Test Image for Halloween

 

A test image for Hallloween.

A blog about ADHD & TRD

Someone has created a blog on substack about their experiences with ADHD and treatment resistant depression.

See it at adhdtestimony.substack.com

Using Claude Code in Various VFX and Animation Tests

I am running a series of tests using AI coding applied to various topics in visual effects, animation and astronomy visualization.  These little demonstrations are intended to be nothing more than proofs of concept.  

Posts like this one will be collected and added to a blog devoted specifically to this topic, and related topics of using technology in visual effects, animation and some astronomy visualization.  In the interim these posts will be added to my general blog.  

Here is a list of the tests in progress:

1. Write a program that examines all movies in a folder, determines their resolution, and writes a script to transcode the movies to the highest resolution maintaining original quality, and assemble those clips into a single movie.

2. Write a program that runs on a smartphone to listen to a conversation, determine who is speaking, and notifies the speaker if they are overly dominating a conversation.

3. Write a program that uses the famous Yale Bright Star Catalog (YBSC) and visualizes it in a web browser using Web GL.

4. Write a browser based DAG (directed acyclic graph) designer that might be a front end to any application that could use such a graph.  Traditionally this has been such things as a compositor, a material designer or an animation script.

5. Write a program that analyzes audio and visualizes the themes and instruments in a way that we might a click track for animation from that audio.

6. Write a program that analyzes the famous "find a grave" database, downloads the graves from a designated region and visualizes the result in a web browser.

The results so far have been promising.  In all cases, certain aspects of the test application have been achieved in a few days at most.  In at least one case, the audio cases in particular (e.g. 2 and 5 above), the limitations of my knowledge are exposed.  The process of analyzing continuous speech to determine who is speaking is non-trivial.  Same for the process of deducing themes in music.  Nevertheless, in both cases, I quickly got to the place where I had a good framework for testing ideas and a GUI which, while certainly not final, was useful for prototyping.

As with using an AI image generation program, it is all about a carefully constructed prompt.  

The feeling of using this AI coding is actually very positive.  It is a very productive process.  Whether it will result in final applications is to be determined.

Here are some examples from works in progress.

From the graph construction and visualization test:

From the YBSC visualization. It is very dark so please click to enlarge:

Audio analysis

Game grid 

Diarization app for android

A very simple visualization of cemeteries in Rome, using a few cemeteries limited to 100 people per cemetery as Rome has so many.

The Old Days of Job Recommendations

Sometimes I talk to friends about how to end my first world underemployment.   People wonder what it is I want (other than for someone else to do my marketing for me).  So here I am going to describe what, ideally, I would want, and then it will be clear that I won't get it, because, as you will see, everything has changed.

In the previous century, when the world was new, and we were in the 1970s and the 1980s, I was able to get friends and acquaintances work, or a project, by simply knowing who was looking for work, and who was looking to hire someone and doing a match.  Maybe one or two phone calls.  I was able to get a lot of people work.  People would meet, see if there was a match and only then was salary and human resources involved.  It is hard to say how many people I helped, but maybe a dozen or two.  

But the world has changed since then.  Consider: back then not many people knew this stuff (computer technology, programming, networks, graphics, etc).  Everyone was younger, and relatively new to their career.  So that meant they cost less, and also they would not be a threat to anyone currently working.  They probably had been recently working, or just out of college, or maybe back from a trip to Europe.  We all knew each other, generally speaking.

Plus, and for what it is worth, I was good at this.  I was good at matching needs to people and I had some excellent successes.

But the world has changed since then in all the obvious ways one can deduce from what I wrote above.

So when I can't seem to get work, usually because of choices I made that turned out to be inadvisable, or because of health issues, the less said the better, or for other reasons, I did not fit the profile of what people were looking for.  Of course I did not see it that way, but that is another story.  

I am pining for the old country, perhaps, across the seas, no longer in existence.

It is also true that there are other forces at work, with my friends, and the internet, and corporations, that are less benign, but this is at least one of the issues.

Homeless Woman Story

I was outside Walgreens in Durham, NC and there was a homeless woman of color who wanted to talk to me.  I gave her $4.00.  We discussed how impossible it was to rent shelter when you are not working.

Those of you who think there is shelter for the poor or low-income housing really need to examine what you think you know about poverty.

She immediately went into Walgreens with this vast wealth.  What did she want to buy?  Drugs?  Alcohol? Food?  None of these.

She went to the greeting card section to buy a birthday card for her mother, who had passed away years ago.  It was a tradition of hers.

This picture was generated with AI.

Less Politics, More Art and Photography

After wasting many years of my life worried about the politics of the former United States republic, I am now formally giving up.  There is nothing I can do.  You are on your own, boys and girls, and frankly, I am sure you are not up to it.

