I know this isn't a humor site, but the three comments above were worthy of any comedy writing team. Result? Instant, involuntary, and un-stifle-able laughter. Thanks!
Can someone give this completely ignorant old fellow a description of what the author is doing in this article?
What is the initial drawing being done with?
What is this stable diffusion process? (Amazing is one answer.)
A very brief description of the software used.
Color me astounded. I actually liked (was delighted by) the results in step-6. When I realized it was done programmatically somehow, I had to pick myself up and get back in my chair.
The author is using a text-to-image neural network to generate an image, in this case the author is also conditioning the model on a sketch to guide the generation process.
Okay. Now I'm starting to wonder if folks who worry about AI taking over are onto something. Well, not really... yet. But color me absolutely flabbergasted.
This has been flabbergasting a lot of us. I have been playing with these text to image models for about a month and I still cannot believe it.
Try for yourself a bit. Here’s my current favorite interface to Stable Diffusion. Give it a little sketch, then go wild with the prompt description. Try different style descriptions like oil painting or comic book.
Thanks! I'm gonna try it out. First, though, I think I'm going to add an exorcist to my contacts list. This is honestly the closest thing to magic I've ever encountered.
Like telling an artist "hey, could you add a tree", "now recreate it, but make it appear to be on the moon", only that he's talking to an AI (artificial neural network).
Thank you for mentioning excalidraw. That's pretty tempting at $6/mo if paid yearly -- yeah, I know I can use it for free. To be able to produce a quick sketch on any computer, anywhere, and quickly share it is pretty nifty. I'm kind of astounded by what people do in browsers nowadays. Even more surprised that those things are so often no longer clunky in the slightest.
And vim? Yeah. Wouldn't want to live without it, though I'm not going to argue it's better than any other capable editor. It's okay to like something just because, right?
There are two types of people in this world (well, at least two): Those who dream of underground living spaces or secret hideouts/tunnels, and those who don't. Count me among the former. Thanks for the link!
An aside about the dream of farming. I'd always heard it subtly implied that my maternal grandfather, born 1899, and early on, a farmer in Minnesota, was not much of a farmer, because, ultimately, after 30 years or so of farming, he gave up and moved to California, and took a job in town.
What I did not realize, and subsequently caused me to regard his farming skills with greater generosity, was that during the first fifty years of his life, the percentage of people working on farms went from 20% of the US population to 2%! So, even if one were a good farmer, there was still a very real chance of getting squeezed out.
I'd never succeed at it, although nowadays, I'd hire a farm manager. That guy might keep it afloat, but then I wouldn't make any money off it because I'd be paying him.
It's been a long time since I read My Antonia. Loved it. If memory serves, though, wasn't the main male character quite the self-made man? Again, it's been a while. Beautiful picture of the harsh reality, and stark beauty of life on the plains.
If you want Ayn Rand that makes sense, read We the Living, in my opinion, by far her best work. As a matter of fact, I'd say Ayn Rand's three major works, can be rated worst to best with length being the determining factor. Worst -- Atlas Shrugged. If ever a book needed an editor of steely resolve, it was that windbag of a novel -- would have been great at 1/2 it's length. The Fountainhead was tighter and better. But We the Living is the best because it is set in the world of her youth and makes her rah-rah cheerleading for capitalism and her deep hatred of communism completely relatable in context. The story never leaves the Soviet Union, so it's very different from her other work.
I love capitalism, but reading Atlas Shrugged left me feeling like this is one hard woman. Reading We the Living left me feeling like now I get it -- I'd be hard, too.
Even notably bad writing, even if espousing the fatally flawed and incomplete ideology of Objectivism, leading to the fatally flawed political movement of Libertarianism, which if practiced ultimately results in pure Socialism, may be ranked: bad, worse, and worst. I couldn't say exactly who the singular worst popular writer of the 20th Century was, but certainly Rand must be a strong contender.
Couldn't agree more with the last two paragraphs. Web standards purists will trot out a reference to some standard and point out the imagined (and terrifying) consequences of making the TAB or ENTER key behave just as they would in a non-web application, AKA a real data-entry program. This is just a version of the "lest thou cause thy brother to stumble" club used to nudge the religious into compliance with strictures that make no sense to them (and yeah, the quote is probably not verbatim, but hopefully the gist of it is clear).
Example: I (who am not a programmer) once wrote a tangled mess of HTML and JavaScript to accept, and tabulate data entry for rebar (reinforcing steel) estimates. I was inordinately proud of it, bird's nest of bad programming practice that it was. I could TAB or ENTER-key my way through all fields, the up and down arrows performed the same tasks as the TAB-key, just like on a desktop program.
So why was it important to do things this way, and break the conventions so dear to the heart of the standard's purist? Because this is how I (and many others) estimated rebar in the 1990's:
You sat at a wide desk or table with a set of plans 30" to 48"-wide spread out to your left (if you were lucky) and another 30"-48" of table was needed to catch the plan pages turned to reveal the one you were working on. You right hand rested on the keyboard's ten-key pad some 3-5 feet away. You didn't look at your right hand -- you looked at your left hand index finger which was glued to (and rarely left) the large page at precisely the item you wanted to enter into your tabulation program, as you entered the SAC code, the qty per unit, the number of units, the bar size number, the bend category, the grade of steel, and the total length. Your eyes never left the drawing as you did this, and immediately upon completing that line item, your left hand picked up a yellow highlighter and highlighted that item -- one of many hundreds or thousands that would be necessary in a materials take-off of any appreciable size. To force the use of the TAB-key, or the mouse to move through data-entry fields would simply guarantee that no one would use your program. Ever.
But the purist says, "Someone may stumble."
Aunt Loreen said, "Sometimes the 'You shoulds' are the sh-ts."
That was my first reaction. I tried clicking the wiki link, though, at the top of the github page, and from there to "Bird's Eye View". Pleasantly surprised.
I thought at first you had invented a clever new word combining strategy and survival. Then I realized that v is just very close to c on a qwerty keyboard. Oh well.
