ahdok.bsky.social
I make comics sometimes https://linktr.ee/ahdok
997 posts
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67 following
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If it helps at all, you can put a pentel energel refill in the Sarasa Grand and it fits. (I did this with my Sarasa Grand, because I like the pen body, but don't like zebra's ink and nib.)
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You can fix this by buying more fountain pens to fill up. It's the only solution.
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I think Altman has previously complained that the majority of users at the $20 subscription level cost him money because they use it too much.
I don't recall the exact figure, but I think he said they'd need to be charging something like $70 to actually break even?
Ed will know, I'm sure.
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Something that could be good would be more ways for people to discover good, independent journalism and reporting and opinion, so they can turn up and support it.
So... a publication to promote good sources of information and journalism... called The Turnip?
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Funny how people who say this kind of garbage never say *which* "diverse thoughts" they think are missing...
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Funny how people who say this never say WHICH "diverse thoughts" they think are missing...
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I'm going to do the one thing to it that those guys would hate most.
Recycle it.
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:)
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I think this is a part of it, because Kash Patel's proportions look different than they do in other photos of him.
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Here's a dramatic re-creation of this to help people visualize it.
My stand-in unfortunately has too much charisma, but the rest of the vibes should be right.
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What do you mean "if"?
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Respectful to him, or society?
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With a bunch of far right governments around the world announcing that they're committing hundreds of billions of dollars to this industry, maybe they just sell their assets to Trump and Starmer, and leave us holding the bag when the sector crumbles.
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The great part is if you make queer art all year around, you can go on a repost spree in June, and then everyone gets to drink from the firehose.
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When you rely on a machine to do this for you, you exercise those skills less, and they atrophy. Without practice, you lose the ability to check information for yourself, or understand it, and come to rely on the machine to think for you.
gizmodo.com/microsoft-st...
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Gen-AI is a tool that outsources "thinking about the problem" to a machine.
The problem is, thinking about problems develops critical thinking and reasoning skills, and reading about related information gives you a deeper understanding of the subject matter.
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If you have even a smidgeon of critical thinking, you'd realize you already know "what you need to research" if you can ask a generative AI model about it, so you can skip that step.
If you use Gen-AI, it'll give you an unreliable or wrong answer, and that just sets you back from where you started.
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Frantically asking google AI "how much does it cost to convert an AI compute data center to an AWS data center so I can sell it to amazon" and getting the response "Use glue"
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This game is calling me out pretty hard.
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Not Just Bikes intensifies.
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Hope that helps? I dunno.
Oh, also, the biggest piece of advice. Do what's fun. Don't stress about getting the exact right answer here, you can always change it later.
Far more important to start making stuff and enjoy yourself doing it.
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If you want detailed resources about making comics, I'd recommend Scott McCloud's seminal "understanding comics" and then "making comics"
If you want a more business-metrics focussed approach, then Brad Guigur's "The Webcomic's Handbook" has a lot of discussion of that stuff.
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There are LOTS of caveats to all of this. For example, if your primary distribution is going to be social media like tumblr, bsky, instagram, then "regular" doesn't matter as much, because it's pushed to your audience anyway. In that case "as frequent as possible" might matter more than a schedule.
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So: I think the best answer to your query is to first ask yourself what you want to accomplish, and what matters to you. Work out what you have to say, pick a schedule and a format that works for your ideas.
After you have that down: aim for regular updates first, then for "as frequent as possible"
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You can't really "force" an audience by changing your format into something "popular" - it's like how corporations can't meme. They're focused on the optics and the metrics, rather than on the content of the post... and people can kinda intuit what they're trying to do.
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And, having your own artistic voice, sticking to your vision - that also drives retention and audiences too! People can tell when you're passionate and genuine about your work, and they like that.
People can tell when you're just trying to follow trends and metrics for views too.
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HOWEVER, this may, or may not, conflict with your artistic vision. If you want to make huge double-page spreads full of detail, and that means making one comic a month, but you force yourself to weekly updates, then you might have to compromise your idea for regular updates...
