There's absolutely no pixel art anywhere in the entirety of the map.
Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
111–120 of 247 posts
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#112Amazing
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#113Appreciate that writeup. Very detailed insights into the process. However those conclusions left me on the fence about whether I 'liked' the project. The conclusions about 'unlocking scale' and commodity content having zero value. Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI…
> Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. We're not ready for it. We're not ready for the scale of impact the tech touches in multitude of areas. Including the artistic world. The diminished value and loss of opportunities. We're not ready for the impacts of use by bad actors. The scale of output like this, as cool as it is, is out of balance with the loss of huge chunk of human activity and expression. Sigh.
If you don’t see these tools as a way for ALL of us to more-intimately reach more of our intended audiences,
whether as a musician, marketer, small business, whatever,
then I don’t know if you were really passionate or excited about what you were doing in the first place.
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#114"map of NYC" does not include Staten Island. That's how we like it
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#115> This project is far from perfect, but without generative models, it couldn’t exist. There’s simply no way to do this much work on your own
100 people built this in 1964: https://queensmuseum.org/exhibition/panorama-of-the-city-of-...
One person built this in the 21st century: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/truckers-viral-scal...
AI certainly let you do it much faster, but it’s wrong to write off doing something like this by hand as impossible when it has actually been done before. And the models built by hand are the product of genuine human creativity and ingenuity; this is a pixelated satellite image. It’s still a very cool site to play around with, but the framing is terrible.
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#116You mentioned needing 40k tiles and renting a H100 for 3$/hour at 200tiles/hour, so am I right to assume that you spend 200*3=600$ for running the inference? That also means letting it run 25 nights a 8 hours or so? Cool project!
Yup back of the napkin is probably about there - also spent a fair bit on the oxen.ai fine-tuning service (worth every penny)... paint ain't free, so to speak
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#117> I’m not particularly interested in getting mired down in the muck of the morality and economics of it all. I’m really only interested in one question: What’s possible now that was impossible before? Upvote for the cool thing I haven’t seen before but cancelled out by this sentiment. Oof.
This is basically the inversion of the famous Jurassic Park quote. “Never mind if we should. What if we could?”
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#118> What’s possible now that was impossible before? > I spent a decade as an electronic musician, spending literally thousands of hours dragging little boxes around on a screen. So much of creative work is defined by this kind of tedious grind. ... This isn't creative. It's just a slog. Every creative field - animation, video, software - is full of these tedious tasks. Of course, there’s a case to be made that the very…
That quote seriously rubs me the wrong way. "Dragging little boxes around" in a DAW is creative, it constitutes the entire process of composing electronic music. You are notating what notes to play, when and for how long they play, what instrument plays them, and any modifications to the default sound of that instrument. Is writing sheet music tedious? Sure, it can be, when the speed of notating by hand can't keep up with the speed your brain is thinking through ideas. But being tedious is not mutually exclusive with being creative despite the attempt to explicitly contrast them as such, and the solution to the process of notating your creativity being tedious is not "randomly generate a bunch of notes and instruments that have little relation with the ones you're thinking of". This excerpt supposes that generative AI lets you automate the tedious part while keeping "the quality of your decisions", but it doesn't keep your decisions, it generates its own "decisions" from a broad, high-level prompt and your role is reduced to merely making decisions about whether or not you like the content generated, which is not creativity.
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had our third kid in late November, and I worked sporadically on it over the following two months of paternity leave and holiday... If I had to bet, I'd say I put in well over 200 hours of work on it, the majority of that being manual auditing/driving of the generation process. If any AI model were reliable at checking the generated pixels, I could have automated this process, but they simply aren't there yet, so…
> If any AI model were reliable at checking the generated pixels, I could have automated this process, but they simply aren't there yet, so I had to do a lot more manual work than I'd anticipated. Since the output is so cool and generally interesting, there might be an opportunity for those forking this to do other cities to deploy a web app to crowd source identifying broken tiles and maybe classifying the error or…
Yeah I'll get the code out there soon - it's just very vibe-y right now, the repo is a bit of a mess since I never bothered to organize things. The secret sauce is really in the fine-tuning, can definitely get those datasets/models public on oxen.ai too
Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
#120> Slop vs. Art > If you can push a button and get content, then that content is a commodity. Its value is next to zero. > Counterintuitively, that’s my biggest reason to be optimistic about AI and creativity. When hard parts become easy, the differentiator becomes love. Love that. I've been struggling to succinctly put that feeling into words, bravo.
Where’s the love here? There are artists who dedicate their lives to creating a single masterwork. This is someone spending a weekend on a “neat idea”.