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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: May 6th, 2024

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    1. Open the Preferences in Calibre

    2. Click on “Saving books to Disk” (found under Import/Export)

    3. Make sure “Save cover separately,” “Update metadata in saved copies,” and “Save metadata in separate OPF file” are all unchecked.

    4. Adjust the “Save template” to the filename format that you prefer. You can use variables as folder names so, for example, {author_sort}/{title} would put everything by Stephen King in a folder titled “King, Stephen” and each book would be inside of a self-titled folder.

    5. Select all of the books you want, then click the floppy disk icon and save them to a temporary directory.

    6. Delete the old library, then import a new library (with the new filenames) from the temporary directory.

    7. Delete the temporary directory.

    Or you can just use symlinks. :P





  • I found it really easy, but I was pretty familiar with the terminal on Windows. I started off with Debian in December and set up LMDE for my wife a few weeks ago and it was dead simple, though I do have to be her tech support since she’s not really a computer person.

    I thought it would be a pain to install drivers and Steam and all that, but it wasn’t. I did give up on trying to set up my printer, but I’ll revisit that eventually.


  • I think, as a Linux beginner also (~10 months), the best way to learn the terminal is to figure out what tools are useful to you and then read the manual pages or [application name] --help (if the application supports that command). Learning how to use grep will also be really helpful for troubleshooting, since sifting through logs is such a pain.

    Like if you want to download a YouTube video, install yt-dlp and then type man yt-dlp into your terminal to learn about how that tool works. You can do this for basic utilities too, like cp, dd, mv, etc. and other applications you have installed. You can also use yt-dlp --help but that won’t open in the parser, just the terminal. Learn by doing things that are relevant to you and branch out from there.

    There are also applications that will let you read the manual pages outside of a terminal, like xman, if you find that useful. After a certain point, you’ll be able to write commands with switches/arguments without needing to check what they mean first.


  • The problem comes when producing work. A generative model will only produce things that are essentially interpolations of artworks it has trained on. A human artist interpolates between artworks they have seen from other artists, as well as their own lived experiences, and extrapolate […].

    Yes, but how does that negate its usefulness as a tool or a foundation to start from? I never made any assertion that AI is able to make connections or possess any sort of creativity.

    Herein lies the argument that generative AI in its current state doesn’t produce anything novel and just regurgitates what it has seen.

    There’s a common saying that there is no such thing as an original story, because all fiction builds on other fiction. Can you see how that would apply here? Just because thing A and thing B exist doesn’t mean that thing C cannot possibly be interesting or substantially different. The brainstorming potential of an AI with a significant dataset seems functionally identical to an artist searching for references on Google (or Pixiv).

    Having someone copy your voice to make it say things you did not say is something many will be very uncomfortable with.

    So is this your main issue? I’m just not sure that that is really a valid reason, since many people are very uncomfortable with like, organ donation, pig heart valves, animal agriculture, ghostwriters, real person fanfiction, or data collection by Google. I’m sure there is something in the world that most people see as either positive or neutral that makes you very uncomfortable. For me, it’s policing.

    On the economic front, I agree - these companies should have been licensing these images from the start and we should be striving to create some sort of open database for artists so that they are compensated. It’s possible that awarding royalties, while flawed, may be a good framework since they could potentially be paid for all derivative works and not simply the image itself. But that may be prohibitively expensive due to the sheer number of iterations being performed, so it’s hard to say.


  • It’s not theft, the artist still has their work. If anything, it’s copyright infringement. When some 16-year-old aspiring artist uses another artists’ work as a reference or traces something, what’s that?

    I guess you could call it practice, but then doesn’t AI do the same thing by iterating based on its dataset? Some AI outputs look terrifying and janky - so did my art when I was younger.

    I dunno, like this issue isn’t as simple as I used to think it was. If we look outside of economics (because artists need money to survive, like all of us) is there actually a problem here?

    I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about all of this, but it’s pretty obvious AI isn’t just gonna go away like NFTs did. I really am interested in discussion, I’m not trolling.