One of the goals of Prefect's SDK is to be minimally invasive from a code-standpoint (in the simplest case you only need two lines to convert a script to a `flow`). Our deployment model also makes infrastructure job config a first-class citizen so you might have a good time trying it out. (disclosure: work at Prefect)
Love prefect! but for workflows involving concurrency, Prefect code needs to get somewhat invasive.
Prefect relies on prefect.task()-wrapped methods as the lowest granularity of concurrency in a program, and requires you to use the (somewhat immature) prefect task APIs to implement that concurrency.
This is an excellent write up thank you for sharing! Yea, our concurrency API needs an upgrade - coincidentally this is going to be a theme of the next sprint or two so I hope I can report some improvements back soon.
It's great that people are interested in art and interpretation, but this piece reads like someone trying to come up with a naive critical theory of art in a vacuum, completely independently from the centuries of theory that have already been developed. And to claim that Dada and James Joyce had no lasting influence is comical.
Yeah it’s like - an interesting start, but some things it spends oddly little time on, as if they’re self-evident -
> the only real narrative found in graphics are in design and advertising, which feedbacks to leading fine artists to distrust narrative as it implies commercial considerations (note the use of predominantly, there can still be fine graphic arts that possess narrative)
Why no explanation about or examples of the narrative inherent to design / advertising / commercial work? I can guess, but why make me guess?
> the authoritative or interpretive imposition of Narrative, wherein the artist or a prominent critic imposes a narrative on the work that has had the narrative removed.
In what sense has it been removed? How is that accomplished? What’s an example of art that’s had the narrative removed?
… it’s all just kind of unsatisfying. I want either historical or modern examples of all these things, otherwise it’s all just… sort of abstract pontificating, imo.
Really, for an author so concerned with narrative in art… it’s seems like they kind of fumbled adding it to their own work here. I’m left wishing there was more to the story.
This article has an implicit premise that the ultimate judge of art is “do I/people like it” but I think art is more about the possibilities of interpretation - for example, the classics/“good art” lend themselves to many reinterpretations, both by different people and by the same person over time. When humans create art "manually" all of their decisions - both conscious and unconscious - feed into this process. Interpreting AI art is more of a data exploration journey than an exploration of meaning.
That's one of my problems with AI art. AI art promises to bring your ideas to life, no need to sweat the small stuff. But it's the small details and decisions that often make art great! Ideas are a dime a dozen in any artistic medium, it's the specific way those ideas are implemented that make art truly interesting.
I feel like AI art promises the ability to raise the baseline art available for people who want some artwork for some purpose from stick figures drawn in MS paint to something reasonably artful. The sort of things that would previously have been filled by a Google image search, ripping something off deviant art or just browsing a stock images / clip art website until you find something “good enough”. I think part of the problem with AI art discussions is we do these side by sides with “real art” while glossing over all the places where “art” is used all the time and doesn’t need to rise to the level of “something that will be displayed in a museum”.
When the quality AI images are created, like these in the post, that description doesn't really apply. If you hang out in those discords, you'll see people obsessing about details and inpainting things that don't look like what they wanted. The high end of results is very specific in the implementation.
There does not need to be intentionality for people to interpret it. Humans have interpreted intentionality behind natural phenomenon like the weather and constellations since pre-history, and continue to do so.
And I contest the original claim that AI art has no intentionality. A human provided a prompt, adjusted that prompt, and picked a particular output, all of which is done with intent. Perhaps there is no specific intent behind each individual pixel, but there is intent behind the overall creation. And that is no different to photography or digital art, where there is often no specific intent behind each individual pixel, as digital tools modify wide swathes of pixels simultaneously.
Your algorithm looks surprisingly similar to "Affinity Propagation" which uses message passing techniques to (approximately) optimize the binary integer programming problem. Message passing algorithms have always fascinated me as they seem to be related to deep structure in the original linear programming problem.
For example, there are results for other binary problems that show a relationship between fixed points of message passing and optimal dual points to the relaxed linear programming problem (see below for an example with maximum weighted independent sets).
Back in the day I spent a long time trying to directly relate the affinity propagation messages to a coordinate-descent type of algorithm on the dual for k-medoids but despite the similarity in structure I could never make it work.
I'm curious if you're familiar with this class of algorithms and how they compare (both practically and theoretically) to the work you've presented here? Thanks for sharing!
A 2 author science paper in 2007 for an algorithm. The authors ought to be proud indeed, this is close to the holy grail wet dream of mine (a single author original nature science paper; the only one I’ve seen in recent decades is the Nature paper on the purported active ingredient of royal jelly: royalactin https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10093 )
If you end up spending any time on this and finding anything interesting I'd love to know! My email address is in my profile, feel free to hit me up anytime; also happy to share any of my original notes, I'm pretty sure I have them TeXed up somewhere accessible.
I'm Chris from the Prefect team. We're hiring senior software engineers on the open source and platform teams, as well as solutions engineers on our go to market team and would love for you to join us!
Ideal candidates will be familiar with the data ecosystem, and more specifically with Python, Kubernetes, and working with large open source communities.
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