SDF Chatter

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1126970/consumers-sue-amazon-for-not-refunding-trump-tariff-costs

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/nonpolitical_comics/p/1665950/archie-what-every-guy-wants

Can someone check my math on this? It feels... wrong:

After cycling a little over 8000km on our e-bike, our battery died. Rather inconvenient, but thankfully we had a variety of cycle shops nearby and one of them was able to find us a replacement.

Ours is a Bicicapace Just Long a fantastic cargo bike with a Shimano motor and battery. The battery that we originally purchased with the bike was no longer available, so the replacement battery is a newer model. It is however a legit Shimano battery rather than a cheap knockoff prone to exploding.

The total cost, just for the battery was £600. Interestingly, this is roughly what I paid for my entire road bike about six years ago.

The steep price tag got me thinking though: if all I can expect to get out of this battery is 8000km, what is the "mileage" of my e-bike? Math is not my strong suit, but the number I arrived at is not inspiring:

If we take the cost of travelling 8000km and ignore the marginal cost of electricity for the sake of my sanity, the cost per kilometre is:

£600 ÷ 8000km  = £0.075/km

That feels... high. My kid's school is almost 5 kilometres from our home, so every day we take her to school, we're effectively paying £0.75 for the return trip and again to go pick her up, so £1.50. That's £7.50/week (not including the weekends which are busier).

Given this, I wondered what it'd cost to do this with a car — only counting the fuel mind you — and the result wasn't inspiring.

The average milage in the UK for a diesel car is 43MPG. I opted for diesel for this exercise 'cause that's what it seems like everyone is driving here. Converting this to metric, you get:

1gal → 4.5461L
43mi → 69.2018km

69.2018km ÷ 4.5461L = 15.22 km/L

With this value, we can calculate how many litres of diesel one might use to travel 8000km:

8000km ÷ 15.22km/L = 525.62L

Finally, with the price of diesel currently here in Cambridge hovering at around £1.569/l, that means that the price to pay for the diesel alone for the same distance I travelled on that £600 battery was only a couple hundred bucks more:

1.569 * 525.62 = £824.70

That's... not inspiring. It's really hard to convince people that cycling is cheaper when the costs of regular use are so high compared to the ridiculously low cost of fossil fuels. Sure, the electricity cost is negligible, and there are many many other costs associated with cars, but having just bit the bullet on £600 battery after such a short time, let me tell you, that taste is bitter.

Hi everyone, I need a key gen for CivilCAD 11.1. Link for the software is this: CivilCAD. I tried using the 2025 version but since my AutoCAD is 2027, it doesn't install properly.

Portrayed by Alessandro Juliani. Sinclair is one of my favorite characters on The 100, while - ironically - Raven is not... I was absolutely hyped when I recognized Juliani on season 4 episode 9 Scorched Earth. 🥰

Dieses Set hat mir bisher am meisten Spaß beim Bau gemacht. Und es sieht auch wunderbar aus.

Am Bau gefällt mir insbesondere die Abwechslung, da hier in kürzeren Abschnitten mal etwas Wasser, Kopfsteinpflaster, Landschaft, Fachwerk, Leuchtturm, Inneneinrichtung, Holzkonstruktionen und Dächer gebaut werden. Die Konstruktion hier finde ich besonders gelungen, weil die Böden alle eingelegt werden, und damit leicht zum Anschauen entfernt werden können. Und die Dächer werden in mehreren kleinen Teilen gebaut, und sind dadurch besonders leicht am Gebäude anzubringen.

Das coolste Detail finde ich die Geheime Schatzkammer des Kneipenwirts, der hier vielleicht durch Schmuggel etwas dazuverdient hat? Die Schatzkammer ist hinter einem verschiebbaren Bücherregal versteckt, und reichlich gefüllt.

Hier sind noch ein paar Ansichten aus anderen Winkeln.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1127117/shl0ms-famous-prankster-on-x-twitter-baited-ai-haters-by-posting-a-real-painting-by-mone

Comments

• Hacker News;
• Reddit.

Context

The painting is one of the 250 oil paintings in the renowned French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series in which he depicted scenes from his home flower garden over the final 31 years of his life.

As the post went viral, many of the critics began deleting their replies, but @SHL0MS and other users such as @Jediwolf took screenshots of some of the best replies before they disappeared.

