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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • One other visual element that people find scary: glowing eyes.

    I’m guessing that this is because it’s a characteristic of nocturnal predators.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapetum_lucidum

    The tapetum lucidum (Latin for ‘bright tapestry, coverlet’; /təˈpiːtəm ˈluːsɪdəm/ tə-PEE-təm LOO-sih-dəm; pl.: tapeta lucida)[1] is a layer of tissue in the eye of many vertebrates and some other animals. Lying immediately behind the retina, it is a retroreflector. It reflects visible light back through the retina, increasing the light available to the photoreceptors (although slightly blurring the image).

    The tapetum lucidum contributes to the superior night vision of some animals. Many of these animals are nocturnal, especially carnivores, while others are deep-sea animals. Similar adaptations occur in some species of spiders.[2] Haplorhine primates, including humans, are diurnal and lack a tapetum lucidum.

    UI: ComfyUI

    Model: STOIQNewrealityFLUXSD_F1DAlpha

    The image is a vector illustration.

    The image is very high contrast. The image contains only pure black and pure white.

    The image contains hard light, directional light, backlighting, silhouetting, and negative space. The image contains no fill light.

    The image is at night.

    There is a nude woman standing in an open doorframe looking at the viewer. The woman is barefoot. The woman is a pure black silhouette. The woman’s eyes are illuminated in white.

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  • I’ve done a few of these sorts of “single image with seasonal transitions spanning the image” before with Stable Diffusion models in Automatic1111 and I think I may have submitted at least one before. In Automatic1111, the way to do this sort of thing is to use the Regional Prompter extension and break the image up into strips; you can then set different prompts for different regions and the degree to which blending should span regions.

    As best I can tell from poking around, using a prompt directing a “blended composite” progression in Flux-derived models gets the same effect with a lot less effort. ComfyUI also has ways to combine different prompts for regions in one image via nodes, but if I can do it from the prompt and it gives enough control, that’s preferable from my standpoint; less work.



  • .io is especially popular because it resembles the computer term “input-output.” It is huge with start-ups and IT companies.

    Well, those companies should also have the technical chops to know better.

    I still think that most of opening up the TLD space was a mistake, not just the two-character stuff. Very few new TLDs have actually provided a lot of use, but they have created a “brand tax” on companies that don’t want confusing use of similar registrations and who then go register the equivalent domains.

    .biz vs .com is a great example.


  • I don’t know about favorite, but high on the mess-with-the-head factor.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion

    Capgras delusion or Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, another close family member, or pet has been replaced by an identical impostor.[a] It is named after Joseph Capgras (1873–1950), the French psychiatrist who first described the disorder.

    In a 1990 paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, psychologists Hadyn Ellis and Andy Young hypothesized that patients with Capgras delusion may have a “mirror image” or double dissociation of prosopagnosia, in that their conscious ability to recognize faces was intact, but they might have damage to the system which produces the automatic emotional arousal to familiar faces.[21] This might lead to the experience of recognizing someone while feeling something was not “quite right” about them. In 1997, Ellis and his colleagues published a study of five patients with Capgras delusion (all diagnosed with schizophrenia) and confirmed that although they could consciously recognize the faces, they did not show the normal automatic emotional arousal response.[22] The same low level of autonomic response was shown in the presence of strangers. Young (2008) has theorized that this means that patients with the disease experience a “loss” of familiarity, not a “lack” of it.[23] Further evidence for this explanation comes from other studies measuring galvanic skin responses (GSR) to faces. A patient with Capgras delusion showed reduced GSRs to faces in spite of normal face recognition.[24] This theory for the causes of Capgras delusion was summarised in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2001.[2]



  • you don’t directly vote for the president,

    Well, okay, so, the US does have the electoral college, and strictly-speaking, you’re choosing electors that choose the President, but the election is and has for a long time functionally been a direct one. That is, you know the person that you are voting for in voting for the elector. Some states don’t even constitutionally let electors vote for anyone other than the person they have pledged to vote for, and in any case, the electors are chosen by the parties, who have no incentive to choose someone likely to vote for anyone other than the candidate that they’ve pledged to vote for, so it’s not really an aspect of the electoral system in the normal case. While false electors exist, normally as a protest vote if they know that their candidate can’t win, they’re rare and have never altered the outcome of an election.

    This came up this year in some discussion in the context of what happens if a President drops out after being placed on the ballot but prior to becoming President, which I assume is what you’re thinking about, so that the electors cannot vote for the person on the ballot, and in that situation, yeah, they’d have to find some kind of fallback.

    But that’s a pretty limited corner case. That is, they don’t just have a blank check to go out and build coalitions and select someone.




  • I’ve fasted – like, just water and vitamins – for a week before.

    I found that I was hungry, especially for about the first two or three days, but that I mostly ignored it after that, though I did find myself paying more attention to food ads and stuff like that than normal.

