Tumbleweed es una distribución «Rolling Release» de actualización contínua. Aquí puedes estar al tanto de las últimas novedades.

openSUSE Tumbleweed es la versión «rolling release» o de actualización continua de la distribución de GNU/Linux openSUSE.

Hagamos un repaso a las novedades que han llegado hasta los repositorios esta semana.

El anuncio original lo puedes leer en el blog de Dominique Leuenberger, publicado bajo licencia CC-by-sa, en este este enlace:

• https://dominique.leuenberger.net/blog/2022/08/opensuse-tumbleweed-review-of-the-week-2022-33/

Nada detiene a Tumbleweed, sigue a toda máquina publicándose 7 nuevas snapshots en una semana, lo que significa una snapshot al día sin interrupciones. ¿estará batiendo un récord?

Hasta ahora llevamos 14 días de publicaciones diarias sin interrupciones y el récord está en 18 días (2021/1116-1203).

Esto en cualquier caso no son más que cifras, lo importante está en la calidad de las publicaciones y esas siguen siendo fiables y sólidas.

Las pasadas 7 snapshots (0811.0817) han traído entre otros estos cambios:

• Linux kernel 5.19.1
• GNOME 42.4 (completo, incluido gnome-shell y gnome-desktop)
• KDE Frameworks 5.97.0
• hdf5 1.12.2
• PostgreSQL 14.5
• Mozilla Firefox 103.0.2
• binutils 2.39
• git 2.37.2
• libwacom 2.4.0: con soporte a nuevos dispositivos como Lenovo 14s Yoga, Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360, y más
• wxWidgets 3.2.0

Y para próximas entregas podremos esperar actualizaciones en paquetes como:

• Linux kernel 5.19.2
• KDE Gear 22.08.0
• Boost 1.80.0
• systemd 251.4
• glibc 2.36
• Shadow 4.12
• fmt 9.0

Si quieres estar a la última con software actualizado y probado utiliza openSUSE Tumbleweed la opción rolling release de la distribución de GNU/Linux openSUSE.

Mantente actualizado y ya sabes: Have a lot of fun!!

Enlaces de interés

• ¿Por qué deberías utilizar openSUSE Tumbleweed?
• zypper dup en Tumbleweed hace todo el trabajo al actualizar
• ¿Cual es el mejor comando para actualizar Tumbleweed?
• ¿Qué es el test openQA?
• http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/
• https://es.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed

——————————–

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Nothing is stopping Tumbleweed – it’s still full steam ahead with 7 snapshots released in one week, which means daily snapshots without interruptions—trying to get a new streak record? let’s see! So far we’re at 14 days of release without a gap. So far, the highest streak was 18 if I’m not mistaken (2021/1116-1203). In any case, these are just nice stats, but the quality of the snapshots has always been more important to us than the number of snapshots. And I’m convinced the Tumbleweed users to see this the same way.

The last 7 snapshots (0811.0817) delivered these changes:

• Linux kernel 5.19.1
• GNOME 42.4 (completed, incl. gnome-shell and gnome-desktop)
• KDE Frameworks 5.97.0
• hdf5 1.12.2
• PostgreSQL 14.5
• Mozilla Firefox 103.0.2
• binutils 2.39
• git 2.37.2
• libwacom 2.4.0: support new devices, like Lenovo 14s Yoga, Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360, and more
• wxWidgets 3.2.0

The Staging projects are well used, and the forge is hot, pressing things like:

• Linux kernel 5.19.2
• KDE Gear 22.08.0
• Boost 1.80.0
• systemd 251.4
• glibc 2.36: meta bug tracking failures: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1202207
• Shadow 4.12
• fmt 9.0

“Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” has been a turning point in my life in many ways. It was one of the first non-classical albums I listened to. It was the starting point in my ability to understand spoken English.

The first steps from classical

My parents only listen to classical music. Even Bartók is too modern for them. In my household growing up, I was only exposed to classical music. Yes, I heard some pop-music on the streets, but I was told that it’s just noise, not music. I must admit that even to this date I mostly agree with this statement :-)

However, today I do not listen only to classical music. I still recall the first album that I liked and was not fully classical. It was Hooked on Classics played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Tons of familiar classical melodies played in the style of pop music of that time. I listened to these albums countless times.

Once the damage was done, I started to listen other non-classical works. From the early years I recall the names of Richard Clayderman and Kitaro. Clearly not classical music any more, even some electronic instruments, but still very different from mainstream pop music.

Understanding spoken English

In high school one of my classmates lent me an album: Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. First I listened to it as I loved the music and the story on which album was built. Then I realized that it can help me to understand spoken English.

It was right after 1989, when Hungary changed to a democracy. The Russian troops were still in the country, but I was in the first high school year where learning Russian was not mandatory any more. My primary foreign language in high school was German, the secondary was English. There was a glut of Russian language teachers and barely enough teachers for other languages. We had one or two English lessons a week, and very minimal chance to listen to real English pronunciation. At that time there was no YouTube, etc. We had a satellite TV receiver, but I could not follow spoken English there at all, as in school I never heard anything close to real English…

When I first listened to The War of the Worlds, I could barely understand anything, even when I was reading the text from the album cover. After a while I realized that repeated listening and reading the book, things “clicked” and I started to understand the language better. Then I started listening to the album not just for the music but to check if my understanding of spoken English improves. After a while I could follow the narrator and the singers even without having the album cover at hand.

