[HN Gopher] I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL*E 2 fo... ___________________________________________________________________ I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL*E 2 for $45: here's what I learned Author : dsmmcken Score : 161 points Date : 2022-08-08 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (deephaven.io) (TXT) w3m dump (deephaven.io) | jrochkind1 wrote: | This is very interesting, but why are all the images just showing | up as blurred out pre-loads for me? Makes it a lot less | communicative, since it's literally about the images! | | I mean, I'm guessing these aren't the intended images, since you | don't need DALL-E to generate blurry splotches! | sbf501 wrote: | You should've invested in CloudFront first because your site | isn't loading. | lmarcos wrote: | Would nginx (caching everything) work on a $5/month VPS? | wyager wrote: | Should work fine. I personally avoided using a reverse proxy | like nginx or apache because they tend to have a _ton_ of | vulnerabilities (check out the CVE database results for | "nginx"), making them a security management headache. | vient wrote: | Any serious vulnerability in NGINX will be big news since | it is so widespread. CVE database shows some entries by | searching for "nginx" but I looked at all 2022 entries and | the only ones affecting NGINX itself are in NJX plugin so | actually not affecting NGINX core functionality. | | https://nginx.org/en/security_advisories.html shows one | "medium severity" vulnerability in the last 4 years. | wyager wrote: | Huh, guess I haven't really checked on this since mid- | early 2010s. Was a lot worse back then. | [deleted] | dsmmcken wrote: | I know. I wasn't actually expecting to hit front-page. Trying | to reinforce it best I can. | brundolf wrote: | Fwiw, in my experience you don't actually need a CDN just to | survive HN. It may be enough to just make sure you're not | hitting a DB on every request; ideally you'd be caching the | HTML output wholesale (via static site generator or | otherwise) | | For reference: with cached HTML, my single Node.js process | running on Heroku's cheapest tier has weathered the front | page multiple times without breaking a sweat | pyrolistical wrote: | Right. So a CDN? | brundolf wrote: | A CDN is its own thing- it's distributed across a | provider; it can't just be served off a simple box. It | requires having or gaining familiarity with a specific | provider, as well as other constraints like you _have_ to | statically export to the file system (can 't just cache | responses in memory), and you can't have _any_ dynamic | content without standing up a separate server, etc | | Makes sense for a lot of things, but it comes with | downsides, especially for hobbyists! I've found I prefer | sticking with a simple server for my website, and OP | might find it's easier to do that too | jedberg wrote: | That's not at all true. A CDN is a content delivery | network. There is nothing that says it isn't a network of | a single host on the same machine as the original | content. | | It's just a cache that returns content faster than the | original content. | TremendousJudge wrote: | At that point, why not just have a static blog hosted on an | AWS bucket? | brundolf wrote: | For me: it's less to manage, it's less to learn (AWS is a | nightmare from my perspective), and I enjoy other | benefits like the fact that one codebase can generate and | then serve up the site, and the fact that it's vendor- | agnostic (just clone/npm install/run). Also allows easy | customization of headers and redirects, allows for the | odd dynamic route, and makes local dev/previewing super | simple | | OP may or may not feel the same! Just wanted to | communicate that a simple server can definitely do the | job | knicholes wrote: | Right, like something like Varnish. | brundolf wrote: | Hadn't heard of Varnish, but yeah, it looks like a good | solution the OP could probably layer over their current | setup without too much trouble | wyager wrote: | I switched backends a bunch of times because everything I | tried (Go stdlib HTTP, Tornado, etc.) kept getting taken | out whenever I would hit the front page, either due to CPU | overload or some sort of resource leak. I ended up using | Warp+Wai+Servant (https://github.com/yesodweb/wai) and it | has been smooth sailing since then off my $3/mo VPS. It can | take thousands of req/sec without flinching (which is | higher than what you see from top of HN - that maxes out at | a few hundred req/s). | mahathu wrote: | What VPS are you using and can you recommend it? | wyager wrote: | Vultr. They have been totally solid for me. Nothing fancy | - just a reliable cloud VM. Have had no reason to look | for alternatives for web hosting. | layer8 wrote: | Did you use some software/service for load-testing the | alternatives? | wyager wrote: | Yes, I first tested locally with httperf and some other | tools. I took it as a good sign when the load testing | tools crashed before my server did. Then, I found a few | services by searching for something like "website load | test" and using their free tier (which would typically | generate