sus

Someone brough up a theory that it's a "symbolic punishment" for a journalist:

remove the eyes so you cannot see
remove the brain so you cannot think
remove the larynx so you cannot speak (the larynx contains the vocal cords)

Capitalism isn't that nebulous, we can start with the basic wikipedia definition:

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit.[a] This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by a number of basic constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth. Capitalist economies tend to experience a business cycle of economic growth followed by recessions

Now what's the central problem here? I'd say it's definitely capital accumulation. The problem is that capital is power, and it has a strong tendency to grow exponentially. Once capital becomes concentrated enough, it will subvert the government via bribery and any democracy via privatized propaganda. From an anarchist perspective it's just another unjust power structure, but veiled behind layers of false meritocracy and false consent.

If you make it impossible for private individuals or organizations to accrue large amounts of capital, you effectively no longer have capitalism but you may still have a market economy.

I think this is talking about basic functionality, eg. can you do basic stuff with a clean install without everything immediately breaking

There's a lot of programming tools that are primarily developed for and on linux, and "windows support" is an afterthought which will result in linux being a very frictionless experience but windows being a minefield of problems and requiring careful manual setup

The earth is rotating, which is a non-inertial reference frame. Fido simply uses its own reference frame, which following the command is now inertial. The result is that Fido is no longer affected by gravity, and slowly floats away just as in the comic

Down here, salt is a way of life

What is mutually exclusive, though, is reality and China's "imminent collapse" which has been looming just around the corner for the past 20 years

So this is exploratory foundational research. It uses "2D materials" (eg. things similar to graphene) and nonstandard elements, and so far they have only manufactured a few individual bits, so "meeting the swelling appetite" is at least 10 years away, and that is probably optimistic

inverted totalitarianism

though it could also just be called good old oligarchy with a thin veneer of democracy

I actually kind of looked at (jpeg) compression artifacts, and it's indeed true to the extent that if you compress the image bad enough, it eventually makes it impossible to determine if the color was originally flat or not.

(eg. gif and dithering is a different matter, but it's very rare these days and you can distinguish it from the "AI noise" by noticing that dithering forms "regular" patterns while "AI noise" is random)

Though from a few tests I did, compression only adds noise to comic style images near "complex geometry", while removing noise in flat areas. This tracks with my rudimentary understanding of the discrete cosine tranform jpeg uses*, so any comic with a significantly large flat area is detectable as AI based on this method, assuming the compression quality setting is not unreasonably low

*(which should basically be a variant of the fourier transform)

I recreated most of the comic image by hand (using basic line and circle drawing tools, ha) and applied heavy compression. The flat areas remain perfectly flat (as you'd expect as a flat color is easier to compress)

But the AI image reveals a gradient that is invisible to the human eye (incidentally, the original comic does appear heavily jpeg'd, to the point I suspect it could actually be chatgpt adding artificial "fake compression artifacts" by mistake)

there's also weird "painting" behind the texts which serves no purpose (and why would a human paint almost indistinguishable white on white for no reason?)

the new ai generated comic has less compression, so the noise is much more obvious. There's still a lot of compression artifacts, but I think those artifacts are there because of the noise, as noise is almost by definition impossible to compress

The thing missing here is that usually when you do texture, you want to make it visible. The AI 'watercolor' is usually extremely subtle, only affecting the 1-2 least significant bits of the color, to the point even with a massive contrast increase it's hard to notice, and usually it varies pixel by pixel like I guess "white noise" instead of on a larger scale like you'd expect from watercolor

(it also affects the black lines, which starts being really odd)

I guess it isn't really a 100% proof, but it's at least 99% as I can't find a presumed-human made comic that has it, yet every single "looks like AI" comic seems to have it

I also noticed how it suddenly went from great to crap.

But the real reason I think is ironically AI. It used to be that you could easily crawl the web, but after the AI craze, images suddenly became valuable to crawl and every website gets bombarded by scrapers, and are adding more and more countermeasures to make it more difficult, so tineye's own image scraper probably can't compete with them and so can't find any new images

I agree that the "arm things" are wrong, as it's pretty clearly just an 'artistic choice' that a human could very much do.

But that said these images are 100% provable to be AI. If you haven't built up the intuition that immediately tells you it's AI (it's fair, most people don't have unlimited time for looking at AI images), these still have the trademark "subtle texture in flat colors" that basically never shows up in human-made digital art. The blacks aren't actually perfectly black, but have random noise, and the background color isn't perfectly uniform, but has random noise.

This is not visible to the human eye but it can be detected with tools, and it's an artifact caused by how (I believe diffusion) models work