Installing Stable Diffusion 1.5

Installing Stable Diffusion 1.5

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To install Stable Diffusion 1.5 (released Oct 20, 2022) locally, I found this video was really excellent – except for a few points:

  1. You MUST use python 3.10.6 (I used 3.9.7 as recommended). The latest version (as of Feb 2023) is Python 3.11.1 – which stable diffusion does NOT seem to like and won’t run.

You might also want to read through this older stable diffusion 1.4 install guide, but he uses model checkpoints which haven’t been updated since version 1.4.

Gotchas and Fixes:

  • If you have an incompatible version of Python installed when you try to run webui-user.bat for the first time, stable diffusion will set itself up to point at this bad python version directory. Even if you uninstall and install the correct python version, stable diffusion will still look at the wrong python version. You can go fiddle with the different setup files – but it’s faster just to blow away the pulled git source at the top level and re-pull it to ensure you don’t have cruft laying around.

Installer Links:

Stable diffusion 2.0 was…well…

Stable diffusion 2.0 was…well…

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Stable Diffusion 2.0 seems to have been a step backwards in capabilities and quality. Many people went back to v1.5 for their business.

The difficulty in 2.0 was in part caused by:

  1. Using a new language model that is trained from scratch
  2. The training dataset was heavily censored with a NSFW filter

The second part would have been fine, but the filter was quite inclusive and has removed substantial amount of good-quality data. 2.1 promised to bring the good data back.

Installing Stable Diffusion 2.1

If you’re interested in trying Stable Diffusion 2.1, use this tutorial to installing and use 2.1 models in AUTOMATIC1111 GUI, so you can make your judgement by using it.

You might also try this tutorial by TingTing

Links:

AI generated comic books

AI generated comic books

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There’s a creative war going on surrounding AI generated art. While some are fighting AI generated art, others are fully embracing it.

AI Comic Books is a whole website/company dedicated to publishing comic books that rely on AI generated art. Check out the offerings on their website to see where the state of graphic novels is going.

This definitely spawns some discussions on where AI art is going to find it’s place in society. I think the cat is out of the bag; and now we’ll have to deal with the economic and moral questions it is generating; but I think that’s a discussion for another article…

Stable diffusion in other languages

Stable diffusion in other languages

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Stable Diffusion was developed by CompVis, Stability AI, and LAION. It mainly uses the English subset LAION2B-en of the LAION-5B dataset for its training data and, as a result, requires English text prompts to producing images.

This means that the tagging and correlating of images and text are based on English tagged data sets – which naturally tend to come from English-speaking sources and regions. Users that use other languages must first use a translator from their native language to English – which often loses the nuances or even core meaning. On top of that, it also means the latent model images Stable Diffusion can use are usually limited to English-speaking region sources.

For example, one of the more common Japanese terms re-interpreted from the English word businessman is “salary man” which we most often imagine as a man wearing a suit. You would get results that look like this, which might not be very useful if you’re trying to generate images for a Japanese audience.

rinna Co., Ltd. has developed a Japanese-specific text-to-image model named “Japanese Stable Diffusion”. Japanese Stable Diffusion accepts native Japanese text prompts and generates images that reflect the naming and tagged pictures of the Japanese-speaking world which may be difficult to express through translation and whose images may simply not present in the western world. Their new text-to-image model was trained on source material that comes directly from Japanese culture, identity, and unique expressions – including slang.

They did this by using a two step approach that is instructive on how stable diffusion works.

First, the latent diffusion model is left alone and they replaced the English text encoder with a Japanese-specific text encoder. This allowed the text encoder to understand Japanese natively, but would still generate western style tagged images because the latent model remained intact. This was still better than just translating the stable diffusion prompt.

Now Stable Diffusion could understand what the concept of a ‘businessman’ was but it still generated images of decidedly western looking businessmen because the underlying latent diffusion model had not been changed:

The second step was to retrain the the latent diffusion model from more Japanese tagged data sources with the new text encoder. This stage was essential to make the model become more language-specific. After this, the model could finally generate businessmen with the Japanese faces they would have expected:

Read more about it on the links below.

Links:

A.I. coming to a bed near you

A.I. coming to a bed near you

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Bryte Balance bed proports to use A.I. to sense pressure imbalances of those laying on the bed and then automatically controls a number of adjustable ‘rebalancers’ that give anyone laying on it a better night’s sleep.