something like a few hundred req/sec - | sufficient to simulate HN). | dsmmcken wrote: | For reference, it's a fully static site on a low-end shared | host. The post had quite a few images, which were pngs from | DALL-E, but I've just now recompressed as smaller jpg. | [deleted] | mym1990 wrote: | Just curious, is there any general number range for how much | traffic a front page post might get? Less than 10k, 10-100,000, | 100,000+, etc | cube2222 wrote: | Second place for a few hours and ~1k points resulted in | around 50k unique visits. | | If your website is a collection of static files and you're | hosting them on S3+CloudFront or something similar (GitHub | pages works too), then it'll work without any issues and cost | pennies for the whole thing. | sbierwagen wrote: | I front paged a couple times back in the day. In the | neighborhood of thousands of pageloads and hundreds of | concurrent users. Totally trivial for static HTML, but most | people get into trouble with hand-rolled or poorly tuned blog | frameworks that make multiple database calls on every | visitor. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | Hit the front page twice with two articles in the past. | | Total traffic both times was around 60k over the course of | 2-3 days. | Swizec wrote: | I once frontpaged with a funny article that readers also | shared with others. Back when people still did that instead | of taking a screenshot. | | 1,000,000 uniques over 3 days in ~2011. | | I have been trying to re-create that high ever since, lol. | Going viral is one hell of a drug. | Syonyk wrote: | I'll see on the order of 10k-25k hits (hard to say exactly, | most of HN uses adblockers/tracker blockers and I use | CloudFlare for caching) from an article on the HN frontpage. | It's not that bad, and I could almost certainly serve it off | my colo'd server without any trouble - bandwidth just isn't | _that_ high. | | But as my blog is entirely static (except for the comment | threads, hosted on my Discourse forum), I just let CloudFlare | serve it. I had to do some tweaks to the configs to say, "No, | _really,_ cache _everything!_ " (it doesn't do that by | default for a range of very valid reasons, none of which | apply to me), but once that change went in, I'll see 98.5% or | higher "served out of cache" ratios when I'm seeing a lot of | traffic from HN or somewhere. | | I'd originally designed it to be hosted out of a Google Cloud | bucket with CloudFlare (egress traffic is cheaper that way | than out to the internet), but I eventually decided to host | on my server, as I could then do Tor and some other stuff | more easily. I've got the server anyway... | | One of these days, I may play with dropping analytics | entirely and just passing requests through to my server, let | images remain cached as that's the bulk of my bandwidth. Then | I can go even more oldskool and parse my server logs for | stats and referrers and such! | Tijdreiziger wrote: | > Then I can go even more oldskool and parse my server logs | for stats and referrers and such! | | Expect to see a bunch of bots. I tried setting up server- | side analytics for a WordPress-based website, but I had to | get rid of it as the bot traffic made it essentially | useless. | wyager wrote: | 10-100k iirc. Peak requests maybe 200-500req/sec (but not | sustained). I had a few posts get >250k but those were on | Reddit as well. | gk1 wrote: | I just hit #1 last week and frontpaged a bunch in the past. | Peaked at around 250-300 concurrent visitors, totaling around | 10k in a 24-hr period, which is on par with past experience. | dsmmcken wrote: | I can tell you it's more than a $5 dreamhost box can handle | right now. | [deleted] | wyager wrote: | My $3/mo vultr box can handle HN loads easily when using a | fast and well-designed (namely resource-leak-free) backend | (I've settled on https://github.com/yesodweb/wai based apps | - the only thing that has worked well for me so far). | ezekg wrote: | I've gotten on the front page more than a few times. In my | experience, it usually peaks around 1.5k concurrents for a | blog post. Peak was 50k total visits over a couple days, but | has been much less too. Depends on the content and how | interesting it is to the wider HN audience. | [deleted] | brundolf wrote: | Archive.org: | https://web.archive.org/web/20220808212448/https://deephaven... | | Unfortunately the images are cached at a very low resolution | superchroma wrote: | When asked about what jobs the robots would come for first, I | would have had to say that digital artist was pretty low on my | ranking before now. | ravenstine wrote: | It's coming for us, too. | | It won't be long before most software engineer positions are | eliminated while some are replaced by software "technicians" | with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code. | Perhaps the technicians will be tasked with building tests and | some automation, but even that stuff can be delegated to AI to | an extent. | | This may seem far off because the present economy is accustomed | to paying engineers large sums of money to write apps. Even | with the retractions we've been seeing in