The good thing is that understanding spoken English did not stop at this album. It was as very important milestone. From that time on, I could pick up more English from the television. Of course high school level English provided just a very basic level of understanding, which I would later build on to greatly improve my English skills. That’s another story, not related to music…

Listen to the album on TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/2917051

Read my blog about Discogs to learn about my music collection: https://peter.czanik.hu/posts/discogs/

The month of August is hot for openSUSE Tumbleweed as snapshots appear to be rolling out daily.

The trend this week is like Tumbleweed on cruise control just rolling out snapshot after snapshot.

Among the updated packages in snapshot 20220816, postgresql14 14.5 made a splash with fixing a Common Vulnerability and Exposure; with CVE-2022-2625, the extensions use of CREATE OR REPLACE or CREATE IF NOT EXISTS are not being adhered to according to the documented rules and attacker can run arbitrary code as the victim role, which may be a superuser. PostgreSQL is blocking this attack in the core server, so there is no need to modify individual extension scripts. Moving on to a more lighter subject, the snapshot provided an update of filesystem utility xfsprogs 5.19.0. The newer version update provides more autoconf modernization and fixes a memory leak. It’s counterpart, xfsdump 3.1.10, fixed bind mount handling that was corrupting dumps and removed Data Management Application Programming Interface support. Xfce users can now have window capture in HiDPI mode thanks to an update of xfce4-screenshooter 1.9.11.

KDE Frameworks 5.97.0 glided into snapshot 20220815 and gave Plasma Desktop users several fixes. Frameworks updated blur and other window effects when the dialog changes size and the password storage KWallet Framework introduced a Secret Service API. User Interface framework Kirigami added workaround for the Qt horizontal scroll-view bug. KIO had an update to better prevent duplicate bookmarks for the same Hypertext REFerence. Text editor vim saw its second update of the week; its 9.0.0203 version had some fixes for invalid memory access and a fix for extra space of virtual text when ‘linebreak’ is set. The diagnostic, debugging and instructional userspace package strace updated to version 5.19. The update had changes in behavior and implemented some decoding socket option and netlink attributes. The last package to update in the snapshot was hdf5 1.12.2; this general purpose library and file format for storing scientific data dropped one patch, disabled another and enabled the rpm and deb CPack generators on Linux.

Snapshot 20220814 updated the distribution to Linux Kernel 5.19.1. Nearly a third of all the updates for the kernel were related to bluetooth and most of those were for the RTL8852C wireless module. An update of gnome-shell 42.4 improved the overview animation performance and had a fix for remembering the set up of bluetooth devices. GNOME’s layout and text rendering package pango updated to 1.50.9 and fixed a thread-safety problem. There was a minor update to the boot splash package plymouth; the update can be used to check the secure boot configuration and put a red warning image on the screen if the secure boot is disabled, according to the changelog. NetworkManager 1.38.4 and mutter 42.4 were also updated in the snapshot.

GNU’s collection of binary tools binutils 2.39 was the lone package to update in snapshot 20220813. The ELF linker now supports a --package-metadata option that allows embedding a JSON payload in accordance to the Package Metadata specification. The linker can also now generate a warning message if the stack is made executable.

Snapshot 20220812 had relatively few packages updated. The one major version update was made to the parse and domain-name decomposer rubygem-public_suffix 5.0.0. The new major version updated definitions and requires a minimum Ruby 2.6 version. The use of importlib-metadata for runtime package version lookups was made in the python-pbr 5.9.0 update, which is used to manage setuptools packaging. Another package to update in the snapshot was ncurses, which trimed out some unwanted linker options seen in Fedora 36.

The 20220811 snapshot started off the week with updates to Mozilla Firefox 103.0.2. The browser update fixed menu shortcuts for users of the JAWS screen reader and fixed an occasional non-overridable certificate error. The 42.4 version of gnome-desktop made Italian and Serbian translation changes and fixed detail text when it contained markup. An update of icewm 2.9.8 made a change that a restart will start icewm if no Window Manager is active and the package also updated the grouping menu when removing a task. Vim had its first update of the week in this snapshot and iproute2 5.19 added a set command and a group link with it ipstats. Intel had a CVE fixed in the ucode-intel 20220809 update; the company thanked those involved for helping find and solve CVE-2022-21233, which affected some processors.

Ya se ha publicado la sede, el programa de charlas, la camiseta del macroevento dela la Comunidad KDE. No obstante quedan todavía algunas cosas por descubrir como es el plato fuerte del programa social de Akademy 2022 de Barcelona el cual suele ser una visita a algún lugar emblemático de la zona. En este caso, se ha elegido realizar un dia de excursión a la montaña de Montserrat.

