The complex mental gymnastics involved in retaining a racist worldview — I recently had an argument with racists online, which gave me food for thought. What I find interesting is that racist ideas are quite widespread, but almost no racist I have ever debated will actually admit to being a racist. They will admit to holding all the ideas which according…

ChatGPT and AI art are emergent phenomena — As I read about more of the details around ChatGPT and AI art creation tools such as Stable Diffusion, I am left with the impression that these systems were not really planned. Rather, something quite amazing arose from attempting to solve much smaller, more narrowly defined problems. …

Comparing the processing of cooking food with making digital images using AI — Unless you live under a rock, you must have picked up on the fact that we currently live at the beginning of an artificial intelligence revolution. In many ways, this is like the beginning of the internet revolution. It swept across the world in the mid-90s and later accelerated with…

Why you need to grasp RGB, CMYK and HSL colors — With AI Art, you write what you want and there is no need to know traditional artist stuff like color models, right? Wrong, if you really want to get good at AI Art, you need to actually learn the usual stuff that any artist has to master. In this regard…

In Affinity Photo, we can change skin tones using blend modes and blending ranges — When working with AI Art, I often need to make changes to skin tones, so I watched various videos on the topic. These videos are great, and I advise you to have a look. However, occasionally, we just want to have something to read as a quick reference, reminder, or…

Basic stuff that all Affinity users should know — This is just a collection of things I have picked up on which I realize are very useful and important for just general usage of Affinity Photo and related suite of tools. Olivio Sarikas has an excellent intro to Affinity Photo which would cover a lot of the same things…

How do Nordic and Asian culture around individualism and common good differ? — Nordic societies are famous for social democracy, which is a social and economic model where the government takes an active role in ensuring the health and wellbeing of all citizens. In a corporate setting or in sports, the group is often emphasized over the individual; what did we achieve together…

Assuming Russia attacked and Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland all stood united with no nukes involved — I saw this kind of silly hypothetical question on Quora and thought it would be fun to speculate and compare. Russia has some obvious numerical advantages. The whole Nordic region only counts 27.36 million people, which is much smaller than the population of Ukraine of 43.79 million people. In comparison…

Canadian professor of psychology Jordan B. Peterson offers his views on every possible topic, but should we listen? — This article began as I was writing about highly intelligent and successful figures in academia who abuse their well-earned recognition in one area to peddle pseudo-science and nonsense in other areas. I began by writing about William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, who after his successful scientific career spent…