Well, for me, the selling points are:

• Versus earlier versions of USB, it's reversible. This isn't a game changer, I guess, but it's definitely nice to not have to fiddle plugs around all the time.

• I don't know if it's the only form of USB that does USB PD -- I'd guess not -- but in practice, it seems to be pretty strongly associated with USB PD. Having USB PD isn't essential, but it makes charging larger devices, like laptops, a lot more practical. I can lug around a power station that doesn't need to have an embedded inverter.

I still feel that it's kind of physically small and weak compared to USB A. That's an okay tradeoff for small portable devices that don't have the space for larger connectors, but I'm kinda not enthralled about it on desktop. I worry more about bending connectors (and I have bent them before).

So for me, I'd say that it's definitely nice, but not really in a game changing sense. I could do the things it can do in somewhat-worse ways prior to USB-C.

Thanks for trying it out! Both the inpainting and outpainting -- the expansion -- worked better than I'd expected, though I dunno if that's exactly what M0oP0o's after.

Lots of odd artifacting, slow creation time and yes it had some issues with sailormoon.

It probably isn't worth the effort for most things, but one option might also be -- and I'm not saying that this will work well, but a thought -- using both. That is, if Bing Image Creator can generate images with content that you want but gets some details wrong and can't do inpainting, but Midjourney can do inpainting, it might be possible to take a Bing-generated image that's 90% of what you want and then inpaint the particular detail at issue using Midjourney. The inpainting will use the surrounding image as an input, so it should tend to try to generate similar image.

I'd guess that the problem is that an image generated with one model probably isn't going to be terribly stable in another model -- like, it probably won't converge on exactly the same thing -- but it might be that surrounding content is enough to hint it to do the right thing, if there's enough of that context.

I mean, that's basically -- for a limited case -- how AI upscaling works. It gets an image that the model didn't generate, and then it tries to generate a new image, albeit with only slight "pressure" to modify rather than retain the existing image.

It might produce total garbage, too, but might be worth an experiment.

What I'd probably try to do if I were doing this locally is to feed my starting image into the thing to generate prompt terms that my local model can use to generate a similar-looking image, and include those when doing inpainting, since those prompt terms will be adapted to trying to create a reasonably-similar image using the different model. On Automatic1111, there's an extension called Clip Interrogator that can do this ("image to text").

Searching online, it looks like Midjourney has similar functionality, the /describe command.

https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/describe

It's not magic -- I mean, end of the day, the model can only do what it's been trained on -- but I've found that to be helpful locally, since I'd bet that Bing and Midjourney expect different prompt terms for a given image.

Oh I also tried local generation (forgot the name) and wooooow is my local PC bad at pictures (clearly can’t be my lack of ability it setting it up).

Hmm. Well, that I've done. Like, was the problem that it was slow? I can believe it, but just as a sanity check, if you run on a CPU, pretty much everything is mind-bogglingly slow. Do you know if you were running it on a GPU, and if so, how much VRAM it has? And what you were using (like, Stable Diffusion 1.5, Stable Diffusion XL, Flux, etc?)

@M0oP0o@mander.xyz, as far as I can tell, you always use Bing Image Creator.

And as far as I can tell, @Thelsim@sh.itjust.works always uses Midjourney.

I don't use either. But as far as I know, neither service currently charges for generation of images. I don't know if there's some sort of different rate-limit that favors one over the other, or another reason to use Bing (perhaps Midjourney's model is intentionally not trained on Sailor Moon?), but I do believe that Midjourney can do a few things that Bing doesn't.

One of those is inpainting. Inpainting, for those who haven't used it, lets one start with an existing image, create a mask that specifies that only part of the image should be regenerated, and then regenerate that part of the image using a specified prompt (which might differ from the prompt used to generate the image as a whole). I know that Thelsim's used this feature before with Midjourney, because she once used it to update an image with some sort of poison witch image with hands over a green glowing pot, so I'm pretty sure that it's available to Midjourney general users.

