• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Right but I mean, the more classic examples of professions to be made in to doll form tend to more easily liken themselves to simplistic representations that you can convey to children as a toy and have them roughly understand and imagine doing. A doctor, an army guy, maybe a mechanic, a police officer, a scientist they’re all pretty visual, they have uniforms or attire strongly associated with the work itself and plenty of props to package with them for the kid to interact with to emulate doing that job. The therapist kinda wears just whatever and their job primarily involves talking so it just doesn’t seem an obvious choice for a doll for children’s entertainment at all.


  • So I know the joke with spelling but also, Barbie therapist!? WTF? How does that work as a play toy? The concepts seem like they’d be so confusing and boring for a child. I gather it was to send a “you can be anything when you grow up” message, but it’d be about as exciting as a toy as a Barbie accountant. That’s just weird.


  • The text is clearly human made, and altogether the whole thing is funny. The tool for creating the images in this context doesn’t really impact upon the quality of the work as a whole given the low standards and the fact that it’s literally a joke, and furthermore is pretty unlikely to have put anyone out of a job. I can’t imagine anyone is making a profit out of this so even the murky topic of copyright for the training data used by the model is at the very least less bad even if not completely abrogated.

    If they’d done this with stolen images from the web and Photoshop I don’t think there’d be a lot accusations of ‘Photoshop slop’ because they didn’t create costumes and props and do a shoot on location and went with the ‘lazy’ option instead.

    There are many things to be worried about with the popular availability of generative AI tools and the torrent of slop that’s being pushed out of them but this really seems not to be one worth worrying about or even having contempt for.



  • The easy answer is no, that is not an overreaction to the problem as you’ve assessed it. You didn’t want to drive to begin with, because of doubts about your capacity to drive, then when you did drive you encountered a dangerous situation and now you don’t to do it again, that’s just rational.

    The tricky part is deciding if you’re going to persevere anyway. Though not wanting to drive again is rational and probably good for everyone else on the roads, you are also most likely not uniquely incompetent even if you’re self critical and doubting. This might be where the idea that you are overreacting comes from, the tension behind this rational response and the simultaneous idea that perhaps you’re being too self critical. Ironically, I think both are true.

    For better or for worse we’re living in a world where you can continue to do this and on balance of probabilities, you will get used to driving and get more capable with it, but there’ll be a period while you reach that stage where you and everyone else on the road will be at risk of harm. That’s not a great situation and something that in other contexts for other activities might not be tolerated, but it also might be a necessary one. It might perhaps put your mind at ease (or the opposite depending on how you interpret this), to realise that the road is full of drivers that might not be “good” drivers because they’re, nervous, have bad multitasking, are drunk or on drugs, are tired, aren’t concentrating, are underconfident, are overconfident, angry right this second, inexperienced, over experienced to the point of becoming inattentive and all manner of factors that should objectively mean people just shouldn’t drive but nevertheless we do and in the time and circumstances that we find ourselves in you wouldn’t be against the moral zeitgeist on this to decide that driving is necessary or beneficial enough for you that you’re going to become just one more such driver less than optimal driver in the roads. Hopefully after a while you’ll get past the fear and inexperience and that will make you a driver of at least average competence.

    This isn’t to say I think you should do that. One less car on the road, especially driven by someone who by their own judgement thinks they aren’t a good driver and also doesn’t want to drive would, in the grand scheme of things be good, but I acknowledge it would be hypocrisy of me to suggest that you should exclude yourself on this basis when very few of the rest of us would.




  • I felt every word of this and it’s so hard and so unfair. I’m really sorry life dealt you this hand and all it’s associated costs. Did you and she part on good terms at least? If you’d been the one to wrap things up a year sooner maybe she’d have taken it hard anyway for assuming she wouldn’t be committed to you. It might be important that she knows you don’t hold any sense of blame or resentment for how it turned out.

    Hope you find that happy equilibrium accepting help from your folks eventually, they want to see you well just as much as you want to be well I imagine.




  • Nah, but a couple surprised me with how much they saddened me because I’d always thought it was kind of stupid to get genuinely upset about the deaths of celebrities you don’t know. Sometimes your cognitive opinions take a backseat without your permission and you just feel actually mournful about someone who has so little direct connection and who’s worldly contributions are almost always in the entertainment space. For me that was David Bowie and Trevor Moore. Both of these surprised me because it’s not like I was a hardcore David Bowie fan so it didn’t feel like that death should have hit me particularly hard and Trevor, I still can’t figure out why that’d upset me so much. I mean I loved his sketch comedy but I’d largely forgotten about him at the time, I think it might have something to do with him being so young as well as all the laughs he’d given us.










  • Loved old school paint. I used to try and recreate 3d renders of Nintendo characters that I’d seen printed in magazines and on my Gameboy pocket pouch by doing a kind of primitive dithering technique that 10 year old me thought up drawing 1 pixel blocks of specific colours in alternating patterns to try recreate shading or gradients of colour and I’d draw whole rows of them with the line tool which naturally had a staircase effect to it. Used to save it all on a zipdisk.