but something we do allow is for players to create characters on the main waifulabs site[1], and then share QR import codes of that custom characters with friends.
Right now it's a small team of 6 people, and we have a bit of funding + compute credits to train models. There's a bit of revenue from some past projects and AI-consulting, but we're mostly betting big on our new AI-powerd mobile title Arrowmancer[1].
> I think the effort required for such an undertaking is vastly underestimated by readers.
Haha for sure. Hosting a real-time ML model for people to do sub 1-second inferences at HN-load scale is definitely nontrivial.
That seems like a nice project that you're working on, definitely more high effort than some other attempts at generated art (procedurally or otherwise).
I can't help but to feel that this would be a better fit for the fad of NFTs as well, as opposed to ugly monkeys or other asset flips that were pretty obvious cash grabs.
I'm guessing your referring to the "one of a kind" part of NFTs, which made me wonder, how would they validate that the created Waifu hasn't been created before?
The question is, would people buy, since there are near endless, and a huge difference is that these don't have a story attached to them...
> I'm guessing your referring to the "one of a kind" part of NFTs, which made me wonder, how would they validate that the created Waifu hasn't been created before?
Oh, not even that, since while some data ends up on the blockchain, i find the whole ownership concept a bit nebulous at best, much like how people mock the whole "oh, just right click the image to save it" thing.
What i was actually referring to was more along the lines of the collector economy idea itself - people willing to exchange their monetary resources for something that they enjoy. Having it be out of a sense of endearment and aesthetic enjoyment (waifus and husbandos) rather than the desire to flip those things (possibly a number of other NFTs or collectibles) seems to be less morally questionable to me!
While i'm not really familiar with the whole NFT space, to me it seems that projects like CryptoKitties are more agreeable and thus viable in this space, as would AI generated images of cute characters! Actually, that seems like a really good fit to me, regardless of how the actual "uniqueness" or "ownership" aspect would play out.
Not to get too deep into NFTs as I to aren't an expert, but from what I understand the images that are used in NFTs are hosted on from a server and the owner of the NFT doesn't own the server, thus do they really own the image?
I too like to collect things, my latest obsession was lingerie. But I always have the image of extreme hoarders in the back of my mind, which quite often scares me out of collecting to much.
I'm not scared of having too much stuff, I'm scared of not being able to notice it myself.
NFTs could ease that problem. But sadly I'm one of those people that prefer analog radio over digital. Wired over wireless.
The smart contract can do a content addressable way of identifying the image, with e.g. IPFS, and then, while in practice there may be a server which is hosting it for people, if anyone has the image saved, they can (if they choose to) continue act as a host for the image of the original server stops being around.
Not, uh, that NFTs for images like this aren’t silly and largely pointless,
but at least for some of them, the “there’s a server hosting the image” isn’t that much of an issue (at least provided that the person who “owns it” keeps the file locally and backed up)
Probably for it to work you would have to limit them and have a set of hand selected images. Seemingly people will buy anything if you can hype it enough.
I guess you could limit it with a colour palette and that way give yourself an option to bring special colour palette images in the future, for special events or occasions.
This sounds a lot like what games like Counter Strike: Global Offensive do with their cosmetic item skins, where they have rarity for each and also specific packages with themes and whatnot.
Now that's a fun business idea (ethically questionable gambling related aspects aside, guess it's about how one markets that and how honest they are).
Waifulabs is certainly a good marketing instrument for Arrowmancer. And regardless of whether the game gains traction it will be a great showcase in case you ever want to offer this as an API for other mobile game creators.
Yeah, this is a pretty narrow window of the millennial generation. If you had been born too late (e.g. Gen-Z), you'd have high production AAA-production mobile games to play between classes and after school instead.
One thing the author overlooks is how game programmers were able to exploit the primitive networking capabilities of the calculator. I fondly remember playing multiplayer Bomberman by plugging two TI-83 together via the 2.5" link cable.
I recently had enough nostalgia to pick up a new 2021 TI-84 Plus CE PYTHON unit. On one hand, it hurts to buy a 20+ year old CPU for over $100. On the other, there's something satisfying about still being able to program TI-Basic via muscle-memory using the token-based input.
Author here. Great point - I totally forgot to write up CalcNet! It was a protocol designed by KermMartian (DoorsCS guy) for connecting up to 8 calculators to a "local network" of tied-together link ports. There was also bridge software to GlobalCalcNet, which let you sort of VPN your calculator into virtual CalcNet networks over USB.
Curious -- any reason you didn't just go with a single machine export + expansion disk shelves on something like ZFS? Installing a MinIO gateway would also act as a bare drop-in for S3 too.
Asking since we're in the same position as yourself w/ high double-digit disks trying to figure out our plan moving forward. Right now we're just using a very large beefy node w/ shelves. ZFS (via TrueNAS) does give us pretty good guarantees on failed disks + automated notifications when stuff goes wrong.
Obviously a single system won't scale past a few hundred disks so we are looking at alternatives including Ceph, GlusterFS, and BeeGFS. From the outside looking in, Ceph seems like it might be more complexity than it's worth until you hit the 10s of PB range with completely standardized hardware?
Some of our rendering processes take multiple days to complete, and the blackbox software we use doesn't have a pause button. So it's not that we're in need of 99.99999% uptime, but there's actually never a moment where rebooting a machine would be convenient (or indeed cost us money). Being distributed over nodes means I can reboot them and the processes are not disrupted.
but something we do allow is for players to create characters on the main waifulabs site[1], and then share QR import codes of that custom characters with friends.
[1] https://waifulabs.com