Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

cannoneyed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 247 posts

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#191

Post by skerit »

jcelliott wrote: post #109

Hey, engineer at Oxen.ai here. Glad the fine-tuning worked well for this project! If anyone has questions on that part of it we would be happy to answer. We have a blog post on a similar workflow here: https://www.oxen.ai/blog/how-we-cut-inference-costs-from-46k... On the inference cost and speed: we're actively working on that and have a pretty massive upgrade there coming soon.

I didn't know Oxen.ai. I took a look at your docs on how to fine-tune LLMs:

> Oxen.ai supports datasets in a variety of file formats. The only requirement is that you have a column where each row is a list of messages. Each message is an dictionary with a role and content key. The role can be “system”, “user”, or “assistant”. The content is the message content.

Oh, so you're forced to use the ChatML multi-turn conversation format.

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#192

Post by anonymous908213 »

abustamam wrote: post #174
anonymous908213 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know anything about electronic music or what a DAW is, but his usage of "dragging boxes around" could either be a gross reduction in the process of creating art, or it could genuinely be just mundane tasks. It's like if someone says my job as a SWE is just pressing keys, or looking at screens. I mean, technically that's true, and a lot of what I do daily can certainly be considered mundane. But from an outsid…

Just to provide a little more context, a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is, underneath all of the complexity and advanced features piled on top, a program which provides a visual timeline and a way to place notes on the timeline. The timeline is almost directly analogous to sheet music, except instead of displaying notes in a bespoke artificial language like sheet music does, they are displayed as boxes on the timeline, with the length of the box directly correlating to how long the note plays. Placing and dragging these boxes around makes up the foundation of working in a DAW, and every decision to place a box is a decision that shapes the resulting music.

Where to place boxes to make good music is not obvious, and typically takes a tremendous understanding of music theory, prior art, and experimentation. I think the comparison to an author or programmer "just pressing keys" is apt. Reducing it to the most basic physical representation undercuts all of the knowledge and creativity involved in the work. While it can be tedious sometimes, if you've thought of a structure that sounds good but there is a lot of repetition involved in notating it, there are a lot of software features to reduce the tedious aspects. A DAW is not unlike an IDE, and there are ways to package and automate repetitive musical structures and tasks and make them easy to re-use, just as programmers have tools to create structures that reduce the repetitive parts of writing code so they can spend more of their attention on the creative parts.

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#193

Post by tecleandor »

crazygringo wrote: post #127

I just want to say this isn't just amazing -- it's my new favorite map of NYC. It's genuinely astonishing how much clearer this is than a traditional satellite map -- how it has just the right amount of complexity. I'm looking at areas I've spent a lot of time in, and getting an even better conceptual understanding of the physical layout than I've ever been able to get from satellite (technically airplane) images. Th…

Feels a bit like between cel shading and isometric pixel art...

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#195

Post by skerit »

cannoneyed wrote: post #47
NAR8789 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core idea in "masking" is to provide adjacent pixel art tiles as part of the input when rendering a new tile from photo reference. So part of the input is literal boundary conditions on the output for the new tile. Reference image from the article: https://cannoneyed.com/img/projects/isometric-nyc/training_d... You have to zoom in, but here the inputs on the left are mixed pixel art / photo textures. The…

That’s exactly right - the fine tuned Qwen model was able to generate seamless pixels most of the time, but you can find lots of places around the map where it failed. More interestingly, not even the biggest smartest image models can tell if a seam exists or not (likely due to the way they represent image tokens internally)

Did you ever consider using something like https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js/ in your process, to make it more proper-pixel-art?

Maybe to process the Nano-Banana generated dataset before fine-tuning, and then also to fix the generated Qwen output?

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#200

Post by andra_nl »

cannoneyed wrote: post #132
crazygringo wrote: post #127

I just want to say this isn't just amazing -- it's my new favorite map of NYC. It's genuinely astonishing how much clearer this is than a traditional satellite map -- how it has just the right amount of complexity. I'm looking at areas I've spent a lot of time in, and getting an even better conceptual understanding of the physical layout than I've ever been able to get from satellite (technically airplane) images. Th…

Author here, and to reiterate another reply - all of the critique of "pixel art" is completely fair. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the AI you can't really unsee it. But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies a lot of other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even th…

Will "Retro art" do?
Post reply on HN