I'm happy that people are creating alternatives, but personally I never had a problem with Fandom.
Yes, they will monetize the content, but they'll also manage it because it makes them money. Content on fandom is probably going to still be available 10 years later. It's the same with DeviantArt, it's worse now than it has ever been, but artwork uploaded 10 years ago is still available, and it will probably still be available 10 years later. You could also say this about Youtube, Google, and many other platforms.
I hope the emerging alternatives prove to be successful, but so far I still don't see a reliable alternative for Youtube, Google, or DeviantArt (or even Twitter, Reddit, etc.). In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a replacement win in the long run. Maybe I'm just too young.
Most of the platforms you mention are "replacements" which have "won" over a long term—Google unseated AltaVista and Yahoo!, Reddit outlived Digg and SlashDot, and microblogging like Twitter started as blogs. And of course, Fandom "replaced" other, less bad wiki farms by virtue of buying them.
But I don't personally remember any of that happening. I wasn't using Reddit when Digg was still around, just like I didn't join Facebook when MySpace was still relevant. The first time I used Yahoo! was after its search engine because Bing with a different label.
Something I realized about AI is that an AI that generates "art" be it text, image, animation, video, photography, etc., is cool. The product it generates, however, is not.
It's very cool that we have a technology that can generate video, but what's cool is the tech, not the video. It doesn't matter if it's a man eating spaghetti or a woman walking in front of dozens of reflections. The tech is cool, the video is not. It could be ANY video and just the fact AI can generate is cool. But nobody likes a video that is generated by AI.
A very cool technology to produce products that nobody wants.
That's an over simplification I think. If you're only generating a video because 'I can oooh AI' - then of course no one wants it. If you treat the tools as what they are, Tools - then people may want it.
No one really cares about a tech demo, but if generative tools help you make a cool music video to an awesome song? People will want it.
Well, as long as they aren't put off by a regressive stigma against new tool at least.
well we had an entire article explaining parts of that. You can skimp out on some areas and fool a human, but human proportions and environmental weight is hard. Then you get to motion and it's extremely hard to fool the human eye.
One end of art is spending millions of man hours to polish this effect to fool the eye. the other side simplifies the environment and focuses more on making this new environment cohesive, which relaxes our expectations. Take your favorite 90's/early 00's 3d game and compare it to Mass Effect: Andromeda to get a feel of this.
AI is promising to do the former with the costs of the latter. And so far it's maybe halfway to Andromeda in its infancy of videos.
If you used AI to make something awesome, even if I liked it, I'd feel scammed if it wasn't clearly labelled as AI, and if it was clearly labelled as AI I wouldn't even look at it.
Yes, the problem is with AI. I'm tired of trying to find X and finding "AI X" instead. I google "pixel art" I get "AI pixel art." I google clipart I get "AI clipart." I go to /r/logodesign to see some cool logo designs, it's 50% people who used ChatGPT asking if it looks good enough.
> I'd feel scammed if it wasn't clearly labelled as AI
TBF - have you looked at a digital photo made in the last decade? Likely had significant 'AI' processing applied to it. That's why I call it a regressive pattern to dislike anything with a new label attached - it minimizes at best and often flat out ignores the very real work very real artists put in to leverage the new tools.
Face it. People are okay with super resolution efforts, including most deep learning-based methods. But not "AI". You can run video through i2i as a cleanup tool and upload it on the Internet, some tried and quit. YouTubers and TikTokers aren't doing it and they're all for attention.
Output of current image generators are trash. It's unsalvageable. That's the problem, not "regressive pattern".
honestly, that's the same argument people made against photographs when the technology became available. Same argument made against the printing press.
New tools aren't inherently inferior, they open up new opportunities.
Yes, it turns out there's more to creating good art than simulating the mechanics and technique of good artists. The human factor actually matters, and that factor can't be extrapolated from the data in the model itself. In essence it's a lossy compression problem.
It is technically interesting, and a lot of what it creates does have its own aesthetic appeal just because of how uncanny it can get, particularly in a photorealistic format. It's like looking at the product of an alien mind, or an alternate reality. But as an expression of actual human creative potential and directed intent I think it will always fall short of the tools we already have. They require skilled human beings who require paychecks and sustenance and sleep and toilets, and sometimes form unions, and unfortunately that's the problem AI is being deployed to solve in the hope that "extruded AI art product" is good enough to make a profit from.
While I am in the same camp as you, there is one exception: Music. Especially music with lyrics (like suno.com) - Although I know that it's not created by humans, the music created by Suno is still very listenable and it evokes feelings just like any other piece of music does. Especially if I am on a playlist and doing something else and the songs just progress into the unknown. Even when I am in a more conscious state - i.e. creating my own songs in Suno, the end result is so good that I can listen to it over and over again. Especially those ones that I create for special events (like mocking a friend's passing phase of communism and reverting back to capitalism).
In my opinion, Suno is good for making really funny songs, but not for making really moving songs. Examples of songs that make me chuckle that I've had it do:
A Bluegrass song about how much fun it is to punch holes in drywall like a karate master.
A post-punk/hardcore song about the taste of the mud and rocks at the bottom of a mountain stream in the newly formed mountains of Oklahoma.
