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Tag: tech-foolishness

  • My Introduction to Stable Diffusion

    For a few years now, I’ve been fascinated by programmatic art. For ten years or so, there’s been a stream of projects that do something along the lines of applying an artist-inspired filter (usually Van-Gogh) to existing photos to stylize them. Last year, the DALL-E project went a step further by generating images from textual descriptions and a library of images.

    I was stunned at both variations on existing images and images synthesized from descriptions. This summer, generative art got a little more accessible to the masses when Stable Diffusion was released, using similar technology, but publicly available models (at least for now).

    I think the business model leverages that you can make interesting images from the public models, but that most businesses will want to tune the image text-to-image models to suit their intended message. The models require an enormous amount of energy to train — the default one has an 11 metric-ton carbon footprint — and the model propagates cultural biases present in the underlying data. Both aspects seem significant enough to motivate an entrepreneur to hire out specialists.

    Stable Diffusion is a little tricky to install on a M1 Mac — you have to checkout a particular branch of stable-diffusion, currently `apple-silicon-mps-support`, and hope that nightly PyTorch builds are stable. You also have to register with HuggingFace to download an image model, which seem to be updated frequently at this point.

    There’s currently no GPU support for Apple silicon for Stable Diffusion, so you need to be patient, but here are some samples of the Stable Diffusion imagination…. that might sound a bit like “stable genius” and artistically sometimes the images resemble another product shoveled from a stable…. but again, samples of

  • More Javascript Futzing

    Poking at my visual programming course, here’s the result of the third assignment. Consider this under a refrigerator magnet.

    The assignment objectives seem to be to introduce use of classes and animation. The new wrinkle for me was Window.requestAnimationFrame(), which we use to schedule repainting the scene to animate.

  • Creative Coding Canvas Transforms

    Here’s some more eye candy from Making Visuals with JavaScript, though it’s still pretty simple and the eye candy analogy might be better if you think of carob-flavored spirographs…..