tal

@tal@lemmy.today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CivitAI will start banning some content soon⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure that flashiness is essential.

  I mean, the core functionality of Civitai is a tiled list of images that show up when one specifies search criteria.

  Needs to parse the EXIF metadata from a few generative AI systems and display it.

  There are animations and endless scrolling and stuff, but the site could function without those.

  There’s a forum feature that might be helpful, but not sure that that’s necessary.

  IIRC there’s a tagging feature, and that might be.

  Not sure that being tied to an actual image generator is necessary. In fact, I’d imagine that if the license on models permits for it, there will be image generation services that will add support for using models hosted on such a service to generate images themselves.

  Not sure that being distributed/federated is necessary. Having the models be redistributable elsewhere probably is. That’d let someone set up another site if need be, akin to open-source projects and source repositories.

  IIRC there’s a Civitai feature to let users buy early access to models. That might be tough, since there network effect matters — if someone is trying to make money on a model, then the size of the userbase is important, and being smaller than civitai matters. Also introduces payment processing into the mix, and that creates leverage for content restrictions to be imposed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CivitAI will start banning some content soon⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  From a software standpoint, I don’t think that it’s likely that hard to clone civitai.com.

  However, the models are not small, and I assume that whoever does so is going to need to have a way to pay for bandwidth.

  Maybe punt the bandwidth problem to users, just provide magnet links to models or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We call people who want to regress conservative and not reactionary⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  We agreed on pro-life/pro-choice rather then having people insist on pro-life/anti-life and pro-choice/anti-choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam will soon start making it easier for players to search for games based on accessibility features⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” dropdown or something. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack enter, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam will soon start making it easier for players to search for games based on accessibility features⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam’s got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I’ve ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.

  Among other things:

  • Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value — but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there’s a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox.

  • It’s easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game’s store page, but then one can’t use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.

  • Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can’t do that…but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.

  • I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.

  • I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.

  I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.

  looks at my own Steam library, adds a shelf sorted by Release Date, looks for notable games

  Satisfactory was released in 2024. It was in Early Access for some time before that.

  Ditto for Caves of Qud and Nova Drift all games that I’ve played quite a bit — 2024 release following time in Early Access.

  Dominions 6 is a pretty involved fantasy strategy game. I haven’t played 6 much, but I’ve played the series a lot in the past, and each game is a pretty direct expansion of prior games. Not sure if that’s up your alley, though. The game turns can get pretty long late-game, as there’s a lot going on.

  I liked Balatro, a roguelike deckbuilder, quite a bit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.

  Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).

  For finding games on Steam, I’ve had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I’ll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. Sometimes I’ve had luck with looking at “similar games” to a game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Stellaris, in particular, might be up your alley.

  I like Stellaris quite a bit, but I should note that OP mentioned how he didn’t like spending money on DLC. Stellaris follows the typical Paradox approach of creating a lot of DLC to expand and extend the game as long as people are interested in buying it, and winding up with a large game that’ll cost you a lot if you want all the DLC. It may be worthwhile, but if one wants to get all the DLC, it’s gonna add a fair bit to the price.

  (checks Steam)

  The base game is $40. Buying every available piece of DLC is another $429.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Always gonna recommend Project Zomboid.

  It does have a sandbox aspect, but much as I want to like the game, I always find myself dropping it and playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead instead, which is a similar “zombie survival” genre, but has vastly more stuff and game mechanics. The big selling point for Project Zomboid, in my book, is the far gentler learning curve and lower barrier to entry; it’s got an adorable tutorial racoon, and doesn’t hit you with too much at once, but…

  • The combat in Project Zomboid frustrates me. It’s very simple, not a lot going on, but because a zombie infection is incurable, a single mistake in timing can have catastrophic effects, so it requires no errors.

  • The character builds. Project Zomboid has a lot of perks and such. Cataclysm’s got vastly more, plus mutations, bionics, all that stuff.

