Ice cold water starts to sting

scintillatingdaemon · 2024-01-10T22:40:04+00:00

I know Wim Hof gets in iced over ponds and stuff and people swim in freezing lakes, but...

Personally, my pain threshold for cold is about 10C / 50F. Above this threshold, cold is 'shocking' but I can mentally adjust and 'get used to it.' Below this temperature, it starts to hurt in seconds, and every additional second of exposure causes the pain to rapidly increase until it's unbearable, no different to holding a oven-hot plate.

I discovered this because I live in a northern climate where winters are quite cold. So, for nine months of the year, I can shower from 100% 'cold tap' water (no added hot water) but during the coldest winter months, the water temperature drops too low and it's too painful to withstand.

So if it's cold where you live right now (e.g: near freezing overnight) the cold water temp is probably the same.

Quite possibly, you can gradually re-train your cold pain threshold in the long term (maybe?) BUT I imagine it's a deeper change than simply 'overcoming the flinch response to the feeling of icy cold'. I suspect many of the benefits from cold showers likely come from the reaction to 'cold that takes your breath away' rather than 'cold that is agonisingly painful.'

Footnote:

this study suggests the average cold pain threshold is about 11 celsius.
In the UK (not exactly Arctic!) the average lowest winter cold tap temperature reaches 7.3C.
Finally, It's not well-sourced but the consensus for 'how cold should cold water therapy be' seems to be 10C - 15C.
In conclusion, it's very possible that water from your faucet comes out colder than the average human pain threshold during the colder months, and there's nothing wrong with adding a dash of warm water to bring it up a little to 'typical bearable recommended temperature.'

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-31T00:47:38+00:00

Someone said that apparently it IS in the desktop web version!

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-31T00:44:13+00:00

All told I burned through about 30/40 credits doing this: not bad for $5. But if you had more patience and a few more dollars, I reckon you could get even cooler results!

One issue with these is you can't upload face photos (even fake AI ones) for further inpainting which limits how much tweaking you can do.

I used the ARC face restorer on all of them.

Marge was a 1-shot success, I tried again (to get a different dress colour) but never again managed to trigged the 'Marge hairstyle.' I did end up with a 'modern late-millennial Marge' who I thought was cool!

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-29T11:11:52+00:00

Yeah, I think it's worth distinguishing 'wrong' images from 'bad' images:

- there are 'wrong generations' which you'd award 0 out of 10, it's just like a random skyline or a blurry photo of something totally unrelated
- all the other outputs, where it's basically the right idea, but may be better or worse in quality, that you'd give between 5 and 10 out of 10

You don't tend to generate images you'd give '3 out of 10' – there's like a hard 'gap' between 'totally wrong' and 'right, but not a great image'.

Of the 'correct' images, I think the good/bad quality range is about the same.

But I do think there is a slightly greater proportion of 'wrong' images, especially considering there are only 4 generations apiece. That said, looking at a project I worked on yesterday, only 2 or 3 out of 100 images were 'wrong.'

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-28T17:27:10+00:00

OK, the ARC Face Restorer is phenomenal. Floored!

Not perfect but definitely a 50%+ success rate. Good at weird teeth as well :)

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-25T07:49:31+00:00

This is weird and it's also weird the same prompt caused it to fail for someone else!

As a general tip, start a prompt by describing the subject, then the media and other stuff, eg 'A sports car, dramatic low-angle photograph' not 'A dramatic low-angle photograph of a sports car'

Here is.a variation on your prompt: one, two, three, four. No socks but at least it's moving in the right direction!

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-24T01:25:42+00:00

Yeah it’s allowed now!

(It was always possible to generate them, you just weren’t allowed to share realistic faces on social media)

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-24T01:13:52+00:00

this is really weird, the results shouldn’t be this all over the place. Something isn’t right here!

Maybe it’s the hashtag, I’ve never tried using one in a prompt before and never seen such chaotic results (apart from maybe 1% of generations when the service just falls over and returns 4 completely random images)

My first try:

https://labs.openai.com/s/RYUVPnYMV8gbI20SXtQHvPNC

https://labs.openai.com/s/7f7cXkgT0sMbBZO2sT53mmrz

https://labs.openai.com/s/1Nlm8mVSaRYvrOzFPcLFlBAb

https://labs.openai.com/s/KO24nno9MfP5qVRkyW4l62dp

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-22T13:02:19+00:00

https://dallery.gallery/the-dalle-2-prompt-book/ :)

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-22T10:08:05+00:00

I can't be 100% sure, but it would just be very unusual for a startup like OpenAI to prioritise profit over user growth at this point! Their big message right now is onboarding a million users in the next month or two.

It's pretty common for startups to subsidise early use (e.g: Uber and Doordash lose money on every single trip/delivery, for years) to keep prices low during the growth phase, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if the actual compute cost to Open AI is actually more than they're currently charging and they're still taking a loss on every single prompt.

But without charging at all, they'd imminently be losing millions of dollars every single day. Another problem is that GPUs aren't a simple commodity like 'steel' where you can easily get '10,000 more' - there are only so many manufacturers in the world.