Programa social de Akademy 2022 de Barcelona

Los eventos grandes del Software Libre son, como todas las grandes ferias, ideales para presentar grandes novedades, avances e incluso cambios de dirección. Es por ello que se esperan con interés muchas de las ponencias de Akademy para conocer cual va a ser el rumbo que va a seguir la Comunidad KDE durante el año de desarrollo hasta el evento del 2022 y saber cuál será su senda futura.

Este años, como sabréis los que sois asiduos al blog, este año se celebra en Barcelona en modalidad híbrida del 1 al 7 de octubre, quedando los días previos, el 29 y 30 para Akadmey-es (¡no te despistes y presenta tu charla ya!).

En Akademy suele haber varios tipos de actividades: charlas, talleres, coloquios, grupos de trabajo, etc. Pero además, y si por algo destaca un evento presencial, es por la parte social del mismos: las pausas del café, la cerveza tras las charlas o las comidas comunitarias son grandes momentos que estrechan lazos.

Y como colofon de estos momentos sociales se suele organizar, a mitad de la semana de talleres, un día de excursión conjunta. Este año se ha seleccionado visitar la montaña de Montserrat, situada a unos 60 km de Barcelona donde se pueden realizar diversas actividades: visitar su Basílica, contemplar su museo y realizar varias rutas de senderismo por un paraje singular. Para una mejor organización del event se recomienda resgistrarse previamente.

A medida que tengamos más información de eventos sociales ya los iré comentando en el blog.

Más información: Akademy 2022 Day Trip

¿Qué es Akademy?

Para los que no lo sepan, Akademy es el evento de la Comunidad KDE que aúna en una gran conferencia todo tipo de simpatizantes de KDE como desarrolladores, diseñadores, usuarios, traductores, promotores, ideólogos, etc. Allí se reunirán a lo largo de una semana para compartir charlas, cenas, ponencias, talleres y, en definitiva, para trabajar juntos.
Es una gran semana que sirve para unir más fuerte los lazos que unen nuestra Comunidad, así como para crear nuevos que se mantendrán gracias a las listas de correo, canales irc o Sprints.

Este año se vuelve a un modelo presencial pero con todo su contenido retrasmitido en lí­nea, cumpliéndose los pronósticos que auguraban que tras el impacto de pandemia este tipo de encuentros se adaptarán a esta nueva realidad.

La entrada Programa social de Akademy 2022 de Barcelona se publicó primero en KDE Blog.

Bienvenidos a un nuevo audio de Juan Febles, y este en concreto es episodio 156 de Podcast Linux (sí, este lo tenía pendiente de hace tiempo) titulado «Linux Connexion con Academia Automatización del Hogar» donde Juan habla con Luis del Valle y con Germán Martín de domótica. Una charla de alto nivel pero asequible para todo el mundo.

Academia Automatización del Hogar en Podcast Linux #156

Hace un tiempo estaba publicando casi todas las entregas que realiza Juan de su Podcast Linux, y la razón radicaba es que estaba al día de todos sus audios. Durante una temporada bajé el ritmo y ahora, afortunadamente, vuelvo a ponerme al día, así que vuelven a estar presentes en el blog.

De esta forma, hace poco promocioné su especial 6º aniversario y su Linux Connexión con Jorge Lama, y está en el horno una edición más especial ya que fui protagonista, pero no adelantemos acontecimientos ya que las verdaderas estrealla de este episodio 156 fueron Luis del Valle y Germán Martín,

En palabras de Juan:

¡¡¡Muy buenas amante del Software Libre!!!
Bienvenido a otra entrega, la número 156, de Podcast Linux. Un saludo muy fuerte de quien te habla, Juan Febles. Hoy vuelve con nosotros Luis del Valle, apasionado del Movimiento Maker, está detrás del blog Programarfacil.com, del podcast La tecnología para Todos y del Campus de Programarfacil y Germán Martín, Mister ESP32, Ingeniero, maker, colaborador en programarfacil.com. Hoy hablaremos de ESP32 y la Academia Automatización del Hogar.

Enlaces:

• Web: https://programarfacil.com/
• Academia Automatización del Hogar: https://programarfacil.com/domotica-para-gente-y-casas-inteligentes/
• Podcast La Tecnología para Todos (Feed): https://programarfacil.com/podcast
• Canal Telegram: https://t.me/programarfacilc
• Home Assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/
• EspHome: https://esphome.io/
• EnigmaIOT: https://github.com/gmag11/EnigmaIOT

Así que os invito a escuchar este diálogo de Juan con Luis y Germán donde además de presentarnos la Academia nos ofrecen una clase magistral para introducirse en el mudo de las casas domóticas. ¡Dentro audio!

Más información: Podcast Linux

Sigue a Podcast Linux

Aprovecho para animaros a seguir Podcast Linux en algunos de los canales de comunicación que tiene:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/podcastlinux
• Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@podcastlinux/
• Correo: podcastlinux@disroot.org
• Web: https://podcastlinux.com/
• Telegram: https://t.me/podcastlinux
• Telegram Juan Febles: https://t.me/juanfebles
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/PodcastLinux
• Feed Podcast Linux: https://podcastlinux.com/feed
• Feed Linux Express (Audios Telegram): https://podcastlinux.com/Linux-Express/feed

La entrada Academia Automatización del Hogar en Podcast Linux #156 se publicó primero en KDE Blog.

