I am not patronising and that was not my intent. Read whatever you want into it of course, I can't stop you.
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Well, sure, and I appreciate your sanguinity haha! I just main support, and felt your question deserves a proper answer.
I am planning on answering when I'm at a computer, as well, because I actually do have a matrix server set up with Synapse and MAS. Quick question though, when you ask how it works, do you mean the actual backend, or are you asking if the performance/user experience is good?
Don't get me wrong, suggestions are appreciated, but you're answer is absolutely typical of a Stack overflow "huhuh well don't do it wrong then" comment. You could have, for example, said you don't use Synapse but this is why you like Continuwuity. (edit: not prescribing speech, giving an example of how your comment could have read better)
As well, I take issue with the idea that people can only ask for help in sanctioned forums. This is a self-hosting community, after all; I am here not only to learn but to share what I learn, which I thought was the whole point.
Polanski is a populist helmet saying what do-gooders want to hear
If that's true, then there's really no hope. I'd try to fix it myself but I don't live in the UK anymore. I did try to convince some of my family but they want to be a researcher and a nurse, respectively, so they dismissed the idea of getting into politics 😅 Best I can do is hope for a miracle, I suppose.
That, I wasn't aware of. Appreciated! I do hope it manages to turn around. I fear the alternative, we've already seen how that goes in the US.
Sounds like you think reform are going to win the general too, so I'm not sure how you're not agreeing with me, but okay. Like, you think the country isn't totally buggered in the event Reform wins? Because they've already shown how bad they are at governing, in the localities they've won seats in. Or, are you saying you think people are smart enough to see the smear campaign against Polanski for what it is? Because I've worked in IT too long to believe that myself.
What is this, StackOverflow? You didn't answer their question and instead just told them to use a different solution.
I'm aware. I don't see anyone but Reform getting elected in the coming general. The only real candidate in my view is Polanski and you've seen what the media are doing to him; It worked with Corbyn and as a result I don't believe my former countrymen are smart enough to see through it this time either.
I reiterate, the country is fucking doomed. Downvote away, I would love to be wrong, but I'm not.
Well, good game Britain. I thought there was some hope after getting the Tories out, but Starmer was the best the "left" could do and now the country is fucking doomed.
The people need to know! The people also need pictures. I'll go first:
Wouldn't know, I haven't seen it - I don't generally go out of my way to view propaganda 😅
We are in emergency mode and fascists kicking in your door without a warrant and disappearing you should be met with due force.
Due force is exactly what you ridiculed the other guy for saying he'd use, and if you won't meet a home invader with what you call due force then your "should" here loses a lot of weight. The rest of your comment is answering something I didn't say; your limits are your own.
But yes, it's bananapants fuckballs insane that this is relevant conversation in America right now.
I don't think this argument stands up to reality. Skilled professionals can prompt a model into doing exactly what they want by giving precise instructions using technical terminology, like the photographer who created an award-winning image with DALL-E 2 a few years back (don't worry, he turned down the prize): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-my-ai-image-won-a-major-photography-competition/
Someone with stage direction and video editing skills can stitch together very effective video ads, see "Puppramin": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBiG1Ao_P1Q
I watched it. It's really bad. But, I wanted to try and give them some pointers. I think there will be a good film made with AI one day, maybe even the entire video will be generated... But it will be written and directed by humans. If OP wants to make a good film, they'll have to learn to write and direct as well as learning how to use AI tools.
The core of the argument is this: film is a language, and direction is the act of speaking it deliberately. Strip that out and there's nothing left, no matter how polished the output looks.
Every choice in a film communicates something. Where the camera sits, how long a shot lingers, when a cut interrupts a beat, what's in focus versus what's blurred, whether the score swells or stays silent, which line in a scene earns the close-up. None of these are aesthetic flourishes; they're sentences. A trained filmmaker watches a scene and reads it the way you read this paragraph, and when they direct, they're choosing every word.
An AI tool doesn't know what you're trying to say. It produces statistically plausible footage: the cinematic average of everything it's seen. That isn't a film, it's a series of generic gestures wrapped in reasonable lighting. And critically, the person commissioning it can't tell the difference, because they don't have the vocabulary either. They can't notice that the eyeline is wrong, that a cut breaks rhythm for no reason, that the music is telegraphing what should have been subtext, that the geography of the scene is incoherent. They see "a film" and miss the dozens of small failures inside it.
This watches like you don't have any experience making films, and if that's true this is a communication failure at the source. You, as the filmmaker, can't say what you want, can't recognise it when you see it, and can't iterate towards it. The AI fills this void with cliché, because cliché is the average. The result is a thing that looks like a film and contains nothing.