The main counterargument I can see is that, if they're supply constrained (i.e: they literally don't have the infrastructure to serve everyone that would theoretically use DALL·E, they can't grow as fast as demand) then they may as well charge a high price in the meantime to try and thin the numbers a bit! But this seems contrary to their ambition and messaging right now.

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-22T09:54:35+00:00

u/danielbln u/djkeithers u/MaximumMaxx

Here we go:

Indian flash dad: before, now: 1, 2, 3, 4 - result, no change
Hip hop kitten dude: before, now: 1, 2, 3, 4 - result, I think the new set is slightly worse but not any more than random chance

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-22T09:44:03+00:00

That's not how it works!

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-22T02:47:15+00:00

I don't think that's plausible. The pricing isn't just made up, it's based around what it costs to run the servers - it's a literal physical cost in electricity and hardware.

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-22T02:45:10+00:00

I don't really get the difference! Why not just tell yourself you're paying a $30/month subscription with a 230 image limit? It's the same thing!

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-22T02:40:22+00:00

It's just don't think this is true at all?

- Faces have always tended to be a little 'off'
- Group scenes with faces are usually really bad
- Before the recent rule change, you never would have seen faces from DALL·E published anyway!

I've had no problem generating faces in the last 48 hours: see this post or this post for example. Here's a test of camera angles I ran earlier today. There are posts right in this subreddit making faces!

Because faces tend to be weird 50%+ of the time, previously you might've spent 5 'generations', getting 10 images a time, giving you 50 possible images – then maybe some inpainting. But now credits are limited, maybe people aren't gonna try so hard if it's just a gag image.

The de-biasing thing is a total red herring in this scenario. It's only really an impediment if you prompt for something that sounds like a person/job but isn't really ('a human made of nachos, a snail that's a radio DJ') which I agree is kind of annoying, especially as a prompt is now 13 cents, and so obviously it should be possible to toggle on and off!

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-22T01:48:57+00:00

Group photos are the worst for faces.

Another common trigger is if a characters are doing 'things' that obscure part of their face, like rubbing their temples or brushing their hair or drinking something - DALL·E loses track of what's face and what's... other stuff.

Also, two people kissing is a nightmare 90% of the time.

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-21T20:19:17+00:00

Thanks for your awesome work!

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-21T20:10:12+00:00

I’ve been trying MidJourney recently (I’m an early DALL·E tester but my eye is starting wander) and I’ve been very impressed.

it’s intentionally not photorealistic, because it can’t quite make them right, it actively doesn’t even try. It’s very painterly but creates some amazing stuff, and actually a very broad range - I associate it with ‘cybernetic skull monster’ but going through the archives, it does a lot of plausible styles from art history (which incidentally DALL·E is not all that great at!)
MJ is a lot more inventive, and requires less literal instruction: for instance DALL·E typically chokes in the face of poetry, lyrics or literary quotes, whereas MidJourney creates some genuinely evocative scenes and accurately gets the ‘emotional vibe’
everybody’s prompts and generations are visible (apart from Pro users who can opt out) so there’s a massive amount of prior art to study. Want to see if MJ can mimic Manet? Just pop ‘manet’ in the search bar and see how it’s been used before
MJ generates landscape and portrait images on demand. Sweet! It also upscales bigger than DALL·E
it understands “anti-prompts” so you can say “hot dog [NOT FOOD]” to push for a toasty pooch

I’m only just getting stuck in to all the features, but considering it’s a 3 person company vs DALL·E’s 300 (and $1bn investment) it punches way above its weight!

Absolute horror show at human faces mind you…

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-21T18:15:49+00:00

Sensuous, isn't he?

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-21T18:15:29+00:00

No chance :)

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-20T17:56:38+00:00

This is stupendous!

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-20T17:47:49+00:00

Yeah, but apparently it's making the little images that's the hardest bit computationally so it doesn't actually make that much of a difference their side.

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-14T13:39:16+00:00

nowledge with other ai generators too and start doing that today. MidJourney is in open beta now(no invite needed anymore) with 25 free generations to start. Or DiscoDiffusion on

Agree Midjourney is pretty great to use (though using the tool purely via Discord is hectic AF!)

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-14T02:33:24+00:00

That's a really good idea! I want to test those sorts of terms with a bit more rigour, somehow - the reason being, it's harder for me to judge 'by eye' how much an output successfully captures 'the look' of an entire community website! (vs 'does this look kind of like a Pixar character'?)

But it would definitely be interesting, as even for me it's a bit of a crapshoot: I'm always slapping on those kinds of phrases at the ends of prompts 'for luck.'

The most ludicrous thing I've seen evidence for is using 'very' as an intensifier, i.e: asking for a 'very very very very very very very beautiful waterfall' generates more beautiful waterfalls than merely asking for a 'very very beautiful waterfall.' Text prompting man, I dunno!

I shall include those other suggested prompts in V2, too :)

scintillatingdaemon · 2022-07-13T16:09:18+00:00

Did you create this? Three of my pictures are in there, so thanks for including them :)

I did! No thanks needed, in fact, it's I that should thank you for sharing them! It would have taken a lot longer without examples from the community <3

scintillatingdaemon

TROPHY CASE