That first GIF is from Team America: World Police, it's a Bush-era film from the guys who made South Park. It aged pretty badly in a lot of ways since it's lampooning the War on Terror, but it's still hilarious IMO. Worth a watch if you like the idea of South Park as an R-rated puppet movie.

I gave up on it for now when the questline involving the NPC learning to write broke, and then I started crashing to desktop (without any logs anywhere, either in the Buffout directory or even in Windows' Event Viewer) every time I left the Swan or fast traveled directly to it, even though traveling to another point literally fifty feet south worked just fine. And since there's no logs describing the crash, I have no idea how to fix it.

I could probably fix it by uninstalling and re-downloading it again, but I have a goddamn data cap that my roommate already blows through every month with the fucking massive updates Fallout 76 has taken to pushing out, I have zero desire to download 60 GB of data (30 GB base game + 30 GB FOLON) every fucking time I sneeze wrong and make the game start crashing again. =|

I actually had some thoughts about this and posted this in a similar thread:

First, that artist will only learn from a few handful of artists instead of every artist's entire field of work all at the same time. They will also eventually develop their own unique style and voice--the art they make will reflect their own views in some fashion, instead of being a poor facsimile of someone else's work.

Second, mimicking the style of other artists is a generally poor way of learning how to draw. Just leaping straight into mimicry doesn't really teach you any of the fundamentals like perspective, color theory, shading, anatomy, etc. Mimicking an artist that draws lots of side profiles of animals in neutral lighting might teach you how to draw a side profile of a rabbit, but you'll be fucked the instant you try to draw that same rabbit from the front, or if you want to draw a rabbit at sunset. There's a reason why artists do so many drawings of random shit like cones casting a shadow, or a mannequin doll doing a ballet pose, and it ain't because they find the subject interesting.

Third, an artist spends anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours practicing. Even if someone sets out expressly to mimic someone else's style, teaches themselves the fundamentals, it's still months and years of hard work and practice, and a constant cycle of self-improvement, critique, and study. This applies to every artist, regardless of how naturally talented or gifted they are.

Fourth, there's a sort of natural bottleneck in how much art that artist can produce. The quality of a given piece of art scales roughly linearly with the time the artist spends on it, and even artists that specialize in speed painting can only produce maybe a dozen pieces of art a day, and that kind of pace is simply not sustainable for any length of time. So even in the least charitable scenario, where a hypothetical person explicitly sets out to mimic a popular artist's style in order to leech off their success, it's extremely difficult for the mimic to produce enough output to truly threaten their victim's livelihood. In comparison, an AI can churn out dozens or hundreds of images in a day, easily drowning out the artist's output.

And one last, very important point: artists who trace other people's artwork and upload the traced art as their own are almost universally reviled in the art community. Getting caught tracing art is an almost guaranteed way to get yourself blacklisted from every art community and banned from every major art website I know of, especially if you're claiming it's your own original work. The only way it's even mildly acceptable is if the tracer explicitly says "this is traced artwork for practice, here's a link to the original piece, the artist gave full permission for me to post this." Every other creative community writing and music takes a similarly dim views of plagiarism, though it's much harder to prove outright than with art. Given this, why should the art community treat someone differently just because they laundered their plagiarism with some vector multiplication?

Okay, but what's the alternative? Trump faked the whole thing in some sort of false flag? He planted a fake gunman to get killed by the secret service, and put two of his close supporters in the hospital in critical condition, for a bump in the polls, when he was already confident that he could beat Biden? Is that really a more plausible explanation than "someone decided to kill Trump over the Epstein files, missed, and was killed"? I absolutely hate the guy, buy I just don't buy it. I can accept "he got hit by a shard of glass instead of a bullet" or "he got grazed elsewhere and it just looks like he was hit in the ear" but claiming the whole thing was faked is just a bridge too far.

We're supposed to be above this type of shaky conspiracy theory level thinking.

Ah, so you're a literal 90s-era troll.

Yeah, I won't deny the quality has gone down, too. Marvel's biggest mistake was thinking they could keep the gravy train rolling past endgame. They SHOULD have let it rest and given the creatives some time to cook and plan a new arc, but instead they pushed forward before they were ready and are paying dearly for it.

It's the same damn mistake they made with the star wars sequel trilogy--if they had sat on it for a year or two, hashed out a coherent overarching plot, and let it cook, we would've gotten something better than "Somehow, Palpatine returned." Hell, if they needed something immediately, they could have brought in Timothy Zahn to adapt the Thrawn books. Instead they went off half-cocked and gave us a barely-coherent retread of the original trilogy.

There's something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can't get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can't reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can't look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability...

Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you've spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.

I work tech support for a NAS company and the ratio of HDDs to SSDs is roughly 85-15. Sometimes people use SSDs for stuff that requires low latency, but most commonly they're used as a cache for HDDs in my experience.

...So your metric of "too much AI safety" is that it won't let you fuck the fish...?

It's very user friendly in terms of tooltips, and if you don't make deliberately bad choices during level up (e.g. taking a feat that gives you a cantrip from the Wizard class... that scales off your INT score... while playing a Barbarian with 8 intelligence that can't cast spells while raging) it's fairly difficult to make an unplayably bad character.

There's a few cases where some general knowledge of D&D is helpful, such as knowing to never take True Strike because it's literally worse than just attacking twice and having some knowledge of good builds is useful, since it helps guide what you take when you level up. That said, there's also entire categories of actions in BG3 that don't really have an equivalent rule in TTRPG 5e, such as weapon proficiency attacks, so online cookie cutter builds don't capture the full extent of what you can do.

You'll be waiting a bit, the release today was Windows only with macOS and console versions coming later.

It's sorta kinda usable but not really? Its main purpose seems to be ~~causing permanent data corruption in~~ ISCSI storage for Veeam backup appliances.