  • I prefer the Cataclysm turn-based play to the Project Zomboid real-time play. I don’t have to wait in the real world for actions to complete, and I can stop and think about what my next move is.

  • To try to illustrate the game complexity difference, take firearms as an example. Project Zomboid has six handguns, four shotguns, and four rifles. Each has one type of ammunition. There are ten weapon mods, each of which can be placed on some of those weapons. There is a firearms skill.

    Cataclysm has, to look at just one firearm class and caliber category, 41 rifle-class weapons chambered in .223 (and that’s by default, as chambering can be modified). Each of these can take something like six different classes of weapon mods (replacing the stock, sticking things on the barrel, adding secondary weapons like underbarrel grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc), multiple fire modes. There are 18 sight mods alone, and it’s possible to have multiple sights on a weapon. Recoil is modeled. Firearms can fit in various types of back/ankle/hip holsters, and draw time and encumbrance is a factor; these also have volume and longest-dimension characteristics, so that a large revolver can’t fit in a small holdout holster. For those .223-caliber rifles alone, there are 13 types of ammunition, including handloads, tracer rounds, armor-piercing rounds, etc. There are 63 different calibers of weapons. Energy weapons, flamethrower/incendiary weapons, chemical weapons, explosive projectile weapons, flechette weapons, illumination rounds, EMP weapons. There are multiple-barrel weapons, including some in different calibers. You can load specialized ammunition in a specified order. Different types of reloading mechanisms (revolver, magazine, belt) are modeled. Some weapons use compatible magazines, and high-capacity and drum magazines exist. Speedloaders for revolvers exist. Weapons can be installed mounted on vehicles (fired manually from a mount position, or with an automated weapons targeting system installed, set up to fire automatically). NPCs (friendly, and hostile) can be armed with them. Bore fouling is modeled. When you fire a weapon without hearing protection, you’re temporarily deafened to some degree. There are multiple stances one can take when firing those weapons. Some of the game’s martial arts forms permit use of firearms. There are firearm melee modifications, like bayonets. There are skills for different types of weapons. The game has all sorts of exotic real-world firearms (e.g. to pick a random one, the American-180, a submachine gun firing .22 rounds with a 180-round pan magazine); the game probably has more real-world firearms than any other video game out there; my current source tree says that there are 555 in total.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I liked ksp2

  If you’re saying that you liked the (unfinished, abandoned, poorly-rated) Kerbal Space Program 2, you might play the original, which is better-regarded.

  On the “factory” side, maybe some colony simulators? Someone else mentioned Rimworld. That’s got a bit of DLC, but I think that even the base game has pretty good value for money. Oxygen Not Included is another colony sim that focuses more on the building/automation side; I think that you’ll get a lot of hours out of that.

  Dwarf Fortress is another colony sim, has a freely-available classic version or a commercial graphical build on Steam. Big learning curve, but lots to explore.

  I like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, though it has a pretty punishing learning curve. Open-world roguelike. It touches on both the RPG (well, not much by way of plot, but in terms of building a character) and the factory (build buildings, faction camps with NPCs, and vehicles) side. You aren’t going to run out of gameplay complexity to explore any time soon on that. Open source and freely-available, though there’s also a commercial build on Steam.

  I have not played Elin, the successor to Elona, but it might be worth a look too if you are looking for both a sandbox aspect and RPG aspect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA: I want a law for PC games to be offered in physical versions again⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d love to have and collect DRM free titles that last even after a platform is gone,

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

  M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc.[1] and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.[2]

  M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.

  Those will outlive you.

  You can get an M-DISC-capable burner on Amazon for $35, and M-DISC media for about $3/pop, each of which will store 100GB.

  GOG is probably more-suited than Steam for this, since it’s aimed around letting you download the installers.

