Exploring "interesting ideas" is kinda broad, but I find Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Iain [M.] Banks all packed full of stuff that gets the noodle baking.
And now you have moved the argument away from Russia. Pulling a thread off-topic like that is one of their simplest strategies. It begs for engagement.
You don't need the Steele dossier to see trump and his entourage are manipulated by Russian agents.
Fact: Michael Flynn talked with the Russian ambassador.
Fact: Flynn lied about the content of his call. Not to journalists, but to FBI agents.
Fact: Trump dismissed Comey to stop the investigations around Flynn. He said it openly, on camera.
Fact: Trump pardoned Flynn.
Fact: Trump is pushing for the prosecution of Comey - a case so weak it has already been rejected before going to trial.
Fact: FBI agents have been demoted and punished for nothing else than working on the Russian dossier. Including respected career agents currently working on e.g. Iranian operations in the USA. Their only crime has been to be assigned to the Russian dossier, something they didn't choose.
You absolutely don't need the Steele dossier to see something's wrong - except to deflect from the obvious.
It seems to me like a lot of the American stuff is people directly or indirectly under Russian influence or part of an international network of extreme-right politics of which Putin is the most powerful figure.
>Musk repeats verbatim Russian talking points about Ukraine.
Have it crossed your mind that they're just closer to truth than what Western propaganda spreads about Ukraine conflict and why it started and keep going?
Another big driver, which TFA mentions, is that outrage drives both clicks and repeat visits. There are lots and lots of people in it purely for the money, including Americans. It's nothing political, it's purely the profit motive. Then the reward functions on FB and YT direct people towards content that appalls or outrages, disturbing videos, conspiracy theories, bigotry. For FB the ideal user is one who's been sucked into a vortex of conspiracy theories and spends all their time on FB.
When I say it's apolitical I mean the con artists know exactly who to target, which is the right, because you can feed them anything and they'll keep coming back for more. It's far harder with the left, they'll say "this is all bullshit" and move on quickly, there's no money to be made there. There was a great interview a few years back with a California-based troll who said he targeted the right because that's where you got the responses: "We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out".
I think the likely scenario is Trump digging in post-mid terms. This is very likely, given the amount of flagrantly illegal stuff he's got floating around him and his crew.
Then two paths: he's either successful, forming the sort of "managed democracy" you see in Russia etc.
Or he's unsuccessful, and we see what happens. ICE are a militia beholden to the regime. Could get spicy.
Constitutionally, I think the framework that's supposed to check executive power is already shredded, or at least revealed for what it's been all along: pretty much norms.
What's really weird about this list is what's not there.
I'm not seeing my spicy extensions (e.g. BPC), or the ones I use to block content on LinkedIn (ViolentMonkey, Ublock). So this isn't about detecting what they might deem as bad behaviour.
Nor could it be a fingerprinting thing, right? You'd want a full list for a full ID.
But they are checking out your religion. Deeply creepy.
We need to approach the US in the same way we approach other rogue states, but more urgently.
We (Europeans) are, at the time of writing, being dragged into a global crisis. It is not hyperbolic to fear WW3.
This is happening because the US has chosen to undertake an assault on a sovereign country, during negotiations, against the advice of its own planners. This has happened suspiciously in line with the desires of a third country, during a major kompromat scandal involving the President.
This will continue to happen unless we demonstrate, as we did with Russia, that no state can act unilaterally like this.
We need a commercial and cultural boycott, divestment from US projects, and sanctions on senior US official and the oligarchs that have enabled this catastrophe.
The Pentium III does sound like a good chip choice for a retro cyberpunk story. Like they said in “The Matrix”, 1999 was the peak of human civilization.
(586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)
The cartridge-style packaging of the Pentium II/III’s was also peak for the lineup.
My favorite PC I ever built was a dual-CPU Tyan motherboard that eventually held two screaming fast Coppermines. Needed a university copy of Windows 2000 to really make them sing—the Windows 95 series never supported SMP—and it was glorious.
I remember 1999/2000-ish I had both a Pentium III/Intel motherboard and Athlon PC. The Pentium III system was rock solid, and performed fantasic. Even the CPU and motherboard looked amazing.
The Athlon was solid but less reliable, various reboots and glitches. I kind have always had a preference for Intel since then.
A lot of that probably came down to the motherboard chipset. IIRC Intel made their own chipsets for the Pentium III and they were good and reliable. Athlons were coupled with chipsets from VIA and whatnot.