Hoy me apetece hablar de unos iconos que tienen un estilo sello de correo para tu PC, una curiosa forma de decorar nuestro escritorio que le da un toque muy personal. Se trata de Perforated Edge un pack de iconos de un viejo conocido del blog: ZMA.

Iconos estilo sello de correo para tu PC: Perforated Edge

Me fascina la variedad que tenemos a nuestra disposición tanto de forma, estilo o colores. Tenemos iconos clásicos, minimalistas, lineales, 3D, que simulan otros sistemas operativos, imaginativos, que recuerdan a objetos cotidianeos, etc.

Hoy os presento Perforated Edge un pack de iconos colorido, variado y basado en Vibrancy-Colors de RAVEfinity y Menda creado por ZMA, un viejo conocido en el blog con creaciones como Yellow Stickers,  Uniform, Not superflat stickers, Gears, White chips y Snowy.

Estos iconos tiene como característica principal mostrar un borde troquelado, como si fuera un sello de correo, que le da un toque muy original,

Como vemos en la imagen superior, queda muy bien para temas claros, pero debido a su diseño también queda de fábula para temas oscuros. No hay excusas para no probarlos.

Y como siempre digo, si os gusta el pack de iconos podéis pagarlo de muchas formas en la página en continua evolución (mirad su nuevo aspecto) de KDE Store, que estoy seguro que el desarrollador lo agradecer: puntúale positivamente, hazle un comentario en la página o realiza una donación. Ayudar al desarrollo del Software Libre también se hace simplemente dando las gracias, ayuda mucho más de lo que os podéis imaginar, recordad la campaña I love Free Software Day 2017 de la Free Software Foundation donde se nos recordaba esta forma tan sencilla de colaborar con el gran proyecto del Software Libre y que en el blog dedicamos un artículo.

Más información: KDE Store

La entrada Iconos estilo sello de correo para tu PC: Perforated Edge se publicó primero en KDE Blog.

Update, February 3rd 2025: It's been a couple of years, and by now, this article is extremely outdated. In fact, it was rendered obsolete roughly two weeks after its publication, when Stable Diffusion was released to the public. The technical bits aren't that interesting anymore, but I think the legal and ethics parts, such as they are, have held up.

---

I recently got access to OpenAI's DALL-E 2 instance. It's a lot of fun, but beyond its obvious application as a cornucopia of funny cat avatars, I think it's now fit to use in certain kinds of creative work.

There are already plenty of good articles out there on the model's strengths and weaknesses, so I won't go over that here other than to note that it's not a threat to high-end art. It's got an idea of what things look like and how they can visually fit together, but it's very vague on how they work (e.g. anatomy, architecture, the finer points of Victorian-era dinner etiquette, art critics), and object inpainting aside, it doesn't rise to the level of realism where I'd worry too much about the fake news potential either.

However, with human guidance and a carefully chosen domain, it can still do some very impressive things. I've suspected that adventure game graphics in the point-and-click vein could be one of those domains, and since I'm helping someone dear to me realize such a game, I had the excuse I needed to explore it a little and write this case study.

Inspiration

Point-and-click adventures make up a fairly broad genre with many different art styles. I've focused my attention on a sub-genre that hews close to the style of early 1990s Sierra and LucasArts adventure games. These would typically run at a screen resolution of 320×200 and appear pixelized, especially so on a modern display:

Contemporary game developers sometimes work at low resolutions, producing a similar effect:

At first glance this seems restrictive (just ask H.R. Giger), but from a certain point of view, it's actually quite forgiving and confers lots of artistic license:

• The perspective doesn't need to be realistic or even consistent, and is often tweaked for practical reasons, such as eliminating visual clutter, providing more space for the action or aligning better with the pixel grid.
• Speaking of pixels, pixelization helps work around the fact that DALL-E can produce odd smudges and sometimes struggles with details. It also helps with manual retouching, since there aren't very fine details or textures to be precisely propagated.
• Does your art look weird? Uncanny valley anxiety? Take a free tour courtesy of the entire genre. Feel your troubles float away as it throws an arm around you. And another arm. And another.

Ahem. What I'm trying to say is, this is a wonderful, fun genre with many degrees of freedom. We'll need them!

How to into the pixels

While you can tell DALL-E to generate pixel art directly, it's not even remotely up to the task; it just doesn't know how a pixel grid works. The result will tend to have some typical pixel art properties (flattened perspective, right angles, restricted palette with colors that "pop") wrapped in a mess of smudged rectangles of all sizes:

It's impressive in a "holy guacamole, it kind of understood what I meant" way, but even if you clean up the grid you don't stand a chance of getting a consistent style, and you have no control over the grid size.

Fortunately, pixelization can be easily split off from the creative task and turned over to a specialist tool. I used magick in my scripts:

$ magick -adaptive-resize 25% -scale 400% in.png out.png

It's worth trying different resampling filters. ImageMagick's -adaptive-resize operator produces nice and crisp output, but when downsampling by this much there may be even better options.

