Oh hey! I made the highest rated post on that sub for recommending alternatives a while back. Glad to see people are still having discussions there all things considered, I expected the sub to get nuked after I left Reddit. Welcome home! I should probably go back and update the post with some more modern info then...
Thanks for working so hard making this instance running smoothly! Here's hoping it can continue to grow and be a more popular space on the internet to discuss programming topics :^)
I thought you were just talking about not updating before the holidays. Either way 0.19 is looking good, these new features are sweet. Also code highlighting, nice!
We have a big conference every year where I live for the tech industry. It's hit or miss depending on the person presenting, and it's usually a miss. Many talks can last over an hour when they could've been a much shorter youtube video and are just there to pad time. Also 95% of the people are there for other motives. Looking for investors, trying to get hired, browsing the booths, etc. Despite being very crowded it's very clear most of the people don't actually care about the talks and do anything else on their phones.
I think in-person conferences can be great experiences when done right but I really got anything out of it. For all the talks about networking with others they give very little opportunities to do that. When everyone is looking for opportunities from other people it felt almost like a competition to try and talk with companies and important people, and it usually boils down to them asking for my contact info so they can flush it down the toilet. I don't know, I just have a bad experience with them.
Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can't even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera's website.
I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.
downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.
I think it's the complete opposite. Platforms with downvotes tend to be less toxic because you don't have to reply to insane people to tell them they're wrong, whereas platforms like Twitter get really toxic because you only see the likes, so people tend to get into fights and "ratio" them which actually increases the attention they get and spreads their message to other people.
In general, platforms without upvotes/downvotes tend to be the most toxic imo. Platforms like old-school forums and 4chan are a complete mess because low-effort troll content is as loud as high effort thoughtful ones. It takes one person to de-rail a conversation and get people to fight about something else, but with downvotes included you just lower their visibility. It's basically crowdsourced moderation, and it works relatively well.
As for ways to reduce toxicity, shrug. Moderation is the only thing that really stops it but if you moderate too much then you'll be called out for censoring people too much, and telling them not to get mad is just not going to happen.
My idea for less toxicity is having better filtering options for things people want to see. Upon joining a platform it would give easy options to filter out communities that are political or controversial. That's what I'm doing on Lemmy, I'm here for entertainment, not arguing.
Technically you're right but the thing about AI image generators is that they make it really easy to mass-produce results. Each one I used in the survey took me only a few minutes, if that. Some images like the cat ones came out great in the first try. If someone wants to curate AI images, it takes little effort.
Are there any statistically significant differences between the different generators?
Every image was created by DALL-E 3 except for one. I honestly got lazy so there isn't much data there. I would say DALL-E is much better in creating stylistic art but Midjourney is better at realism.
I feel for you. A few people said the human art I put in the survey were lackluster but I thought they were pretty good, not everyone is an S-tier artist.
77% of people guessed this was AI generated, and a friend of mine kept saying it was weird and inconsistent so "I doubt a real artist would put random food in the back"
No, the AI didn't try to copy the other art that was included. I also don't train the model myself, I just tell it to create an image similar to another one. For example the fourth picture I told it to create a rough sketch of a person sitting on a bench using an ink pen, then I went online and looked for a human-made one that's of a similar style.
I can see it now, thanks! Might've been some cache issues.