Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

When generating art with MidJourney, one of my favorite things to put in a prompt is "magic hour." Here are some results with and without that phrase; see if you agree!

In both cases, this is MidJourney v4, and the only addition to the prompts was ", magic hour"

#AIart #midjourney

@freemo Yes, that is an important point! But again, at the risk of belaboring this, that's on the "exit" side of things, and I'm not seeing much on the "enter" side of things.

It's nice to know I can't easily be kicked out of club UFI, but that doesn't answer why I'd want to be in club UFI in the first place.

Put another way (and now I really am starting to think this horse is dead), people have been falsely accusing qoto, and therefore you, for a while now. But Eugen removing qoto from joinmastodon pushed your buttons big-time. It incensed you in a way that being on a blocklist or three did not. Why? Because it was Eugen, and you care about his opinion more than others? Or, as I recall you stating, because being removed from joinmastodon cut off a supply of users unexpectedly?

I guess I'm thinking it's mostly the latter, which is why I'm saying that I think the UFI needs to deliver some value like that. Be a better joinmastodon, not subject to arbitrary whims, but with a covenant and process.

@freemo I guess what I'm getting at is: in terms of outreach, I hope there's something more. A UFI site to point people that makes onboarding much easier than it currently is, for example.

Right now the choices are joinmastodon, which was weirdly limited and unhelpful even before they cravenly booted qoto, or something overwhelming and unhelpful like instances.social or fediverse.observer.

Perhaps UFI could deliver a better index site? That could be an attractor, at least for admins open to more users, and the "safelist" (I hate the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist") would then be a bonus.

@freemo ...which is appealing to people who suspect they might be soon on the chopping block, but nobody ever does! Or rather, those who expect to be defederated generally deserve to be, and the zone of protection would do them no good.

You feel strongly the need for a zone of protection because you are in the middle of being unjustly targeted. Most admins are not.

So if I'm running a server, decentpeople.socialbutintroverted, or whatever, and I see there's a proposal, right now it seems like it amounts to: If you're just starting out, or suddenly dealing with a big influx of users, and would like some guidance or advice on moderation, here's a minimal code of conduct that you can use. As a bonus, if you affirm that code of conduct, you'll be able to advertise on your About page that you are part of the United Federation of Instances, which lets people coming to your server know you're not a haven for nazis or pesos or whatever. And if there's any accusation against your server, other UFI servers will stand with you--so long as you're still actually following that code of conduct.

Does that seem like a fair description? Because I'm not entirely sure how appealing that is as I wrote it, but then, I don't run a server.

@freemo I don't want to go through the trouble of creating a GitLab account, nor use my work GitLab account, to ask there, so I'll ask here:

I think I get why you're doing this. UFI seems like it should emphasize positive association rather than the negative association of FediBlock, for example. The question is: why would another server admin want to join UFI?

@MichaelPorter This seems completely broken, and reminds me of the strange behavior I started to see around iOS 7. That was rumored to be when Jony Ive took over. Before that point, every element on iOS had a Z-position, and things that were pulled up or down or over all layered in a predictable order, with UI affordances that made the order clear. That was deemed (apparently by Mr. Ive) to be too skeuomorphic and unwelcome in an all-digital world, and so the layering disappeared, and the coloring the indicating depth disappeared, and it stopped being possible to figure out what was tappable, and... whew! Bad memories.

This feels like more of that. Coloring the tabs correctly would be suggestive of the real world, and skeuomorphism is out, so instead you just have to guess that in this app, and maybe only this app, the blue text indicates the active tab. Are there only two tabs? You have a 50% chance of guessing correctly, then!

Picking up tacos at Rusty Taco, there are signs about tacos, natch. The t-shirts worn by employees carry a restaurant slogan: “God. Country. Tacos.” I’m not entirely sure how they square those priorities with repurposing Joshua 24:15 into Salsa 24:7, which seems mildly sacrilegious to me, but the tacos are good.

#photography #RustyTacos

My daughter wants beef tacos for lunch, so I asked MidJourney for help.

The "beef tacos" are almost normal, but the "beef soft tacos" have unusual titles add for no obvious reason, and definitely no benefit.

#AIart #midjourney

Today I tried a few new prompts, no refinements, just simple phrases. These are from MidJourney, and my settings are: MJ version 4, Base quality, Style med, Regular upscale.

The v4 model often seems to add titles where none are needed or wanted, but overall I found all eight images pleasing. The waterfront pics don't look like Hong Kong at all, but they're all nice-looking waterfronts. The night market pics look more like Hong Kong, except all the Chinese writing is broken.

#AIart #midjourney #HongKong

@xine the whole thing does seem very middle-school to me. I say that as a parent to a middle schooler!