hiring and venture | capital, there's just enough easy money still there and the | capabilities of code-writing AIs isn't quite there yet. | | All we need is a significant market correction and the next | generation of AI to wipe out a large swath of tech jobs. | | The next step regardless is applying technologies like DALL-E | to web design, and for said technology to be widely used, open | and affordable. We won't need web designers or even UXD. | | Then we won't need as many engineers when AI can solve a lot of | common problems in building software. AI can do it better | because it won't spend inordinate amounts of time dillydallying | over next-gen frameworks, toolchains, and preprocessors. AI | won't even have to worry about writing "clean" and maintainable | code because those things will no longer matter. | ipaddr wrote: | Wouldn't millions of unemployed developers start creating | software that would compete/overthrow existing software | companies? | xwdv wrote: | It will never come for us. You think it will, but that's | because you don't understand software. | | Pick any random Jira ticket for a large software project. | Could an AI understand and implement that feature into a | larger project? Can it correctly deploy it without | interruptions to production jobs? Will it correctly implement | tests and decent code coverage? If there are regressions will | it know how to go in and fix them? If there are bugs reported | by users will it be able to investigate and accurately fix | them? What about when multiple branches of feature | development have to be merged, will it know how to do it | correctly? Will it know how to write high performance | software or just use shitty random algorithms? | | If it can't do these things AI is basically useless. Because | this is basically 90% of software development. | silvestrov wrote: | Writing software is like writing novels: putting words | together to make sentences is easy. Making the story make | sense is difficult. | | One could think that much of art is just pretty form | without sense and that is why DALL-E works. | chiefalchemist wrote: | > "This may seem far off..." | | After experimenting with GitHub Co-Pilot I can see that day | being 50% - perhaps even just 25% - as far as it used to | feel. | [deleted] | amildie wrote: | I don't think we'll see this in our lifetimes. | | For that scenario to be possible, general AI needs to be | developed first. | | A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring | out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. | Sometimes, they themselves don't even know. | | Dealing with ambiguos jira tickets, poorly reported bugs, | non-existent requirements, missing or outdated documentation; | these are the "common problems" in building software. Current | AI technology isn't even close to being able to sort these | types of problems today, and it won't be until a monumental | breakthrough in the field is achieved. | | Generating art is "easy" in the sense that art can't be wrong | or right, it just is. | | Generating the backend of a streaming platform? I'd like to | live long enough to see it. | amelius wrote: | > A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is | figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to | build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know. | | Yeah, but that part can be learned by anyone without a CS | degree. | | Perhaps not everything in software can be automated, but I | could see a team of 10 programmers be replaced by 1 person | (programmer or not) handy enough to control a bunch of AI | software tools. | losteric wrote: | "Physical" engineering fields will probably come first... | think AI-generated architecture, with AI-generated structural | engineering, plumbing, electrical wiring, etc... _with_ | human-guidance of the generative process, and human-review | /accountability of final output. Amplification of humans, not | obsolescence. | | In software, yeah boiler-plate and function-level code- | generation... I could also see generating trivial UIs for | CRUD apps, or no-code data-pipelines for small businesses... | maybe even generating high-level architectures for new | services... but we're far off from AI auto-generating code | for enterprise applications or foundational services. The | differentiation being making changes within an existing | complex domain/code-base, in contrast with generating new | assets from nothing. | joenot443 wrote: | Most of the math for structural engineering is already done | through software, we just don't call it AI. The difficult | part and valuable part of being a good structural engineer | is translating requirements and dealing with clients. The | actual math and engineering work is often not much more | difficult than what's done taught in their undergrad, and | much of it is offloaded to designers anyway. | | Source: My family owns one of the largest civil engineering | firms in my home province. | xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE wrote: | Imma be honest, working as an artist who has to come up with | Dall-E prompts and as a programmer who has to maintain a | codebase slapped together from GPT-5 output sounds equally | horrifying. I think I'll stick to my grug brain engineering. | skunkworker wrote: | I am personally bearish on this assumption unless a few | hurdles are reached. Being a software engineer involves a lot | of translation of intent from a required feature into an | efficient and maintainable implementation. | | In a good number of cases it is more difficult to communicate | what needs to be built rather than actually building the end | product. | | The recent work with DALL-E 2 echos a similar problem, coming | up with a descriptive prompt can be difficult to do and needs | fine tuning to be done. Not unlike trying to communicate with | a graphic designer your expected intentions and giving | similar works to draw from. | ceeplusplus wrote: | The problem with that theory is that writing code is easier | than reading code. This is generally not the case in other | professions. It is definitely not the case for an artist. | | You still need correct code, and the halting problem says you | can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At the end | of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and fix shit | the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to understand the | code the AI wrote. | tablespoon wrote: | > The problem with that theory is that writing code is | easier than reading code. This is generally not the case in | other professions. It is definitely not the case for an | artist. | | > You still need correct code, and the halting problem says | you can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At | the end of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and | fix shit the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to | understand the code the AI wrote. | | This might have been your point, but chances are the "code | the AI wrote" will be an unmaintainable mess, so "fixing | it" means throwing it away and re-doing it. | kache_ wrote: | programming is going to get automated with language models in | <5 years | | however, I find that my job (SWE) is about 1% programming and | 99% strategizing, designing & communicating. | Dylan16807 wrote: | > software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI | to generate working code | | People keep trying to make simplified programming | environments for significantly less-trained people and they | keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to make it | _easier_ to get a result that has no crippling bugs? | numpad0 wrote: | And how is it going to increase information in the output | by having AI involved, if these AIs aren't actually | thinking and pouring out of their own entropy source into | outputs? | lmm wrote: | No, but when have crippling bugs ever stopped software | businesses from shipping it anyway? | tablespoon wrote: | >> People keep trying to make simplified programming | environments for significantly less-trained people and | they keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to | make it easier to get a result that has no crippling | bugs? | | Yeah. I've even worked in one of those environments for a | year (not my choice). | | I'm of the opinion those kind of environments won't ever | work. They'll either be: | | 1. Extremely cookie-cutter (e.g. make a clone of our | "standard app" with a insignificant little tweaks). | | 2. Require software engineers to get anything useful out | of them, and those engineers will feel like they're | working with one hand tied behind their backs (or banging | their heads against a wall). | | IMHO, one of the main skills of a software engineer is | translating user requirements into technical requirements | that work and understanding when they work. I don't think | skill is automatable without a fairy-tale AGI. | | > No, but when have crippling bugs ever stopped software | businesses from shipping it anyway? | | A lot? Depends on your definition of "crippling." A | software engineer will gripe and say, "I don't want to | use this;" something that's awkward but the people who | use it can still get their work done; or the system | literally incapable of performing its function? | sjducb wrote: | I think when AI can do the full job of a programmer we'll | have reached the singularity. Programmer will be the last job | to go. | sbmassey wrote: | Judging by the current state of DALL-E, the generated | software will look good at first impression, but have lots of | weird bugs when examined closely. So yeah, not much different | to current software dev. | bearjaws wrote: | Time for me to open up my "AI Code Refurbishing" shop and | specialize in fixing all the disasters these "AI technicians" | make. | thrown_22 wrote: | AI has been over promising and under delivering for 50 years. | | There's a reason why the general models aren't being | released. The second you look under the hood and start poking | the unhappy paths you see that it doesn't understand anything | and you're talking to something dumber than a hamster. | andybak wrote: | There's a weird tension between people who say saying "AI | is overblown" and people who say "this is the most magical | thing