GAN NFT Art

GAN NFTs

Just fooling around with a GAN to generate some NFTs. I only had about 200 source images that I scraped from a few different projects. It’s pretty obvious that this output is a little overfit. When observing the outputs of the GAN over many generations, it’s really interesting to see it create images like this or even better, then deteriorate into noise. Hyperparameter optimization required.

Postcard from Another Dimension

My GPU took 45 minutes to generate these beautiful people from nothing. Well, not nothing. It was a Generative Adversarial Network. What’s that you ask? It’s an architecture for a neural network. This architecture was developed by NVidia, where they showed how, with just a bit more hardware, you can generate photo-realistic people that never existed.

Pretty neat. I’ll fool around with this a bit to see if I can optimize it, but I’m also looking forward to testing it on other media.

Huge shout out to Jeff Heaton for the YouTube tutorial! I’m looking forward to trying this out on other data sets.

The Cloud Landscape – Do I need a strategy?

Let’s take a minute to reflect on the IT industry.  Heraclitus had it right: “The only thing that is constant is change.”  We’ve all seen the disruptive waves of technology sweep through the IT world. With every wave there are winners and losers. Speaking directly to the compute environment, there have been mainframes, microprocessors, open systems, virtualization, and now cloud computing.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. (The irony here is that IBM is the only company to survive every disruptive wave to date).

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Working with Windows 8 — The Quick Guide to Making it Usable

I recently bought a new laptop that came stock with Windows 8.  I heard rumblings that “Windows 8 sucks” and that it is unusable.  The same could be said about any OS by someone who isn’t comfortable.  I see an OS as a tool.  I use Ubuntu and Windows 7 on a daily basis, and know my way around OSx.  Windows should come naturally to me, right?  Wrong.  There are a few tweaks that, in my opinion, should have been applied out of the gate.  I’m happy to report that I am still running Windows 8.1 and haven’t downgraded to 7.

I’m also running on a touch screen.  80% of the time, I’m using the keyboard and mouse.  I needed to make some tweaks to make the touch screen more usable.  For now, I’m going to keep this post bare-bones; but I will get the “meat’n’potatoes” down here.

Firstly, upgrade to Windows 8.1.  Some of these tweaks won’t stay persistent through the upgrade, so do this first!

  • Windows Metro sucks.  It does.
    • Install “Classic Shell”
    • Boot directly to desktop
    • Convert user account to local (allows you to make insecure passwords and not be dependent on a Microsoft web account.  Small passwords are not best-practice, but for my home devices I want an easy password set so I can share it with friends and family.
  • Touch keyboard sucks.  It is impossible to hold any modifier keys on the default touch keyboard!
    • I found myself using OnScreen keyboard instead of the Touch Keyboard because it was so unusable.  There is a setting to add the full keyboard as a keyboard layout to Touch Screen.  This makes the keyboard much more usable.  If I were Microsoft, I would definitely make a few changes beyond this, but it’s 90% of the way there.

Please, if you come across this page and are looking for more information, I’ll be more than happy to help you through these issues.  Just comment below and I’ll build out a walk-through for any/all of the above tricks.

Cheers,
Jon

Goals

I have two goals with this blog.  Every post/page I have should tie back to one of these goals.

  1. Dive into market trends in IT and investigate the specific products and companies that are making it happen.
  2. Explore how to maximize success (work/life balance, financial, happiness), avoid mistakes made by others while reflecting on my own, and share this journey with my followers.