The last two weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind as a result of the website I mentioned in my last update, This Airbnb Rental Does Not Exist. Hello to the new subscribers to this newsletter! I use this weekly update to try to collect the various creative hobbies that I’m engaging in, which include cooking, social commentary, studying German, and – most interestingly for new folks – general technical hackery.
Last week, I travelled to LA for work, so I had no weekly update and fewer videos than usual. I don’t know if I’m going to catch up this week or not, but we’ll see!
Neural Nets and This Rental Does Not Exist
Over the past two weeks, I’ve done a lot around This Rental Does Not Exist.
At a technical level, I used transfer learning to create additional different types of rooms: kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms, in addition to bedrooms. I wrote more about the transfer learning process. This included creating a small demo site showing how quickly a transferred model was able to learn how to produce alternative rooms.
I also experimented with training a model using Google Cloud. I compared prices for different types of GPU machines available from Google, and (somewhat surprisingly to me!) found that the cheapest way to train a model is actually on the most expensive/high end GPUs: the increased speed makes up for the higher cost.
In order to show off the effect of transfer learning, I created a quick video demo:
This video combines output from four different models – one for each type of room – into a single video frame. For each frame, the same random inputs are given to each model, and the video moves smoothly between the various random points along a normal distribution.
This video also attracted a bit of attention on Twitter.
I haven’t written even half of the technical posts I want to about this process yet: I still have notes on everything from Colab to how I learned to use MoviePy – but I did at least get a few things written up!
In addition to the technical side, I also did interviews with a handful of reporters, two of whom had pieces come out! Both pieces were focused more on This Person Does Not Exist and the underlying technology, but I got good quotes in each of them.
From CBC’s Spark comes New AI makes it harder to detect what’s real online, talking about the underlying problems of better computer generated fakes. In that piece, I got the last line:
“Don’t assume just because there’s a picture out there, it’s real,” said Schmidt.
“Because anything that [Philip Wang] or I could hack up in a day or a weekend or whatever is going to be far below the capabilities of a dedicated bad actor.”
From Rachel Metz for CNN Business came These people do not exist. Why websites are churning out fake images of people (and cats), where I also got the last word:
Schmidt, too, hopes sites like his will make people question what they see online. “Maybe we should all just think an extra couple of seconds before assuming something is real,” he said.
Cooking
I’m behind on cooking updates, but I have been continuing to cook! With the exception of last week, where travel got in the way, I have cooked two meals every week since I started Blue Apron.
Two weeks ago, I had my first meal where I actually bought my own ingredients instead of using Blue Apron. It was educational! I learned how hard it is to buy ingredients for just two people in a grocery store; how time consuming shopping is when you don’t know what you’re doing, and more about the relative cost of Blue Apron to grocery store shopping. For the time being, Blue Apron is still going to be part of my life, but over the next couple months, I hope to be able to grow my grocery shopping skills to make this a more common task.
I wrote about my experience, but you can also see it in action in the YouTube video!
Beyond shopping for myself, I’ve also moved on to cooking for four people instead of two on Blue Apron. Initially, I wanted to start small and see if I could stick with it, and now that it’s working, I’m looking to expand our mealtimes. I’ll be documenting that more in the coming week, so you’ve got that to look forward to!
That’s it!
Short update this week because of travelling to LA last week; travel always takes a lot out of me. Next week, hopefully I’ll have posts about
All links for this week:
