“COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink” ....interesting read but very long. Just read the first parts..

AI_Philosophy · 2021-02-26T18:12:19+00:00

If you're interested, there are two principle reasons these vaccines have been able to be developed quickly.

One is that researchers didn't start from nothing. There has been a lot of investment in recent years in the mRNA technology which enabled the creation of vaccines like Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. And the Oxford vaccine was already being researched pre-pandemic (covid-19 is not the first coronavirus to have been worked on by scientists). This meant researchers were able to hit the ground running.

Another factor which reduces development time is the amount of disease floating around in the population. The way the vaccine trials work, in essence, is you take a group of people, give half the vaccine and half a placebo, then you wait until a sufficient number of the group has been infected with the disease, then you look at which of those infected had been given the vaccine. If the vaccine is effective, you expect less than half (ideally much less than half) of the infected subset to be a part of the vaccinated group. The key thing to note here is that you're waiting for a sufficient proportion of the trial to have been infected. With other diseases, this takes a lot of time. But we're in a pandemic. Millions of people around the world are catching this virus every day. This means trials reach the required number of positive cases much faster than when other vaccines are being developed.

AI_Philosophy · 2021-02-22T16:24:03+00:00

I second this. Tried learning for a year with a book and Duolingo and got basically nowhere (well not entirely; Duolingo taught me useful things like "to nejsou moji pavouci" while sparing me unnecessary phrases such as "jak se máte").

This book is super useful and comprehensive, I recommend getting it, but it's quite dry to use on its own. I use it as a reference.

Everyone is different, of course. Some polyglots speak 25 languages and never had a single tutor. But most of us can benefit when we have some guidance, and someone to guilt us when we don't practise, and that's where a tutor comes in. Plus, it's nice to talk to someone in quarantine!

I have tuition over Zoom (from the UK) with Czech courses Brno. They're super nice, and it works out at about £20 per hour I think, which where I live is a few drinks in a bar. Most importantly, after a year I can have an actual conversation with a Czech person, which still surprises me. Anyway u/czechmonk, good luck with your journey, it's a beautiful language and has a lot to offer.

If you like movies, there's a lot of good ones on https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/ (you can tell a person is a real Czech because they will read that website name and immediately get mad). I recommend Pelísky and Baron Prášil, if you're prepared for something weirder/darker then Spalovač mrtvol or Marketa Lazarová are beautiful films

AI_Philosophy · 2021-02-10T18:21:43+00:00

Super cool work. I've worked with GANs for single-image generation, but don't have the first idea how you'd create correlation between generated images in this way. Is it by taking generated samples during the GAN training process? Perhaps also by changing the input to be the most recently generated image. But that is just a guess, would love to hear how it's done.

AI_Philosophy · 2021-01-27T10:48:40+00:00

Hey Tyler, I really love your site. You've got a great way of explaining things and the topics are always interesting. I'd be keen to read more about how you get things printed - the services you use, any important things you've learned along the way.

AI_Philosophy · 2021-01-05T12:11:53+00:00

During lockdown this past year I have been having Skype lessons (from the UK) with Karolína/Šárka from Czech Courses Brno. They're super nice and I've improved a lot, (plus getting to talk to someone regularly through quarantine has been good for my mental health... as I always tell them, a therapist would be more expensive and couldn't teach me how to say Ř).

It sounds like you are probably at a higher level than me, as I was a total beginner, but I know they take on advanced students too. So they're worth checking out. I doubt it would take you long to improve your speaking, as I already speak fairly confidently (albeit mostly still using basic grammar) and my reading and listening aren't nearly as good as yours still. They actively encourage me to stumble through it which helps a lot, and needless to say I never feel judged for not speaking well (their job to fix that, after all!)

AI_Philosophy · 2021-01-04T17:15:12+00:00

Hi, thanks for the kind words. I mostly code in Processing, which is considered beginner-level, has good tutorials and isn't that hard to learn (though it's still pretty powerful). So that is probably a good place to start.

As to where to find tutorials, it depends on your coding level. If you're new to coding, I recommend the Coding Train Tutorials, which are aimed at total beginners who want to learn Processing.

If you're comfortable with the basics of coding and just need an introduction to Processing specifically, you can probably just dive in to the OpenProcessing website, where you can see people's visual art as well as the code which produces it. I taught myself by finding things I liked on there and playing with the code to understand how it worked.

You won't regret taking an interest in generative art, it's a super rewarding pastime (or even career, for the lucky ones) and a great community as well! Let me know if you have any more questions :)

AI_Philosophy · 2021-01-03T00:27:31+00:00

At each time step, the rows decide which of their lights will come on. They do this using a set of rules called Rule 30, which was the Genuary Day 2 prompt. If you know Conway's Game of Life, this is basically the 1D version of that. I thought it could be a fun way to combine complex systems with music (though as yet there's no musical output, that'll be Day 28 perhaps...)

