comfy

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23370165

"The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

• Marx, German Ideology (1845)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23370165

"The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

• Marx, German Ideology (1845)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23370165

"The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

• Marx, German Ideology (1845)

"The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

• Marx, German Ideology (1845)

credit to Discomrade

From Histeria! , by the folks who brought you Animaniacs.

This question is broad, so you're free to decide which metrics and conditions you consider the most important.

Context: Pony Diffusion v6 is one of the most popular SD models, and the upcoming v7 has the potential for similar popularity. An interesting aspect is their controversial decision to use AuraFlow as a base model, rather than Flux or SD3 The creator of Pony Diffusion (AstraliteHeart) was interviewed on a Civit.ai stream two weeks ago where they discuss this further. I don't use Discord so if you have more visibility and insight into the details, I'd like to hear it.

As mentioned in the stream, as of Nov 2024, some of the big drawbacks with AuraFlow are the high VRAM usage (apparently 24GB VRAM to generate a 1024x1024 image) and the lack of tooling (afaik there are no ControlNets, or training scripts for making LoRas, and many generation UIs like A1111 don't even support it yet). These sound like big issues, although the stream host points out the recent release of Mochi:

Mochi, the video model release two weeks ago, on release the developers said you're going to need three H100s [80GB each] to run this model. And now, two weeks later, you can run it on 12GB of VRAM. So I wouldn't be too worried about this,

There has been a long-standing claim that the missing tools will be built and optimized by the community once there is a decent community using AuraFlow and it's reassuring to have real examples of these rapid leaps in accessibility and efficiency to look at. And I believe the Pony project is one of the things which does have the real potential to bring in that rapid development activity.

Which brings to mind another side of the choice to use AuraFlow, which I would casually call an activist aspect. And I don't mean 'activist' in a melodramatic way, I mean it just as much as me saying 'You should help make Lemmy more active because reddit abuses its users' is activism: I believe one tool is better for our communities and therefore I choose to use my small influence to promote it. I'm also not saying 'activist' as a solid claim, accusation or glorification because AstraliteHeart's contextual reasons for choosing AuraFlow could effectively be 'I prefer their commerce-enabling license' or 'I think this base model is more effective for this one specific project', I honestly don't know, but on the other hand, I notice they praise Simo and their team for this open project. And whether or not it's intentional, Pony shines a big spotlight on their admirable work. Further than that, upon launch, Pony could even be the catalyst to enable AuraFlow to receive major community support and remain competitive with the venture capital-fueled Flux, SD and others.

If PonyFlow is deemed a groundbreaking finetune, with strong enough results to bring its huge audience from SDXL to AuraFlow, that's a powerful force and one big enough to bring technical development, just like the reddit API exodus brought a wave of devs into Lemmy development, resulting in important improvements in a relatively short time. When I say a powerful force, here are a few stats from civit.ai on the stream:

468,000 downloads, 160 million on-site generations Out of the 3,500 LoRas that we train every 24 hours [...] the vast majority are Pony-based.

If PonyFlow can show those people it's worth crying out for, generation services like civit.ai would be crazy not to try and support it and there will be significant demand for other open-source tools like generators and trainers to support AuraFlow. So if Pony can bring those kinds of boosts to an open project, then I say good on them for it and I think that anyone wary of venture capitalist enshittification should support this push towards a more open tool.

edit: just found this

There is a well-known internet proverb, the bullshit assymetry principle:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

Anyone who has been in a few software chatrooms, a political communities, or any hobby groups has probably seen the eternal fountain of people asking really obvious questions, all the time, forever. No amount of patience and free time would allow a community to give quality answers by hand to each and every one of them, and gradually the originally-helpful people answering get sick of dealing with this constantly, then newcomers will often get treated with annoyance and hostility for their ignorant laziness. That's one way how communities get a reputation for being 'toxic' or 'elitist'. I've occasionally seen this first hand even on Lemmy, and obviously telling people to go away until they've figured out the answer themselves isn't a useful way to build a mass movement.

This is a reason why efficient communication matters.

Efficient teaching isn't a new idea, so we have plenty of techniques to draw from. One of the most famous texts in the world is a pamphlet, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a way for the Communist League to share the idea of historical materialism to many thousands using a couple of dozen pages. Pamphlets and fliers are still used today at protests and rallies and for general promotion, and in the real world are often used as a resource when someone asks for a basic introduction to an ideology.

However, online, we have increased access to existing resources and linking people to information is easier than ever. I've seen some great examples of this on Lemmy with Dessalines often integrating pages of their FAQ/resources list into short to-the-point replies, and Cowbee linking their introductory reading list. So instead of burning out rewriting detailed replies to each and every beginner question from a propagandised liberal, or just banning/kicking people who don't even understand what they said wrong (propaganda is a hell of a drug), these users can pack a lot of information into their posts using effective links. Using existing resources counters the bullshit assymetry principle. There's a far lower risk of burnout and hostility when you can simply copy a bookmarked page, paste it, and write a short sentence to contextualize it. No 5 minute mini-essay in your reply to get the message across properly, finding sources each time, getting it nitpicked by trolls, and all that. Just link to an already-polished answer one click away!

There are many FAQ sites for different topics and ideological schools of thought (e.g. here's a well-designed anarchist FAQ I've been linked to years ago). There are also plenty of wikis, like ProleWiki and Leftypedia, which I think are seriously underused (I'm surprised Lemmygrad staff and users haven't built a culture of constantly linking common silly takes to their wiki's articles. What's the point of the wiki if it's not being used much by its host community?).

Notice that an FAQ is often able to link to specific common questions, and is very different from the classic "read this entire book" reply some of you may have seen before - unfortunately when a post says "how can value com from labor and not supply nd demand?", they're probably not in the mood to read Capital Vol. I-III to answer their question no matter how you ask them, but they might skim a wiki page on LTV and maybe then read further.

(Honestly, I think there's a missed opportunity for integrating information resources into ban messages and/or the global rules pages, because I guarantee more than half the people getting banned for sinophobia/xenophobia/orientalism sincerely don't think anything they said was racist or chauvanistic - it's often reiterating normal rhetoric and ""established facts"" in mass media; not a sign of reactionary attitude. The least we can do is give them a learning opportunity instead of simply pushing them further from the labour movement)

Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it's clear when they do something right or wrong.

Maybe we can't expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?

The English-speaking web has many different types of websites. For social media, there are link aggregators (Lemmy/Mbin/etc., reddit), microblog sites (Mastodon/Pleroma/etc., Xitter), forums like BBS boards, and more.

This post talks about Misskey and how it diverges from Western-made Fediverse culture. This reminded me of some other Japanese-style websites, such as textboards, chan imageboards and booru sites (booru imageboards are essentially a tag-based media archive, which similarly to chan boards have entered into the English-speaking internet but remain niche, mostly centered on art communities such as anime and furry fandoms).

What other styles of websites exist beyond the English-speaking internet? Does their design reflect a different culture? Are they better in some ways?

Maybe it's just a reddit/Threadiverse thing, maybe it's stronger in political communities, but I constantly see sarcasm everywhere online, far more than anywhere else. Scroll down and you'll even see it here.

Funnily enough, in a vacuum, one might expect online forums to avoid it more, since written text can mask tone and make sarcasm unintentionally ambiguous, to the point where it's common to see people adding tags to clarify. It's not rare to see arguments started when people don't recognise non-literal language.

Is it merely a habit being repeated? Is it a widespread coping mechanism for frustration? Is it simply the lowest form of wit, a simple and popular way to make fun? Is it an effective way to normalise unpopular views with the plausible deniability of just making jokes?