  But you can just install a DRM-free Steam game — there are some games that don’t have any form of DRM on Steam, and don’t tie themselves to Steam running or anything, if you’re worried about Steam dying — and then archive and save the directory off somewhere. Might need a bit more effort if you’re on Linux and trying to save copies of Proton-using games, since there’s also a WINEPREFIX directory that needs to be saved. And then you can stuff that on whatever archival media you want.

  I’ve copied Caves of Qud to my laptop, which doesn’t have Steam installed, for example. Just requires copying the directory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Useless rant about Witcher 3 romance⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough. All that’s contingent on whether you’re up for multiple runs through a game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Useless rant about Witcher 3 romance⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So do I go back to end of now or never and change the answer? Do I go back further and leave novigrad when it was in chaos? Even further before the questline began?

  If you think that you’d like to play The Witcher 3 more than once, one suggestion:

  • The first pass through is the only time that you can play the game without foreknowledge. You can never experience that again. If you’re going to play without guidance from a wiki or anything like that, really sit in the main character’s shoes, I’d do it that time. Just don’t worry that much about getting your ideal outcome, because you can do another run.

  • Then in subsequent runs, you’ve already experienced a number of “spoilers” from your prior runs, and you can try to use that knowledge (as well as knowledge from wikis or forums or whatever) to guide the plot to your desired outcome.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the 2 hour refund limit on Steam affect game design?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The other elephant in the room is if steam refunds are meant as a demo for everything or just to check technical issues like FPS and network connection issues

  I’m pretty sure that the refund window isn’t primarily intended to create an ad-hoc demo of games, but to let you return a game that doesn’t function correctly on your system.

  Game developers who do want to create a demo can (though I’ll admit that it’s a less-common route than one might expect).

  store.steampowered.com/demos/

  I usually read review content, maybe watch a YouTube video of someone playing the game if I want to see gameplay.

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=KePY3IfxqOQ

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game genre communities on Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  EDIT: Oh, and @PugJesus@lemmy.world has kept a flow of material to !fallout@lemmy.world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How I Got Hacked: A Warning about Malicious PoCs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For the command line, do what OpenSSH does, take passwords on terminals.

  For environment variables, the issue is passing them to all programs; you don’t want to put credentials in a .bashenv or similar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game genre communities on Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  sffa.community/c/sffgaming?dataType=Post&page=0

  I can’t DNS-resolve sffa.community, either on IPv4 or IPv6. Google’s DNS root can’t see it either:

  $ host -t a sffa.community 8.8.8.8
  Using domain server:
  Name: 8.8.8.8
  Address: 8.8.8.8#53
  Aliases: 
  
  Host sffa.community not found: 2(SERVFAIL)
  
  $ host -t aaaa sffa.community 8.8.8.8
  Using domain server:
  Name: 8.8.8.8
  Address: 8.8.8.8#53
  Aliases: 
  
  Host sffa.community not found: 2(SERVFAIL)
  
  $
  

  It clearly existed at one point, because lemmy.world has local copies of some stuff from a year back:

  lemmy.world/c/sffgaming@sffa.community?dataType=P…

  But I think that the instance is gone now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game genre communities on Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Another adjacent community that is seeing no real activity: !arcadesticks@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game genre communities on Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  !gamemusic@lemm.ee

  Community for sharing game music.

  On that note, !gameart@sopuli.xyz for video game artwork.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How I Got Hacked: A Warning about Malicious PoCs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This does kind of drive home some points. Obviously, once malware is running with your full user permissions, all bets are off. But there are some things that could have mitigated harm here.

  The malware wasn’t just mining cryptocurrency—it was also stealing as much sensitive information as possible. It collected:

  • SSH keys from ~/.ssh/

  If you password-protect your SSH keys with a decent password, it will help address this. Now, the problem is that any software that can get at your SSH keys probably has a shot at also setting up some kind of keylogger system, but at least it makes it not a one-step process.