You could also experiment with color reduction and dithering. The images I generated for this article have been postprocessed like this…

$ magick -adaptive-resize 25% -ordered-dither checks,32,32,32 \
    -scale 800% in.png out.png

…which pixelizes to a 1:4 ratio, restricts the output to a color cube with 32 levels per channel (i.e. 15-bit color) and applies subtle — but not too subtle — checker-pattern dithering. It also upscales to twice the original size for easy viewing in a web browser.

Style prompts and selection

After some trial and error, I settled on a range of prompts involving techniques, styles and authors of fine art: oil on canvas, high renaissance, modernism, precisionism. This gave me a good chance of output in a handful of repeatable styles with sufficient but not overwhelming detail:

Beyond important details ("sunny day"), vague modifiers like "atmospheric", "dramatic" and "high quality" can have huge effects on lighting, camera angles and embellishment. They're also very unreliable, and I have the feeling they can crowd out more important parts of the prompt from the model's tiny mind and cause them to be overlooked. It's better to use compact, specific prompts until you're close, and then, well, watch it fall apart as you add a single modifier.

Which brings us to the second human-intensive part of this task: selection. Since the OpenAI UI produces four variants for each prompt, this is mandatory. It's also very necessary, as most of the output falls far short of the mark. With the right prompt, you might get a distribution where roughly 1/20 images is good (with minor defects) and 5/20 are potentially salvageable. The remainder will be obviously unusable for various reasons (major defects, stylistic and framing issues, photobombed by anthropomorphic utility pole).

I think it's the same way with the impressive DALL-E mashups being shared. By the time you're seeing them, they've been curated at least twice; once at the source, and one or more times by the chain of media that brought them to you. You won't see the hundreds of images that came out funny but not ha-ha funny.

Since each image takes only a second to generate and a few seconds to evaluate, this wild inconsistency isn't disqualifying. It just means DALL-E isn't magical or even very intelligent.

Setting the stage

An adventure game location is a bit like a theatre stage; it's a good idea to have an ample area close to the camera for the player to walk around in. It's also a good idea to avoid scenes where the player can get far away from the camera, as you'd be forced to choose between a comical perspective mismatch and a really tiny player character that'd be hard to follow and control. Obviously a real game won't want to follow these rules strictly, but it's important to be able to implement them when needed.

Fortunately it can be done, and it's not too hard:

To control the perspective and make it more flat, adding "facade" seemed to be effective. Ditto "diorama" and "miniature", although they tended to produce a more clinical look. Specifying a typical ground-level detail to focus on, e.g. "entrance", was also helpful. I'm not sure "2d" and "2.5d" actually made any difference. Bringing it all together:

• Specify the era, time of day and lighting conditions (e.g. "on a sunny day in the 2000s").
• Be specific about the overall location ("town", "city", or a named geographical location), the focus ("facade", "hotel entrance") and the immediate surroundings ("houses", "streets", "plains").
• You can explicitly ask for open space, e.g. "…and street in front" or "plaza surrounded by…".
• Sometimes it's necessary to ask for the space to be empty, otherwise DALL-E can paint in objects and people that you'd rather add as overlays later on.
• You can also specify camera placement, e.g. "seen from second-floor balcony", but you risk ground-level details becoming too small.
• Some combinations will have the model drawing blanks, resulting in ignoring much of your prompt or horking up non sequitur macro shots of blades of grass and the like. Be prepared to rephrase or compromise. Think about what might be well represented in the training set.
• Do not under any circumstance mention "video game", unless you want blue neon lights on everything.

Retouching and editing

This is easy to do using the in-browser UI. Just erase part of the image, optionally edit the prompt and off you go. Very useful for those times you've got something great, except there's a pine growing out of a church tower or an impromptu invasion of sea swine. Adding objects works too. Here's a villain's preferred mode of transportation, quite believable (if out of place) on the first try:

You can also upload PNG images with an alpha channel, although I had to click somewhere with the eraser before it would accept that there were indeed transparent areas. I suspect you could use this to seed your images with spots of color in order to get a more consistent palette.

Extending the images

DALL-E generates 1024×1024-pixel postage stamps. To fill a modern display you want something closer to a 19:10 ratio. Transparency edits come in handy here. The idea is to split the original image into left-right halves and use those to seed two new images with transparency to fill in:

This is easily scriptable. Note that you have to erase the DALL-E signature from the right half to prevent it bleeding into the result. Something like this can work:

$ magick in.png -background none -extent 512x0 -splice 512x0 left.png
$ magick in.png \( +clone -fill white -colorize 100 -size 80x16 xc:black \
    -gravity southeast -composite \) -alpha off -compose copy_opacity \
    -composite -compose copy -background none -gravity east -extent 512x0 \
    -splice 512x0 right.png

Upload left.png and right.png, reenter the prompt and generate a couple of variants for each. Since there's lots of context, the results turn out pretty good for the most part. Then stitch the halves together like this:

$ magick +append left.png right.png out.png

With a little more scripting, you can generate all possible permutations and apply your big brain judgement to them, e.g:

…and so on. You can also tweak the side prompts. Put in a pool or whatever:

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of image extension made it into the standard toolbox at some point.

