your friendly neighbourhood vampire

an airplane stuck on a toyota minivan

this miata built by rocket scientists

the mr2 boat

the nyan cat bmw that i think actually played the song at all times

the homer simpson car built by uranium workers

this limo whose brakes caught on fire

the dumbest corolla and supra wearing funny hats

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

I am currently building a multi-decade chain of papers on computer vision and image generation to have this discussion, and I would like to do so in a moderately calm manner.

Unfortunately if I want to cite a journal article from 1983 in a tumblr post, the copyright holders of this article about image restoration and pixel randomization want $248 per section of excerpted text (<500 words).

This is a 2024 paper by one of the Adobe developers who worked on those compositing tools going over how the tools work. For the record, this model was trained on licensed and public domain images only and the tools are run on device, so the copyright and environmental complaints that people frequently make about AI don't apply to these specific tools.

That paper uses research from this 2015 paper on AI detection of composited images. That paper uses the ImageNet dataset.

ImageNet's dataset is a combination of images sourced from image searches starting in 2009 and description tags generated by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. The images are not owned by ImageNet, but were scraped from various internet sources in the late 2000s.

That project uses algorithms and processes described in this 2007 paper on the utility of a general image database and image segmentation.

This 2000 paper on image segmentation developed some of the models used in the later paper, based on a collection of 1000 Corel stock images.

That segmentation was based on statistical models in this paper from 1994, which used a small training dataset collected by the researchers.

That 1994 paper made use of the model in this foundational paper from 1984 on predictive pixel selection for algorithm-based image restoration.

That paper helped to refine the boundary-finding methods used in this 1986 paper, which was an improvement on methods from the 1980 Hildreth paper.

Both Hildreth and Canny cite this 1971 memo from the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, which describes the process of using a computer to find lines in an image.

Personally I like this note from a revised version of that 1971 memo that shows that we are still currently dealing with some of the same problems in computer vision that people were 50 years ago.

"This program has no idea what a reasonable line-drawing should look like when it represents an image of polyhedra. Instead it is very general and will find arbitrary line-drawings. Observing the particular way in which things sometimes go wrong, one quickly comes to the conclusion that higher-level understanding of the scene being analysed could greatly improve the line and vertex creating phase of this program. As thing stand now this understanding comes only after the line-finder has done its work."

Okay so what's my point?

My point is that there is a long chain of models, statistics, and research that, stretching back to the beginning of computer vision, has been centered around figuring out the likelihood that one pixel next to another pixel is black instead of white. The computers have never been very smart, they have never understood context, and the improvements we have made from the line finder in 1971 to "harmonize" in photoshop in 2026 is a very traceable chain of refining how the statistics are calculated.

They hallucinate extra elements, they don't know what shadows are.

Computers are still stupid, they just do math a lot faster than they did in the seventies.

Harmonize is apparently a new "AI" tool available in photoshop that is capable of matching lighting, texture, and other qualities in photos that are composited together. One of the things that the flesh pit guy is currently being dragged for (aside from really seeming to be a pretty tremendous asshole) is using this particular type of AI tool as a time saver on his ongoing art project.

I want to have a conversation about this, by which I mean I want to make some arguments about this.

I'm writing this specifically about the harmonize compositing tool in photoshop (and similar tools like upscaling). This is not about using grok or generating whole images or whole elements of images, this is not about whether or not the flesh pit guy is an asshole. I will grant that he is an asshole and I personally find whole images generated with AI tools like grok to just kind of look bad and be really boring.

Work with me on this, and let's accept the premise that adobe's Firefly is an ethically trained model (up to 5% of the images used to train firefly may be midjourney images that were licensed to adobe as stock images after being generated by midjourney, but adobe pays creators standard licensing fees to train data and does not train on client data), and that the tools are run on-device and do not consume any more resources than creating a 20-layer document in photoshop would.

