tal

cultural wasteland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_historical_population

According to this, Nevada only had 110k people statewide in 1940.

In 1940, New York City had 7.5 million.

Gotta have people to produce cultural output.

These are not official state foods. They are what the source website has decided to appoint as the favorite food for each.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190622015744/https://www.cookingchanneltv.com/recipes/packages/50-state-foods

This is a list of official state foods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_foods

EDIT: Corrected link; source page is down and had originally linked to wrong page. Used archive.org to get to original.

While it's usable and I've read material that way, I've found that I want a larger screen. I've read books on a Kobe e-reader, a tablet, a laptop, and a desktop, and those are fine. The phone requires movement to the next page with more frequency than I'd like.

I agree that OLED screens doing light-on-dark look great at night, though.

EDIT: YouTube clip of an OLED and LCD phone side-by-side in the dark:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I1aGY0Wq5KU

I got 1000 games, 200 of which are GOG offline installers.

Nothing but food and bills now as I wait for it all to collapse.

While I'll believe that you have solid storage longevity, prepping for societal collapse by archiving 1000 video games seems kind of unorthodox.

Well, under GE Proton, presumably.

I don't think that it's going to work. I assume that the people who most aren't happy are moderate Republicans who can't stand Trump and company:

Disgruntled Republicans sick of being bullied by Donald Trump and Democrat centrists imperiled by the Left are secretly having conversations about forming a third party in American politics, The Swamp can exclusively reveal.

But they aren't gonna be enough votes alone. The people they'd best get along with are probably moderate Democrats, but the Democrats just ran Harris, who is also pretty moderate, so I doubt that moderate Democrats are especially upset at the moment. I think that they'd have a tough time attracting a bunch of moderate Democrats.

If you had just had an election between, I don't know, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, then maybe you could try to run off with the Democratic center.

The second problem is that the US electoral system always stabilizes around two big-tent parties. It can be disrupted temporarily, but you're gonna eventually get two parties. If one or both of the Big Two parties splinter, they will just reform into a new two parties in a few years. So even if you get people who are unhappy with the status quo, once things stop shifting around, you're gonna have two big-tent parties again.

It's not clear to me that introducing a new party solves problems here. Like, you want a different coalition, you can do that within the parties. You're gonna have to make concessions and sell people on it, but long run, you'd have to do that with a new party too.

EDIT: I guess technically they could get a few Greens, but the American Greens are more of a left-wing protest party than specifically being anti-carbon or whatever, the way the German Greens might be. That's probably not gonna have much overlap with moderate Republicans. And there's the Libertarian Party, which might like more relaxed borders and lower barriers to trade, but LPers probably aren't going to generally be really enthusiastic about a muscular foreign policy, which I bet the unhappy people want.

EDIT2: My guess is a more-likely outcome, if the GOP stays Trumpy post-Trump, is that a bunch of Reagan Republican types give up on Trump, just join the Democratic Party and get some policy concessions out of the Democrats.

I think I watched part of Pretty Woman at one point, lost interest, never finished it. Wouldn't have known the names of anyone in it, though.

Just giving an example; translate to your preferred environment!

This led to significant inventory buildup in America that will now need to be cleared, according to market watcher Canalys. However consumers are not biting because of several factors, including that tariffs have pushed up prices in a number of key spending categories already, meaning households are likely focusing on essentials and avoiding forking out on discretionary items.

To put this in blunter terms, the Trump administration had already started taxing the poorer chunk of the population sufficiently on other items via tariffs that it had drained off their available disposable spending money, preventing them from buying the imported-before-tariffs-went-into-force PCs, since they don't have the funds available to do so.

Richard Gere?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gere

Richard Tiffany Gere (/ɡɪər/ GEER;[1][2] born August 31, 1949) is an American actor. He began appearing in films in the 1970s, playing a supporting role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and a starring role in Days of Heaven (1978). Gere came to prominence with his role in the film American Gigolo (1980), which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol.

Ah.

If you use pixz, you can get indexing-permitting-for-random access, parallel compression/decompression and (generally superior to gzip's LZ77) LZMA compression with tarballs.

$ sudo apt install pixz
$ tar cvf blahaj.tar.pixz -Ipixz blahaj/

Also responding in response to a private message in hopes that some information might be useful to others:

To be honest, I understood about half of it haha.

rubs chin

So, I'm not sure what bits aren't clear, but if I had to guess as to terms in my comments, you can mostly just search for and get a straightforward explanation, but:

inpainting

Inpainting is when you basically "erase" part of an already-generated image that you're mostly happy with, and then generate a new image, but only for that tiny bit. It's a useful way to fine-tune an image that you're basically happy with.