Other things it can do, and some that it can't

I had some success with interiors too. "Cutaway" was a handy cue to knock out walls and avoid claustrophobic camera placement, and it handled decorations and furniture fairly well (e.g. "opulent living room with a table and two chairs"). It could also generate icons for inventory items after a fashion ("mail envelope on black background"). I didn't delve very deeply into that, though.

You've probably noticed that the generated images all contain defects. Some can be fixed by erasing them and having DALL-E fill in the blanks, but others are too numerous, stubborn or minute for that to be practical. This means you'll have to go over each image manually before pixelization (for rough edits) and after (for the final touch). You'll also need to adjust colors and levels for consistency.

DALL-E can't write. In fact it will rarely be able to arrange more than three letters in a correct sequence, so if you want words and signage, you'll have to draw it yourself. Maps and other items that convey specific information by virtue of their geometry can probably also be ruled out, although you may get lucky using a mostly transparent cue sketch.

You won't get much help with animations, especially complex multi-frame ones like walk cycles.

If you want to convert an existing daylight scene into a night scene, that's probably best done manually or with the help of a style transfer model.

I realize I've barely scratched the surface here, and there's bound to be a lot more that I haven't thought of.

The economics of AI jackpot

OpenAI controls usage through a credit system. Currently, one credit can be used to generate four images from a single prompt, or three edits/variants from a single image and prompt. I got some free welcome credits (50 or so), and they're promising another 15 each month. When you spend a credit, it takes 4-5 seconds to get results, which means about a second per image. You can buy 115 credits for $15 + tax, which in my case works out to a total of $18.75. That's $0.163 per credit, or at most $0.0543 per image (batch of three).

Let's say you use this to generate locations for a point-and-click game. How many will you need? Well, one very successful such game, The Blackwell Epiphany (made entirely by the fine humans at Wadjet Eye Games), has about 70 locations. If you're considering AI-generated images for your game, you're probably not trying to compete with one of the industry's most accomplished developers, so let's lower that to 50.

50 locations is still a lot, and as I mentioned before, only 1/20 images come out adequate. For each location, you can probably get by with 10 adequate candidates to choose from. That means you'll generate 200 images per location, or 10,000 images total. Let's double that to account for some additional curation, edits, horizontal extensions, late changes to the script and plain old mistakes. Then, 20,000 * $0.0543 = $1,087. Since most of the images will be generated in batches of four, not three, it's fair to round that down to an even $1,000. It's probably not your biggest expense, anyway.

How about time investment? I mean, evaluating that many images seems kind of crazy, but let's do the math and see. If an image takes about 1s to generate and you spend about 5s deciding whether to keep it (recalling that 95% is quickly recognizable as dross and you'll be looking at batches of four), that's 20,000 * 6s = 120,000s or about 33 hours. Even if you can only stand to do it for two hours a day, you should be done in three to four weeks.

Throughout this you should be able to generate 10 candidates and 10 edits for each location. Further manual editing will likely take much longer than three weeks, but that's not something I'm experienced with, so I've really no idea. It also presupposes that you're starting out with a detailed list of locations.

Legal considerations

In addition to their API policies, OpenAI have public content policy and terms of use documents that appear to be specific to DALL-E. I'm not trained in law, but the gist of the content policy appears to be "don't be mean, sneaky or disgusting", which is easy for us to abide by with only landscapes and architecture. Some of the restrictions seem unfortunate from the perspective of entertainment fiction: Could I generate a bloodied handkerchief, a car wreck or something even worse? Probably not. Anything containing a gun? Certainly not. However, they're also understandable given the stakes (see below).

The most concerning thing, and likely a showstopper for some creative enterprises, is point 6 of the terms of use: Ownership of Generations. My interpretation of this is that generated images are the property of OpenAI, but that they promise not to assert the copyright if you observe their other policies (which may, presumably, change). If you're making a long-lived creative work, especially something like a game that may include adult topics alongside the generations, this seems like a risky proposition. I wouldn't embark on it without seeking clarification or some kind of written release.

Ow, my ethics!

So, yeah, ethics. An obvious line of questioning concerns misuse, but OpenAI is erring on the side of caution (or realistically, trying to keep the lid on just a little longer), and anyway, our use case isn't nefarious.

What's more relevant to us is the closed training dataset and how it might contain tons of formerly "open" but copyrighted material, or simply pictures whose author didn't want them used this way. We're talking half a billion images, and the relevant research and blog posts either allude to web scraping or mention it outright. A search for reassurance didn't turn up much, but I did discover an interesting open issue. So, could this be disrespectful or even abusive?

A common defense claims that the model learns from the training set the same way a human student would, implying human rules (presumably with human exceptions) should apply to its output. This can seem like a reasonable argument in passing, but besides being plain wrong, it's too facile since DALL-E is not human-like. It can't own the output (or, as the case would be, sign its ownership over to OpenAI) any more than a relational database could.

