Tuesday, June 4, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Shortbread App – AI-powered, romantic comics for women

Show HN: Shortbread App – AI-powered, romantic comics for women
12 by Fengjiao | 7 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! Fengjiao and Evan here. We are building Shortbread App, Netflix for webcomics. We publish guilty-pleasure romance series (think 50 Shades of Gray) as comics. Like the mature version of Webtoon. You can see two comics episodes at https://ift.tt/c4VvPsY... https://ift.tt/Rp0Zq8l... , and read more in the app via https://ift.tt/7oC03lT . All comics in the app are made by artists using the Shortbread AI Comics Studio ( https://shortbread.ai ). It is a powerful Photoshop-like editor that speeds up comic creation 10x with AI. The editor provides consistency and granular artistic control. More below. We first posted on HN 6 months ago when we built a prompt-to-comics AI ( https://ift.tt/Au2fX4F ). We sunsetted this soon after - it was a fun experiment but it didn’t meet the real need of comic artists. Shortbread Studio now changes this by enhancing how creators naturally work instead of replacing them. The tech: One-shot Character LoRA: Artists upload a single photo of their character. Our backend uses prompt engineering and ControlNet pipelines to generate a synthetic dataset from this photo. This dataset shows the character in all kinds of angles, poses and facial expressions that the artist can pick the best from. It’s then sent to our LoRA training service to create a LoRA model. This takes about 7 minutes. Control -> Redraw -> Refine Workflow: In real life drawing, you draw, erase, and draw again. The human creative process is iterative. In Shortbread Studio, artists can start from a text prompt, a sketch, a web image or a pose reference as a basis, create an initial panel and quickly modify and regenerate until they get what they want. If you spend 5 seconds, you get a decent panel. If you spend 10 minutes, you can push the limits and get pro results. Built-in Post-Processing: The editor’s features include liquify, upscale, remove background, and outpainting to extend an image. This allows artists to remove, add, or modify parts of an image on a pixel level without drawing by hand. We combine this with segmentation models like Segment Anything ( https://ift.tt/uzm2V1C ) to support intelligently selecting and editing a part of an image. Google-docs like collaboration: The Studio runs in the browser and supports comments and collaboration. LLM Powered Copy Editor: Comics need text. An AI agent proofreads speech bubbles, fixes lettering and identifies grammar mistakes. Read our comics: https://ift.tt/EU5mwk3 (free to download + read, iOS + Android) All of the above are built by a team of 3 engineers including myself. I will be around to answer any questions in this thread!

Monday, June 3, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
28 by davekeck | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! A few years ago someone kept trying to steal my motorcycle, so I decided to make a small camera with really long battery life to catch them. The hardware/software is totally open source, but the companion app only supports macOS currently. (I'm a big fan of native apps, and didn't want to block releasing on Linux/Windows support.) I wrote some blog posts about the process: PCB design: https://ift.tt/0rBT4vI Enclosure design: https://ift.tt/fDju9kN Image pipeline: https://ift.tt/pevalGz Rainproofing: https://ift.tt/HhyDezT Source: https://ift.tt/AlcXJ3a

Saturday, June 1, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: This Message Does Not Exist

This Message Does Not Exist
13 by sebtron | 0 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Google's new summarize SMS just read another person's messages to me

Tell HN: Google's new summarize SMS just read another person's messages to me
21 by nogridbag | 1 comments on Hacker News.
While I was driving, I received a text message from my father with 3-4 pictures and some of his typical dad jokes. Android Auto prompted me with a new feature "Summarize Messages". Usually I'm strongly against these features but curiosity got the better of me so I clicked "Turn on". Then I clicked "Summarize" on my father's message. It started giving me a detailed summary of names that are not in any of my contacts or my actual social circle, e.g. "Zach and Melanie are planning to visit NYC this summer". I'm not sure if it was truly another person's summary of some canned dev message. But now I'm a bit worried Google is giving other users my SMS history.

New top story on Hacker News: Boeing and NASA call off Starliner crew launch minutes before liftoff

Boeing and NASA call off Starliner crew launch minutes before liftoff
6 by shinryudbz | 2 comments on Hacker News.