What is Nostr?

Nostr itself isn't an app or website, but a protocol. 

Think of it as a set of rules that allows different apps to communicate with each other in a decentralized way. It's designed for social networking and focuses on privacy and censorship resistance.

Nostter.app is a website that uses the Nostr protocol. From this website you can create a Nostr identity, post messages, and follow others.  Since Nostr is decentralized, there are  many other Nostr-based apps available.

Like Primal.net another website using the same protocol (using the same secret key), 

What is a protocol? Imagine email. Email itself is a protocol, just like Nostr. 

Different email providers like Gmail or Yahoo Mail are like the Nostter.app -  they use the email protocol to offer their email services. 

Navigating the Commissioned Art Market in the Age of AI

While the digital age has given opportunities for artists (digital or traditional) to showcase their work on the internet, a less discussed but equally significant consequence emerges – the economic challenges faced by artists relying on commissioned work. The proliferation of AI-driven tools and user-friendly platforms threatens to reshape the traditional market for personalized art, impacting the livelihoods of artists who thrive on commissions.

1. Erosion of Commissioned Art Market:

Many artists (hobbyists or professional) could earn a living through commissioned work, or add some revenue to their main income, by producing commissioned artworks (such as caricatures, portraits, or comic pages), but that was before  2022 as this market is being eroded by the accessibility of AI-powered tools.

2. Economic Realities for Artists:

Competing with AI tools is unfair, they are fast, produce relatively good quality artwork in matter of minutes, this is leaving artists potentially undervalued for their time and expertise. The customer could get dozen of possible artworks version in less than an hour, and if he has the assistance of a prompt engineer or a person skilled in Stable Diffusion (or midjourney), it is just a matter of retouching the best result they have selected in the end. Most AI artwork are public domain.

3. Quality vs. Quantity Debate:

There are tensions between artists and AI companies, because of the ease of producing AI-generated art quickly and the fact that the database (the checkpoint model) used to generate art is a mix of 'plundered' artwork produced by humans, some from past public domain source, or taken without permission.

Sure the unique, personalized touch that human artists bring to their creations is something that AI is not able to bring to the table, but many customers previously taking commissions are not art literate and will not perceive the difference.

4. Platform Dynamics:

Because some many AI generated images have flooded tumblr, facebook, pinterest, etc ... these new images being mixed with the real work of artists and hobbyist (trying to make a living) has impacted their visibility, client acquisition, and overall market presence.

5. Adaptation and Innovation:

The artists who manage to learn AI skills have successfully navigated this changing landscape by adapting their skills or finding innovative ways to collaborate with AI tools. And are now a lot more efficient, and produce more and with a keen professional eye.

While many others are struggling. Except for the renowned, recognized one.

The hope is that the future will empower artists to remain competitive while preserving the value of their craft in the face of technological disruption. The hope is that art communities are coming together to support one another, sharing insights, and fostering a sense of solidarity amid industry changes.

As the commissioned art market undergoes a transformation fueled by AI and automation, the economic realities for many artists become increasingly complex. Navigating this landscape requires a delicate balance between adapting to technological shifts and preserving the intrinsic value of personalized, handcrafted art. Artists and the broader creative community must engage in conversations, advocacy, and innovative solutions to ensure the sustainability of artistic livelihoods in the face of evolving digital landscapes.

Nadine Kerastas

Discovering German fitness model and Instagram influencer Nadine Kerastas

How to Download youtube subtitle

Watching a 40 minutes video is great, what is not so great is trying to remember a special moment in a video you watched 2 months ago, and while you remember a bit of the content, and check your history ... it is quite challenging to find that video again.

Because compared to a text search performed on google, which will find easily a song lyrics but simply typing a sentence of that song, searching for a text extracted in a video is not going to work ... the only way to find a video is via its title or the keywords associated with that video.

Then this tool is a game changer, it will download the text from the video 

https://downsub.com

DownSub is a FREE web application that can download subtitles directly from Youtube, VIU, Viki, Vlive and more. 

Downsub supports downloading all subtitles/captions formats such as: SRT, TXT, VTT. 

DownSub doesn't force our user to download or install any type of extensions or third party software. 

It provides an online method to download subtitles by just entering the URL of the video and clicking Download.