I've seen in my lifetime". | | I lean towards the latter but with a healthy dose of "it's | deeply weird and hard to get anything useful from". But | that doesn't make it any less _magical_. | | And no - it's not "intelligent" in any human sense. | | But I can't relate to people who pooh-pooh it as if there's | nothing exciting happening. Either they are deliberately | cultivating a dismissive air, or they are deeply jaded and | weary. | | EDIT - There's a 3rd option. People are making a rhetorical | point because they perceive a need to correct an imbalance | in the general mood. This is actually the most likely | explanation and is often under-appreciated as motivator in | public statements. I've noticed it in myself frequently. | substation13 wrote: | Programming requires far more breadth and precision than 2D | art. | | I think that in the very long run programming work will be | automated, but by that stage we will either be post-scarcity | or reconstituted in computation substrate. | echelon wrote: | You say that with such confidence. | | I'm looking for ways to hedge my reliance on my skills. | substation13 wrote: | I'm confident that society would be so radically | different that trying to predict and prepare is a fools | game. | thrown_22 wrote: | >This time will be different. | | The 20th time you hear that is when you stop caring. | samatman wrote: | I don't think it will be like that, for two reasons. | | One, coming up with a correct description of a program is | what computer programming actually is. Implementation is | something we're always looking to do faster, so we can | describe more behaviors to the computer. | | Two, we're nowhere near the scale of software production | which would clear market demand. If everyone who writes code | for a living woke up and was ten times as productive, there | would be more churn than usual while the talent finds its | level, but the result would be ten times as much code per | year, not five times and 50% unemployment. | | Today I wrote a little bit of code to generate a prefix trie | and write it out in a particular format, with some extra | attention to getting the formatting 'nice'. This took me | about three hours. | | It won't be long before something in the nature of Copilot | could have gotten this down to, _maybe_ , a half hour for | results of the same (minimal, acceptable) quality. | | Wonderful! Can't wait, I'll be six times as productive at | this kind of task. | | This might make it hard, on the margin, for some of the more | junior and glue-oriented developers to find work, but I think | the main result will be more software gets written, the same | way using a structured programming language got people | further in a day than writing in assembler did. | pphysch wrote: | AI is great for recommendation systems and art because they | are fuzzy. "Good enough" results are relatively easy to | achieve. There is lots of tolerance for errors, because human | preferences are flexible and fuzzy themselves. | | Engineering is a different ballgame... If anything, all the | code monkeys will simply become QA monkeys/test-engineers, | because you need to be really sure that your black box | algorithm is actually doing what you think it should be | doing. | gitgud wrote: | The reason it's focused so much is that art has incredibly low | stakes... and people don't want AI making any seemingly | important decisions... | Dylan16807 wrote: | Maybe, but this is replacing fifty cents of stock photo, not | digital artists. | [deleted] | jonas21 wrote: | Who do you think created that 50-cent stock art? | Dylan16807 wrote: | Probably not a digital artist. Is there a big fraction of | that on stock photo sites? | lagrange77 wrote: | Is DALL-E 2 generating the images on every page request? ;) | [deleted] | akamaka wrote: | Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures | really bad? They often have weird and unsettling details when you | look closely. | | I mean, it's an incredible achievement in AI that we can generate | images at this level, but I don't want them shown to me on a | daily basis while I'm reading blogs. | lxe wrote: | For maximum coherency, you have to make batches of 50 - 100 and | pick the best one. Which can be time consuming and expensive. | ebjaas_2022 wrote: | I agree. They're pretty in the same way as fractals are pretty, | but still boring and bland. | | I would not have any of the ones that I've seen this far on my | wall, or as my blog icons. | WheelsAtLarge wrote: | I'm with you. I would hate to see these images all over the | place -many are just unpleasant to see. | | The cover image generated for the cosmopolitan cover is | stunning at first but after seeing it a few times it begins to | feel uncomfortable to look at. The uncanny valley is alive and | well in many of these images. | amelius wrote: | The pictures are certainly deep down in the uncanny valley, but | I think they would be great for nightmarish games. In fact, | game developers (and especially game artists) might be the next | profession on the line, to be automated by AI. | thrownaway561 wrote: | It's not about being perfect, it's about having something