I know that you recently expressed frustration with Bing's Image Creator's current functionality, wanted more.

Inpainting's time-consuming, but it can let a lot of images be rescued, rather than having to just re-reroll the whole image. Have you tried using Midjourney? Was there anything there that you found made it not acceptable?

Relevant username.

Back under Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings was a very vocal advocate of the UK setting up something similar (though he referenced ARPA, DARPA's predecessor, which wasn't explicitly-military).

The result of that was ARIA being set up last year.

He was also very interested in advanced artificial intelligence work, so I kind of imagine that funding that was a goal.

https://www.aria.org.uk/

I don't know if all their work is public, but looking at that website, it looks like they're publicly working on:

• Genetic engineering of plants

• Robot dexterity

• Analysis of "tipping points" caused by climate change

• Safeguarded AI research (how to "contain" advanced artificial intelligences)

Aww. Thanks for doing the research, though!

it's just ComfyUI behaving this way. Nothing is loaded, no LLMs

Oh, okay, then I'm probably wrong on VRAM, then. On my system, it needs to actually run the nodes before the VRAM gets allocated. Sorry! I thought I had it...

Just realized that I was dyslexic with the ordering directive, which worked well with Flux apparently not understanding it, since I wound up with the desired ordering; I'd intended to write "left to right".

Not yet! One thing that AI generated images right now are not so good at is maintaining a consistent portrayal of a character from image to image, which is something you want for illustrating a story.

You might be able to do something like that with a 3d modeler to pose characters, generate a wireframe, and then feed that wireframe into ControlNet. Or if you have a huge corpus of existing images of a particular character portrayed in a particular way, you could maybe create new images with them in new situations. But without that, it's hard to go from a text description to many images portrayed in a consistent way. For one image, it works, and for some things, that's fine. But you'd have a hard time doing, say, a graphic novel that way.

I suspect that doing something like that is going to require having models that are actually working with 3D internal representations of the world, rather than 2D, at a bare minimum.

Are there any specifics as to what the major disagreement was on, or has been in the past? All the article has is:

The coalition leaders meeting was widely reported as a "make or break" meeting for the coalition, with Lindner, in particular, having hinted in the run-up that he was not too worried about the latter.

In his reaction to Scholz's scathing remarks, Lindner accused the chancellor of a "calaculated break-up of the coalition" and his coaliton partners of "not even accepting" the FDP's proposals for turning the economy around "as a basis for discussion". Discord about how to revive an ailing economy

The coalition had been at odds for a while, with serious strains on the budget for 2025 and a disappointing performance by the German economy eliciting increasingly different suggestions on how to face and solve the problems.

So I'm assuming that Lindner wants more-economically-liberal policy than Scholz does?

Is there reason to believe that there's sufficient public support in elections to form a red-green coalition, or is it likely that the SDP and Greens would be out of government in a new election?

kagis

https://theweek.com/politics/german-economy-crisis-volkswagen

A snap election could be "disastrous for all three coalition parties," said Reuters. SDP and the Greens have lost support since the 2021 election, and the FDP "could be ejected from parliament altogether." But the dispute involves fundamental differences: FDP wants budget cuts, while the other two parties "agree that targeted government spending is needed to stimulate the economy," Reuters said.

That doesn't sound very good for them.

If they're out, and the AfD has been at record-high levels of support, does that mean maybe an incoming AfD government?

venv nonsense

I mean, the fact that it isn't more end-user invisible to me is annoying, and I wish that it could also include a version of Python, but I think that venv is pretty reasonable. It handles non-systemwide library versioning in what I'd call a reasonably straightforward way. Once you know how to do it, works the same way for each Python program.

Honestly, if there were just a frontend on venv that set up any missing environment and activated the venv, I'd be fine with it.

And I don't do much Python development, so this isn't from a "Python awesome" standpoint.