I was mystified by the code structure of a repo until realizing that I was on the wrong branch.
2025-01-05
2025-01-04
Painting style LoRA experiment
Watercolor painting and pencil sketching style experiments (conducted during company shutdown with some spare time and compute).
- Download tens of art works from my dad’s FB page.
- Train a LoRA over this ink style model.
- Generate outputs via prompts similar to the painting titles from the aforementioned FB page.
A few results look interesting while most are uncanny or boring.
My dad commented that AI cannot replace human artists.
2025-01-02
Dinner after train 666
At the departing station for their evening train, he thought about ordering a meal box, but she preferred going for a restaurant at the destination station.
Upon arrival her original choice had a 20-minute wait, so they went to a nearby alternative.
It was slightly passing his usual dinner time, so he lost patience waiting for the food.
She looked flustered, but the food arrived soon after.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/215937081/SoftTrainNumber
The vegetarian by Hang Kang
I read this book for the first time in 2016 after it won the Booker prize, and re-read it again during a recent period of no internet access.
The story centers around a woman who started by refusing to eat meat and gradually transitioned into refusing to eat anything at all as she believed she is becoming a plant. The book is divided into three parts from the perspectives of three different characters: the husband, the brother-in-law, and the sister of the main character. The plot is very imaginative and sensational (Korean pop style), especially the second part, while the third part is much darker and meditative.
The book is a good read, but I am not sure about the Nobel literature prize.
Funeral
A funeral is more for the living to bound than for the dead to transition.
The start of the year at an isolated place.
It is the morgue’s interest to have a long and elaborate funeral.
3-part incantation by 3 monks for 3 hours.
If a spirit keeps attaching to me after the funeral, will it show up behind me during a virtual conference call?
Many family members spent a lot of time chatting, while some sat there staring blank.
2024-12-31
Shell scripts
Try to use bash instead of source to execute scripts in separate shell environments, especially in a nested fashion to avoid side effects, such as variable pollution and exit status propagation that could lead to mysterious bugs.
2024-12-30
Flipped middle toe
Draw from an earlier dream partially reflecting a jammed toe in reality.
2024-12-16
Facial “lotion”
The facial “lotion” that I have been applying in the past fortnight turned out to be cleansing gel.
2024-12-15
Target-aware light projection
Went to watch Let’s Glow SF 2024 across several sites and found the effects to be most impressive when the content is customized with respect to the structure of the target display (e.g., virtual clock tower on the physical ferry building).