CapoteTDawg

I’ve written before about BigGAN, an image-generating neural net that Google trained recently. It generates its best images for each of the 1,000 different categories in the standard ImageNet dataset, from goldfish to planetarium to toilet tissue. And the images it produces are both beautifully textured and deeply weird. Some of the categories - scabbard, rocking chair, stopwatch - are delightfully aesthetic.

[scabbard, rocking chair, stopwatch]

Google has made the trained BigGAN model available to the research/art community, which is nice, since people have estimated that today it would take around $60k in cloud computing time to train one’s own.

But there’s more lurking in the BigGAN model besides the 1,000 ImageNet categories. The model thinks of each category as a big set of numbers that describes exactly how to smoosh and stretch and color random noise. Following one set of numbers will transform noise into a flower, while following another set will turn that same noise into a dog instead. But another thing a set of number is, is a position in space: latitude and longitude for example, or x,y,z coordinates - in math terms, we call the set of numbers a vector. And in machine learning, all the positions in space (granted, an approximately 100-dimensional space) that a model’s vectors can point to is called vector space.

So one set of numbers - the flower vector - points you to some location in vector space, and another set of numbers - the dog vector - points you to a different location.

[daisy, saluki dog]

But here is where it gets fun. The vectors are just numbers, which means you could, in theory, average them. What happens when you average together “saluki dog” and “daisy”? There’s no ImageNet category there, so what’s lurking in that spot in vector space, halfway between the two? Delightfully, dogflowers.

This, it turns out, is so cool. Joel Simon has put together an app called ganbreeder.app that lets you mix and match categories.

So, this is what you get when you travel to the point in vector space midway between bedlington terrier and geyser, with a little dingo thrown in.

And this spot in latent space is somewhere between Pembroke Terrier and espresso.

This aesthetic delight is bookshop + radio telescope, with a teensy bit of boston bull. (It turns out that since the ImageNet dataset is full of dogs, vector space is too)

Want to make something adorably small? Add a bit of thimble. (This is the bit of latent space midway between thimble + zucchini)

Want to make it really ornate and fancy? Throw in some church organ, or perhaps some saxophone. This, for the record, is conch + organ + sax + scabbard + book jacket.

This spot around electric locomotive + greenhouse + prison + vault + rocking chair + shoji is very beautiful.

I’m also fond of trilobite + carpenter’s kit + french horn + ladle + streetcar.

While the less said about the bit of latent space midway between bathtub + butcher shop, the better.

Go explore ganbreeder.app, which is free and so so fascinating!

Here’s what you get when you give incomplete cookbook recipes to a neural network trained on the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft:

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 32 minutes. Test corners to see if done, as center will seem like the next horror of Second House.

Whip ½ pint of heavy cream. Add 4 Tbsp. brandy or rum to possibly open things that will never be wholly reported.

Cook over a hot grill, or over glowing remains of tunnel mouth.

With blender on high speed, add ice cubes, one at a time, making certain each cube is the end.

Dice the pulp of the eggplant and put it in a bowl with the vast stark rocks.

NOTE:  As this is a tart rather than a cheesecake, you should be disturbed.

This may be one of the most exceptional souffles you’ll ever serve. The beet color spreads upward from the noisome Great Ones.

Coat apple slices with strange things.

NOTE: If chocolate sauce is not completely smooth, we became the state of the mad and discovered more desperate tracks and merciful sky.

Cook over medium heat until thickened and bubbly. Spoon over bizarre eyes.

Remember this logo. If a book has this logo, boycott it.

That’s the logo for publishing company Simon & Schuster who have given racist sack of shit Milo Yiannopoulos a $250,000 contract to write a book.

Yiannopoulos is the “alt-right” editor at Breitbart News, who was banned from Twitter after launching a widespread attack on actress Leslie Jones.