    I was significantly cooler. I assume that the metabolism cranks down. I needed to wear heavier clothing than normal to feel comfortable.

    I felt like I had less energy to effortlessly run around. Like, I could get up and go somewhere, wasn’t weak, just felt more like something you’d think about doing before doing.

    Don’t need to hit the toilet much. That’s neat. Do need to stay hydrated, which I found to be surprisingly easy to forget about without sitting down for a meal.

    I wasn’t trying to push myself physically while doing that, though.

    I’ve also tried running a long-run calorie deficit where I wasn’t fasting, but also wasn’t eating much – something like 500 calories a day or less – for a longer period of time, for months, and then did a ten mile bike ride a day – there are calories coming in, but they’re considerably less than what you’re burning just living. I found the biking to be kinda rough. It just yanked all of the sugar out of my blood. Had a couple times doing that when I had my vision start to gray out at the end of my ride, needed to stop and get my head down. Was kinda like a zombie after my ride for a bit. Also was colder, just as when fasting. While it’s doable – I lost a bunch of weight doing it – I have to say that I think that it was rather harder than just outright fasting and not doing the exercise. Every time I ate, I felt like it kicked me back into “being hungry mode”, and it was only really physically a strain during the bike ride.

    I had a harder time mentally concentrating on things when I’m doing that. Haven’t tried quantifying it, but I’d say that I was less-productive while doing that.



  • I try to go easy on those, as I vaguely recall reading that frequently taking melatonin for long periods of time can have some unpleasant effects, but yeah, I finally picked some up, and I’ve used them on rare occasions when I absolutely cannot get to sleep or when my sleep cycle is way out of whack, and they definitely do have an impact.

    I try to keep the room dark. Don’t drink caffine near bedtime. I have one of those blackout masks to really get rid of any light if necessary. Avoid thinking about anything interesting or with emotional impact. Get some exercise prior to going to sleep. I’ve rarely had problems with sounds keeping me awake, but I have some silicone ear plugs for the very rare times that that comes up.


  • This is a remake of an image that I submitted about a year ago here, this time higher-resolution, in 16:9 aspect ratio, photographic and done with the Flux-derived Newreality model.

    To repeat my comment then:

    Some years back, I gathered up all the scary images I could find, and looked for commonalities, tried to figure out what was “frightening” to people. One pretty consistent element was a wide, toothed smile.

    While I think that the earlier image is tough competition for this one in terms of visual impact, when I created the earlier image, I was much more lax in terms of what I was willing to accept from the generator – I just wanted it to look scary, and to have a wide, toothed mouth. That is, a lot of getting the image was a dice roll; I had to generate a bunch of images, take the best.

    But this time around, I have enough control from the model’s ability to take natural-language description to be able to intentionally try to specifically target something like the original image, which is a stupendous improvement. Was just like an arrow to a very specific image that I wanted, just took a few minutes and iterations. Fantastic.



  • I hadn’t gotten SD Ultimate Upscaler (using SwinIR_4x) set up with a Flux-based model until this image, so I’d been just putting out images at a quarter this resolution – my monitor is 2560x1440, so this is a fullscreen image for me – until now.

    ComfyUI lets you “disable” a node in a workflow – it’s an option available in the right-click context menu when clicking on a node – so if you use the posted workflow, you can just “disable” the upscaler part of the workflow until you actually care about its output, then re-enable it, as it’s time-consuming.

    I hopefully now have my general vanilla workflow to use for most images back up and running, which I haven’t really fully since moving off Automatic1111. :-)



  • I rarely use speakers, as my environment is one where I might bother others easily. On the rare occasions that I do, I use some small old USB Logitech speakers from ages back. I have a surround sound speaker setup with subwoofer and such sitting around, but don’t bother to plug it in, since I’m just not going to use it.

    I mostly use headphones, though I’ve got an elaborate mass of mixers, sound interfaces, headphones, and multiple clock-synchronized powered mics hooked up to the computer.

    I will say that small speakers have come a hell of a long way since the 1990s, when I remember them consistently sounding kind of tinny. They pretty much all sound great to me today.



  • which means only one person can win and any vote for someone who isn’t in the top two is pretty much a waste.

    Parliamentary systems basically do the same thing as presidential systems, just in a different way.

    There are only two really viable parties, and other parties can only really influence things via the spoiler effect in the US.

    Yes. However, there are also very few actually viable party coalitions in most parliamentary systems. Like, the far-left party probably isn’t going to enter into coalition with the far-right party. And neither has anywhere near enough support to actually determine the executive. Any coalition they enter into is going to mandate a lot of compromises from what their particular party program – what we in the US typically call a “party platform” is. So…they aren’t really an option for running the executive, even if they show up on the ballot.

    In a parliamentary system, the parties make their promises to the public. Then the vote happens. Then there’s some horse-trading, and parties throw out some – not known to the public at the time of election – of their electoral promises, and create a coalition.

    It’s true that in the US system, you basically only have two viable parties…but that’s because in the US, parties are more analogous to party coalitions in some parliamentary systems. Basically, in the US, the horse-trading happens before the election, so you see the coalition that you can vote on at the time of the election. The parties in a parliamentary system with many parties are maybe more analogous to the caucuses. So, we don’t have a “party for black people” in the US…but we do have the Congressional Black Caucus, which (mostly) operates inside the big-tent Democratic party.

    The fact that parties expect to likely have to throw out some promises in a parliamentary system also comes with some issues. The UK uses FPTP rather than proportional representation, so tends away from having coalitions, but is a parliamentary system, and can do so. It is very likely, from what I’ve read, that the reason that the UK Brexited was because of some jiggery-pokery associated with this. Basically, the Conservative Party in the UK had promised its voters a referendum on UK membership in the EU. However, at the time this promise was made, the Conservative leadership expected not to be able to achieve a majority, that they would have to form a coalition with the Liberal Democratic party, as they had previously. The Liberal Democratic party was strongly in favor of being in the EU, and probably would have required them to not hold such a referendum as a condition of being in coalition. Holding a referendum is not actually something that the Conservative Party likely wanted to actually do. As a result, the Conservatives could make such a promise and get the electoral support from doing so…with the expectation that they would never have to actually follow through on it, because they’d get the opportunity to throw out some of their electoral promises to voters during the coalition-forming process. However, they did better than expected, and didn’t form a coalition, and were stuck holding a Brexit referendum. You won’t get that in the US, since the executive makes their promises prior to the election.

    NGOs, like the EFF or Greenpeace or the like, also tend to play a larger role in the process in the US, which provides for a lot of options as to involvement in advocacy. In Europe, some countries developed “Pirate Parties”, political organizations that work something akin to the EFF here (though there’s also the EDRi in Europe, it acts as more of a coordinating institution).

    One other issue that parliamentary systems run into is that after the election, they have to decide on a coalition to choose the new executive. This usually doesn’t take too long, but sometimes the legislators don’t agree in the post-election horse-trading process, and the result is that no executive gets chosen (or, in some cases, as in Italy, a “technocratic” executive gets chosen for the public). Belgium and Northern Ireland have recently had extended periods without an executive (which, in their terminology, is “without a government”), which hampers their ability to do much. In a presidential system, after the election, you know who is going to be running the executive.

    In the US, the Big Two parties also hold primary elections, which permits you, as a member of the public (usually registered as a voter of that party, though there are even some exceptions to that), to choose which candidates you want your party to run. That isn’t a constitutional requirement, and some parties do not do that. However, it’s also input that frequently isn’t available to the electorate in Europe, where legislative candidates are selected internally by the party.


  • This is to elect the President. In a presidential system, as in the US, you choose the leader of the executive portion of government separately from the legislative leader. In a parliamentary system, as many countries in Europe use, the public doesn’t choose the leader of the executive portion of government. Instead, they just vote for representatives in the legislative portion, and then those legislators form a coalition (if necessary) and choose a leader of the executive (the prime minister). The closest analog to coalition forming in the presidential election is doing exactly what the Greens are proposing above – having a candidate drop out and endorse another, with the hopes that they can sway their supporters. It’s basically what JFK Jr did, for example, with Trump.

    While hypothetically the US could form legislative coalitions, in practice, due to the way the US electoral system works, US parties are essentially equivalent to electoral coalitions in parliamentary systems already – we already form “big tent” parties necessary to control a house. In the US, the closest analog to this sort of thing actually happening after the elections is when you hear about something like “an independent legislator who caucuses with the Democrats”. The US also has weak party discipline compared to many countries in Europe, so legislators are much less constrained to vote along party lines anyway.

    Different systems, function kinda differently.



  • Thanks, though only “Cats” was really just put up for the looks; the other three were to show off some functionality to other folks who might be doing local generation themselves, to let them know about functionality that I’d run into that I wanted and give 'em a heads-up as to it being possible (a way to get decent food photography, a way to emulate artist styles again under Flux, and that the ability to generate progressive transformations in Flux exists).


  • tal@lemmy.todayOPtoAI Generated Images@sh.itjust.worksProgression
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    10 days ago

    Or for another example:

    UI: ComfyUI

    Model: STOIQNewrealityFLUXSD_F1DAlpha

    An image divided into four sections showing a progression from left to right.

    The image shows a full-body image of a girl.

    The image is a drawing.

    The first section shows a good, innocent character.

    Each section moving rightwards shows an increasingly-evil, increasingly-dangerous and increasingly-corrupted character.

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