the weeks that has passed e.g Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4. Now do the same again, reading through your weekly notes and writing down any observations you have, patterns you've observed etc in the weekly notes. Finish off with the same list of headings mentioned above, but now thinking on a monthly timeline rather than a weekly one. When you are reflecting think, of how your progress is fitting in to medium term picture of the projects and goals you are working on.
Repeat this each month.
After three months, create a quarterly note. As you have probably guessed, Month 1, Month 2, Month 3 and the headings above. As you are now at the three monthly review, you should now be reflecting and thinking on the larger term picture of how this quarter is fitting into your 1 - 3 year goals.
After a year, create a yearly note. Repeat the process with the quarterly notes, but also read and review anything else from the year that you want to reflect on. Think about how the year went and how it fits with your values and the type of life you want for yourself.
One caveat on the above: if you are going through a frustrating period where nothing is working out despite all your best efforts, sometimes an incessant feedback loop can just make things worse. If that is the case, you may want to stop journalling for a bit, focus on relaxing and enjoying life and come back to it when the storm has passed.
I felt this way at one point and vocally proclaimed as such on here. My Fold 5 developed a bubble under the screen protector after about 18 months. I sent it into Samsung through the website to get it repaired. Whoever "repaired" it, just seemed to slice the screen protector down the middle with an knife so it had a big ugly line down the center. Predictably, it was full of bubbles again within a week. I'm not even bothering opening it anymore for fear that it will break the inner screen. Between this and the fact that I had another two Samsung phones that developed hardware faults making them unusable after 2 years of use, I'm absolutely done with Samsung. Before that, I had an iPhone that was still going strong after 7 years. I'm preordering an iPhone tomorrow and selling the Samsung. Doubt I will be venturing into the Android ecosystem again. Might get an Apple foldable depending on what the initial reports are like on durability after it's been around for a couple of years. The time sink of having to transfer a phone across is high and I really cba with doing it because of avoidable screen repair.
>I had another two Samsung phones that developed hardware faults making them unusable after 2 years of use, I'm absolutely done with Samsung
I haven't tried any foldable phones and I have no intention to anytime soon, but with other samsung phones my experience has been completely different. I've only ever used Samsung smartphones, and the only times they broke was when I dropped them or mishandled them myself somehow. My current one is past the 6 year mark, and I have no issues with it. It still keeps 48 hours of battery with my normal use (though that might not be saying much considering my normal use is different from most people's normal use of watching videos for hours)
My experience with 5 Samsung phones over 10ish years, last one being 2019:
Great hardware that nearly always impresses. Very infrequent hardware issues compared to its main competitors (in the android space).
Extremely annoying software experience. Locked bootloader aside, as I recognize that's only an issue for a very small group. But the software goes through these intense hills and valleys where you can go a long time without updates, with bugs, with bloat, with problems. Then a burst of updates that seem to address many of those issues, then it just slides back into the shit. And the amazing hardware is dragged down in this cycling, to the point where the phone will feel old at an accelerated rate. I've hard that exact complaint about apple and a few other android manufacturers many times but only Samsung has genuinely given me that experience.
It's very unfortunate. If they unlocked the bootloader I could bypass the software issues myself and have damn near the perfect phone.
I had a fold 3, and now a fold 6. The screen protectors are easily replaceable yourself. It's the only weakness on the phone I've found, and a cheap ($17ish) wear item. The replacement ones I get feel much nicer and thicker than the original.
I love the replacement matte inner screen protector on my fold 4. It's so much better than the glossy screen protector and it was cheap, and easy to install.
A forced reboot error first occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 folds, and the same error repeatedly appeared at roughly every 10,000 folds afterward (e.g., around 16,000, 26,000, etc.).
Around 46,000 folds, creaking noises started coming from the hinge.
At 75,000 folds, an unknown black liquid came out of the hinge, but it has not appeared again.
At 175,000 folds, all speakers (earpiece, top, and bottom) stopped working.
The hinge has become smoother. Free-stop still works, but elasticity seems to be lost.
The reboots at 10K intervals seems like a software problem fixable by an update.
The speakers failing at 175K folds seems like the major failing point. I suppose bluetooth would probably still be working so you could still limp through day-to-day activities.
Of course, now you're opening a whole other can of worms. In the UK, only 1 in 9 Arts Council funding applications is successful.