Topic: Geek Life

Adventures in Wordsmithing — In Short …

I’ve always loved words and reading. In fact, some of my earliest memories are of wanting to read but not having the words — once when I was about three and wanting to read a comic in Sinhala and a couple of years later, discovering English comics (TinTin and Marvel comics on two separate occasions) and not knowing English.

I sometimes feel like that these days, when I try to read technical papers on Stable Diffusion and other related areas of deep learning 🙂 Sure, I can read the words, but they (or their meaning) don’t quite make their way to my brain.…

— 5 MIN READ

Adventures in Imagineering — Communities and Conduct

I have been developing software for over thirty years and for around 20+ of those years I have been involved in open source and free software. In fact, for most of my software development career, I’ve released software for free because I believe that if it is something I like and find useful, then it might help others too. In fact, I think the only exception has been my mobile software for iOS, but that’s a different story.…

— 6 MIN READ

Adventures in Imagineering – How GUI is it?

At this point in time, there are a lot of Stable Diffusion codebases and GUIs out there. But, as far as I know at least, there aren’t a lot of GUIs for macOS. In fact, getting Stable Diffusion working on macOS is itself problematic for two reasons:

  1. On Intel macs there isn’t any GPU support
  2. On the Apple Silicon side, while there is some support for MPS (Metal Performance Shaders) the support is still nascent and is a little buggy.
…
— 4 MIN READ

Adventure in Imagineering – Getting Random

As I’ve written previously, I’ve been working on a GUI for Stable Diffusion since I prefer working with a simple UI that allows me to do everything in one place. The trouble with that is that I don’t get as much time for doing other Stable Diffusion development since I only get to do any of this work in my spare time and on weekends.…

— 3 MIN READ

Adventures in Imagineering – Getting GUI

I previously talked about how I had been working with Stable Diffusion and that I also was creating a GUI for the image generator. Well, I re-wrote the GUI again since I wasn’t happy with how the previous version worked 😛

The thing that annoyed me the most was that wxPython sliders had no way to display floating point values. So, when a setting like guidance had to go from -15 to 30 with 0.1 intervals (just to be really picky), I had to actually set the slider to go from -150 to 300 and then divide the user setting by 10 afterwards.…

— 3 MIN READ

Adventures in Imagineering — Stable Diffusion, the Unstable Bits …

I figured out a more or less functional set up for running Stable Diffusion on my Apple M1 MacBook Pro a couple of days ago. Since then, I’ve mostly done Stable Diffusion tasks on my local machine instead of doing things on Google Colab (or Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab).

Working on the local machine, at least for me, gives me more time to think about what I’m doing and to try to improve upon the code.…

— 9 MIN READ

Adventures in Imagineering – Where do the GPU-less go?

I’ve been writing a lot about Stable Diffusion (and image generation using AI) lately. That’s because providing a text prompt, getting an AI generated image back after a few seconds, and then improving upon your prompt to get the exact image you want can be so very addictive 🙂

But there’s a flip-side to the coin — those who can’t run AI systems like Stable Diffusion because their machines don’t support it.…

— 4 MIN READ

Adventures in Imagineering – I’m Outpainting the Discworld!

It’s been a pretty interesting few weeks for those interested in AI image generation. Things are happening fast and it might even be a bit hard to keep up with all that is going on. First, there was the arrival of Stable Diffusion. That was version 1.4 of the model, BTW.

This week, Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, has released version 1.5 of the model on their Discord servers.…

— 5 MIN READ