"Working with the artificial intelligence company RAIC Labs, which scanned satellite images of China's entire land border captured by Planet Labs, The Times identified the locations of new villages and checked them against historical images, state media, social media posts and public records.
The mapping reveals that China has put at least one village near every accessible Himalayan pass that borders India, as well as on most of the passes bordering Bhutan and Nepal... "
"[Artists] would much rather be properly compensated for their work..."
'Properly compensated'... determined by the market, right? That's being driven close to $0, just like with software (and was headed that direction before the recent AI craze).
"Artists would much rather... focus more on fulfilling creative tasks."
Like the two penis jokes shown on that site? Incredible.
> Properly compensated'... determined by the market, right? That's being driven close to $0, just like with software (and was headed that direction before the recent AI craze).
This is just completely false, and there are so many obvious counterexamples I don't know where to begin, so let's just start with artists working in the film and video game industries. These are real working, earning people who do art and design as a career.
Oh I thought they were talking about silly web comics and random art on the internet that was 'stolen'. Film and game industries of course embrace all types of tech to make money (didn't Disney use generative AI for the opening sequence of a Marvel series last year?)
> Oh I thought they were talking about silly web comics and random art on the internet that was 'stolen'.
It is extremely common for "silly web comics and random art on the internet" to be meaningfully monetized by their creators, whether or not they make a living that way.
> Film and game industries of course embrace all types of tech to make money (didn't Disney use generative AI for the opening sequence of a Marvel series last year?)
Yes, and they also employ legions of human artists.
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edit: I checked out the OP artists' Patreon and they are, at a minimum, making over $2500/mo that way. That's a lot more than $0!
"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it. Worse still, that means they'll tend to be attached to their first ideas..."
So obstinate people expect the desired outcome to depend on their expertise at some point(s) in the past. Is the difference between the two just humility?
Some do that humility was the mother of all virtues in the same way that pride is the mother of all vices ... I don't have any data to back it up either way, but I would say anecdotally (and thus providing a single datum), "yes".
I was struck by the number of oddly posed photos as well. The choice seems consistent across all their Q&A interviews. https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/qa/
A clue about the styling can be found on their 'About' page: "Our work often resembles journalistic alchemy — we mash together the complexities of science with the malleable art of storytelling in an attempt to forge a precious new alloy. It can be a mind-bending enterprise, but we relish the challenge."
"... Louis Sarkozy is a Franco-American writer. After having been raised in France, he moved to the United States and graduated from Valley Forge Military Academy and College... " [1]
and
"... He is currently applying to the United States Army's Officer Candidate School, where he hopes to start a career as an Army officer..." [2]
Makes it seem like he is preparing to be the next Lafayette in case China invades the USA.
'Irish beef' here refers to the country of origin. This is a hangover from the BSE crisis, when people became very edgy about British beef. Restaurants nearly always say where beef came from ever since.
That's probably true, but it's also very common to see for example "British [meat]" or "German [meat]" marketed in their respective countries these days, not just beef.
Paradoxically, British beef producers and their marketing board doubled down and made a virtue of Britishness, which seemed brave at the time, but was based on confidence -- and building confidence -- in the inspection and control regimes.
Frankly I think that confidence has been repaid over the long term, but at the same time I have only eaten beef or lamb a handful of times a year since the late nineties, even though whatever risk I carry of some future diagnosis is entirely to do with having been alive and eaten beef before 1989!
I'm not saying they are not worthy of consumption or anything like that, but A: I doubt very many teachers would accept a "book report" written about a graphic novel and B: consuming graphic novels, by their nature, is not purely reading. Your brain/imagination has far less work to do, as you don't have to mentally picture the scenes/people/actions, they are right there for you to look at.
These are... not books.
you don't have to mentally picture the scenes/people/actions
I sort of see what you're saying, even if I don't agree with it. I think the really neat thing about these, are that they present _classic stories_ in a way that is more appealing, and more easily digestible, to kids who might never have considered them otherwise.
I remember when I was in middle school, my English teacher had a box in the corner of comic book adaptations of about a dozen "classic" stories. Several were stories by Poe, and similar 1800s-era classics. (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, etc.) I devoured them (despite loving reading "regular" books too). I've forgotten most of the plots, but remember having enjoyed reading them. Some of them, I've never read the originals, but for others I had already read (or subsequently read) the more-detailed originals. (Anything Sherlock Holmes, at the time, was something I enjoyed.)
Reading these stories as a manga makes you lose out on a lot of details, but probably makes it a lot easier to digest some things. Pride and Prejudice, for example, has pages of details of peoples' social lives, and the complex interactions of several younger and older women, along with descriptions of gardens and houses, and I know that I definitely had trouble keeping track of who all the ancillary characters were. Having visual representations of these characters might make it easier to track that. You lose out on the richness of Austen's prose, but you keep the core character developments, relationships, and emotional interactions that form the basis of the stories.
That makes a while since I've read physical books, but the great things I liked when I was a child was books with illustrations. Not the one with a picture every two pages, but one that tries to paint the atmosphere of the books. For short fictions (150 pages), I'm OK with the cover, but for anything longer a few full pages pictures kinda kept me in. It anchored me in the story.
Picture books have been around from the very beginning. I'd say that the modern graphic novel is just the result of various gradual innovations, one of the important ones being that of embedding text - speech, thoughts, onomatopoeic description - inside the pictures rather than alongside them, which improves the flow of the story, and which helps prevent the reader from becoming focused on either the pictures or text to the exclusion of the other.
I'd posit that anyone whose imagination conjures up mental pictures from a purely written book would be incapable of not doing so with a graphic novel. One's brain could have less to do, true... yet it doesn't choose the easy path. In my personal experience, the scenes of a good story grow and become more detailed in my imagination, regardless of whether they are depicted in prose or picture.
One thing I love about written language is that can be used in so many ways; the vast majority of reading isn't 'purely' reading for me, but associated with other activities - encyclopaedias are reading interspersed with skimming, possibly in order to inform another task such as writing, graphic novels are the appreciation of visual art in a narrative form supported by text, and then there's the entirely practical way in which being able to read "wet paint" helps me from getting myself into a sticky situation.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/warm-sesam3/id6744872364
Please take a look at the 'About' in settings