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Plots

I’m plotting again after an August hiatus. The new Gondola Plotter is super quiet, so nice! I’ve made a few refinements to the software stack of course… The usual.

I found a bunch of really cool engravings in some very old books I found in the abandoned house. These books are worthy of some discussion on their own much like the old vinyls, but this isn’t the time.

I got ChatGPT to make me a few SVG handling tools that are really incredibly well done and will help me shed some of the apps I was using. With SVGs there really is not a single app that does all the things, so I drag a collection around just to use 1 or 2 of their function. AI is helping me write scripts to explore algorithms and replace more trivial functionality from apps.

Case in point: this super cool recursive inset fill algorithm to turn fills into something a plotter can do.

I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while, but I knew it’d take me a good few days to nail it. That got turned into 30 minutes with AI. Jaw dropping. I love the effect as it echoes a lot of bored fillings of shapes I’d do as a kid getting bored in class. The cookstove above is filled with it, but it’s far too dense at this size and so it really looks like a actual fill rather than a particular effect.

A lot of my tooling these days is Python which has good libraries for handling SVGs. I used to dislike Python for their dumb purist move from 2.7 to 3 which wasted everyone’s time, and because they had managed to reimplement library hell. But I have to say venv is a successful redress to the later.

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Cool AI Use

Last time Esther wanted some coloring pages, I guess it’s time to battle with a bazillion sites trying to monetize everything. Jump through hoops here, web inspector there, the usual “this will take a minute” turns into another tech ordeal. Wait… I could just ask ChatGPT for some black and white stuff made for coloring.

The cool part? Esther gets a say into what she’d like to color. Well, she likes cats.

Then I realize that instead of asking for the generic stuff we’re used to seeing on coloring pages, we can ask for specific moments of her life.

Playing with an umbrella on a pile of woodchips? No problem:

Jumping on a trampoline full of Duplos? You got it!
And quite a few more:

Beyond the cool factor, I wonder if coloring her lived experience has a similar effect to journaling. Maybe, this helps process things?

More could be done to clean up the SVGs but this is quite sufficient for us. Evidently though, artists who were in the kid’s coloring niche have some competition :\.

One of the things that blows my mind with AI is all the things it can already do but have yet to be discovered.

All images above clickable for SVG, if you end up coloring one please send a pic 🙂

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Stable Diffusion

I’ve played with Stable Diffusion a few months back, but the learning curve is steep, and easy access to DallE & MidJourney made it not worth it to press on. Until… I got excited about a super cool extension:

https://huggingface.co/monster-labs/control_v1p_sd15_qrcode_monster

I just love the idea of having the same image have one analog meaning to a human and discrete meaning to a machine. And the same extension can be used for general masking other than just QR codes.

Without further ado, here’s the eye candy:

A benign QR code

General masking for an almost subliminal effect

There’s much to be refined in my incantation, but I really like how the mask isn’t just overlayed on top of a drawing in a subtle way, rather it’s the basis for growth of AI hallucinations.