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However, after that caveat, the more often you update, the better it is for retention, because there's less time between updates for people to drift away or forget to check it, etc etc.
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It's probably more important to make sure you're updating on time than it is to have a few more updates. "Twice a week, consistently" will probably do better for retention than "Three times a week, but I miss about 10% of updates"
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Regular updates are a definite plus for trying to build an audience, and I mean "regular" in both senses.
Assuming you have a dedicated site, It's important to have a fixed schedule and keep your output to that schedule, people will come back regularly if they know there's going to be an update.
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However, what if the question is "to attract and retain readership?" - A lot of the time when people ask "what's the best format" they're thinking in terms of trying to build an audience.
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Long and short here, if the goal is to create the best answer for your artistic output, then "whatever feels like it works best for you" is the answer here.
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If your eventual goal is to produce a book, (or you think you might want to do that one day!) then it can be good to constrain yourself to a specific set of dimensions that'd work well in print. Or sometimes constraining yourself to a set length is a good constraing creatively.
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Order of the Stick is a great example of a webcomic where the format and length shifts from one strip to the next, sometimes very short, sometimes full pages. If the strip is a simple joke, it might be 2-3 panels, but if it's narrative exposition it might be 100 panels.
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There are no hard and fast rules here. It's worth considering "do I want to have each comic be the same number of panels for consistency, so my audience has a familiar format?" vs "would I rather have every comic be as long as it needs to be for it's message?"
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So firstly, let's talk about artistic vision.
The correct answer with artistic vision is that you should make the pages and chapters as long as you think they *should* be to best convey your vision. Does your narrative work better with longer pages? Do you want short, punchy joke pages? etc.
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Hello.
This is a genuinely interesting and complicated topic, and the answer will change depending on what your goals are in asking the question!
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Alright, actual summary:
1) Made claim
2) Constructed bad faith test of claim
3) Ignored an explanation of the flaws in his claim
4) Shifted goalposts for claim to stupid ones
5) Shifted goalpoasts for test
Summary, it's not worth debating this further, because he's not interested in learning.
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It's also dangerous to turn your brain off and blindly trust that the machine.
Critical thinking, like ANY skill, is improved through application and use. It atrophies if you stop practicing.
Relying on LLMs is like using a forklift to lift weights in the gym.
www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...
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Yes, the whole pitch here is that you're "outsourcing critical thinking." If you have a niche query, and don't have the brains to contemplate the query and think about what information you need to solve it, then GPT will try to construct a plausible answer to that specific query.
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To conclude:
Green flowers.
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The funniest part is that:
1) His beetle answer contains the same wrong conclusion that his flower question did,
2) Someone else immediately runs that query through google and finds an interesting website about beetles where they learned cool stuff.
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However, for the purposes of fabricating a contest where google search doesn't contain an answer to the very specific novel question, but chatGPT does? Sure, it's a "better" query.
It's bad faith, and that's all there is to it.
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The guy then says congratulates himself and says "actually, this is a better query"
"better" for what?
For learning about the topic? No, it's the same information, but a worse framing that'll get you worse results because it's novel.
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People try to create useful resources, with information in the, and then let you do the thinking to apply that information to your specific situation. The INFORMATION you would want here is still "what colours do dogs see" and the "in beetles" part is just there to try and fabricate an advantage.
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The answer is that this is a desperate attempt to engineer a completely novel query. It's the same approach as the "in flowers" but to an extreme.
It's unlikely anyone specifically has written a webpage about the exact situation... Because it's not HELPFUL to write a page about it.
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Instead of "can dogs see the difference in colours in flowers" it's now "can dogs see the difference in colours in an iridescent beetle?"
Who's asking this? What's the point of such a query? what the hell is even going on any more?
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In order to demonstrate that he's definitely right, we now also shift the goalposts with the query, which again, was already a bad faith query.