(Also I acknowledge that training a model uses a lot of power and resources but creating a video game or an animated movie uses power at a much higher level than playing the game or watching the movie on your own machine; i've got to limit the scope somewhere so I can actually ask the question I've got)

Again, we are granting the following before you respond to the poll:

If the model was trained on ethical data and

If the tool runs locally and does not use more power than your computer uses and

The art the tool is used on is a personal, individual project and does not lead to poor treatment of workers

this list is not in any order, and i am not familiar with most of these artists, so an inclusion on this is not an endorsement of anything! if ive made a mistake anywhere, just let me know!

schmekel - transmasc jewish folk band (they seem to have deleted the majority of their music off most platforms, unsure why? but this link is to a playlist of re-uploads)

exiliahu - very vocally pro-palestine jewish trans man

noah finnce - british trans man, pop rock

ellyotto - canadian trans man, hyperpop

jesswar - fijian-austrailian trans man, hip hop

2am ricky - Black american trans man, hip hop/soul/jazz/house

rahim redcar - french trans man, indie/alt-pop

elio mei - american trans man, indie folk

anjimile - Black american trans man, indie folk

the oozes - queer punk band w/ a trans man lead singer

sushi soucy - transmasc, folk rock

dopamine - band of scottish transmascs

boy jr - transmasc, indie/alt rock

great grandpa - queer indie rock band w/ trans man lead singer

riotnine - transmasc punk band

the muslims - transmasc poc anti-fascist punk band

TR sun - Black american trans man, hip hop

billy tipton - american trans man, 1940s jazz star

mal blum - american trans man, indie rock/folk punk

dayflower - british transmasc "dreamcore" indie pop band

ryan cassata - american trans man, folk punk

ezra butler - british trans man, indie pop

bells larson - canadian nonbinary trans man, indie pop

sasha allen - american trans man, indie pop

boy bowser - american trans man, energetic hip hop

mikah amani - Black american trans man, folk music

jake edwards - british trans man, pop music

jakey bake - trans man, super indie/underground

king aiden - Black american trans man, indie pop

addison grace - american transmasc, indie pop

dylan and the moon - british trans man, indie folk

searows - american trans man, indie folk/bedroom pop

elio kennedy yoon - Asian-american trans man, indie pop

beverly glenn copland - Black canadian trans man, art/folk pop

REVENGEOFPARIS - nonbinary transmasc rapper

V3CTORGRAPH1CS - nonbinary transmasc, hyperpop

Um Jennifer? - american indie rock duo ; one is transmasc, the other is transfem

jigsawllie - transmasc, indie "weirdcore" vocaloid music

The straights aren't okay

It's likely that none of the young, straight people talking about this are having good sex.

Okay @syntheros-artemidos, this is the rundown in as neutral a way I can write it:

A man and a woman went on a date. The man says on the first date that sexual compatibility is a priority for him, and that he's interested in having sex early on. The woman says she doesn't know if that's what she wants.

Apparently things went well enough though for the two to plan a second date, which is apparently to happen at her home.

Since the woman said she wasn't sure if she wanted to be physically intimate, he feels like he's getting mixed signals being invited over, so he sends her a voice memo. In the voice memo, he reiterates that he wants to have sex, and that if she's not interested in that he doesn't see the point of continuing. He says it's okay if that's not what she wants, and if that's the case they shouldn't keep seeing each other.

Then, the woman shared the voice memo with a friend, and the friend uploaded that voice memo to the internet.

Because nothing is allowed to be private in the modern panopticon.

There are two prevailing interpretations of this situation.

One, which is the one I tend to agree with, is that he got mixed messages, made his wants clear, and sent them to her when there was physical distance so she wouldn't feel pressure to not turn him down. It was literally just a potential second date and they started as strangers, so he was pretty much saying "hey, we shouldn't waste each other's time if we don't want the same thing." She clearly didn't, and beyond the weird need to violate his privacy, it was the optimal outcome for these two people to just part ways.

Like was he the smoothest when he said what he said? No. But it was a pretty straight forward. I should note that this is the interpretation that most queer creators seem to be going with too.

Because, uh, the second interpretation is kind of wild.

You see, the other group of people think he was being entitled asking for sex. That somehow, him leaving the voice mail is an act of coercion (even though he has no power over her and there is no implied threat of violence -- since he was making sure he talked about it while he was literally nowhere near her). Also, people are wildly claiming that if he got her to say yes to sex in a text that somehow it would be considered consent in a legal case in case he raped her. Which is, y'know, not how consent works.

(I honestly think a lot of people were projecting their own trauma onto things)

There are also a bunch of people effectively shaming him for wanting to have a casual sexual relationship at all, and that somehow there was something wrong with him for not wanting the same thing that she wanted. People saying that folks looking for hookups shouldn't be using dating apps (as if someone looking for a romantic relationship might not be prioritizing sex too). Mostly just a bunch of puritan culture weirdness, and some people wanting to date for the performance of dating over the desire to find a compatible partner, etc.

And it's been going on for a couple of days.