Recalling the Last Four Days

As I write here, the day is ending.

A trite observation in some sense, but then again, this is one of two ``mandated'' long weekends for this year from my employer due to the addition of a gazetted break day to the government declared one.

So four days. Across these four days I...

• Finished re-reading The Sandman;
• Caught up on the latest for One-Punch Man manga adaptation;
• Caught up on Komi Can't Communicate manga;
• Completed A Hat in Time;
• Completed version 1.0 of Vampire Survivors;
• Replaced my 12-year-old mattress with a new one;
• Finally started on The Complete Calvin and Hobbes: Book One (1985--1988);
• Completed the perimeter wall shape for my castle project in Minecraft;
• Hung out with some friends old and new playing games (Singapore Dream, Splendor, and Unstable Unicorns);
• Finally picked up Aurelia to doodle on---I've been meaning to do so, but kept being distracted on other instruments like Eliana, and Mio;
• Accidentally partook in the Deepavali lighting festivities out in Little India while on the last bus heading home (the police presence was heavy with deployed riot police command centres);
• Continued with a summoning build that I started quite a long time ago in Grim Dawn; and
• Catch up on some of the Hololive/Holostars EN folks.

It was definitely a feature-filled four days, coupled with generally adequate amounts of sleep (that is going to go awry when the work week begins anew).

Head is comfortably empty; I feel fairly relaxed. With that new mattress, there is definitely a break between before this four-day break, and the last quarter of the year.

Oh, and NaNoWriMo is coming up. I've a rough idea of my new novel, currently titled Dig It All Realisation. Still needs to have the draft structure set up though... which I think I will do some time later this week.

I think that's about it. It's a really short post as these posts go. Just wanted to make a note of it here so that perhaps some time in the future, I can look back on this date and summon up the memories that I didn't write in here.

Till the next update.

lang-aware Domain

Yeah yeah, I know. No word from me for a while, and then suddenly two posts in quick order.

🤷‍♂️

I finished reading The Sandman series once again. The last time I read it was back nearly 10 years ago, from way back when. To say that The Sandman was influential to me is an understatement---I have previously written about how Death of the Endless is my handphone wallpaper, as evidenced from 2015, and once again in 2013. That was roughly when I started to fear less about Death and think of Death not necessarily as a cute goth chick, but as an inevitable old friend who will come visit in time to come.

Dream though, he's too bloody moody in his Morpheus aspect. Reading the CBRs in the full glory of my vertical monitor is a much different feel from reading it off the puny tablets and even punier phone.

But I didn't come here to write about reading The Sandman, and catching up on Komi Can't Communicate (till Chapter 376) and One-Punch Man (till Chapter 172), though they are tangentially related.

I recently updated the Unifont version from 13.0.04 to the more recent 15.0.01. While doing that, I observed that I was having a Variant Chinese character problem (this is where the tangential relatedness occurs).

First, have a look at this simulated screenshot (font used is Unifont):

Look carefully at the third CJK character after the punctuation parentheses in the second line for each (underlined in red).

Do you see a difference?

You should. The first one is the 素 glyph, rendered in 素 in Chinese, and then later on, rendered in 素 in Japanese. They are of the same Unicode codepoint---32032---but have different forms as determined solely by the context of the language that is used.

If you do not or cannot see a difference in what I wrote in this entry (as opposed to the screenshot), it is likely that you are viewing this on a set up that do not have the correct fallback fonts installed, leading to some strange glyph being rendered instead.

In any case, the screenshot shows the outcome of the quality of life improvement I did. In updating my hosted copy of Unifont, I also uploaded another version of Unifont that is tuned for Japanese text. I also replaced the TrueType format with the OpenType format where applicable, solely to transfer less bytes overall when these fallback versions of the fonts are used to handle combining character algorithms (about 4.8 MiB compared to around 15 MiB).

Now that the outcome is demonstrated, let me talk about what exactly I did.

I went through my entire website and added lang attributes to all text fragments that deviate from standard English. For each of the lang attributes used, I defined a list of fonts (most likely to appear on the Big 3 operating systems) and styles to best represent it. These included:

• ``fonipa'' for International Phonetic Alphabet;
• ``zh-Latn'' for the romanised pinyin (think dizi and the like);
• ``zh'' for regular Chinese; and
• ``ja'' for Japanese.

These language tags also allow anyone else who have different settings for rendering different languages (see this old rant about CJK font sizes).

I know that it is a short blurb of what I did, but it involved quite a bit of digging and updating through all the files. But all of these are worth it as it helps improve the readability of my personal domain.

And that's about all I want to talk about for this for now, I suppose.

Till the next update.

Tension Headaches... Again

This week... was a bust.

I was hit with a nasty tension headache that was ameliorated only through a few days of mandated rest and orphenadrine-infused paracetamol from the doctor.

In addition, I was also hit with random bouts of low grade fever (the so-called febricula).

The combination of it all meant intense brain fog that made thinking hard to impossible.

I absolutely hate that. That's why as part of my own thought experiments, I think I'd rather euthanise myself when I eventually get diagnosed with dementia---I'd rather leave the mortal coil on my own terms while I am still mentally competent than to lose what is essentially me, leaving behind a husk of a body. But part of that difficulty is defining where the boundary of the point of no return should be---should it be at the moment where I am diagnosed as having dementia, or should it be when I realise that I am losing it, diagnosed or otherwise, or should it be left to the consensus of the people whom I interact with?

Each has its pros and cons, and I have not figured out the best strategy yet. Which is why there is still no page on my own domain that leaves behind explicit instructions on how to handle me when I am no longer competent. Whatever I may end up putting up needs to be sufficiently ironclad that no one can collude and harm me, while at the same time, not prolong my own suffering---a difficult trade-off.