A better argument is that the training process munges the input so thoroughly that there's no way to reconstruct an original image. You don't have to understand the process deeply to see that this makes sense: there's terabytes of training data and only gigabytes of model. Then the implication becomes that this is transformative remixing and potentially fair/ethical use.

Thinking about this kind of hurts my head, particularly as it's also playing out in my own field. I haven't definitely concluded, but in general I think it's important to focus on the net good that technology and sharing can bring and how the benefits (and obligations) can be distributed equitably.

So is this going to upend everything?

Well, not everything. But some things, for sure. Neural networks have evolved very quickly over the past couple of years, and it looks like there's plenty of low-hanging fruit left. Current research leaves the impression that DALL-E 2 is already old news. There are also open efforts that seem to be completely caught up, at least for those with some elbow grease and compute time to spare.

A dear friend of mine joked that we've been privileged to live in a truly global era with minimal blank spots on the map and a constant flow of reasonably accurate information, the implication being that the not too distant past had mostly blank spots and the not too distant future will be saturated with extremely plausible-looking gibberish. We had a laugh about that, but you have to wonder.

A clarification regarding pixelization

August 18th: This article sort of made the rounds, and there has been lots of interesting feedback. Contrary to conventional wisdom, my experience when this happens is that other netizens are mostly very thoughtful and nice. So too this time.

There's one recurring criticism I should address, though, because I think it stems from my own carelessness and/or attempts at brevity: This is not pixel art!

Well, sure. It's not what we understand to be pixel art in 2022. Pixel art is when you hand-pixel the things, and maybe this could be too if it had gotten seriously retouched during/after pixelization — but in its current state it isn't. Since I'm aware of the distinction, I tried to word the article carefully ("adventure game graphics", "pixelization", "pixel graphics" in lieu of "lowres" or whatever) and only brought up pixel art in relation to the DALL-E query because, y'know, one can dream.

I sort of danced around it, though, and never explicitly said so. Here's the missing section:

An important reason I started out with a comparison to early 90s games (and not, say, any of the great 80s games) is that around that time, it became practical to make adventure game art using physical media (e.g. matte painting) and then digitizing it, which is somewhat similar to what I'm attempting here — except there's no need to digitize DALL-E's paintings (already digital). Instead, I added postprocessing as a callback to the traditional digitization process. Here's an excerpt from a nice Sierra retrospective by Shawn Mills. Go read the whole thing, it's great:

"We started painting with traditional media and then had our programming team develop some amazing codecs to scan the artwork in. That also allowed us to key scenes for other people and send them overseas to places like Korea and have them paint them. So we could really up the production because we [alone] never would have been able to raise the quality of production that we wanted."

Bill Davis, first Creative Director at Sierra On-Line

So Sierra got more for less, and they did this by sending prompts to dedicated overseas painters (vs. learning to paint faster/better or hiring more in-house). Sound familiar?

There's still the sort of "ugh" reaction one might have to talking about efficiency and art in the same sentence, and I do feel that. It's more fun to learn a new skill, or to work closely with others.

What's not fun, though, is to watch a nice, practical article that's already way too long start to overflow with the author's opinions and speculation. That's what the comments are for.

El pasado 10 de agosto de 2022 las autoridades holandesas han arrestado al desarrollador Alexey Pertsev que ha desarrollado código para la aplicación de software libre Tornado Cash

¿Es el software libre peligroso? ¿Te pueden arrestar por desarrollar software libre? Eso es lo que le ha pasado al desarrollador ruso que vive en Holanda, Alexey Pertsev que ha desarrollado código para el software libre Tornado Cash.

En esta historia ha habido tres hitos que vamos a ir desgranando con la información que tengo para contemplar los hechos y ver en perspectiva.

La semana pasada, la United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) algo así como una organización de los EE.UU. que gestiona las divisas, sancionó el software Tornado Cash que está publicado bajo licencias de software libre.

A grandes rasgos, este software creado por Roman Semenov, anonimiza el uso de criptomonedas y el uso de Ethereum, haciendo que se pierda el rastro de las transacciones con estas monedas, lo que otorga más privacidad y anonimato a quienes las usan.

Tornado Cash es software libre y cualquiera puede utilizar el software y además cualquiera puede colaborar en el código con sus aportes. Ya sabes : derecho a utilizar, compartir, estudiar y modificar el código.

A raíz de esto, GitHub cierra las cuentas de usuario de los desarrolladores de este código que hospedaba su código en esta plataforma de desarrollo propiedad de Microsoft desde hace unos años. También elimina el código de su plataforma, GitHub se debe a las leyes de EE.UU.

Y para terminar el acoso a este software, las autoridades holandesas han arrestado a Alexey Pertsev, que no era el creador del software y que simplemente había colaborado escribiendo código para Tornado Cash.

Ni siquiera es empleado de la empresa de ciberseguridad que creó Tornado Cash, simplemente colaboró con el código como cualquier otra persona con intereses por la ciberseguridad y el código podría haberlo hecho y como seguro han hecho otras personas con Tornado Cash.

