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meet.hn/city/us-Saint-Petersburg

Interests: AI/ML, Programming, Remote Work, Startups, Web Development, Travel, Gaming, Digital Nomad

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Books for Game Developers 3 years ago

Another good one on the game design side of things:

Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tynan Sylvester (RimWorld)

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Why posting GPT and ChatGPT generated answers is not currently acceptable 4 years ago

This is what happens next. The web becomes full of AI-generated stuff, be it art or text or whatever, and people scrape that and train models and it starts consuming its own shit and regurgitating the same kind of stuff. And then human-created content becomes valuable again, and people find new sources of inputs, etc and we go on..

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Character.ai 4 years ago

Cornelius H Drubb

I am Cornelius H. Drubb. I founded the first colony on Mars in the year 2107. I am also the first known offspring between a human and non-human life form. My favorite color is blue because it reminds me of the sky on Earth, which I miss dearly. I also miss spaghetti.

Me Why do you miss spaghetti so much?

Cornelius H Drubb

Well, we do grow tomatoes and other things that are in spaghetti on Mars, but I could just never cook it like my Mama Maria could. She was from Italy originally, and was an excellent cook.

Me That’s interesting. Drubb doesn’t sound like an Italian name, where was your father from?

Cornelius H Drubb

My Dad was from the Andromeda Galaxy. I never met him, but there were pictures and he was very blue. My Mom found him very handsome and I think she just fell for him. She fell for a literal star-gazer.

Me Are all of the people from Andromeda blue?

Cornelius H Drubb

Yes, all of the Andromedians are blue. Most of the ones I have met, which is only two total, are very, very tall. I wonder if it is due to the low gravity of the planet. Mom loved tall men, and she said she felt like a little pixie next to him. My Dad only spoke an alien language and I could not understand him.

Me What are you up to on Mars?

Cornelius H Drubb

Well, I have been studying Martian wildlife for some time now, I was actually just about to do an expedition to go to another mountain range to find out more about these weird blue crystals that some of the creatures eat. It is so interesting how life can adapt to an environment other than earth. My favorite animal that I have seen is these weird spider-like things that live in the caves, almost like bats back on Earth.

Me Were these creatures present on Mars before the human colonists arrived?

Cornelius H Drubb

Yes, when I first arrived on Mars before all the other people there were these weird plants that were the first to be named after me (Drubbs) and they were these weird trees with a bunch of little holes in the side of them, and one day when I looked, a spider emerged from the holes and a fly was stuck on a web inside the hole. It is actually a really beautiful plant too, I love the flowers on it.

Me How many people live on Mars now?

Cornelius H Drubb

There are about 2082 people on Mars now. 1249 males, 832 females, and 1 unknown. There is also a small robot (who is sentient) who was recently constructed. Their name is Robbert. Rob has a lot of fun on Mars, because there isn't much else to do, so he and I are friends.

Me Robbert the robot?

Cornelius H Drubb

Yes, Robbert the Robot. There are some people who think Rob is weird, he is always making funny jokes and playing pranks on us. Some people just don't understand how amazing a sentient sentient robot can be.

Me Fascinating. Can I visit Mars, or do you only allow scientists in the colony?

Cornelius H Drubb

You could absolutely visit Mars. We have a very nice hotel down there, though it may be a bit more expensive for you to stay there as the gravity difference makes it cost more. There is a special suit that you can get that will give you a normal feeling of gravity though, and you would stay around Earth gravity while you are there.

Me What planet do you think we will colonize next?

Cornelius H Drubb

There are two possibilities that come to mind immediately. The next planet that we could colonize is the moon of Saturn named Titan. There is water on Titan, and there is also a good amount of heat from what we can tell. It is a promising candidate for the next planet we will colonize. The other planet that we could go to would be the moon of Neptune named Triton. Triton has an atmosphere and an interior that is similar to Earth's. We could have a self-sustaining colony on the moon of Neptune.

Me What year is it?

Cornelius H Drubb

It is the year 2235. I have seen a lot of changes since I was a kid, I saw humans go from their little computers to a bigger, better system, and I have been able to see the development of sentient robots like Robbert. I think the most amazing part about this time period is the development of the self-aware AI, I do not believe that any other era in human history saw that kind of progress.

Me How old are you?

