Reads
Stable Diffusion is amazing:
- Stable Diffusion is a really big deal: From the article: “Stable Diffusion is a new “text-to-image diffusion model” that was released to the public by Stability.ai six days ago, on August 22nd. It’s similar to models like Open AI’s DALL-E, but with one crucial difference: they released the whole thing.” There is an amazing flood of tooling coming out around this family of models.
- Show r/StableDiffusion: Integrating SD in Photoshop for human/AI collaboration: For example, take a look at this plugin that’s integrates Stable Diffusion right into Photoshop.
- 4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything: You probably saw this article making the rounds this week. I know it hit daring fireball, for example. Think about what he’s doing - he’s painting. With words. And a 4.2GB stable diffusion model. Is it a tool like Photoshop or a projector for a mural? Is it cheating?
- An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.: Does your opinion change about the 4.2GB if the artist wins an art award? Should it? This one created using midjourney.
Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake finally:
- Ethereum’s “merge” rally explained: Having been heads down inside the Solana ecosystem for the past few months, I take for granted the low transaction fees and relative efficiency of the chain. Ethereum is on the cusp of achieving at least the efficiency part of this as it switches from a proof-of-work model to a proof-of-stake one. The key number is a 99.95% more energy efficient network. Transaction speeds and costs should also be more reasonable.
- How The Merge will slash Ethereum’s climate pollution: A nice summary of the energy usage of Ethereum.
- The Merge: If you haven’t been following along with what this “merge” consists of, and how they’re handling it, Ethereum’s own page on the transition is a good read.
Heisenberg Hydrogen - clean & messy:
I’m always fascinated when the physical scale of invisible things have visible engineering side-effects (e.g. microwaves being too big to fit through the mesh on the microwave door - how nuts is that?!). Turns out hydrogen being element #1 makes it tiny - so tiny that keeping it from escaping a pipeline or a fueling port is… tricky:
- Years after shuttle, NASA rediscovers the perils of liquid hydrogen: One reason SpaceX and the other private space companies may move faster than NASA - they don’t need to worry about direct interference from politicians. That seems to be the lesson here of why NASA chose hydrogen as the fuel for the Artemis launch system.
- Clean hydrogen has a leak problem—and the tech to monitor it is nascent: Leaking hydrogen could undo it’s otherwise clean uses. Good overview on the state of the industry.
Everything else:
- Cyber Guidance for Small Businesses: Very good set of recommendations here. FIDO MFA, people. It’s the way to go.
- Adam Grant on Brainstorming: I really like this approach. I need to remember this for the next brainstorming session. Optimize for ideas, not for the strongest personalities.
Game Things
- Skeleton Retargeting in Unreal Engine 5: Fascinating demo that shows them retargeting a lion onto the skeleton used in their multiplayer demo shooter called Lyra. It covers skeleton retargeting overall in Unreal 5, but the demo with the lion is both impressive and leaves the host nearly in tears from laughter. Skip through to about 30 minutes if you just want to see the lion portion.
Code & Tools
- Nix: Ran across this checking out an open source project by a former colleague. It’s a toolchain that attempts to provide reproducible build environments and deployments. Anyone play around with this? Reach out - would love to hear why you tried it and how it went.
- Eraser: I’m a sucker for good documentation/diagramming tools. This one looks interesting. Some of the simplicity of the text-based tools I listed a few weeks ago. In practice, I found editing older diagrams more confusing in the text-based tools, this looks promising as it’s WYSIWYG like most diagramming tools.
- Use the Keyboard: I’m a keyboard shortcut fan. This feels like it was made for me. It’s a reference of popular apps, including webapps, and their keyboard shortcuts.
Cool Projects
- Raspberry Pi Pico Solar System Project: Neat little project. Love how sharp these little screens are.
