Post-Twitter

Every so often I’m motivated to move my online content in-house. With todays purchase of Twitter my intent to “own” my content has been renewed.

Dropping Twitter – A 2008 animation I made of the “Fail Whale”.
(Original artist illustration = http://www.yiyinglu.com/?portfolio=lifting-a-dreamer-aka-twitter-fail-whale)

I’m going to clean up my old Feedly RSS subscriptions and try posting here a bit more frequently.
You can subscribe if you like – https://www.somenice.com/feed/

What is a feed? What is RSS? Here is a great explainer from Matt Webbaboutfeeds.com

Generative Art Using Machine Learning

Yesterday OPENAI released a showcase of examples demonstrating image generation from text called DALL-E. The complexity of never seen examples is impressive. The quality of illustration and images makes you wonder where this will be used when anything you can think up, can be convincingly generated.

Sleepy Owl Illustrations are not SuperbOwl but not too bad.

Art, design, fashion, or possibly just to deceive? Still I’d love to see more categories or variations. Possibly an Open API

Dendrocreation

The examples are uncanny and familiar while still being “unique” or new. The low effort to produce many satisfactory results will be enough for many, especially if the cost is low.

It’s easy to point to jobs or industry that this could one day replace however I see more people working with machine learning. Human preference should steer results. A fleshy discriminator.

I joked that I’m now a Canadian fashion designer.

And just the day before another generative adversarial network, or GAN was shown called Taming transformers. This technique uses segmentation trained from landscape images to generate high resolution landscapes.

Generate van art

Cryptoart seems to be booming for well known generative artists at the moment and tools like these now eclipse some of the earliest GAN art sold at auction.

Previously other trained networks such as StyleGAN and BIGGAN peaked my interest in generating art with code. Neural networks for image generation have improved in leaps and bounds. Better UI to allow anyone to explore makes this really accessible and easy.

Exciting times.

Adafruit MagTag

Just started playing with the Adafruit MagTag internet connected eink display.

Running CircuitPython, and using ESP 32-S2 to connect over wifi. It’s wild that the 4-shade B&W eink display stays even after power is removed.

Stemma connectors make adding sensors quick and easy. Live updating code.py file and plenty of libraries / examples makes testing super-quick.

This greyscale eink explainer is great way to understand what’s going on.

The most difficult thing to this point is correctly double-clicking the reset button to update UF2

More to come…

Refresh 2020

An ongoing rebuild… Please watch your step. [ under-construction.gif ]