that | doesn't take time to produce. like the article says, searching | google and stock image sites looking for a picture that very | few people are going to ingest is a huge waste of time. | Kranar wrote: | I find the images to be incredible, but it's very unsettling | when you focus on certain details like hands, feet, and eyes. | The hands and feet that it draws are almost always mangled, and | while it does a good job of drawing an individual eye, it | doesn't seem to draw two eyes in a well coordinated manner, | either one eye is bigger than the other, or there is something | weirdly unsymmetrical about the eyes that makes the image look | creepy. | Rodeoclash wrote: | I have a great example of this: | | "Jesus takes a selfie" - https://imgur.com/a/togE2ko | | I'm pretty sure this snap was three days after the | resurrection. | Jiro wrote: | Online DALL-E generators often are deliberately prevented | from producing good faces, because of the potential for | abuse. | WheelsAtLarge wrote: | FYI, "ARC: FACE RESTORATION" is an AI that fixes distorted | faces. It won't do miracles but it does a pretty good job | when the face is just off a bit. | | I suspect that overtime there will be many AIs that will | target very specialized functions similar to ARC. | Alex3917 wrote: | > Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures | really bad? | | Bad compared with what? They certainly convey a lot more | information than a randomly generated gravatar. | ryanSrich wrote: | > Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures | really bad? | | Well they're bad at not looking like AI generated art. It's | impressive, but I've yet to come across an example that doesn't | look like AI generated art. A few seconds of surface level | inspection and you can see the weird AI psychodelic circling | effect (no idea what the technical name is - eye-ball- | ification?) | upupandup wrote: | They are good enough for most people and over time those | details will get better until we have no need for illustrators. | | Already I see website agencies and bloggers using DALL-E. What | I do see is that it is easy to pick out DALL-E generated | images, in that its too fantastic. Way over the top to a fault. | dylan604 wrote: | >Way over the top to a fault. | | way over the type _as a style_ | | it's like the uber-modern modern art. the next level of those | goofy over-the-top meme images that make the rounds in | socials | | while you may not like it, you just know that this will be a | thing on how to create AI-like images without AI. I used to | refer to that as grade school ;P | ajqreh wrote: | The article isn't loading for me, so I can't really comment on | the images it contains, but I've found telling the ai to apply | an impressionistic filter does wonders for removing the | unsettling aspect. Obviously that limits you to a specific | style of image, but I imagine there are other stylistic filters | you might apply that achieve the same goal. | | I could spend all day looking at the output of "impressionist | cats" and similar queries. | petercooper wrote: | I'm over 1000 credits into Dalle so far (I know, I know..) | and you're on the money. You can go a lot further than | impressionism, though. Specifying the names of famous | illustrators, photographers or artists. Specifying the media | used. Lens types. Colorways. Film types. Lighting. The right | combinations can yield some incredibly realistic looking | things, even faces, and then for the rest of it, there's | Photoshop, Gigapixel, and other tools to patch things up. | (I've had more luck creating 'elements' with Dalle and then | montaging them the old fashioned way.) | | The images used in the blog linked by OP are okay but | stylistically all over the place. OP acknowledges how | difficult good prompts are to write. Beyond that, though, you | still need to think like an art director and establish a way | to set a common style to avoid jarring the readers, and Dalle | alone can't do that. | jiggawatts wrote: | Dall-E is very "first generation" in its design and | interactivity with the users. | | It's just a matter of time until setting a "consistent art | style" becomes a feature of these things. | | Similarly, asking the AI to produce multiple views/poses of | the same thing will likely become a common feature. | boredemployee wrote: | I tried it a lot and I think it works _ok_ for simple, mundane, | trivial prompts, but when you start to ask for sophisticated | stuff it gets weird. | throw_m239339 wrote: | These are good enough for 99% of blogs out there. | | Just like AI generated articles are good enough for 99% of | content farms out there. | jedberg wrote: | > Maybe it was because this was my first attempt, but with 100 | more posts to go, I hoped I could get better with practice. It | would be super cool to just feed DALL-E a whole blog post and | have something great pop out, but even with some GPT-3 magic we | probably aren't there yet. | | I see a business opportunity here. Feed text into GPT-3 and have | it generate DALL-E prompts to make appropriate images. | | Then you have it do the same thing for a children's book. | gbrindisi