Individual replies

Critics, however, were eager to point out all kinds of “obvious” details that show why the “AI” Monet can’t hold a candle to a genuine Monet. One person even took the time to write out an 850-word breakdown of the AI work’s shortcomings.

“I’m disappointed I have to even point it out,” writes @egg_oni. “There is no cohesion to the depth and color choices. The reflection of the tree bleeds into the lilypads with no regard for spatial depth or contrast. The background lilypad-algae amalgam is egregiously vague, like most AI art.”

“The reflection in AI art is just noise splattered right,” writes @jordoxx. “Monet actually understood how light behaves on water.”

“The choice of color in places e.g. the purple around the lily pads sticks out to me as decidedly worse than most Monet,” writes @0xchiefyeti. “I get a sense that the artist failed to connect their eyes to the brush/palette […]”

“No frame, no sense of the threshold between subject and object, just colors,” writes @robertjett_.

“I would say that the allegedly real one here is superior in the sense that it carries, and conveys more information than the artificial one,” writes @artprograce. “The dark cold reflection of the trees triggers my attention. They strike me as slightly off, too dirty, and too pronounced to be natural.”

“I’m no artist but a real Monet actually looks like a real place…” writes @amaldorai. “the further back you get in this picture the less it looks like anything at all.”

“Depth, contrast, and cohesion are the most obvious,” writes @para_dim3. “There’s also no clear focal point.”

“It feels less lively,” writes @AzuriSplashes. “It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices and creases and bevels and topology of plastic arts. The fine, calculated highlights. The AI version is granulated pixelation, and it looks that way, it lacks the mess of humanity.”

“The fact that it looks like s**t and is s**t,” writes @RDL0013 in a since-deleted reply. “Slop. Doesn’t look anywhere near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet’s typical choice of colors. Looks dull.”

“There’s no coherent composition,” writes @HundtRichard. “The eye is drawn to the 1/3rd from bottom, 1/3rd from left region and there’s nothing really to focus on. The lilly’s contrast is too low and the negative space around it too cluttered. The surface texture in the water regions are too vertical.”

“[T]here is no consistency in colour choice,” writes @Polymind_. “The view looks obscured perspective wise and feels like there is too much detail in the AI version, which if I am thinking correctly comes back again to the colours being so distinct and contrasty.”

“As an amateur art enjoyer, the only criticism I can offer is that the AI generated image does not make me feel anything,” writes @ThrosturTh. “It does not conjure emotion, thought or wonder. It’s just a colorful wallpaper pattern. If you look up ‘monet painting’ in Google images, you feel something.”

“There’s a certain harshness, no soft blending of colors, no depth, no symbiosis of the elements,” writes @JesTer396.

“The AI seems to be unable to distinguish plant reflections and submerged plants, for one,” writes @DavyRogue27930. “It’s combining tokens from the two randomly and the result is an incoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens.”

“Spatial coherence,” writes @enfilmigult. “The phony gen-AI pic isn’t getting it right and the reflections look like they’re growing out of the water. You look at the painting and instantly see the angle of the water surface. Also those lily pads are hideous, looks like someone drew on them.”

“Because it’s crap. That simple,” writes @nightingale9181. “This ain’t no painting. No talent to it. AI needs to go.”

“I present you with my eye lines, thickness denotes how quickly my eye moved,” writes @KEMOS4BE in a since deleted post, which included helpful illustrations. “One has a sensible, meandering composition that fits the subject.”

People are pointing out that results of this experiment are in line with what studies have shown about how people perceive art differently in light of how it was produced. The famous 2004 Kruger study into something called the effort heuristic found that people liked and valued artworks more if they believe they took more time and effort to create.

There is also a natural human bias against AI. A 2024 study published in Nature found that while people generally prefer AI-generated artworks over human-made ones when they didn’t know they were AI-generated, they preferred AI art less after finding out that AI was behind it.

The Post.

Lunar Shadow - The Pall of a past World

I really like the opener, however the whole album is a truly immersive journey. Epic metal with a touch of Maiden and Trouble. Melancholic and playful. Great record!

A really valuable contribution to the current wave of more traditional Heavy Metal. The music is subtle with only occasional really heavy or fast parts. But it never feels "too little".

https://lunarshadow.bandcamp.com/album/the-pall-of-a-past-world

#music #reviews #heavymetal #epicmetal #vinyl @metal