My rainbow animals

 

You have seen a couple of them now, in the vast repertoire of my all consuming AI library short films: Rainbow animals!

You take an animal. You make the animal rainbow colored. You put the rainbow colored animal into my library. And after 75 attempts, prompts, nudges, and so on, you get a great 15 or 20 second clip all together of a real life rainbow animal alive in the world.

It's super exciting!

I showed you here one of the cats I made a few days ago. It was a rainbow cat!

They have a Reddit devoted to all things rainbow. I very rarely post to Reddit because, well, people are too mean. But the rainbow subreddit is all about rainbows! And it's all about not being mean. And it's very clear how they welcome everything rainbow no matter what.

So I thought "I'll show them my cat."

And they all yelled at me.

Not everyone likes AI!

So I went away and breathed and, after just a little bit, I was okay. 

And then I went and I made this rainbow animal to express my feelings. 

Trust

 

I was reading an online discussion on the "Libraries" subreddit. Someone had asked about printing and what different libraries do about the costs of their printing. The questioner's perspective was that they weren't making any money with their printing payment system, and they weren't sure, but they might even be losing money.

Responses from across the library world varied. Some people were pretty salty about any implications that a library might want to not lose money on printing. After all, libraries are funded by the community to provide useful information, environments, and even services to the community. Many people weighed in on the disaster of free printing, citing the people who invariably abused the largesse so badly that it could even break down the printing system by overwhelming it. Other library staff complained about the misery of dealing with a paid system and the increased strife, costs, and labor involved. And still others put forward their system's allowance of a limited amount a free printing tied to a library card.

Because I think my library system's solution is a shining beacon on the hill, I was surprised not to see it mentioned at all: We charge for printing, but it's an honor system. There are lock boxes next to the printers. We have prices. It's up to the library users to police their own usage.

The World is dangerous and mad. Terrible things are afoot. Nothing works. Corruption is running rampant. Human decency is choking on its rage. People are losing their fucking minds.

But, believe it or not, the world still runs mainly on trust. 

All the good parts, that is.

But who am I to talk?

Did I write a comment in the library subreddit to explain our wondrous solution? No.

I'm sure nearly everyone there in that library world would be perfectly nice about my comment.

But out on the Internet at least, there is always one asshole...

We take a moment to make a tiny bit of fun of Reddit

Oh, you want me to explain Reddit?

Not today. 

I started to, and it was fascinating, theoretically, to someone, somewhere, but I started to get very very very tired.

So instead I will offer this delightful detail that may go a longer way in saying something than I could have hoped to have provided on my own.

One day a very popular question was asked on Reddit, on a heavily subscribed page called "Ask Reddit". And the question was:

"What do you most hate about Reddit?"

The most popular answer, the most upvoted, and the most replied answer, in a variety of different forms, aye, the one hated thing about Reddit that was uniformly agreed upon was:

"The hivemind."

I rest my case.