wrote: | Already done: https://medium.com/@glan1k/dall-e- | gpt-3-d1aaaff38639 | glofish wrote: | Visit their main blog page to see a subset of the resulting | images all at once | | https://deephaven.io/blog/ | | https://deephaven.io/blog/page/2/ | | etc | Guest9081239812 wrote: | I find the images fairly distracting and they take all the | focus on the above page. The artwork also isn't very consistent | which makes it feel like a jumbled mess. When you click a post | the image takes the entire screen and pushes all the content | below the fold. It's more like browsing a community art | portfolio instead of a tech blog. | | I'd prefer smaller thumbnails or icons that give more context | to the actual post. This way they could add some benefit, such | as helping to visually categorize the content. As of now, | they're just a bunch of random illustrations taking up valuable | screen real estate. | | That being said, thanks for sharing, it's interesting to see an | example of someone integrating DALL*E 2 into their workflow. | Halan wrote: | Suggestion for the next blog entry: How my blog post going viral | on Hacker News pushed me to finally use a CDN | l00sed wrote: | I wrote that one, but haven't gotten enough traffic again to | see if it works... https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/hug-of-death | motoboi wrote: | How I generated static html for my static site and it got | served and cached. | [deleted] | amsterdorn wrote: | this. I couldn't even load the page. | brundolf wrote: | Honestly, this is an awesome use of DALL-E and I'll probably | start doing the same for my blog | | It's perfect because: | | - The images just need to get across a vibe, they don't need to | be perfect | | - It's a low-value enough use of images that you'd probably never | commission a human artist to do them; instead you'd either use | stock photos, or skip having images completely | | - The nature of header images for a tech blog tends toward the | abstract/surreal, which means it's either hard to find the right | stock images, or the ones you do find will be _super_ abstract to | the point of being boring | | All of these make it a great use of the technology | dreadlordbone wrote: | Archived link: https://archive.ph/uNfeK | robocat wrote: | That is missing the images. | jwaterhouse wrote: | I take your point about images and increased engagement but I'm | so over useless imagery in blog/article content. I think I first | really noticed it with Medium. So many pointless header images | that very rarely have anything to do with the article. Just | visual noise. | | My prediction is that a lot of blogs will do what you've done | too, and then they'll all look/feel the same. New models will | come out I guess, but then they'll proliferate too and everything | will look the same again. And then maybe to differentiate, those | few that value it/can afford it will make the effort to find | actually relevant images or commission artwork. | thenerdhead wrote: | What service did they use for $45? Is this legal to include in | published works too like a book? | jdminhbg wrote: | From the Dall-E terms of use: | | > Use of Images. Subject to your compliance with these terms | and our Content Policy, you may use Generations for any legal | purpose, including for commercial use. This means you may sell | your rights to the Generations you create, incorporate them | into works such as books, websites, and presentations, and | otherwise commercialize them. | markdown wrote: | They must be well-funded if they're leaving money on the | table like this. I'd pay a few a dollars for commercial use. | SilverBirch wrote: | > Our approach so far has been to spend 10 minutes scrolling | through tangentially related but ultimately ill-fitting images | from stock photo sites, download something not terrible, | | This just seems... Not interesting, well done you've recreated | images that clearly even before AI everyone ignored. | WheelsAtLarge wrote: | >"While the role of the artist isn't going away soon, the role of | stock image sites might disappear. " | | Not, yet. While it's cheap relative to stock images, it's time | consuming to generate exactly what you want. Prices for stock | images will collapse for the common quick to use images but the | price for the specialized high end images will hold their value | or even increase in value. Those historical and such images will | continue to be valuable. | | It will be interesting to see if a specialized job will rise | where people will get paid to generate just the right image. It | might be called "A.I. image artist " This individual will | generate an image with an A.I. but use graphic tools to finalize | it for use. | andreyk wrote: | Agreed - having played around with DALL-E 2 a fair bit and | having made a lot of usage of stock images over the years (for | blog posts with specific subjects), I would say the former | takes more work/time than the latter. With stock images I can | just do a quick search on Shutterstock and find a lot of high | quality options (usually), whereas with DALL-E 2 I need to | figure out the exact prompt I want and iterate on