  • Shell history from .bash_history and .zsh_history

  Avoiding using sensitive data as command line arguments is a good habit to be in. They’re visible systemwide to all processes on a normal system, which already creates a meaningful leak on multiuser systems, and various pieces of command-line software go out of their way to avoid having passwords and the like passed on the command-line.

  • AWS and Azure credentials from ~/.aws/ and ~/.azure/

  Not familiar with the current forms of these, but I bet that they provide some way not to store unencrypted credentials there.

  • Environment variables and system information

  Environment variables are a really good place not to put sensitive data, because software that crashes and uploads a crash dump to God-knows-where will also tend to dump environment variables along with it, as it’s important debugging information. Storing credentials in an environment variable is not a good idea.

  • Lists of files in my home directory

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨White House expects UK trade deal ‘within three weeks’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If so, it seems pretty unlikely that the people negotiating can be doing much in terms of modifying things from the pre-tariff situation, and Trump is likely to do what he did with USMCA — change very little, and then spend time giving the impression to supporters that he’s drastically modified the trade environment. I mean, trying to complete any kind of meaningful free trade agreement tends to take far longer than that.

  piie.com/…/how-long-does-it-take-conclude-trade-a…

  Table 1 Duration of US free trade agreement negotiations (in months)

  US FTA partner	From launch date to signing	From launch date to implementation
  Jordan	4	18
  Dominican Republic	6	37
  Bahrain	7	30
  Oman	10	45
  Korea	13	69
  Australia	14	22
  Israel	15	29
  Morocco	16	35
  Costa Rica	18	71
  El Salvador	18	37
  Guatemala	18	40
  Honduras	18	38
  Mexico	18	31
  Nicaragua	18	38
  Canada	20	32
  Peru	23	56
  Singapore	29	37
  Chile	30	36
  Colombia	31	96
  Panama	38	102
  Average	18	45

  On top of the fact that this would be off-the-charts short for a meaningful FTA in any case, neither of the two “shortening” two conditions that were found exist here; it is not a US election year, and while the UK is nominally a monarchy, the monarch holds no power and Parliament is, no doubt, going to be involved in any substantial change in trading relationship.

  Despite the small sample, two variables are significant in explaining the delay between launch and signing.

  1. A king. Having a monarch reduces the length of negotiation by about half. Only four agreements took less than a year, and three were with Bahrain, Jordan, and Oman. A king surely has more leeway to carry out reforms he deems reasonable. (The fourth was the Dominican Republic’s negotiation to join the Central American Free Trade Agreement or CAFTA, though it benefited from joining late, which may suggest that late entrants to an already negotiated TPP could also face shorter delays.)
  2. An election year. Agreements that are signed in a US presidential election year end up taking about 40 percent less time than agreements signed in other years. This makes sense: Negotiating presidents want to close agreements that they started, which will be part of their legacy. The urge to close is real: More than half of the US agreements were signed in election years and of course the TPP, if implemented, will add to that group.

  In the UK’s case, there was some prior discussion about a UK-USA FTA, so maybe they could bootstrap off that to reduce the throughput time, but I have a hard time believing that even an administration-friendly, Republican-majority Congress is going to sign off on whatever the Trump administration negotiates without having some kind of input.

  en.wikipedia.org/…/United_Kingdom–United_States_F…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a cancelled game you really miss?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.

  I suppose you’re most-likely aware of them, but if you wanted more turn-based Fallout, have you looked into Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re super-into it, have you tried Port Royale 2, which also came out in 2004 and is kind of the same sort of game on the age-of-sail combat side?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a lot more ships than the DLC ships. But yes, it’s almost inevitable you will end up buying a couple of them, because the DLCs let you spawn a ship for free every day.

  In fairness, I didn’t notice that the game was F2P, no entry fee, so they have to get money from somewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Naval action for slow wooden ships in the Bahamas.

  I haven’t seen this prior to now. The idea of a nice age-of-sale combat game sounds interesting, but…man, looking at the Steam description there has some surprises:

  • That is an appallingly low Steam rating.

