filler
Messing With AI Art
With the new thing being AI art generation, I couldn’t help but give it a shot. After spending a few days trying to get Stable Diffusion to work with my GPU, I finally was in luck. Seeing I have no real place to post some of these besides here and in a few smaller communities (remember I don’t do social media), here’s some examples.
First thing off, was realizing you have to order your words exactly in a specific order or unexpected results occur. I thought bacon on a skillet would be easy… WRONG!
Having bacon after the skillet caused it to be part of the campfire. I got a massive laugh from it. Fourth try got exactly what I was looking for.
I tried to feed some ideas from my book writing times into it and see what it gave me. If it worked great, I could possibly not bother with trying pay an artist commission for book covers and a few web banners in the near future. Not really what I was looking for but still funny.
AI art generators, both stable diffusion and craiyon seem to have issues with real faces. Not a really big deal. It handled anime girls quite well though and paintings as well.
Now for some crazy stuff, because why not.
If I was told just a few years ago you could have art generated by a computer program by just text, I’d be skeptical that it could occur that quickly. I do have some concerns that as this stuff becomes more prolific, there will be restrictions of some kind restricting people from entering specific words or using it in a certain fashion. Where I am okay with metadata being embedded in the images saying they were generated is okay, that’s about as far as I go. Sadly, it’s not the stage yet where I think I can use it in some manner for here yet unless I want everything to look like anime girls, not that I have a problem with that. I’ll be following it for a while though.
Note: I’ve laughed my ass off while generating as many images as I could. This has been quite enjoyable.
A look back at the past…
Since politics seem to be what everybody talks about right now, I thought it would be interesting to point out stuff not political that might be of educational value.
Something people take for granted in {$Current_Year} is their computers and the internet itself. A handful of people are widely known as pioneers for the modern age of computers, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee and others. However tons of people have contributed to creating what people use daily and are not as widely known.
Some people of note:
Dale Heatherington and Dennis Hayes – Created the first PC modem, the 80-103A. Their company (Hayes Microcomputer Products) created the command set for modems that’s still used to this day.
Dennis Ritchie (who died at the same time as Steve Jobs and didn’t get as much media attention) – Invented the C programming language and created the UNIX operating system with colleague Ken Thompson. The C Programming language (in various variants) is used for creation of several software products widely used today. The technology created from the UNIX operating system is used in several computer operating systems to this day.
Vint Cerf – designed the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which is the primary data protocol used on the internet today.
Gary Kildall – Created one of the first programming languages for the Intel 8088 and 8080 processors, PL/M. He also created one of the first OSes for that processor, CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). CP/M would later be copied by other companies using its reference material, one of which was Seattle Computer Products. That company would later license its OS, 86-DOS to Microsoft to be sold as MS-DOS.
There’s tons of other people out there, these are just ones that I know of from memory. Out of the ones on the list, I’ve been doing research the most on CP/M and its creator, Gary Kildall. In 2019, CP/M will be 45 years old, and mostly if not forgotten by nearly everyone.
A concern of mine is people not wanting to learn where what they use daily came from, or if they do come across information, see what was done and consider it inferior to today. In modern terms, it is technologically inferior, however things take time to build up and develop over time. So take some time, go look up one of those names and start from there. You might learn something new.
Not forgotten…
It’s been almost a year since I posted any updates on here. Between moving and setting up for a new job, I haven’t had the time to sit down and come up with original content like I planned on. Hopefully that will change soon. I have a bit of a priority to spend some time working on my book in the next few months so I’ll finally be getting around to doing an update to that.
I have a good guideline I want to follow that’s 90% done, however the hardest part I’m struggling with is out of all things, the beginning. I have a few other things I might post about here soon that aren’t really rants and not stupid things like me going off on license plate frames.
On a side note… Arguing with environmentalists is just like arguing with someone who doesn’t think evolution exists, it seems like their brains are wired exactly the same. (More on this later)