A useful analogy: you can use a generative tool to produce paragraphs of writing, but a person who has never read books, who doesn't understand argument structure or voice, will produce noise even with the best tool. Not because the tool is bad, but because they don't know what good would look like, so they can't steer towards it. Film is harder still, because the language is non-verbal and the failure modes are subtler. A bad sentence reads as bad. A bad cut just reads as "a cut."
Direction is taste in motion. Without years of watching, analysing, and trying to make things, that taste doesn't exist.
Now, apply that to what's actually on screen. The following elements show that this isn't a film, it's a two minute Instagram reel dressed up to go to the Oscars.
Vertical orientation. Cinema is horizontal because human vision is horizontal, and because the width of the frame is itself a storytelling tool. A wide frame lets you place characters in relation to each other and to a world. It lets the environment carry meaning. Vertical strips that out. You can fit one face, maybe two stacked, and nothing else. There's no geography, no context, no sense of where anyone is. Vertical is the format of TikTok and Reels, designed for a single subject filling a phone screen during a feed scroll. It isn't a cinematic frame; it's a content frame. The choice signals at the outset that the maker is thinking in posts, not scenes.
Everyone facing the camera. Direct address to camera is, in film, a rare and deliberate device. Ferris Bueller does it. Fleabag does it. It works because the rest of the film maintains the convention of an unobserved world, and the break is meaningful. When every shot is a person looking down the lens, the device collapses. There's no world being interrupted, because no world has been built. There's no shot/reverse-shot, no eyeline match, no two characters occupying the same space and reacting to each other. It's a series of talking heads strung together. That's the grammar of testimonial videos, vlogs, and AI avatar tools, none of which are films, because none of them construct a scene. A scene requires people existing in relation to one another. This is portraits in sequence.
Floating text around each character. On-screen captions are grammar for the social media feed, designed for muted autoplay where you need to convey information without sound. Their presence in something claiming to be a film is itself the argument: if the visual and the performance were doing the storytelling, the words wouldn't be needed. Cinema works through what isn't said, through what's implied by behaviour, framing, and silence. Captions short-circuit all of that. They also tell you something specific about the production. Generative pipelines struggle with coherent lip-sync and natural dialogue delivery, and floating text papers over both. People notice.
AI voiceover. Voice is performance, and performance is where character actually lives. The breath before a line, a syllable held a fraction too long, the catch in a voice that wasn't in the script: these are what make a line mean something specific rather than something general. AI voiceover produces the mean reading of every sentence, technically correct, emotionally null, with no relationship to what's happening on screen, because there's nothing happening on screen for it to react to. Even if the maker wanted a particular reading, they couldn't get it; and if they got it, they wouldn't recognise the difference. So every line lands at the same temperature, and the result sounds like every other piece of content built with the same tools.
Stack those four together and you don't have a movie with some rough edges and technical limitations. You have a moving video with completely different grammar: a vertical, frontal, captioned, voice-over format that is excellent at being scrollable feed content and structurally incapable of being a film. The form has already decided what the thing is, before the question of "story" even enters the picture.
In short: this will never be a good film. You might be able to Ship Of Theseus it into a good film, but only by learning how to direct and write, and then changing everything about it.
Never gonna happen. Every time you try to judge, everyone just end up looking at pictures of cats all day.
You think the fascists literally kicking in your door to take you and/or your family away is anything other than "nothing left to lose" territory?
I thought we've (indirectly?) observed dark matter with Webb? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLedYv1lzQ0
Did I totally misunderstand what Anton was saying?
Fair enough, nothing here is really private after all, so I appreciate even that much. I've got a general plan to stand up a Matrix server soon; I'll DM you my handle when I've got it up and running if you'd like to contact me there.
To answer your question in a long-winded but hopefully entertaining read: I don't have an academic background, myself. I dropped out of college and got my certificates like the A+ and CCNA, MCP too back when that was a thing (dating myself a bit). My favorite story is passing the Linux course without the textbook, on the logic that all the information I could need to pass was available on the internet. I was right 😂 Went straight into working in IT after that.
I'm a sysadmin by career, and an indefatigable entrepreneur by nature. My latest venture is a food brand here in the US; I built it with the intent to automate as much as possible so I can run it alongside my day job, from anywhere. Self-funded, which is kind of scary and rather limiting, but this structure gives me endurance to carry on as long as I have gainful employment (or until my other projects bear profit).
I also named my company in such a way that I can expand into other industries naturally, without having to rebrand. That's because I don't have any great passion for food specifically - more of a general desire to produce high quality output that other people can use, or enjoy, or otherwise benefit from, and a lot of different personal interests.
"Both" is also acceptable.