Week 1156
I took 3 days off from work this week to learn more about image generation with stable diffusion. I installed this tool called ComfyUI which breaks down image generation workflows into easily customizable steps. It’s a nice abstraction on top of pytorch code where you can customize your models, parameters, and other workflow options without needing to write code yourself. I’ve found it helpful for learning the different parts that go into image generation:
- CLIP to convert text to embeddings
- U-Net models to de-noise embeddings
- VAE to convert embeddings to pixels
- upscaling and other post-processing techniques to improve image quality
- conditioning the input embeddings to have more control over the output image
- and so many other options which I haven’t tried yet
It’s amazing that this is an open source project that anyone can try. I would really like to contribute to the codebase at some point and give back to this tool and it’s community.
My friend Justin and I created ghiblify.com as a placeholder for some product experiments that we want to run together. Our first one is a tool to re-style images as if they were drawn in the style of Studio Ghibli. He made a tiktok to promote the site which currently has around 36K views and generated some inbound asking us to do contract image editing work.
The subtitle says we are out of GPU capacity but in reality I just haven’t had much time to figure out the infrastructure side of things to deploy our local workflows on a cloud GPU. I got pretty busy with Retool work and got a bit distracted by other miscellaneous stuff.
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Some miscellaneous stuff:
- I caught up with one of my older cousins who came to visit SF from Vancouver. He’s about ten years older than me and also works in tech so it was nice hear some of his advice. I wish I was closer with my cousins but it’s hard when you live so far from each other and have a large age gap. Hopefully we have the next few decades to rectify that.
- I hosted a poker night at Retool! It was super fun; we had around 35-40 people show up and hired 2 professional dealers. Our CEO, CTO, and head of engineering came to play as well which was hype.
- 5 people on my team recently hit their Retool anniversaries so my manager and I hosted a team trivia game to celebrate. I’m realizing that event planning is a lot harder than I thought.
- Justin and I were chatting with one of our Uber drivers this week and found out that he moved here from Mexico to start a tequila brand. He owns some agave farms in Mexico and is trying to manufacture and distribute tequila. We got his contact info and it reminded me that there is so much opportunity in the world outside of tech. Everyone you come across has their own unique story and all you need to do is just ask. I should chat with my Uber drivers more often.
- I went home to visit my parents and my grandfather. He is such a calm and kind human being and I hope to emulate his peacefulness when I’m older.
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Reading:
- Dean Jon Levin's remarks to the GSB class of 2023
- Be curious, seek novelty, and don’t be afraid of uncertainty
- Database Wars 2.0 by Dominic Whyte
- The proliferation of AI makes it so important now to own the data stores and not just the application layer on top of the database.
- An Analysis of Komal Swaminathan’s Water! by Ayush Pancholy
- My roommate published an essay analyzing fate vs free will through the lens of Tamil culture and literature
- Finished Originals by Adam Grant
- Lots of interesting anecdotes about psychology and leadership
- I should reference this book again in the future when I’m in a leadership role