Notices by Steve Troughton-Smith (stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social), page 5

"The weeknd in the style of sin city, painterly”

Again, huge leap forward in v6

Re-running last year's prompts (Midjourney v2) in Midjourney v6:

"a vector illustration of david bowie performing on stage, bright colors”

How do you quantify this kind of progress?

As a topic, I think this stuff is fascinating. If you're not keeping up with the bleeding edge on Midjourney, you would totally miss the huge improvements that have come to image generation since you last ran something like DiffusionBee on a Mac. It has gone from 'silly little images' to what I would say are stunning works of art and demonstrations of capability. I have no idea what this tech looks like one year from now, never mind ten

“50s album art depicting a 50s motorcar”

v2, v6

To get a feel for what kind of keywords will make for great Midjourney output, I like to pick an artist name and ask for a 'landscape by <name>’. A really basic prompt — effectively ‘when I say this person's name, what comes to mind?’; makes for an easy comparison point. Oftentimes generated art looks nothing like what that artist would actually create, but still conjures distinctive reusable style elements

Names used here:

1) David Hockney
2) Takashi Murakami
3) Yayoi Kusama
4) Kara Walker

‘Kehinde Wiley’ makes for an amazing seed for a prompt, though the generator seems to struggle with body parts (I've had to reject more images than usual to get to these few) — perhaps because the artist's own backgrounds are so busy it might be difficult for the network to separate elements?

Midjourney still lets you generate with each of its model versions, which is kinda neat! So I ran off the same prompt — "a boxer dog” — in the six major versions. V1 was released February 2022, V6 is the new alpha hotness

(Bonus points for the tiny doggy boxing glove)

These kind of live-action stills are gonna do a number on the Mandela Effect hawkers 😅

A tip that's new to me; Midjourney's /describe function can take an uploaded image and spit out prompts that could guide it back to making more. And you can use this to reverse-engineer images it has generated in the past, of styles or elements you don't recognize, to figure out how to make follow-ups.

There are so many features buried in slash commands that I might never come across

Lesser-remembered thread in Love Actually

Now that I have uncovered this hypothetical Kobold movie, I kinda want it to exist 😅 Studio pitch?

Now this one I'm putting in the bank. Just the slightest bit of generative-fill Photoshop retouching of two Midjourney images 🤪

One thing's for sure: I do not miss having an algorithmic timeline. My feed has been super chill all year, and I like it that way

One aspect we can see from the current Threads integration is if a Threads user @-mentions a non-federated Threads user in their post, that post will not be federated to ActivityPub. So if users aren’t opted-in by default, we're going to see a patchwork of missing posts and broken reply-threads rendering the whole thing pointless / @mosseri

EDIT: looks like that may be fixed, now? Threads posts with mentions are now retroactively showing up /cc @jessel

This doesn’t sound good; making ActivityPub integration opt-in (or opt-out wholesale) just means nobody is going to opt in, and there will be no easy way to ask or convince accounts to do so. You will lose a lot of the value of interop immediately, and if somebody has a bad interaction with a Mastodon user they might cut off access entirely with a toggle switch. Block people, block instances, but no master switch or all this is for nothing @mosseri

We're a long way from anything like this happening, but, man, seeing Threads profiles light up here conjures a potential future where you might follow Instagram, TikTok, maybe even YouTube accounts and more right from Ivory. How much better could it be to be able to repost or quote-post the /original source item/ instead of a link to some external site every time. ActivityPub all the things!

January 24 is gonna be the 40th anniversary of the launch of the original Macintosh. If Apple is really convinced about Vision being the foundation of the future of computing, I could see hitting that anniversary date in some way as a real juicy marketing target, even if deliveries don't start until some time in February.

I still feel we're due a launch keynote, even if it’s just a 20 minute prerecorded video

♻️ Recycled thread, June 22 2022

I had an inkling it might be possible to patch AppKit in Mac OS X 10.0 to re-enable the NEXTSTEP interface style after it was removed during the Developer Previews — and I was right! So here’s the shipping, consumer Mac OS X without Aqua turned on. It’s rather broken and crashy

@gruber ah yes, damn those EU lawmakers for… *checks notes* …creating laws around privacy. How dare they 🙄 Next you'll tell us they trying to protect human rights or something, the fools!

Getting into the WWDC groove by investigating SharePlay support in @broadcastsapp. It’s trivially easy to implement, and it seems to just work