tal

Yeah, he's got a few quirks. Flux didn't like doing things upside-down much. May be a good way to go about doing that (other than just generating and flipping the image, which has drawbacks of its own), but I haven't gone investigating.

I was pretty impressed with Flux, plan to use it more. For a Tarot deck, which has a bunch of nude figures, it was pretty determined to clothe them; I eventually just left the woman in The World wearing something. Describing the image as "NSFW" helped; I'm sure that people have their own techniques that I just don't know about.

I'm used to being able to use regional prompting in Stable Diffusion to stick specific things at specific places in the image. I don't know yet if there's a regional prompting analog compatible with Flux; the Stable Diffusion and Flux workflows are (unexpectedly to me) quite different in ComfyUI. Flux does understand some level of English-like description of the layout of the image, which is cool, but I wasn't always able to get the output I wanted with that, so I expect that there's still more digging.

The US Navy has had its share of driving ships into things that it shouldn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Guardian_(MCM-5)

On 17 January 2013, Guardian ran aground on Tubbataha Reef, in a protected area of the Philippines in the middle of the Sulu Sea. The vessel was turned and pushed further onto the reef by wave action. Unable to be recovered, the vessel was decommissioned and struck from the US Naval Vessel Register on 15 February 2013.

There were two destroyers that collided with cargo ships a few years back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_S._McCain_and_Alnic_MC_collision

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crystal_collision

There was also that incident -- though in an era with more-primitive navigation -- where most of a squadron of destroyers collided with California:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Point_disaster

The Honda Point disaster was the largest peacetime loss of U.S. Navy ships in U.S. history.[3] On the evening of September 8, 1923, seven destroyers, while traveling at 20 knots (37 km/h), ran aground at Honda Point (also known as Point Pedernales; the cliffs just off-shore called Devil's Jaw), a few miles from the northern side of the Santa Barbara Channel off Point Arguello on the Gaviota Coast in Santa Barbara County, California. Two other ships grounded, but were able to maneuver free off the rocks. Twenty-three sailors died in the disaster.

"We have found a reef, and it has an oil slick."

Looks like China's got a pretty large lead, even relative to London.

https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/

The 10 most surveilled cities in the world – cameras per person

Based on the number of cameras per 1,000 people, these cities are the top 10 most surveilled in the world:

1. Cities of China* — 626m cameras to 1.43bn people = 439.07 cameras per 1,000 people

2. Hyderabad, India — 900,000 cameras for 10,801,163 people = 83.32 cameras per 1,000 people

3. Indore, India – 200,000 cameras per 3,302,077 people = 60.57 cameras per 1,000 people

4. Delhi, India — 449,934 cameras for 22,547,000 people = 19.96 cameras per 1,000 people

5. Singapore, Singapore — 109,072 cameras for 6,080,859 people = 17.94 cameras per 1,000 people

6. Moscow, Russia — 214,000 cameras for 12,680,389 people = 16.88 cameras per 1,000 people

7. Baghdad, Iraq — 120,000 cameras for 7,711,305 people = 15.56 cameras per 1,000 people

8. Seoul, South Korea — 144,513 cameras for 9,988,049 people = 14.47 cameras per 1,000 people

9. St. Petersburg, Russia — 75,000 cameras for 5,561,294 people = 13.49 cameras per 1,000 people

10. London, England (UK) — 127,423 cameras for 9,648,110 people = 13.21 cameras per 1,000 people

The only state that appears to currently permit firing squad as an option for prisoners in non-exceptional circumstances is South Carolina:

https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-procedure/death-penalty-laws-by-state.html

To put it another way, when I first joined, it was to kbin.social. Kbin has a feature to help people discover new communities where it will suggest random comments. This leads to...rather dramatic cross-pollination. So, for example, I remember looking at a technology community on pawb.social. Some other random kbin.social user also showed up there, I'm sure via random comment, and was complaining that everyone in the forum was a furry. I mean...yeah, you just hopped right into the middle of their den. Same thing with yiffit.net and probably a number of other instances. Does that mean that the Threadiverse is all furries? Well, no. I'd say that it's disproportionately so compared to Reddit, but it's more that it's got special-interest instances.

Or transexual users on lemmy.blahaj.zone.