Anyway, thanks to all that, this week is a bust. Thankfully there's yet another mandated ``wellness day'' thing that is a declared day-off on Friday, which when combined with Deepavali on Monday, leads to an excessively long four-day weekend.

Whatever shall I do with all that time?

Not completely sure. There are some partial plans that I am not at liberty to reveal here till perhaps after the fact, and apart from that, I don't have much else in mind.

Maybe restarting my more ``hard-core'' practising of flute/dizi. Or building more of my Minecraft castle. Or grind through the Son of Sparda difficulty of Devil May Cry 5, the ``true'' starting difficulty of the game.

Who knows?

This post is fairly short... just wanted to note that I'm still not dead yet, and that the days are still bloody hot and muggy.

Till the next update then.

AI Art?

Ah, October, the oddly named tenth month of the year. Probably the month where the on-rush of inertia towards the end of this year and the start of the next is the strongest. After the last entry involving tiny fonts, I didn't really feel a need to say anything. Until now.

The recent release of DALL·E for unfettered public use combined with how an artist winning top honours at a fine arts competition with AI generated image has fanned flames of arguments for and against the recognition of AI generated images as art.

I won't list the arguments down here, but instead share my perspective on this and on related aspects of this in general.

See, scientific and technological progress leaves an indelible mark on the overall psyche of the human race. In many cases, the belief that something is possible has proven to be enough of an impetus to drive someone to make that belief a reality. If they can explain it, we get new science. If they can replicate it consistently, we get new technology. In that sense, the progress of science and technology cannot be halted.

In the case of having faster computational hardware, or the ability to make more money with less labour in the world of manufacturing and business, almost everyone is in agreement that such progress is beneficial. And the near optimism of the ingenuity of humanity to solve problems in the future (especially the problems that the solutions of today have created) creates this self-feeding and self-expanding loop of advancement.

Due to the generally dehumanised aspects of manufacturing, business, and computation, most people do not see a threat of sorts. There were once those who fought against the rise of the machines in industrialisation, but their fight was more about how the former labourers were ill-treated in the rise of higher productivity tools than how the tools were of higher productivity, despite their group (the ``Luddites'') being used these days to mean an opposition to industrialisation/automation.

So, why the brouhaha over AI generated images as art?

It's not just an issue about labour the way the original Luddites were fighting against (though I suspect that this will eventually become the real argument in time to come), but it seems to, at some level, impinge upon what some claim to be a quality of what is essentially human---art. ``Art'' is a loaded term, and with the post-modern movement being a thing, is even more loaded than ever before.

At the risk of oversimplification, ``art'' can be thought of as the outcome from the sum total of an expression of qualities that have not been adequately expressed/explained in a quantitative manner that permits a consistently deterministic and predictable outcome. You know, the thematic opposite of ``science''.

Art is older than science---we have been expressing/creating things long before we knew how to characterise, explain, and replicate them at scale. Despite all the new gadgets that we have created over time, art still exists, though to be fair, art has also evolved.

Evolved to make use of the newest gadgets to assist in the expression.

Finger painting was among the first forms of visual art. Then different pigments were discovered, and other media to use them were also created. Art evolved from depicting the past to depicting the future, from symbolisms of reality to abstractions to hyper-realism, from the still to the animated to full multimedia extravaganza---you name it, art has and will continue to explore it.

AI generated images is just another gadget that is created that incumbents have not gotten used to. After all, no one seems to bat an eyelid when the ``clone stamp'' is used in art, or even more dumbly, when three-point perspective is used---both of the cited examples are gadgets/technological tools that artists have accepted as part of their toolkit of expression.

AI generated images are going to be that, eventually. There is no running away from it, and I am sure that many artists know this.

But what they are angry about is the same as what the Luddites are angry about back in the day: the ill-treatment of the specialists of the art by the Johnny-come-lately wielders of the latest geegaw brashly proclaiming deceptively that they were also artists without acknowledging that their apparent powers came about through the use of a new high-productivity tool as opposed to walking the hard path that the specialists of old used to get to where they were.

Thus, it is about the deception that are ruffling the feathers of the naysayers against AI generated images as art, and not necessarily the AI itself. There are some arguments about how the AI model is somehow stealing intellectual property through amassing the images of artists to train from, but I do not see how this argument can be fought comfortably, considering that even the regular training of a human artist involves studying the artwork of other artists.

As someone from tech-land, I want to point out that the representation of something does not make it that something, i.e. ``a map is not the territory''. If the representation used in the AI model is a literal copy of the image, then there are strong grounds for how the AI model is truly a copying-plagiarist. However, if the representation used is an abstracted form of the image, then the argument is severely weakened---even in the case of human-land, when an artist is sued for copyright infringement through what is claimed to be a derivative work, the burden of proof for the actual copying aspect is subtle enough that a lawsuit in front of a judge is needed to sort it out, because factors other than the representation in the head of the allegedly infringing artist will come into play to determine culpability.

There may be strong arguments about attribution of the training data source images, especially if they are digital in nature, mostly because in the land of the discrete, a map of the territory is the cheapest when it can be a literal copy of the territory itself. For the confused, this means that if I want a ``map'' (i.e. representation) of the digital ``territory'' (say an image, or a video, or even a plain text document), it will cost me negligible amounts to simply copy bit-for-bit of the digital ``territory'' than to re-create a ``map'' of it (through transcoding for example).

Other than that though, it is probably best to dissuade deception by making it clear when a work is made from these AI tools, at least until their use are so ubiquitous that it seems a bit silly to do so (no one ever declares their use of three-point perspective for example).

And when will that be? Who knows... I've written a fairly long and rambling post, and it is time to head back into Minecraft to prepare the perimeter for my traditional stone brick castle.

Till the next update then.