“Image-to-image”.

That's an Automatic1111 term, I think. Oh, Automatic1111 is a Web-based frontend to run local image generation, as opposed to ArtBot, which appears to be a Web-based frontend to Horde AI, which is a bunch of volunteers who donate their GPU time to people who want to do generation on someone else's GPU. I'm guessing that ArtBot got it from there.

Automatic1111 is was widely-used, and IMHO is easier to start out with, but ComfyUI, which has a much steeper learning curve but is a lot more powerful, is displacing it as the big Web UI for local generation.

Basically, Automatic1111, as it ships without extensions, has two "tabs" where one does image generation. The first is "text-to-image". You plug in a prompt, you get back an image. The second is "image-to-image". You plug in an image and a prompt and process that image to get a new image. My bet is that ArtBot used that same terminology.

prompt

This is just the text that you're feeding a generative image AI to get an image. A "prompt term" is one "word" in that.

Stable Diffusion

This is one model (well, a series of models). That's what converts your text into an image. It was the first really popular one. Flux, which I referenced above, is a newer one. It's possible for people who have enough hardware and compute time to create "derived models"

start from one of those and then train models on additional images and associated terms to "teach" them new concepts. Pony Diffusion is an influential model derived from Stable Diffusion, for example.

A popular place to download models

the ones that are freely distributable

for local use is civitai.com. That also has a ton of AI-generated images and shows the model and prompts used to generate them, which IMHO is a good way to come up to speed on what people are doing.

Horde AI

unfortunately but understandably

doesn't let people upload their own models to the computers of the people volunteering their GPUs, so if you're using that, you're going to be limited to using the selection of models that Horde has chosen to support.

Models have different syntax. Unfortunately, it looks like ArtBot doesn't provide a "tutorial" for each or anything. There are guides for making prompts for various "base" models, like Stable Diffusion and Flux, and generally you want to follow the "base" model's conventions.

SD

A common acronym for "Stable Diffusion".

sampler

So, the basic way these generative AIs work is by starting with what amounts to being an image full of noise -- think of a TV just showing static. That static is randomly-generated. On computers, random numbers are usually generated via pseudo-random number generators. These PRNGs start with a "seed" value, and that determines what sequence of random numbers they come up with. Lots of generative AI frontends will let you specify a "seed". That will, thus, determine what static you're starting out with. You can have a seed that changes each generation, which many of them do and I think that ArtBot does, looking at its Web UI, since it has a "seed" field that isn't filled in by default. IMHO, this is a bad default, since if you do that, each image you generate will be totally different

you can't "refine" one by slightly changing the prompt to get a slightly-different image.

Anyway, once they have that "static" image, then they perform "steps". Each "step" takes the existing image and uses the model, the prompt, and the sampler to determine a new state of the image. You can think of this as "trying to see images in the static". They just repeat this a number of times, however many steps you have them set to run. They'll tend to wind up with an image that is associated with the prompt terms you specified.

An easy way to see what they're doing is to run a generation with a fixed seed set to 0 steps, then one set to 1 step, and so forth.

You seem super knowledgeable on the topic, where did you learn so much?

I honestly don't, because for me, this is a part-time hobby. Probably the people who you can access who are most-familiar with it that I've seen are on subreddits on Reddit dedicated to this stuff. I'm trying to bring some of it over to the Threadiverse.

• Civitai.com is a good place to see how people are generating images, look at their prompt terms.

• Here and related Threadiverse communities, though there's not a lot of talk on here, mostly people showing off images (though I'm trying to improve that with this comment and some of my past ones!). !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com tends towards more the technical side. !aigen@lemmynsfw.com has porn, but not a lot of discussion, though I remember once posting an introduction to use of the Regional Prompting extension for Automatic1111 there.

• Reddit's got a lot more discussion; last I looked, mostly on /r/StableDiffusion, though the stuff there isn't all about Stable Diffusion.

• There are lots of online tutorials talking about designing a prompt and such, and these are good for learning about a particular model's features.

Some stuff is specific to one particular model or frontend, and some spans multiple, and while there's overlap today, that information isn't exactly nicely and neatly categorized. For example, "negative prompts" are a feature of Stable Diffusion, and are invaluable there

are prompt terms that it tries to avoid rather than include

but Flux doesn't support them. DALL-E, a commercial service, doesn't support negative prompts. Midjourney, another commercial service, does. Commercial services also aren't gonna tell everyone exactly how everything they do works. Also, today this is a young and very fast-moving field, and information that's a year old can be kind of obsolete. There isn't a great fix for that, I'm afraid, though I imagine that it may slow down as the field matures.