A social media that pays you : tsu.co

Talk about coincidence just a few days after I posted "Why an alternative to facebook is needed" mentioning ello.ch as the hot new facebook alternative... tsu.co was launched.

tsu.co

As ello.co motto was about counteracting facebook tendency to sell his users information to marketers - tsu.co goes for the revenue aspect.

Basically tsu.co rises the question to facebook users who are "content creators" (such as artists and celebrities) and ask them this simple question :

"How much money do you directly make by having x followers on your facebook page?"

Because the answer is most certainly : none

You can be a cosplayer like Jessica Nigri and have made nearly 3 Millions Followers and receive nothing from facebook advertising money.

Which is to be fair, a bit like working in an office where all your visitors are buying stuffs from your landlord while they are in the building and you don't make any money (you just don't pay rent).

Or like a radio station that would use many songs and never give any money back to the song artists...

tsu.co is here to mend a fundamental issue on the internet related to content creator and their lack of revenue, they want to distribute some money back to them : the "content creator" - because let's face it, we don't go to facebook to look at an empty website with ads, we are going for the posts of people we follow, or our friend's timeline and to post cool links.

Some facts

Basically what you are doing on facebook, you can do on tsu.co (except they don't have an IRC, or groups, or pages, just tags, and messages) ; the big change is that tsu.co pays you back (and they provide some analytics for the visits).

Best of 2 worlds

Now the smart way to play the social media game is to setup your tsu.co account so it will be used as a proxy to post on facebook - and your twitter account.

The feeling you will have after a while browsing tsu.co is like walking through a shopping mall with people you don't really know. Many people are there to make money, and will send you friend requests, but they mean nothing, the only thing they want is a follow-back, visit their profile and that you will share their posts (because that's more or less how they make money).

Searching on tsu.co sucks, you are not supposed to look back for an old post, but to keep posting and posting (until you have filled your quotas).

Hannah Minx

Hannah Wagner (better known by her stage name Miss Hannah Minx; born Oct. 1990) is an American vlogger known on Youtube for her Kawaii anime look and proportions (notice the frequent use of top down photo like the one above).

Her extensive cosplay in Japan, her informational videos about Japanese culture, and her JWOW (teaching a Japanese Word of the Week)/JPOW (Japanese Phrase of the Week) made her one of the most successful Youtube account.

She is actually so successful that many popular vloggers have made parodies of her characters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCPNPm1nlq0
Controversies, parodies, hateful comments nothing seems to stop Hannah, why?

Because Hannah Minx is quite a package of win

What are her angles? Japan, cosplay, teaching Japanese to the mass and being a geek with a big heart.

In my blog I've made some articles on famous cosplayers, and I wanted to add Miss Hannah Minx - even though she's not really a conventional cosplay girl ; because of her enthusiasm.

You can tell whatever you want about her characters or her videos, but you'll never get bored.


YouTube - MissHannahMinx's Channel
http://www.youtube.com/bonusminx
http://misshannahminx.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/HannahMinx
https://www.facebook.com/MissHannahMinx

Now absolutely nothing to do with the character above - I just fund a fantastic t-shirt :

My next article will be about .. the invasion of pornstar in the cosplay milieu.

New Business models for the 21st century

Employees are doomed

We all heard about the end of the "Employee paradigm" - the mythical guy who has been working for the same company all his career is a very endangered specie. Today working 3 or 4 years for a company is already a big achievement.

Work as we know it today, is still a concept inherited from the industrial age, but this concept is obsolete and that's why we are confronted with a massive unemployment on one hand or many jobs that are either "artificial" or counter-productive and employers that are reluctant to hire freshly certified student or prefer to invest in abroad facilities or outsourcing on the other hand. Because one side is trying to enter the workforce place to access the consumerism model (buying a house, a car and starting a family) and the other is trying to lower his price and maximize his profits.

Until society accept that there is no shame to be unemployed - and address the people's need to find their own true purpose - society will be in dire straights.

The rise of the self employed

Because many people are unemployed - or are trying to find or add a new income - self employment or freelancing and self empowerment, have emerged and are giving the economy a boost in self-help, coaching, mentoring, sales training, etc...
But still being "self employed" is usually a synonymous of "being a loser at home" society's perception is still in preference of the old paradigm of the three piece suits employee working 9 to 5 in a modern office - and for the "Freelancer" the challenges are even more difficult, because now the former "frustrated employee" is still the employee, but he also has to be his own boss ...