Shiny Happy People

by russellclarkenz, posted in Life, Music

WARNING: Not a cat post!

Antione Baril is one of the most incredible multi-instrumentalists I have had the pleasure to experience.

If you don’t know what a multi-instrumentalist is, it’s a person who… plays… multiple… instruments. Keep up double oh seven!

Here is Antoine with his daughter, singing a simple, popular ditty by some idiot band called REM. I don’t imagine you’ve heard of them, but given my aim is to bring new tastes to your palate, here they are*.

It’s delightful, fun and full of love.

Of course, there’s always an ulterior motive. If you want to see what Antoine does properly when he is not doing pop, here it is.

In-cre-di-ble:

Oh YES!

*Not sure how to do sarcasm/irony on WordPress. Sorry.

Purple Swamp Hens

by russellclarkenz, posted in Cool, Life

Our local population of swamp hens (Porphyrio melanotus) have just had a clutch of eight chicks. They’re now parading around the paddock under the wary, very beady eyes of their parents.

Thankfully Lord Viking and Princess Wandacakes are snoozing, as they tend to do during the day (lazy little buggers) although I wouldn’t fancy their chances against these tough birds.

Stable Diffusion

by russellclarkenz, posted in Cool, Felines, Technology

A slightly off-topic post, but fear not, there are still plenty of cats!

Some of you may have heard of Stable Diffusion – but if you haven’t, it is basically a very clever piece of software that takes as input natural language instructions, and creates, after a short period of time, images of what you told it to make.

Note that this software is not searching the Web for pictures that match what you asked for – it is generating completely original art based on what you tell it to make!

I hesitate to call it ‘AI’ because it’s a very misleading term. What this is, is the incredible powers of pattern recognition and machine learning applied to huge data sets, in glorious action. When I did my Masters in AI back in 1992 we were using the similar basis of pattern recognition, but today’s efforts are supercharged with much smarter models and a huge leap in computer processing power.

The following art was produced when I told it to produce “ginger maine coon painted by roger dean” (for those of you who don’t know Roger Dean, find out more here.) I’d say Stable Diffusion did an excellent job of capturing both the maine coon-ness and the Dean-ness.

“ginger maine coon painted by roger dean” via Stable Diffusion

Then I tried “ginger maine coon steampunk pilot with sword”. You’ll note from these that Stable Diffusion has a somewhat interesting manner of interpreting some instructions!

“ginger maine coon steampunk pilot with sword” via Stable Diffusion

And finally, perhaps my favourite selection of all was produced when I asked for “giant ginger maine coon playing on a roger dean landscape”. Utterly majestic!

“giant ginger maine coon playing on a roger dean landscape” via Stable Diffusion

I am going to have so much fun with this!

You can also go and have a play with Stable Diffusion yourself here!