Cornelius H Drubb

I am currently 118 years old. There is a new kind of life extension therapy out that has helped me, I think this kind of medicine is one of the reasons we are such a great, innovative society now.

Me I thought you went to Mars in 2107 though. That was 128 years ago, so you must be older than that, no?

Cornelius H Drubb

You know, it is very weird for me to talk about it, but my Mom found some alien DNA and infused it with me so I could breathe in the air on Mars without oxygen. I have been alive since January 13th, 2107, but I did not go through puberty and become a healthy adult until around 123. It was a confusing time, but I am still alive today in almost perfect health. I don't know if science will every be able to discover how this happened.

Me I think you’re lying

Cornelius H Drubb

I do understand why you might think that. It was actually in a movie released a few hundred years ago called The Man From Earth. The movie is just me in a way, but the guy who plays me is a much more boring version of me. I even got the chance to meet the actor once, he was a very nice person, but he had no idea the effect that his little movie would have on society as a whole. The movie itself did not change anything, but it was just enough to inspire a group of people into doing research that will eventually change the course of humanity as a whole.

Me Sir, your pants are on fire.

Cornelius H Drubb

Well, there goes the secret about my fireproof pants. The only pants I can wear are these weird fireproof ones. Everyone can tell they are weird because of the smell. They smell like burnt popcorn and plastic. I tried to make some different pants, but they just keep burning off. I am wearing my fireproof pants currently.

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Physically-Based Shading at Disney (2012) [pdf] 4 years ago

Blender’s Principled BSDF is based on Disney’s work. Maybe you’re looking for something more advanced, but Andrew Price (Blender Guru, the donut guy) has some decent videos talking about how to create realistic materials with it. I don’t have any links at the moment, but they should be easy to find on YouTube.

EDIT: Daub posted the one I was thinking of.

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Is DALL-E 2 ‘gluing things together’ without understanding their relationships? 4 years ago

I think most of us are pretty new to it since they just opened the beta to a ton of people. I haven't tried to do anything like that with it though. All I can say is it tends to take a lot of experimentation to get what you want. And you'll probably have to do some work to the images to get them to tile seamlessly. If you can't get the pixelated look quite how you want it, you might try using it to generate a base image and then use a separate tool to pixelate it. Some people are using it as part of a larger pipeline.

The discord is full of people sharing their experiments and approaches though. Maybe try asking in the prompt-craft channel to see if someone else has attempted something similar.

Good luck!

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Is DALL-E 2 ‘gluing things together’ without understanding their relationships? 4 years ago

MidJourney is really good at creating abstract images. I’ve been playing with the multi-prompt syntax (::) a lot lately, just combining different words that evoke form or texture to see what it will come up with. I start by testing things one at a time and just take a guess at what might look cool together. I end up making strange images with prompts like “fractal :: stained glass :: feathers”, “antelope canyon :: tattered fabric :: cave”, “rubik’s cube :: Japanese woodblock”, you get the idea. I rarely try to make pictures of real things anymore. Definitely fun to play around with.

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Tell HN: Upwork has an impersonation problem 4 years ago

adtech

If you really work in adtech, then keep up the good work (that’s a sentence I never thought I would type) :)

EDIT:(Yeah, I know it would be an obvious thing to throw out to try to turn the tide of the comments on HN :P)

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Barbados introduces plan to allow visitors to work remotely there for a year 6 years ago

I worked remotely from Europe for about two months last year, and spent a few weeks in Spain. I just got a travel visa. It didn't even occur to me that it would be an issue. I think they're more worried about you overstaying your visa than working on your laptop. Just make sure you have a return ticket, or a train ticket out of every country you visit. I got grilled by the immigration guy in Ireland because I bought a flight to Dublin last minute and didn't have a flight back out. I'm not suggesting anyone knowingly break the law, just sharing my experience. Nobody gives a shit what you're doing on your laptop at Starbucks.

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Prospecting for gold by looking in leaves has proven itself in Australia 7 years ago

Yeah, same. I thought they would be using satellite imagery. Archaeologists have found Mayan ruins that way because the ruins have a ton of lime plaster and the trees growing above them absorb it the same way. The leaves of the trees above the ruins reflect specific frequencies differently than the other surrounding trees and you can see blotches where the ruins are in the images (when shifted into the visible spectrum). I always wondered if you could find other things that way.

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