A hair band power ballad about white dad sneakers.
But for "serious" songs, the end result sounds like generic muzak you might hear in the background at Wal-Mart.
Makes sense that GP appreciates the taste of dog water when they’re mocking their friends for having had values (friends whom likely gave up their values to stop being mocked)
Tomorrow Bing could say "yeah no more index for you" and DDG shuts down. It doesn't feel like a very stable business model to depend entirely on someone else's business.
I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse.
My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and "fanciness" of a search is not something we all value and that's what we're experiencing.
My pet theory is that the reason why every search engine is worse than Google is because they all use Google's interface. They want a single textbox capable of searching everything. Google spent who knows how much money in R&D perfecting this search box. You can't make a search box more perfect than what Google has. I'd even say that most problems of "bad search results" are directly caused by this minimized interface design.
I think alternative search engines would have better chances if they provided alternative interfaces to refine search queries instead of trying to compete with Google/Bing.
I suspect it's because DuckDuckGO is Bing, and Bing is getting worse. Why is Bing getting worse? Because Bing has grown enough market share to be worth SEO people optimising for it.
>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland
In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
For most of those years, fundamental parts of the desktop experience were just not possible on Wayland. Even today, there are some current Xfce features that are just not implementable on Wayland.
> You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
Depends on your goals and team size. Part of me would love to rewrite Xfce in Rust (yes, I'm one of those people), using a different, lighter, actually-well supported toolkit (unlike GTK3), but with the team we have, that would be another two decades.
Consider that Xfce 4 is a little over 20 years old at this point. It's taken that long to build it to what it is. Starting over wouldn't take any less time to get there with the people and resources we have.
"Unsupported" as in there are no maintainers, there's no roadmap, there's no future. X11 is a dead end. All the people who were working on it would rather work on Wayland instead. It's taking a while for the DEs, etc. to catch up, but even the slow pace of improvement Wayland is exhibiting is much better than "dead in the water" which is where X11 is.
You maybe don't want to hear it, but the overwhelming majority of people are on Gnome or KDE. You might as well claim X11 is not supported because Hyperland, Cosmic and many others aren't supported on X11.
Unsupported in the context of software doesn't really mean what you took it as anyway.
I don't agree, because experimental support means it's being worked on. Legacy support means the opposite - it's not being worked on and never will be worked on.
So for now it happens to work. But none of those DEs are contributing to the X.org implementation of X11, right? So it will slowly break down over time. That's the current status of X11, it's on hospice.
>Wayland has a myriad of unresolved problems regarding surface suspension blocking presentation and the FIFO (vsync) implementation being fundamentally broken leading to reduced GPU-bound performance.
To which someone replies:
>If we do this, we are basically accepting these issues are unfixable for the next ten years (SDL4). Having this as the default in SDL3 (which isn't being used yet!) is important for signaling to other stakeholders that we actually do need to get solutions in place for detected issues.
To which the committer says:
>SDL is not your tool for "signaling to stakeholders" about what is important. It's an actual library used by real developers and users!
Likewise. My PC is not a tool for signaling library/DE developers that there are more and more people using Wayland now and that they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code. I use my PC for real things. I couldn't care less if things are running on X11 or Wayland so long as they work.
If Wayland isn't working with my use case, I just won't use it. I won't switch to Wayland juts to beta test it, and then spend years begging people who know how to hack Linux to implement the features I need that I had on X11.
If Linux drops X11, and Wayland still doesn't work. I won't use Wayland. I'll use Windows.
> they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code
They already have, this is what I'm trying to tell you. All the X.org maintainers are on Wayland, and none of the DEs are contributed to X.org. It's on hospice. It happens to work just because, but that won't be the case forever.
It's fine if you currently like X and use X. I myself use X on Debian Stable.
But the reality is that it's dead technology, and eventually it won't work right.
Wayland is constantly being improved by many, many different parties. Valve, KDE, Gnome, freedesktop, Redhat... they're all constantly making new protocols and implementing them to solve problems.
They haven't stopped maintaining it because the programs still run on X11.
GIMP supports PNG. That doesn't mean GIMP contributes code to libpng, or libpng needs updates. It just needs to have code to make it work with PNG.
X11 will stop being supported when the developers literally remove the code to make their programs run on X11 from their projects. Until then, it's still supported.
Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?
All X11 programs already run under Wayland. There will always be applications that are X11-only and they will always work. This is a fake problem, IMO.
> Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?
I guess you don't, but then again, I don't see you running Windows 95. I think this is maybe something you like to believe, but in practice people do want new things and new software.
It looks like the sticky header with "Add to cart" disappears when the large "add to cart" button scrolls into view, and reappears when that disappears.
Yes, they will monetize the content, but they'll also manage it because it makes them money. Content on fandom is probably going to still be available 10 years later. It's the same with DeviantArt, it's worse now than it has ever been, but artwork uploaded 10 years ago is still available, and it will probably still be available 10 years later. You could also say this about Youtube, Google, and many other platforms.
I hope the emerging alternatives prove to be successful, but so far I still don't see a reliable alternative for Youtube, Google, or DeviantArt (or even Twitter, Reddit, etc.). In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a replacement win in the long run. Maybe I'm just too young.