  • It looks like the split is between players who think that the game is too-slow-paced and those who are fine with that, so I could see someone who wants a slow game being into it.

  • Jesus Christ, the DLC prices. They’re selling each additional ship for ~$50? Like, the game with all ships is ~$700? mean, I know that DCS World and Il-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad use that model, but I can’t imagine that the ships function as differently as the combat aircraft.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I really wanted to like Raft, but the game just felt kind of shallow and on-rails in actual gameplay compared to Subnautica.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a lot of different categories.

  I like naval warfare games, but I tend towards the sim side, not the “experience being someone there” sort.

  The naval warfare game that I have played the most of recently is Rule the Waves 3. That’s definitely not an eye candy game, but it models the development of warships from 1880 into the Cold War, the construction of fleets, and the tactics when they meet, has a lot of flexibility to simulate different stuff.

  The game that I’m most looking forward to being completed is Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age, which is presently still in Early Access and last time I played it still had a lot of unfinished work. Sort of a spiritual successor to Fleet Command/Jane’s Fleet Command. Modern air and naval warfare.

  It doesn’t work on Linux, so I can’t play it, but Command: Modern Operations is probably the most sim-oriented program you can get.

  Two other naval warfare games that I enjoy playing:

  Cold Waters, which is a Cold War sub warfare game. It abstracts out a lot of the manual stuff that some other sub sims do. Covers the “hide, gather data, strike” bit.

  Carrier Command 2. This is not a real-world oriented sim. You command an amphibious assault ship which can capture islands to gain resources, capture technology, and buy munitions, air and amphibious vehicles, and fight against another similar amphibious assault ship approaching you. I really like the untextured polygon aesthetic – they make stuff look pretty even with just that. If you’ve played Hostile Waters, sort of similar idea — both are based on Carrier Command. Not mission-oriented the way Hostile Waters is. It’s really intended to be played multiplayer, which I’ve no interest in, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of doing all the tasks.

  You mention Subnautica. I enjoyed that, though unlike the other games here, that’s not really a naval warfare game, but it’s certainly got a sea theme. I think I own the sequel, Subnautica: Below Zero, but haven’t played it, but given that you don’t mention it, I thought I would, as I’d assume that if you like the first game, you’d also enjoy the second.

  Sunless Sea and its sequel Zubmariner is…hard to describe, more about providing a dark British Empire fantasy naval-themed game. Not naval warfare, but exploring a subterranean world…but it’s got sea theming.

  It’s not, strictly-speaking, a sea-based game, but Nebulous: Fleet Command is a sci-fi space-based fleet warfare game. A lot of the elements that you might want in a fleet naval warfare game are there.

  I think that those are the sea- or sea-associated games that I’d probably most recommend, myself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's everybody using for AI art and video generation nowadays?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, though I’ve seen it also make errors.

  The really bad days in my experience were Stable Diffusion 1.5. I mean, at that point, trying to get anything reasonable finger-wise was just horrendous.

  After hitting Stable Diffusion XL, I might have to try a couple goes or inpaint or something, but I could usually get something reasonable. Maybe cut out some prompt terms, or see what nonessential prompt terms I could reduce weighting on to give SD more freedom.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's everybody using for AI art and video generation nowadays?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been meaning to try Flux.

  My own main irritation with Flux is that it’s more-limited in terms of generating pornographic material, which is one thing that I’d like to be able to do. Pony Diffusion has been trained on danbooru tags, and so Pony-based models can recognize prompt terms like this, for which there is a vast library of tagged pornographic material (including some pretty exotic tags) about which knowledge has been trained into Pony models.

  danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/tag_groups

  There are Flux-based derived models that have been trained on pornographic material, but they don’t really have the scope of knowledge that Pony models do.

  If one isn’t generating pornography, that’s not really a concern, though.

  Flux also doesn’t use negative prompts, which is something to get used to.