Some of those chipsets were fine and others were less reliable or compatible. The quality of the drivers for each chipset may also have mattered.
Jesus Christ finally. I'm not joking when I say that the old text tool wasn't simply bad, it was THE WORST text tool I ever used. If you had a dark theme and made the text black, you literally couldn't see the text you were editing!
I believe the last feature Krita needs to become a decent design tool would be fixing the layer styles so you can add the same style multiple times to the same layer (and if possible better bevel and 3D text tools). An immense number of designs are not much more than multiple strokes or "slightly" 3D text. Multiple strokes can be done in Krita in a very complicated and impractical way (you can do it by adding the layer style to a group, but with too many strokes the rounding errors make the outer strokes "flat," so the "correct" way would be to add the largest stroke first and then use clones to add the inner strokes). Photopea (a free online editor) supports both of these.
My opinion is that Krita has a tremendous amount of potential to serve a free and open source application for several niche use cases, but it's routinely held back by lacking "that one feature the user will need." Probably because everyone still thinks it's just an application for illustration and can't be used for image editing or design.
Animation is probably the most obvious one. Krita has an entire curves-based timeline editor, but the integration is so poor that it can only be used to animate opacity and the simplest type of transforms (translate, rotate, scale). That's an incredible waste considering it has cage transform, perspective transform, etc. All the non-destructive filters already have the code to serialize their settings to XML and back, but somehow those settings can't be animated? The liquefy transform, by far the most powerful, can't be animated. If transform masks had opacity and you could animate that, even that could be extremely useful, but they don't so they can't be animated in general.
Layer styles are another integration problem. Many users don't know they exist because they're hidden in the context menu. Krita already has filter masks. It doesn't even need a separate UI for layer styles, the styles could just be filters instead, then they would be able to get drag-n-dropped around and you could add multiple of the same to a single layer. Apparently this is because they want compatibility with Photoshop, but you could just convert Krita filter masks into Photoshop styles in the save step, so I don't really understand the problem. Naturally if the filter settings ever became animatable, that would mean layer styles would NOT be animatable in virtue of them not being filters, which would suck a lot.
By the way, I haven't tested the new version yet but Krita ALREADY has a color overlay layer style. So it looks like they simply... duplicated a feature they already had? Also the UI looks very similar to Clip Studio Paint, but a key difference in CSP is that single-color layers use 8 bit pixels instead of full 32 bit RGBA. I'm afraid this UI I'm seeing in the video is going to mislead some users into creating dozens of 32 bit layers with color overlay for easy color management and then end up with much worse performance than they would have in similar software. It also seems the color overlay "mask" behaves in a way that is completely different from literally every other mask in the software. I guess I'll have to download it to know for sure.
Edit: by "3d text" I sincerely don't mean more than WordArt level stuff. A lot of text for mobile games is very basic "curved text + vanishing point 3D + multiple strokes." Krita also lacks a "long shadow" style (i.e. infinite shadow instead of a drop shadow), which is common in a lot of designs and that GIMP has.
Most of the transfors you describe are still unfortunately destructive (ie the only way to go back is to undo). I'm not an expert on this, but I think the only way this could be key framed would be to take snapshots of the pixels and insert the modified raster data as keyframes? I'm not sure there's a good/correct/obviously way to interpolate betweens say a before and after liquefy operation the way it currently works. Maybe some of them coul store brush+inputs (pressure, cursor movement, etc) but that seems difficult to work with as an artist. Again, not done much animation (as a dev or artist) so maybe I'm just out of the loop completely
But yeah I agree with you in principle though, it would be nice if these were non-destructive and could be keyframed.
They are all non-destructive in Krita. Just use a transform mask and go to tool options, select liquefy and after you liquefy however you want you can just hide the transform mask and it stops liquefying the layer.
Yes, Krita has had this feature for years. Non-destructive filters (adjustment layers), too.
GIMP still doesn't have it. Only in 3.0 it got adjustment layers for filters.
Oh, this is news to me! I've used Krita to pain (recreational noob, not on a professional level) and I never realised this. I'll play with this tomorrow
I've just moved to a new town, and my social life is kicking.
Found a local computer club, crew of lads tinkering and using open source software. Really nice, smart bunch. I'm learning loads and appreciating their company.
OP found this lacking, because it's not working fast enough and he's not getting enough time with people.
I totally agree putting in time with old friends is always worth it (maybe not through surprise calls) but on a local level, I'd encourage patience.
Things take time, friendship isn't something you can just switch on. It takes years, and that's the point. It's a journey, not a destination.
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