Combine that with some ultra lux phone app controls and you got the making of a luxury bed being used at some of the top luxury hotels and resorts in the world – like the 5 star Park Hyatt New York and Carillon Miami.

You can own one yourself if you like. It’ll only set you back $6,299

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl6VL6bFis0

Wata Games being sued

Wata Games being sued

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I have written about multi-million dollar retro game sales by Wata before. At the time, Karl Jobst, Wired magazine, and other sites like Kotaku have written about the business models that have lead to extremely questionable multi-million dollar sales of vintage video games by companies like Wata.

Well, it turns out someone has noticed and now there is a lawsuit. One can only hope Wata and these sorts of schemes get busted for any criminal wrongdoing they seem very highly likely to have committed.

If you care at all about collectors markets like retro video games, I highly suggest you read up on grading, auction, and fractional sales operations like Wata and their partners.

Nintendo VirtualBoy emulator – on Oculus

Nintendo VirtualBoy emulator – on Oculus

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Nintendo’s VirtualBoy wasn’t exactly a smashing success. It was, however, one of the first forays into mass consumer 3D gaming. Sadly, the hardware was really limited and most people had lots of issues using the devices.

Fast forward, and someone decided to make a VirtualBoy emulator on the Oculus. Meet VirtualBoy Go. You can play your original virtualboy roms using a modern oculus instead of the fiddly and hard to find Virtualboy.

You can check out this stream where a speed runner runs the wonderfully awful Waterworld game: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1594810061

RAII: Resource Acquisition is Initialization

RAII: Resource Acquisition is Initialization

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This is a great little video from the Back to Basics series offered by CppCon. They even have their slides and code on github.

CppCon has a bunch of other great ‘Back to Basics’ videos that cover a whole host of great topics: safe exception handling, move semantics, type erasure, lambdas, and a bunch of other critical but oft misunderstood elements of C++

In this video, you get a refresher on RAII.

“Resource Allocation is Initialization is one of the cornerstones of C++. What is it, why is it important, and how do we use it in our own code?”

Moving out of Portland’s new taxes

Moving out of Portland’s new taxes

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Portland’s ballot measures have resulted in the second highest tax rates in the country as of this year – a tax rate only second to New York City:

Starting in 2017, Multnomah County voters passed several tax measures aimed at improving life in their burgeoning city. After Metro and the county levied taxes to combat homelessness and provide preschool for all, Portland now has the second-highest total state and local income tax rate in the nation—14.69%—exceeded only by New York City at 14.78%, according to a report from Ernst & Young commissioned by Oregon Business & Industry.
That’s the top marginal tax rate, meaning you pay it only on income above $125,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples filing together. By comparison, the only New Yorkers paying the top rate there are those making $25 million or more, single or married. That means plenty of nonplutocrat Oregonians are paying taxes rivaled only by those levied on Gotham millionaires.”

https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/02/01/they-left-portland-is-losing-some-of-its-biggest-fans/

We also have had an over-zealous city sending tax penalties and threats of IRS actions to anyone that wasn’t paying – even though thousands of taxpayers and their companies didn’t know how to file payments for the new taxes.

Get out

Another option is to get out of Portland, Multnomah county, and the Metro area. Before you move, you need to make sure you’re really out. Portland, Multnomah, and Metro have continually gerrymandered their boundaries to absorb as much of the tax base as possible. This is important because the most recent tactic is to levee taxes against residents of the county and ever-expanding metro area to even further spread the boundaries.

How do you know if you’re in those jurisdictions? There’s a tool for that from the tax notices they sent out:

  1. Go to portlandmaps.com, enter your address, then check the ‘Jurisdiction’ info box on the right. If it says ‘Portland/Multnomah’ or any combination that has either ‘Portland’ or ‘Multnomah’ – you’re still stuck with at least some of the new Portland and Multnomah county taxes.
  2. Go to Metro boundary address lookup. Enter your address. If the Within Metro Boundary column says “Yes” – then you’re still going to have to pay the new Metro taxes.
  3. Double-check your address against the global Metro boundary map – and watch for areas it is likely to expand and absorb you. It’s been growing a lot recently.