Midjourney Example (not mine)

The following example was found on midjourney.  I did not do it, but I found it fascinating.  I emphasize it is not mine so please do not use it without figuring out the attribution.

I have found Midjourney to be very responsive to photographic knowledge... knowledge I emphasize I do not have.

Here is the description, and then the "photograph".

Museum scale photograph. Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, ordinary weekday Catholic Mass. Viewpoint from halfway down the nave, static camera, available light only. Image assembled from numerous nearly identical large format negatives exposed minutes apart. Everything aligns except suspended incense smoke, occupying several incompatible exposures simultaneously, edges never agreeing. Stone and people perfectly registered. Only the air contains accumulated duration. Visible: darkroom masking seams, enlarger registration drift, tonal mismatches between layers, sheet film overlap, contact print imperfections. Archival silver gelatin print. Evidence of repeated enlargements, optical printer composite. No obvious manipulation. No central subject. No climax. Documentary evidence of something the camera recorded but never understood. Quiet. Observed. Recovered. Not composed. Peter Milton layered photographic intelligence. Thomas Demand documentary restraint. Early Jeff Wall before theatricality. Lewis Baltz. Large format field camera. Anti illustration. Anti cinematic. Anti AI. --ar 16:9 --stylize 75 --chaos 48 --no fantasy, surrealism, concept art, illustration, painting, glowing light, volumetric rays, god rays, dramatic lighting, epic, cinematic, HDR, CGI, Unreal Engine, octane render, perfect symmetry, centered composition, hyper detailed fantasy, beautiful composition --raw - Image #4 @Clayton 

She Sings with Capacitors

She sings with capacitors

She dreams with resistors

Her patch cables hold me at night

Her music is analog

Electrons spontaneous

Ohmmeters measure her love

She said that she loved me

Was in tears when I left

When will I see you again

The day I drove east

She closed the door

She sent her friends to attack me

She will not let me see her

She will not let me hold her

I miss her dog we used to play tricks

Test of creating posts from smartphone

This is a test of creating a post from my smartphone. I am not always able to get to a desktop or laptop.

Notes to a Friend About Claude Code-based Development

The following is one of a series of posts involving the use of AI for VFX and other development.  This will be spun off to its own blog soon, I hope.

I tried to explain to a friend an issue involving Claude Code - based development and he did not believe me, hence this explanatory note.

The reason I mention these things (the problem of the development environment and framework choice) is based on the idea that I can contribute real experience and insight into new technologies for the benefit of myself and my friends. If that is not true, if I explain myself badly or if people just do not believe me, then I am wasting my time. In this case I think I was frustrated by another example of the situation I describe below. It is not a waste of my time because even if my friends think I am a moron, I still have to learn these things.

The short version is that in software development, there are many, many choices to make before you can write much code (or use or test something Claude does). Since the internet explosion of roughly early this century, that has become an adventure game with lots of twisty passages all alike.

However, even here Claude may be a game changer.

The longer version goes like this. It has always been the case that when starting a software development project, that one must put a development environment in place. Not all elements of that software development plays nicely with all other parts, that would be way too expensive and is usually not necessary. It is also the case that one has to constrain a problem to fit the resources at hand and failure to make those choices wisely can wildly screw up a project. Generally many if not most of these obstacles can be finessed with small amounts of money, it is not a big deal. Sometimes it is very expensive, but that is a fact of life. (Example you want to develop a lisp application for Symbolics but you dont have access to a Symbolics machine).

Since the early 90s this development environment issue has been one of the high order bits of my ability to be productive. Some of these problems are trivial (e.g. you want to develop for iPhone, so you need a mac and an iPhone). Some of these are annoying, you have to use a specific development environment and you discover that it requires a later version of the OS and a several week learning curve (or worse). Therefore, a reasonable development plan, even with Claude, is to either use a development environment you know well, or budget in the time to figure out what that development environment needs to be and see what budget, etc, is required.

In this case, my unofficial advisor, Henry Fuchs, came up with an entertaining, non trivial app for a phone he would like to see me write with AI. He has an iPhone, I have an Android. Claude can handle this very easily, but obviously there are framework implications. I need a separate path for the iPhone from the Android, and a plausible framework for cross platform development. The Claude chosen framework for this is called Flutter from Google, it is free, it should work on all platforms, and there is some configuration problem on my Windows 11 box and/or the current Windows Subsystem for Linux (which is excellent by the way) that is causing it to fail.

I am out of practice, I forgot about these issues in a desire to impress Henry. I am bad, no doubt, but the problem is a cost of doing development.

The good news is that I should be able to give Claude direction as to which development environments and frameworks I want to use.