  It doesn’t have prompt weighting (though as best I can tell, some adjectives, like “very” have a somewhat-similar effect).

  However, Flux can do some stuff that left me kinda slack-jawed the first time I saw it, like sticking objects in scenes that are casting soft shadows or have faint reflections. I still don’t know how all of this happens internally, assume that there has to be at least some limited degree of computer vision pre-processing on the training corpus to detect light sources at a bare minimum. Like, here’s an image I generated a while back around when I started using Flux:

  lemmy.today/post/18453614

  Like, when that first popped out, I’m just sitting there staring at it trying to figure out how the hell the software was able to do that, to incorporate light sources in the scene with backlighting and reflections and such. The only way you can do that that I can think of — and I’ve written at least a little computer vision software before, so I’m not competely out of the loop on this — is to try to pre-process your training corpus, identify light sources, and then separate their contributions from the image. And just to forestall one suggestion — no, this isn’t simply me happening to generate something very close to a particular image that the thing was trained on. I’ve generated plenty of other images that have placed light sources that affect nearby objects.

  Here’s a (NSFW) image from a Tarot deck I generated, with the The Devil trump containing light sources. Same thing.

  Another example of an image (Progression) I created using only the prompt in Flux: an image containing a series of panels with a boy transforming into a girl:

  lemmy.today/post/18460312

  Unlike the Turn of the Seasons image that I generated also linked to in another comment here, I did not explicitly specify the content in each panel. I know how to accomplish a somewhat-similar effect with a Stable Diffusion model and with plugins, where basically you divide the image into regions and have prompt weighting that is procedurally-altered in each frame, and I assume that somehow, Flux must be doing something akin to that internally…but Flux figured out how to do all this from a simple natural-language description in the prompt alone, which left me pretty boggled.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's everybody using for AI art and video generation nowadays?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t do video generation.

  I’m mostly moved away from Automatic1111 to ComfyUI. If you’ve ever used an image processing program that uses a flowchart-style of operations to modify images, it looks kinda like that. Comfy’s more work to learn — you need to learn and understand some things that Automatic1111 is doing internally ---- but:

  • It’s much more capable at building up complex images and series of dependent processes that are re-generated when you make a change in a workflow.

  • It can run Flux. Last I looked, Automatic1111 could not. I understand that Forge can, and is a little more like Automatic1111, but I haven’t spent time with it. I’d call Flux and derived models are quite impressive from a natural language standpoint. My experience on SD and Pony-based models meant that most of the prompts I wrote were basically sequences of keywords. With Flux, it’s far more natural-language looking, and it can do some particularly neat stuff just from the prompt (“The image is a blended composite with a progression from left to right showing winter to spring to summer to autumn.”).

  • It has queuing. It may be that Automatic1111 has since picked it up, but I found it to be a serious lack back when I was using it.

  • ComfyUI scales up better if you’re using a lot of plugins. In Automatic1111, a plugin adds buttons and UI elements into each page. In Comfy, a plugin almost always just adds more nodes to the node library, doesn’t go fiddling with the existing UI.

  That being said, I’m out-of-date on Automatic1111. But last I looked, the major selling point for me was the SD Ultimate Upscale plugin, and that’s been subsequently ported to ComfyUI.

  For me, one major early selling point was that a workflow that I frequently wanted was to (a) generate an image and then (b) trivially perform an SD Ultimate Upscale. In Automatic1111, that required setting up txt2img and SD Ultimate Upscale in img2img, then running a txt2img operation to generate an image, waiting until it finished, manually clicking the button to send the image to img2img, and then running the upscale operation. With ComfyUI, I just save a workflow that does all that, and Comfy will rerun everything necessary based on any changes that I make (and won’t rerun things that aren’t). I can just disable the upscale portion of the workflow if I don’t need that bit. ComfyUI was a higher barrier to entry, but it made more-complex tasks much less time-consuming and require less nursemaiding.