Nicktar

joined 1 year ago
[–] Nicktar@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

I was at a small roleplaying convention last week. It was great to meet the others again after about a year and game with them. Unfortunately someone was rather generous with their flu viruses and I got my personal helping. So I'm on sick leave for the second say but luckily, according to the test it's just a flu and not the big bad C. On Monday I clobbered together a small template for my sister to build fake computer screens as props for TV shows... All in all a mixed bag of some good stuff and some annoying things...

 

Don't really know what to make of this...

[–] Nicktar@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Several times, sometimes to find out when an incompatibility was introduced in an upstream dependency to find the maximum compatible version, but usually to find the commit that introduced a strange bug.

The process is always the same... Write a unit test, start bisect, check test select next bisect step, repeat. If your last-known-good and first-known-bad are correct, it always worked for me.

[–] Nicktar@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I've seen the fun of "prints everywhere" in production when a colleague forgot to remove a "Why the fuck do you end up here?" followed by a bunch of variables before committing a hot-fix... Customers weren't to amused...

Edit: That was a PHP driven web shop and the message ended up on to of the checkout page

[–] Nicktar@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I seldom use profilers because I seldom need to. It's only usefull to run a profiler if your programm has a well defined perfomance issue (like "The request should have an average responsetime of X ms but has one of Y ms" or "90% of the requests should have a response after X ms but only Y% actually do).

On the other hand I use a debugger all the time. I rarely start any programm I work on without a debugger attached. Even if I'm just running a smoke test, if this fails I want to be able to dig right into the issue without having to restart the programm in debug mode. The only situation, where i routinely run code without a debugger is the red-green-refactor cycle with running unit tests because I'll need to re run these multiple times with a debugger anyway if there are unexpected reds...

What enables me? Well there's this prominent bug-shaped icon in my IDE right besides the "play button", and there's Dev-Tools in Chrome that comes with the debugger for JS...

Running your code without a debugger is only usefull if you want to actually use it or if you're so sure that there aren't any issues that you might as well skip running the code altogether...

[–] Nicktar@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

German it magazine iX has an interview with the mods of r/de. I don't know if this was mentioned here before...

Interview (German)

Short summary: the mods of the large German communities see a huge issue with reddit not recognizing content creators and mods work and there seems to be growing support for an ongoing blackout or so they say.

[–] Nicktar@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

That's an important question to ask. For me (and I want to make very clear that this is exclusively how I handle things for myself) there is a huge difference between things I use (or what I call passive association) and things I work on or contribute to (or what I call active association).

While im ok-ish with using their software if they don't really profit from my usage, I wont be actively helping them. Given the state of the world and western society, I can't really escape using products that are unethical and as a software developer working for a company I can't really decide who gets to use my paid work and since I very much like having a bed and a roof and food and even some comfort in that, I'd rather stick to my job, but I can make a choice on who I support with my free time.

[–] Nicktar@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hi, I'm Nicktar, end-40s software architect and creator of unfinished projects. I love to find out how stuff works and if I can make it better or different or repair it but once I figured out how to do that and and know that I could do this, I lose interest and it becomes work... So my place is filled with (partially) working prototypes like cat toys, hydroponic flowerpots, broken tablets halfway turned into interactive picture frames, disassembled cordless screwdrives that need a new battery...

Also climate activist, table top roleplayer and currently quite busy playing around with Stable Diffusion

[–] Nicktar@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

same here... just right now downloading the font, thinking if I don't at least give it a try, I'll forever wonder what it'd be like...

 

I don't know if this community is intened for posts like this, if not, I'm sorry and I'll delete this post ASAP....

So, I play TTRPG (mostly online) and I'm a big fan of visual aids, so I wanted to create some chahrcter images for my charakter in the new campaign I'm playing in. I don't need perfect consistency as humans usually change a little over time and I only needed the character to be recognizable on a couple of images that are usually viewed on their own and not side by side, so nothing like the consistency you'd need for a comic book or something similar. So I decided to create a Textual Inversion following this tutorial and it worked way better than expected. After less than 6 epochs I had a consistency that was enough for my usecase and it didn't start to overfit when I stopped the training around epoch 50.

Generated image of a character wearing a black hoodie standing in a rundown neighborhood at night Generated image of the character wearing a black hoodie standing on a street Gerneated image of the character cosplaying as Ironman Generater image of the character cosplaying as Amos from the Expanse

Then my SO, who's playing in the same campaign asked me to do the same for their character. So we went through the motions and created and filtered the images. A first training attempt had the TI starting to overfit halfway through the second epoch, so I lowered the learning rate by factor five and started another round. This time the TI started overfitting somewhere around epoch 8 without reaching consistency before. The generated images alternate between a couple of similar yet distinguishable faces. To my eye the training images seem to have a simliar or higher quality than the images I used in the first set. Was I just lucky with my first TI and unlucky with the other two and simply should keep on trying or is there something I should change (like the learningrate that still seems high to me with 0.0002 judging from other machine learning topics)?