Black person here; this social disconnect is of course something I pay quite a bit of attention to.
The answer, typically, is OF COURSE. Big time. It would be well appreciated by most.
That being said, I get where this perception comes from -- there can be, as you call them, outsider social-justice folk who might try to say something weird here:
But I just need to highlight the "outsider" part of that -- if only for non-black folks to understand and to try to pay attention to exactly who you're listening to and getting authority from? I hate to use a phrase like "real Black people" but I'll go with that for now; real Black people tend to be the MOST reasonable, but often under-heard.
I'm reminded of, e.g. police reform; I understand that it's incredibly important and necessary. Which is why phrases/ideas like "Abolish the police" and "ACAB" are deeply unhelpful.
(and as always, I am only one Black person, nothing I say here should be taken as gospel for everyone, I could be wrong)
I'm reminded of college in Hyde Park: the older black people wanted the UCPD in the neighborhood because they saw it as a force of stability, while young white students who wouldn't be affected by shrinking the patrol area criticized it.
The paper discussed has A.M. Darke listed as an author, who appears to be black. And that adaptive shell paper is not about black hair - it merely uses black hair as an example, along with cat hair, dog hair, leaves, and horse hair.
Ok I don't know what to tell you then, we can't answer your question because there are no papers that meet your criteria. That's the whole point of this discussion, nobody has even tried.
More accurately, there are over 300 SIGGRAPH papers on hair.
Slide 3, with this headline:
> Curly hair in graphics research is limited to “classical European locks”
Contains this phrase:
> which varies from an elongated ellipse for African hair
Which leads me to think the Eurocentricity of the other 300 papers is being rather oversold. The Beethoven-looking redhead on the previous slide has two hair styles which are unmistakably models of common African hair textures. Being generous I would guess that the hair was made lighter to show details better? Caucasians presenting with that level of frizz is also not unheard of.
Afro-textured hair is certainly a topic worth a few SIGGRAPH monographs all on its own, and a dedicated library is also great. But I suspect that a thorough review of the 300 papers in question would find that the insinuation that none of them treat on the subject of African hair is somewhere between "not supported" and "wildly false".
I am not going to read through all 328 papers to fact check this, but I'm very confident they did do a "thorough review", that's how you start research like this. There's a bit more detail in the course that this presentation is from:
> As of 2021, we only found two technical papers that showed Afro-textured hair [Bertails et al. 2005; Patrick et al . 2004]. While some technical papers containing Black hair have started to appear since we published our findings [Hsu et al . 2023; Wang et al. 2023], these usually represent relatively unstyled hair. Some styles have started to appear in short talks [Ogunseitan 2022], but a wide range of intricate, sophisticated, and very common hair styles still lie outside the visual language of computer graphics research.
The four papers they mention here are not from SIGGRAPH. The "short talk" was from SIGGRAPH 2022, but as that phrase implies it was a talk and not a paper.
One could read the claim being made as there aren’t any papers that are primarily about Afro-textured hair, nor about Black hair geometry considerations, which is likely true. There might not be that many papers that you could say are primarily about Caucasian hair either, but there most definitely is a lot of straight and wavy hair. I think some Siggraph hair papers do show examples of Afro-textured hair, IMO Darke’s slides here have one (p.23, example (c)) tkim.graphics/MORETHAN/Darke_Slides.pdf
Might be worth pointing out there aren’t that many siggraph papers on procedural hair geometry generation, quite a few are on rendering hair and do cover dark/black hair with elliptical cross sections. IIRC there are some papers on blonde hair specifically because it exhibits more visible scattering.
Anyway… is there a historical/cultural bias toward Eurocentric hair and not a lot of representation of Black hair? Yes that would probably be totally fair to say. Splitting hairs on whether or not their words are unambiguously and perfectly accurate might be slightly beside the point. Let’s take it as a hint that we can improve, and enjoy a paper that brings new hair generation methods to bear.
I'm inclined to believe that the authors, if they quoted that, read it. The implied claim is that this treatment is inadequate. (My reading is supported by the text on the previous slide: page 23 in the PDF.)
That's what the 1987 source says, but the 1906 article says
> In days when vigilante justice was a major component of the Society, "not a few horse thieves were apprehended by the organization of the long name."
Can we stop it with the "bad apples CEO" thing. These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do. They're not exceptions. Theyre the norm.
The reality is that ads and such are (probably) the only effective way to go and founders will sell to capital groups for profit. Over and over. Look at image hosting, which is a similar case. We went from ad laden tinypic's and such to ad-free imgur and now imgur is ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.
We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.
They are objectively bad for some definitions of bad. What do you want for them? Universal respect? Just because taking something good and making it shitty is one way to make money doesn't mean that it is the only way to make money.
And yet, when YouTube cracks down on adblockers, people on here get outraged instead of just paying for Premium. Everyone keeps saying "just let me pay" but when the option exists, it seems like most still avoid it and stick to complaining.
I read that in their battle with adblockers, the YouTube team seems to have broken Premium at least once. I think they were accidentally showing banner ads to Premium users.[1] It seems kind of odd, but wouldn’t your money be better off being spent on helping the ad-blocking effort rather than paying websites that seem to offer a gradually worse experience for everyone who isn’t blocking ads?
Yes, that's certainly an odd argument. Why would I do that when I'm happy with the service I'm paying for? Especially when it's the best way to support the creators I enjoy, since they get a much bigger share of revenue from Premium views than regular views.
I don’t trust or like the company. I expect them to drive up the premium price in the future, make it inconvenient to use multiple devices, etc. so I’d much rather steal their stuff.
That's still an extremely blunt point. While we can imagine some alternative world where we all live in a communist utopia and the internet is the great free place it was in its early days, it's not so easy to build such a society. All the attempts I'm aware of either didn't scale (small, local communes) or were large-scale disasters resulting in the deaths of millions.
What we have now is no paradise, but it's not a disaster either. It's balanced on the razor's edge of disaster, however.
I'm assuming parent-poster means "publicly-traded corporations with limited-liability and low friction on transfers of ownership."
However you're right that "capitalism" encompasses many potential different varieties and actors. For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
Family owned businesses can be sold to private equity just like any other. Instant Pot was a family owned business started by the inventor and it was famously sold to private equity who then proceeded to raid its assets and bankrupt the company.
In contrast, I've never heard a complaint about a previously-respected product run by a private-equity firm that became ruined after it was taken private by a closely-held family business.
This person is trying to clarify that the problem isn't specific to Fandom, it is a general problem with our system of capitalism and will never go away until we change our system of economic incentives.
Basically, sell everything of value to make a quick buck is the guiding principle of our economy at present. It's the best way to get rich even though it ultimately makes society way worse off long term. We have to solve this on a fundamental level or things like Fandom will just keep happening.
Can we stop this capitalism boogeyman thing? Market economies don't force people to conduct business this way. We've had our current system for a long time and while corporate raiding has always existed the current epidemic is very recent. Its the result of a complex confluence of market, legal, regulatory and competitive forces that make it an ideal move for many businesses.
> These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do
I'm sort of without, in the sense that they are for profit, so the CEO is going to attempt to increase profit. The problem arise when short-term profit is priorities over all else. I don't see the point in trying to have a record year, in terms of profit, if that means that customers/users are leaving your business long term.
Part of it might be the whole misguided SV startup mentality where we burn a ton of money and then sort of hope that profit will appear when volume is reached. Imgur is a pretty good example, not once did the founder stop to think about why all their competitors sucked. In the long run Imgur was forced down the same dark path because the idea is, and always was, going to be unprofitable.
I don't think Fandom is unprofitable necessarily. They have a lot of original content, written by unpaid users, and which has been increasing in popularity. The problem is how profitable they need to be vs. how profitable they want to be. They don't need to be a billion dollar company, there's nothing wrong with being a 100 million dollar company, or how much they are able to sustain without pushing users away. They just have to not lose money.
I'm with you for the most part but we definitely need to hold PE and the Ticketmasters of the world more accountable- there's no escaping modern capitalism but better markets are definitely possible.
Yes, when I said "what happened" I was referring to how quickly the site changed for the worse and how extreme the decline was, not just the fact that it has ads. Most sites do follow the pattern described in the parent because they can't escape the need to make money, the transition is usually very gradual and they often stop at the point of sustainability, rather than pushing to the absolute maximum of short-term audience-destroying profit.
@zoeysmithe I'm sorry for the mass downvotes though, I think you are basically right. I still think it's worth noting private equity ownership because while we can't really choose what economic system we're in, we can often choose to work with people who care about more than just profit.
Yes, and like pretty much every AI release I've seen, even these cherry-picked examples mostly do not quite match the given prompt. The outputs are genuinely incredible, but if you imagine actually trying to use this for work, it would be very frustrating. A few examples from this page:
Pumpkin patch - Not sitting on the grass, not wearing a scarf, no rows of pumpkins the way most people would imagine.
Sloth - that's not really a tropical drink, and we can't see enough of the background to call it a "tropical world".
Fire spinner - not wearing a green cloth around his waist
Ghost - Not facing the mirror, obviously not reflected the way the prompter intended. No old beams, no cloth-covered furniture, not what I would call "cool and natural light". This is probably the most impressively realistic-looking example, but it almost certainly doesn't come close to matching what the prompter was imagining.
Monkey - boat doesn't have a rudder, no trees or lush greenery
Science lab - no rainbow wallpaper
This seems like nitpicking, and again I can't underestimate how unbelievable the technology is, but the process of making any kind of video or movie involves translating a very specific vision from your brain to reality. I can't think of many applications where "anything that looks good and vaguely matches the assignment" is the goal. I guess stock footage videographers should be concerned.
This all matches my experience using any kind of AI tool. Once I get past my astonishment at the quality of the results, I find it's almost always impossible to get the output I'm looking for. The details matter, and in most cases they are the only thing that matters.
The one thing that immediately stood out to me in the ghost example was how the face of the ghost had "wobbly geometry" and didn't appear physically coupled to the sheet. This and the way the fruit in the sloth's drink magically rested on top of the drink without being wedged onto the edge of the glass as that would require were actually some of the more immediate "this isn't real" moments for me.
The ghost is insanely impressive, it's the example that gave me a "wow" effect. The cloth physic looks stunning, I never thought we would reach such a level of temporal coherence so fast.
I think those types of visual glitches can probably be fixed with more or better training, and I have no doubt that future versions of this type of system will produce outputs that are indistinguishable from real videos.
But better training can't fix the more general problem that I'm describing. Perfect-looking videos aren't useful if you can't get it to follow your instructions.
CNN is the most popular news website in the US by a huge margin and they are confident enough in their position that they're going to start testing out a paywall next month.
> There have been no papers on afro-textured hair at SIGGRAPH ever.
There are over 300 SIGGRAPH papers on other types of hair.
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