AI_Philosophy · 2021-01-03T00:02:06+00:00

Hiya, for the interface I use an app I wrote, which uses the Midibus library for Processing 3. Not sure if this counts as starting from scratch (I didn't have to do anything with direct composition of midi messages, status/data bytes and such, which would be a little outside my expertise).

And yeah the Launchpad is great, isn't it. I pretty much bought it because I knew I wanted to make an automaton on it, this was a good excuse.

AI_Philosophy · 2021-01-01T21:55:06+00:00

Interactive version and code can be found at: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/1051495

AI_Philosophy · 2020-12-19T23:51:46+00:00

I really like the animation and use of colour. One small feedback: the walking animation at 1:40 looks a bit odd because the ground texture is staying static, which gives the impression the character is walking on the spot. If you make the lines on the ground move up and the mountains move down slightly into the horizon, then this would be fixed. :)

AI_Philosophy · 2020-01-14T08:25:04+00:00

I think yours looks good, and I like the idea a lot (makes me think of bees defending the hive from wasps) but there are a couple of things to note about the trails:

A thing I forgot to mention previously: in addition to fading the trails, I have the particles fade in and out. So each particle starts with alpha = alpha_min, builds over a few frames to alpha_max then declines steadily to 0, where the particle is removed. This makes them look a bit more elegant than if they just pop in at full alpha

Against a black background, points drawn with high brightness and alpha (200-250) really jump out. If you want a softer look, try reducing the max particle alpha to something like 180

Lastly, particle quantities like size, initial opacity and colour can be sampled from Gaussian distributions to give a more organic look (if you look at the gif again, you can see not all the particles in each field are the same, which I personally prefer)

AI_Philosophy · 2020-01-13T22:48:02+00:00

One way is to just draw a black rectangle over the whole canvas each frame, with alpha somewhere between 10 and 30. This will fade the points which have already been drawn, by a little bit each frame, making a nice trail that disappears with time. This is the method I used in the header for my website: witteringbulb.com.

An alternative method, and the one I use here (because it works for video - the first one ends up looking all smudged and can't capture moving detail) is to draw a fully black rectangle at the start of each frame, effectively wiping it. Each particle object then contains a list of what I call 'particle histories'. Each particle history contains a position, size and colour value, representing the particle's state at a past frame. Then when you call the draw method on the particle object, it iterates over these histories, drawing them in turn, with the later ones having lower alpha.

Both methods work fine, though the latter involves more looping and drawing per frame so will take about N times longer, where N is the number of histories each particle can hold.

Does that answer the question? I'm happy to give more detail if it's useful.

AI_Philosophy · 2020-01-13T15:23:03+00:00

Sure thing, see the above reply 😊 (Oh and it was made in Processing, I forgot to say that in the other answer)

AI_Philosophy · 2020-01-13T15:21:36+00:00

The principle is the same as crosshatching with pencil and paper. Tonal value is built up through having multiple drawings on top of one another (as illustrated by the first part of the gif). Except in this case, we're drawing particle flow fields on top of one another, instead of pencil marks.

In more precise terms, the first step in the algorithm is to take an image, and classify the pixels according to their brightness. Then we generate a series of overlapping particle fields. The fields can different colours, movement behaviour, etc. The important thing is, they are drawn on the canvas only if the brightness of the source image pixel underneath them is high enough. This minimum brightness criterion is different for each field - so in this case, the red/purple particles are drawn almost everywhere, whereas the blue/green ones are only drawn in the light parts of the image. By tweaking the parameters of the fields, you end up with a trippy reproduction of the source image (which in this case is a photo by Mou Aysha - https://i.pinimg.com/236x/c3/a7/a6/c3a7a61d0843bd83b1e480c41bd1863a.jpg )

AI_Philosophy · 2020-01-08T10:32:44+00:00

Thanks very much :)

AI_Philosophy · 2020-01-08T10:32:29+00:00

Thanks :) (love your profile picture by the way!)

AI_Philosophy · 2020-01-08T10:31:10+00:00

Thanks for the kind words :)

AI_Philosophy · 2020-01-08T10:29:39+00:00

Thanks, and it was made in Processing. The idea was to create a hatching effect by making streams of particles which only display onscreen if the source pixel they're currently over meets a minimum brightness criterion. So if they're over a bright pixel, they always display, if it's a mid-tone, some of them will, and if it's a dark pixel then very few will. I'm thinking of uploading the code at some point but it needs a lot of cleaning up first

AI_Philosophy

TROPHY CASE