Or porn enthusiasts on lemmynsfw.com.

Or underage anime porn fans on burggit.moe.

Or science enthusiasts on mander.xyz.

Or Star Trek fans on startrek.website.

Hop onto any of those or communities on those, and you're likely to find a lot of content of the sort that the instance focuses on. But if your instance doesn't federate with them, you may not see that material at all, nor the users on those instances.

I've seen multiple videos of barn owls "dancing" to music.

I have no idea what's going on in their heads, but it's something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fUIx_cmqM4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKU_PRt9rpg

There were really two different groups of tank destroyers in WW2.

The US and UK wanted something that would prevent a situation akin to what came up in the Battle of France, where fast-moving German armor penetrated French lines at Sedan and performed a successful massive exploitation through that breach.

They had fast vehicles that were intended to fight from concealed, defensive positions. But those vehicles had to be able to get out in front of an armored breakthrough in time to parry the thrust. What was critical was speed.

Germany and the Soviet Union, out on the Eastern Front, needed heavily-armored vehicles with big guns to slug it out over open fields with long fields of fire.

While, yes, both were aimed at fighting armor, they weren't really aimed at the same role, and I kind of wish that the two groups of vehicles had gotten different names, rather than "tank destroyer" being applied to both.

We did have the Mark 14 torpedo, in the "disaster" category.

Germany had her own torpedo problems, but the Mark 14 went out the door in abysmal form, and we were extremely slow to get the problems fixed. And we were fighting a war with more naval focus than was Germany.

And while we had some work on the VT fuze and would have eventually gotten there ourselves -- though time is valuable in a war -- that was really the Brits. They gave us their work and we finished the work to put it into a shell.

And some of our concepts, though we ultimately made use of them in some way, failed in their original form.

The idea that ships would be a sitting duck for high-altitude level bombers was just wrong. Down the road, yes, but not in WW2. Billy Mitchell really oversold the state of things. And while it wasn't catastrophic for us, it did hurt our initial ability to respond to naval forces.

The B-17 concept that massive interlocked fields of fire from defensive guns would permit bombers to sail past fighters didn't really work. It was in a stronger position than the Avro Lancaster for daylight bombing, but we took horrendous losses; ultimately long-range fighter escort was still required.

The Norden bombsight didn't really deliver the tremendous advantage that had been expected.

We initially drastically overestimated what our early radars could do for us in naval night-fighting, and it led to things like the Battle of Savo Island. The Brits seriously bailed us out here with the cavity magnetron.

Germany also had some significant wins. Yeah, they didn't have the semi-auto rifle as a standard issue, whereas we had the M1 Garand. But they did have the assault rifle, in the form of the StG 44. They had the general-purpose machine gun in the form of the MG 34.

I see a lot of handwringing in society over kids not being able to handle themselves online.

I'd be more worried about senior citizens.

I don't think anyone has polls. There is a much higher far-left proportion than on Reddit, as things stand.

Note that Reddit is one unified world, albeit with division by subreddit.

The Threadiverse is not. Some instances have very different communities -- some only permit certain types of users. And not all instances federate with each other, and if your instance doesn't federate with another, you won't see content from those instances.

So, for example, lemmygrad.ml and to a lesser degree lemmy.ml has a bunch of people -- including the lead Lemmy dev -- who are enthusiastic about Stalin and the Soviet Union, pro-authoritarian-left. Hexbear.net is kinda out there too.

Then you've got exploding-heads.com, which I believe is far-right.

Lemmy.world is more-mainstream, but I'd certainly place it left of Reddit on average. It doesn't federate with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net or exploding-heads.com.

Beehaw.org is what I'd call far-left, but less in the authoritarian camp, but they've defederated from lemmy.world.

You can see defederations on an instance under "Blocked instances" at /instances. So for example:

https://lemmy.world/instances

Most instances also say something about their policies in the right-hand sidebar.

I think that some of it is also that some people are very vocal about their political views, and I think that some of those are disproportionately in the far-left camp. Like, if someone wants to vent that they think that society would be better off as an anarchy or that private ownership of industry or money or whatever shouldn't exist, I think that those people are gonna be more likely to have strong feelings about and repeatedly post about their point of disagreement than someone saying "I think that things are going pretty well, but I'd like Tweak X and Y".