huh?

tilliewalden:

I’m taking a break from social media for the rest of December, so here’s a couple of things before I take off and disappear into my bed: 

Have you read my new graphic novel SPINNING yet? It’s about growing up as a gay figure skater. Get it here.

My webcomic On a Sunbeam is coming out in print in Fall 2018. In the meantime, you can read it all here. Don’t worry, the comic will stay free and online even after the book is published. 

Want to get prints or cards of my art? Check out my shop.

Thanks for a great year y’all. 

T

curseworm:

howdymynamesis:

curseworm:

just lie down on the sidewalk with your tongue against the concrete till th whole world dissolves like an uncoated pill

i wanna know if op was okay when writing this

one day youll be face to face with whatever saw fit to let you exist in the universe and youll have to justify the space youve filled

New paint colors invented by neural network

lewisandquark:

So if you’ve ever picked out paint, you know that every infinitesimally different shade of blue, beige, and gray has its own descriptive, attractive name. Tuscan sunrise, blushing pear, Tradewind, etc… There are in fact people who invent these names for a living. But given that the human eye can see millions of distinct colors, sooner or later we’re going to run out of good names. Can AI help?

For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?

One way I have of checking on the neural network’s progress during training is to ask it to produce some output using the lowest-creativity setting. Then the neural network plays it safe, and we can get an idea of what it has learned for sure.

By the first checkpoint, the neural network has learned to produce valid RGB values - these are colors, all right, and you could technically paint your walls with them. It’s a little farther behind the curve on the names, although it does seem to be attempting a combination of the colors brown, blue, and gray.

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By the second checkpoint, the neural network can properly spell green and gray. It doesn’t seem to actually know what color they are, however.

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Let’s check in with what the more-creative setting is producing.

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…oh, okay.

Later in the training process, the neural network is about as well-trained as it’s going to be (perhaps with different parameters, it could have done a bit better - a lot of neural network training involves choosing the right training parameters). By this point, it’s able to figure out some of the basic colors, like white, red, and grey:

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Although not reliably.

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In fact, looking at the neural network’s output as a whole, it is evident that:

  1. The neural network really likes brown, beige, and grey.
  2. The neural network has really really bad ideas for paint names.
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