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margoguryan's comments

margoguryan | 3 years ago | on: Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround

When I was in high school (06-10) you wouldn't believe how many kids could hang out at B&N for hours and hours and just drink some coffees and look at weird books or hang out with friends. I had several friends who would go for the annual Crterion Collection 50% Sale.

margoguryan | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Where do you buy your eBooks or have eBook subscriptions?

Google Play Books is a behemoth of rare, obscure, archaic and poorly formatted free stuff. I have a massive collection of books on New France, Canadian history, very old folklore and poems, screenplays, pretty much every classic in the public domain.

Gutenberg is wonderful, especially for history. I've been using them a ton to stock up on non DRM stuff.

Do you use an eReader? I just got one of the newest Kindle models and I'm having a really hard time getting things to convert or whatever - even stuff that is, like, already formatted for eReader purposes gets mangled. Should I have not bought the Kindle in the first place? Haha

Thank you for all this, that newsletter tip is great.

margoguryan | 3 years ago | on: Run your own DALL-E-like image generator

CLIP is my favorite of all of them. But it's not especially friendly - like riding a horse bareback. I've made some ridiculous, very bizarre and interesting stuff with CLIP that just isn't possible with DALL-E.

margoguryan | 3 years ago | on: Run your own DALL-E-like image generator

I've tried to do a bunch of prompts involving, like, pirates and cannons - rapiers and daggers. 16th century Treasure Island aesthetic. No bueno.

I also tried uploading a film still, and it said I may not use realistic faces. So I used another AI tool to remove the face. It still wouldn't budge.

margoguryan | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: I'm building a browser-based DAW

As someone who uses very minimal freeware DAWs (literally, LMMS and Audacity- I am now a big fan of FL Studio Mobile with the Samsung S Pen as well), I would probably use this a lot!

Have you considered a sample market? I'd love to be able to sell loops that I can't really find much of a use for, or drum samples that I made myself but don't need.

margoguryan | 3 years ago | on: Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)

I collect fake Calvin & Hobbes merchandise as a hobby and have enough peeing Calvin stickers to make a surrealistic flipbook of it if I hold my collection in my hand. Bill Watterson should enjoy these dimensions of kitsch, irony and cheap simulacra instead of fighting it; and even still, would we have pissing Calvin to begin with had he licensed it early on enough? Who invented pissing Calvin? I don't care about Bill Watterson. I care about pissing Calvin.

margoguryan | 3 years ago | on: A prompt engineering guide for DALLE-2

As someone who makes very weird and experimental stuff, DALL-E is like a Segway and CLIP is like a horse (especially with those edge cases that tend to self-engorge/get worse if you aren't clever). It's a shame compute costs aren't much different between the two (correct me if I'm wrong) - I don't think there is much of a purely artistic process with DALL-E, although I do like to use DALL-E Mini thumbnails as start images or upscale testers.

>Real-time traversal of the generation space is absolutely key for getting the output you want.

I've been sketching around a two-person browser game where a pair of prompters can plug things in together in real-time :D

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