Hi. I’m someone who’s worked in publishing her entire career, and I’m here to explain the Milo Yiannopoulos issue (notorious troll just got a hefty book deal from Simon & Schuster; internet is freaking out) and how to handle it:

BACKGROUND: Let’s get the “free speech” arguments out of the way: Yiannopoulos is an actively dangerous man who leads bullying mobs against selected targets, and spreads hate speech as a life ethos. Even a person as vile as Yiannopoulos has the right to speak his mind, but decent people owe it to the world not to give him additional platforms and the air of legitimacy. That’s doubly the case in this political climate, which insists that all opinions should be valued equally, regardless of whether they’re true or false, and whether they make the world a better or worse place to live in. This is rather like deciding to publish “Mein Kampf” - is that really what you want your legacy to be as an organization?

WHAT NOT TO DO: No “I’m going to boycott Simon & Schuster” talk unless you are a published author and you’re talking about not contracting with them. This is not like buying toilet paper or leather jackets - they sell the work of real, living, struggling authors who really really want you to read what they’ve labored over for years, and it’s unfair to penalize them because their publishing company is being dumb. Print media is a fragile industry these days, and that’s why we’re seeing these big stupid controversial book deals - it’s because we no longer have a world where people walk into their local independent neighborhood bookstore and let the kindly old cashier recommend you a book of poetry with a 500-copy print run that speaks perfectly to your reading sensibilities. You gotta have your crossover blockbusters or the whole enterprise crosses the December finish line in the red. Insisting on a boycott just makes people who haven’t bought a book since college want to run out and pre-order this to spite you. Simon & Schuster knows you “I love books, here’s a shared image macro about how I would literally make gentle love to a piece of printed paper if it were socially acceptable” folks get all your books used from Amazon for $3.99 + shipping, anyway, so they don’t care whether you’re their friend. This is for the business traveler with gross views who needs something entertaining for the plane flight to the Atlanta conference. You gotta convince them not to sell to THAT guy.

WHAT TO DO: Write them letters, hard-copy ones that need a stamp and an envelope. At any major publishing house, the people at the bottom are mostly clever, thoughtful, progressive gals who don’t like this sort of thing any more than you do. They want to be able to go to their bosses’ bosses’ bosses with a massive stack of post and say, “Hey, this is the only reader correspondence we’re getting now,” because that wastes time, and the easiest way to piss off a publishing house is to waste their employees’ time. Wasting time = less time for making books. Remember also that everybody who gets into publishing does it because fundamentally they love to READ, they READ anything that is put in front of them, even the guys at the top who spend more time on the phone and at cocktail parties than working with text believe in words as a magical conduit of ideas, and if you write them a long heartfelt letter, they may scoff at it but they will read it, and if they have 1000 heartfelt letters a day, then sooner or later all those words will sink in.

This is not a plastics manufacturer, this is not a bank. This is a book company. Write to the people who are in the business of reading.

CONTACT INFO:

Corporate Headquarters SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 PHONE: 212-698-7000 And individual contacts here, best to address it to someone in particular: http://about.simonandschuster.biz/leadership/ Normally, the best tactic is to write directly to a specific editor or the imprint, but Threshold is conservative, so they may not care. Still, perhaps try: Threshold Editions General Phone: 212-698-7006 General Fax: 212-698-2858 Jennifer Robinson Vice President, Director of Publicity [email protected] And make the point that the views of this author are not conservative views, they are fundamentally hateful and aggressive views which seek to undermine the rights of other citizens. He did, after all, help lead the hate mob against Leslie Jones that got her hacked - they should ask themselves whether that’s something with which they want their otherwise respectable work to be associated, especially since the published book may end up becoming associated with additional hate crimes should readers take it too literally. Surely they don’t want their book to start making news for being repeatedly found in the homes of every homegrown militant for the next 10 years.

Sansa and Lady

‘The electric street-lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about.‘ (J.R.R. Tolkien in On Fairy-Stories)

‘In about ten minutes she reached it and found it was a lamp-post. As she stood looking at it, wondering why there was a lamp-post in the middle of a wood and wondering what to do next…’ (C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)

so here’s our favorite adoptive space dad Bail Organa in Revenge of the Sith:

and here he is in Rogue One:

meanwhile, here’s Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith:

and here he is after the exact same amount of time: