The arts and education — when they are at their best, anyway — have in common this deep root: they ask us to see and to think and to feel, to see with fresh eyes, to be aware of our own seeing, to be •active• in our seeing.

In that way, both the arts and education are antidotes to the AI hype cycle, and similar endeavors of capitalism run amok.

2/

I’m fond of quipping that arts education is •the• foundational form of education, and that education in any field should never stray too far from being arts education.

It’s little wonder that the forces that push investment bubbles and wealth concentration are so hostile to both the arts and education. And we need to recognize that hostility, which is so often cloaked as support:

3/

Commoditization disguised as democratization is a form of hostility.

The AI venders saying “Now anyone can make music!!” slip quickly into “Nobody wanted to work at making music,” then “Music is best manufactured and sold by the yard,” then “Music is essentially worthless.”

4/

But here’s the thing: anyone could make music •before• gen AI. Some more skilled or more artistically successful than others, sure! But that’s not the point. •Doing it• is the point. •Living it• is the point.

A product that promises to generate it for you so that you neither do it nor live it is antithetical to the point, is hostile to the idea of art itself.

(Note: that’s exactly what the artists in the OP are •not• doing! They are all grabbing the AI and actively •doing• and •living• while poking at the curious new object.)

5/

Similarly, hostility to education cloaks itself as support by saying that education should be useful, should be practical, should be focused only on what students need, should be narrowed to what students need, should narrow students, should narrow students into being only what capitalism needs.

I wrote extensively about this dangerous line of thought here:

innig.net/teaching/liberal-art…

6/

Susan Sontag:

❝What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to •see• more, to •hear• more, to •feel• more.❞

7/

Georgia O’Keefe:

❝Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.❞

8/

@lanodan @janvenetor The image is 10 kB ^^

It would actually be kind of sad if a clean PNG screenshot were larger than the whole game, since PNG should be pretty good at eliminating redundancy the same way the original game does!

I think this meme probably originally happened with degraded images (stuff like JPEG artifacts compressed as PNG again) which adds a bunch of hard to compress noise.

(Also, the game is technically 40KiB, 32K code + 8K graphics)

Nah, look at it in a good image viewer, there's no jpeg artifacts (like jpeg can't do monochrome background like that).

And I'd kind of doubt PNG encoders are that clever, more likely that you could gain space by having the relevant parts of the sprite sheet in PNG + compact vector format (SVG isn't, more like flash).

Although trying to make it smaller: Passing it to pngcrush I get 7957 bytes instead of 10432.

Edited it a bit in LibreSprite as the red line joining the circles used anti-aliasing and so transparency (luckily circles don't), that encodes it to 8399 bytes.
And then passing that to pngcrush I get 6924 bytes, nearly 50% less but still pretty big.
(Interestingly making the red line+circles with the light-wood color of the ?-item box ends up at 6930 bytes)

> I just put up a megabyte high resolution photo as a login page background, on explicit customer request, and cried a bit :/ they are considering a background video :/

Urgh, I hate background videos, they always take so much time to load and sometimes it means actually important stuff loads afterwards if it's on the same CDN.
super mario bush cloud edited.out.png

Right, that's what I would expect! PNG isn't smart enough to do literal sprite/tile mapping but zlib compression is still pretty good at eliminating the duplication, and does a better job within tiles themselves which makes up for it in other ways.

What I meant is the original "this screenshot of SMB is larger than SMB" meme (it's a thing) probably used a really degraded screenshot, which is not the case here.