La cosa es que la agencia estadounidense cree que hay unos delincuentes que han utilizado Tornado Cash para borrar el rastro de sus criptomonedas y a raíz de ese acto quizás criminal, arrestan como culpable a un desarrollador que colaboró con su código en la herramienta Tornado Cash que usaron «los malos».

¿Detenemos a las personas detrás del desarrollo del navegador Mozilla porque algún desalmado ha entrado en una web sin permiso?

¿Detenemos a las personas detrás del desarrollo del protocolo Tor, porque hay algún delincuente que lo ha utilizado para infringir alguna ley en EE.UU.?

¿Eres un delincuente por desarrollar una herramienta que después se utiliza para fines criminales? hay mucha tela que cortar si empezamos con esta línea de pensamiento.

¿Es un aviso a navegantes? Quizás una cabeza de turco para que otras personas se lo piensen dos veces. ¿alguien más pensó en el malogrado genio hacker de Aaron Swartch?

¿Es hora de que muchos proyectos abandonen GitHub por otros servicios autogestionados?

Te dejo los enlaces que he consultado para que te formes una idea de lo acontecido y si quieres comparte tus comentarios al respecto.

Enlaces de interés

• https://www.theblock.co/post/163297/arrested-tornado-cash-developer-is-alexey-pertsev-his-wife-confirms
• https://www.criptonoticias.com/mercados/que-es-tornado-cash-polemico-protocolo-privacidad-sancionado-ee-uu/
• https://conandaily.com/2022/08/15/alexey-pertsev-biography-10-things-about-tornado-cash-developer/
• https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

Después de escuchar el podcast de Mancomún sobre el «Concilio de lo Libre» y en aras de conocer un poco mejor la relación entre Software Libre y las universidades he decidido realizar una serie de artículos donde de a conocer las Oficinas de Software Libre que tenemos en España. Inicié la serie con la Oficina Software Libre de la Universidad de Zaragoza, OSLUZ, y seguí con la Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad de La Laguna, hoy me complace presentar la Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad Complutense Madrid que la conocí a partir de Concurso Universitario de Software Libre

Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Nos encontramos con una Oficina que ha sido un descubrimiento para mi… lo cual parece ser un gran error por mi parte ya que navegando por su web he visto que es bastante activa.

En sus propias palabras:

La Oficina de Software Libre podría ser considerada como un proyecto que recoge la esencia de lo que la Universidad Complutense de Madrid significa: una Institución educativa que pretende ser un núcleo de formación, investigación y construcción con una meta clara: el desarrollo de sujetos LIBRES (LIBERTAD) que, con su talento, contribuyen a un mundo cada vez más complejo y global (UNIVERSO, UNIVERSIDAD).

De esto se deduce que la Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid dedica su actividad a la promoción del software libre en el ámbito de esta universidad, dedicando recursos a acciones y actividades de divulgación, destinadas a dar a conocer sus beneficios: el estudio, desarrollo e investigación independientes en el marco de una facultad y Universidad que aspiran a ser un centro de encuentro para los estudiantes que persiguen dicho objetivo.

¿Qué ofrece la Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid?

Si navegamos un poco entre su web conoceremos pronto sus actividades principales:

• «Penguin on tour»: regularmente se acude al hall de un centro diferente de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y, durante unas horas, se ayudará a instalar el sistema operativo GNU/Linux en el ordenador de las personas que allí se acerquen.
• «Talleres que molan»: para convencer a la comunidad complutense de las bondades de las tecnologías libres, no hay nada mejor que talleres en los que se muestran cosas interesantes que pueden realizarse a través de estas.
• «Alejandría»: Si apostaste por liberar el código de tu Trabajo Fin de Grado o Máster, el catálogo «Alejandría» es tu siguiente parada yq eu esta iniciativa pretende ser un escaparate más del trabajo de aquellos estudiantes que han decidido apostar por el software libre contribuyendo con su propio código, así como una muestra de la apuesta de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid por esta filosofía.

No obstante, encontramos otras actvidades bastante interesantes:

• Publicaciones: sección donde además de libros para aprender LaTeX nos encontramos plantillas para elaborar documentos con este lenguaje, cursos de Gimp o de GNU Octave.
• Videojuegos: sección dedicado al juego libre online Teeworlds y al Museo Interactivo del Videojuego.

Y no os perdáis la sección de Historial para ver todo lo que han organizado a lo largo de los años.

Editado: !Añado su canal de youtube!

Más información: Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid

¿Qué son las Oficinas de Software Libre?

Las oficinas del Software Libre de las universidades son departamentos de estas instituciones que tienen como objetivo general, como no podía ser de otra forma, promocionar el Software Libre.

Lamentablemente deben su existencia a que las universidades, fuera de toda lógica, no promocionan ni utilizan prioritariamente Software Libre en sus actividades, enseñanzas o procesos, así que alguien debe hacerlo y es aquí donde entran las Oficinas de Software Libre (OSL).

Existen muchas OSL en todo el territorio español y es el momento de hacer un repaso de las mismas en el blog. Espero que os guste y que, sobre todo, os anime a acercaros a ellas para realizar todo tipo de actividades.

La entrada Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid se publicó primero en KDE Blog.