I’m not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I’ve used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a “I’m kinda thinking about this…” Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I’m writing. So I don’t really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it’s always kinda funky)

I’ve avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I’ll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an “open source” model doesn’t solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)

You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren’t done with LLM’s.

Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better “lasso” select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.

I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they’d need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it’d incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current “LLMs for everything” nonsense right now.

There are some detailed instructions on the docs site, tho I agree it’d be nice to have in the readme, too.

Sounds like the dev was not expecting this much interest for the project out of nowhere so there will def be gaps.

Absolutely, it’s expensive. Definitely better to share it with family and friends to equalize the cost.

I only consider it because I listen to a ton of music, my university degree was music, and I spend a lot of money on music generally.

Not FOSS, but something I’ve been considering is Roon. I switched to Tidal from Spotify (which is a legit improvement imho)

They have a self hostable option and the idea is to mix your personal library, Tidal, Quobuz, and recommendation engines into one app.

I have no interest in engaging further with your pedantic hypotheticals. Go move the goalposts with someone else.

I wasn’t even trying to argue with you. It was just info that didn’t require a response since not everyone lives in a corporate computing environment. You are the one who wanted to tilt at imaginary goal posts for no reason. Not every comment in a thread is an argument.

Touch grass and relax a bit. The corporate environment can be properly maintained another day.

Not everyone at a company can be managed by group policy or in-tune or whatever. Like if they aren’t using windows. You can run into the same situation on macOS or Linux depending on if you have the old and/or new clients installed at the same time.

I was curious too (tho I don’t really partake in the community) and this explains the situation:

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20976989

Prob a highlight of how Lemmy needs to solve community migration cross-instsnce properly as well as how community moderation vs. instance moderation will always be a problem in reddit-like fediverse implementations.

While this is the answer for an IT Admin, it isn’t for companies on not-Windows and all the small/medium companies on O365 who were sold it on the promise of not needing IT Admins for their stuff.

Microsoft doesn’t ACTUALLY care about teams so it’s a nonstop bad UX, then they try to fix it, then they go a different direction, and so on. To Microsoft, its an add on that they mostly use to keep people away from Slack. When they spend time on it, all they are doing is enough to keep people away from Slack.

Its been like, what, 2 years there they’ve shipped a “new” client seperate from the existing client (at least on macOS)? People are constantly using the wrong one or switching when one breaks, and Microsoft constantly breaks the new one.

On windows the existence of the built-in “Teams” App is constantly confusing when people are trying to sign into a work account, which requires a different client. This is because the “Teams” App in Windows is just a rebadged Skype.

Before 2022 when I used it for some meetings (we used slack in our unit since we had some of our own budget, but the wider corp was on teams) it was a daily toss up as to whether video calls would work on macos or linux.

Most of my frustrations come from having to develop some integrations with teams:

1. Right now there’s a massive bug for the templating language to render cards in the UI and Microsoft’s answer has largely been a big shoulder shrug.

2. There are several really easy ways an admin can break a custom integration via azure. Obviously an app-based integration is better, but it’s also really common in b2b to have more ad-hoc setups to send some data to teams. Even better, lots of small/medium companies have been convinced that they don’t need IT people to help them with their Azure configuration, so no one ever knows how to solve any problems they create (this also applies to email fwiw… Unbelievable how many small/medium O365 customers have very broken email servers)

3. Microsoft’s implementation of federation between O365 users is a mess of tiered settings, and figuring our if rhe issue is on the business side or your side is a sysiphean task. If you are in an org which doesn’t have a domain hooked up to your setup (as in you use username@company.onmicrosoft.com) there is a very specific sign in page you have to use or it’ll blow up on you. And it’s not the generic sign in page you get when going to teams or O364’s web site.

Tl:dr; Teams is a hacked together mess of bubble gum and toothpicks masquerading as a chat app. Its a miracle ir works as well as it does for “normal” usage, but it’s a joke compared to Slack in every other way and quickly becomes a nightmare if you are working on integrations with it.

They may not be happening in Chicago, but they are very much happening in Phoenix. I’m not informed enough specifically to say whether Chicago or any of the other listed cities were just a feint or if they have been delayed for other reasons. Its also likely that many state and city officials are doing their best to put roadblocks in the way right now.

As someone who lived in Phoenix during Arizona’s SB1070 raids, don’t expect news coverage to keep up. Even outlets trying their hardest to stay on top of it are under-resourced, and it can take time for civilian footage from the scene to get vetted. It’ll likely get better the more awareness is spread and once the strategy Trump’s administration is more well understood.

Many state and local democratic parties are far ahead of the national party in the progressive shift, too, and it’s absolutely easier to inspire change in a local or state party than the national party.

And it’s not just running for elected offices. In-party roles like chair membership and planning can be effective for driving change in a party, and also be the difference in whether the elections continue to go to the shoe-in forever politicians or someone new. The people supporting a change who have access to the resources of the party are just as important as those running.

And if anyone is thinking “my city/county/state party is so tone deaf/old/corporate” consider that they might simply need someone younger or more progessive to become more involved. In an ideal world, they’d be able to speak more with the community, but sometimes they are understaffed or unaware and rely on who is involved to provide context. Become that context.