TBH, the sort of people who would get to the point of paying a stranger for a hug wouldn't necessarily be the sort of people who would progress a social connection with a stranger to the point of hugging. Building up a relationship, platonic or otherwise, takes time and effort, and often the ones that best fill those roles in our lives are also those we don't regularly meet in person.

Thank you, that explanation helps me a lot. I certainly agree with that core point.

Giving your pronouns along with your name (and any other additional information) as part of a normal introduction isn't what's depicted in the comic's pronoun-circle though. We see everyone just sit down to shout out (and start to argue about) just their hex-codes/pronouns.

Also, I have a hard time interpreting the arguments of #LEG3ND. #LEG3ND points to the visually green appearance of the other figure in defense of their self-identification of a less-matching green hex-code, and opposing the suggestion of the closer-matching hex-code. I would normally understand that interpreting someone's external appearance instead of just trusting their stated pronouns or gender would be a bad thing, but here #LEG3ND's (seemingly inaccurate?) interpretation of appearance is given as the more favorable supporting point? The comic seems to use non-primary colors as an analogy for untraditional/neo pronouns or non-binary genders/identities. But then #LEG3ND unapologetically gives a "hex-code" that is not only outside the range of primary colors (or something like standard named html colors), but actually incompatible with the format of hex codes entirely, and refuses to clarify at all, which seems equivalent to something like responding with a set of pronouns that is not usable in standard English (eg a list of 5). So then is the comic then, through its protagonist, deriding the answering with intelligible pronouns at all? Given context, that doesn't seem the intended effect, but understanding what the author actually intended to convey about real-world pronouns or genders without substantially assuming their analogies seems impossible unless there's some cultural references I'm missing.

I recommend you let them take it rather than giving it yourself. Too many questions like "who are you?", "where did you get that?", and "how did you even get in here?".

And anyone who plants a tree is providing aid and comfort to them.

I think this could pretty fairly be expanded to Christian fundamentalists, religious fundamentalists in general, or really any overarching philosophies or beliefs that are interpreted in an extreme and/or uncompromising way. I don't think you need to read their sacred texts and make an untrained judgment on how well a particular fundamentalist's beliefs conform to scripture to determine whether those beliefs are compatible with participating in a healthy, modern society. In fact, while a less extreme reading of those texts may give a generally positive message, I think trying to make such comparisons presumes infallible goodness of that message and hinders valid critiques of "reasonable" interpretations that ought not stand up to modern scrutiny.

IMO, implying that folks are responsible (to the point of liability) for following the news closely enough to see whether the manufacturers of the products they own have lied to them sets a dangerous precedent. That would mean you not only have to research your purchases beforehand to make good economic decisions for yourself, you also lock yourself into some unknown period of ongoing investigation with unknown depth to keep from being liable for someone else's failures. It's one thing if what is being marketed and sold is comprehensive driving assistance theoretically requiring no driver input, it's another when it's called full self-driving and the CEO makes overreaching claims about its capability. It's been repeatedly ruled that corporations can't bury clauses that fundamentally alter the nature of their agreements with consumers deep in the fine print and expect that to reverse what was otherwise communicated plainly.

I saw the watermark stuff, and I'm not contesting any of that, my specific interest is in the fine-detail artifacts. The apparent leaning of some of the bars, eg the 5th and 6th, can 100% be explained by something like a smudge between them; I'd know because I actually drew up some parallel bars in paint.net, rotated and zoomed them, lightened a splotch, and gave it blur to match. Human eyes and brain are pretty good at picking out valid details from degraded images, but you have to remember we're talking about the level of shading of a handful of pixels, it does not take much disturbance at all to create an illusion of non-parallel lines. A hard object hitting the tag there would be enough to damage the barcode printing slightly to create such a lightening as would produce the leaning appearance.

I'm not saying that an AI didn't draw the barcode, and I'm not even saying that it doesn't have an effect like that because of generative AI imperfections. I'm saying that nothing that I see, or that has been pointed out to me, about the appearance of the barcode provides any indication or suggestion that the image is AI-generated, instead of those being typical results of looking at an image that has been resized and compressed/converted as it travels across the internet. Or to say the quiet part out loud, that those who see "ai artifacts" in the barcode are chasing ghosts, regardless of the actual image creation or the presence of watermarks/fingerprinting.

Can you specifically describe what you are seeing then that stands out as an AI artifact? I am genuinely interested, not just try to challenge your statement. Here's my observations and thoughts on it:

What I see is the JPEG compression blocks around the lines and characters where the chunk changes from a smooth color to a much noisier square; what looks to have once been much blockier aliased pixels forming the barcode lines that got scaled up and blurred, so now there are distinct vertical segments a within each line, as well as a noticeable gridding on the small characters (some of which might also be my viewer); and then possibly some sort of moire effect from the slightly angled barcode lines interacting with the grid of the pixels and/or JPEG compression chunk boundaries. As with many images on the internet, it looks like it has changed size and format in the past, and it's possible that someone composting an image from different sources would end up with different artifacting in different places.

Given how small the details of the barcode are, I think they would have to come pretty much entirely from the VAE decoding itself, not from the typical generative AI denoising that we would typically associate with hallucinations, extra fingers, and all the other "classic" tells of older image generation models as well as the less-specific "wrongness" of some more recent ones. So it would AFAIK end up having to be a pretty specific artifact to the actual base model being used, and even then just doing a VAE encoding into the compressed, many-dimensional latent-space and immediately decoding would produce the same artifact, and that's hardly an "AI" process on its own.

That just looks like typical camera and compression artifacts on a fine detail pattern, not like a generative AI that doesn't actually know what it's drawing so it starts making inaccurate extrapolations? What about that makes you think it was done by AI?

Not a true expert, but I think it comes down to "observing" a particle/phenomenon like this inherently comes down to some sort of interaction, and it can't just be neglected like you could on a macro scale. Even for something like holding a ruler up to an object and seeing what mark lines up, you're relying on a bunch of light bouncing off the object (and the ruler) to be able to judge that. If the thing you're trying to measure is on the order of one particle of light, blasting it with a bunch of anything is gonna affect it pretty severely, and who knows what a "ruler" would even mean in that analogy. So it's less like some idea of sapient knowledge, and more like when you struggle to measure something like a tiny feather or single bead of Styrofoam, like you can't even get near the thing without the wind from moving or some random static or something else moving the thing around uncontrollably, except many orders of magnitude more sensitive.

"Get me some oil so I can tap this tight hole. You're going to need to screw it hard, and then drop a double nut on it. Make sure to keep your bush clean, or you can try sticking your finger in and twisting it around, otherwise you'll never get this hard shaft into it. And remember: if it's walking funny when you drill, try putting the tip between a pair of nuts."

Maybe a bit more machining, but it's not even a stretch to make it sound absolutely terrible. Those are all even pretty reasonable statements in context (if you know zero slang), not just isolated words.