it for a | while. Stock images are not that expensive -- if you buy many | it's as low as $2 per image, or on the high end (if you pay to | just download a few per month) it's more like $10 per image. It | does cost more, but time is money, so... | paulcole wrote: | Time is only money if you someone will pay you for your time. | If that's not true, then it's just a good excuse to spend | your money when you could (in some cases should) be spending | your time. | texaslonghorn5 wrote: | Would that be similar to a "prompt engineer" role? | [deleted] | sfink wrote: | Ugh, this immediately drives home the realization that | representative images are soon going to be devalued and useless, | to the point that we'll all be ignoring them soon. Possibly even | stripping them with ad blockers or similar tools. | | I actually think it's really awesome to be able to do this with a | series of blog posts, and even if you look past the stylistic | inconsistencies and oddities, this particular usage is good and | adds value. | | Which is kind of the problem. Relatively low cost, currently high | benefit? It's going to be driven into the ground. | | We've seen this over and over again. Some reliable form of | signal, or of value, becomes inexpensive enough to produce that | it gets commoditized, monetized, and weaponized against us all. | | Email is a major productivity advance that gives a low-friction | way of communicating for mutual gain? Well, now we're drowning in | spam and phishing attempts and people won't read random | unsolicited messages--if they even make it pass the automated | filters. Same for text messages. Bold images and lettering used | to be good for highlighting and accentuating important | information. Now we don't see them, even if they make it past our | ad blockers, because the neural networks living in our skulls | know to filter them out as negative-value advertisements. | | The same thing will happen here. Nearly all blogs will soon be | sprouting cutesy images to go along with the posts. Initially, | many of them will be useful and add value, suggesting a metaphor | or analogy or simply providing a visual anchor to make the | content more memorable. | | But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll have | the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have _some_ image | because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops it 's | too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just added | for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the _absence_ | of an image is a good signal for content quality, we 're at -1%! | | (If you put work into the prompt and curate carefully, it will | still be a net positive to your content. But it won't matter for | long in terms of traffic/engagement, because everyone will be | mentally ignoring it.) | iroh2727 wrote: | Yep. My analogy for this kind of effect is McDonald's (and | other fast or prepackaged food). Fast food never eclipsed good | food because, well, it's not that good. But it spreads. It's | just the result of unfettered capitalism (tech is no different | in this regard to any other industry). | | But it's also a culture thing...like people trying to convince | us that mediocre stuff is good or cool. I mean in this case | it's _new_ because a machine is doing it, but what are OpenAI's | real economic motivations behind all their press releases I | wonder...? | jedberg wrote: | > But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll | have the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have some | image because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops | it's too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just | added for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the | absence of an image is a good signal for content quality, we're | at -1%! | | Too late. It already started happening a while ago. Tons of | blogs with annoying animated gifs and now browsers have the | ability to block them. | lupire wrote: | [deleted] | thorum wrote: | How is this different from the current status quo with most | websites using stock photos? If anything, I would expect AI- | generated images to be more closely related to the content than | whatever random image you get by searching "business" on | Shutterstock. | cowmix wrote: | I'll wait to read it when it actually comes up but until then I | have to say when I finally got access to the DallE2 beta, I was | underwhelmed. The mini-Dalle, while not as good in the image | fidelity department, is much more fun. | wyager wrote: | An important lesson: >99% of your blog readers will visit during | <1% of the time. | | If your goal is to allow people to read the stuff you write, you | _must_ be capable of serving your content to >1000 people per | second. | | Use a good backend (I recommend Servant+Warp or Snap - the only | two I've tried that could handle it, out of probably 15 popular | options tested) or a good caching reverse proxy (insofar as such | a thing can be said to exist) and/or a CDN. | motoboi wrote: | Static html, from a cloud bucket. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-08 23:00 UTC)