[HN Gopher] City Does Not Exist
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City Does Not Exist
Author : chippy
Score : 252 points
Date : 2022-03-03 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thiscitydoesnotexist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thiscitydoesnotexist.com)
| jojohohanon wrote:
| Oh. I thought it was a set of images of cites from satellite data
| that had no official name.
|
| Deniable cities, so to speak.
| muhehe wrote:
| There is a lot "X doesn't exist" sites. Is there any tutorial how
| to make my own?
| chippy wrote:
| not a tutorial, but here is how they did it:
| https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18t0k17k0Xxo0BXMdjl6m...
| [deleted]
| otikik wrote:
| This tutorial does not exist.
| tinsmith wrote:
| This tutorial doesn't exist.
| pawelduda wrote:
| This HN comment doesn't exist
| Jerrrry wrote:
| General adversarial networks
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
| eimrine wrote:
| God does not exist
| brink wrote:
| You do not exist
| [deleted]
| johndough wrote:
| First, you have to collect a few thousand images of the same
| thing (maybe more or less depending on how complex your thing
| is or how good the results should be). Then, you train a
| generative adversarial neural network on those images to
| generate new images. https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2-ada-
| pytorch works quite well. https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan3
| is supposedly even better, but I did not try it yet.
| lkbm wrote:
| This is an excellent summary. Thanks!
|
| My follow-up question is whether anything will work with an
| M1 yet. I'm guessing nothing from NVlabs. :-)
| shmageggy wrote:
| Those are implemented in pytorch which can use various
| backend including CPU-based ones.
|
| https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/backends.html
|
| Whether or not it would be prohibitively slow is another
| question, however.
| hwers wrote:
| I would suggest getting a colab pro account. If you only
| use it for a month that's only $10 but it's plenty for
| training lots of these models (maybe 1-3 days per dataset
| depending on resolution and dataset diversity).
| https://colab.research.google.com/github/dvschultz/ml-art-
| co...
| omnicognate wrote:
| Thought maybe I should do thispipedoesnotexist, but of course
| it's been done: https://thispipedoesnotexist.com/
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Brilliant!
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| It's literally loading the same image every time.
| omnicognate wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| My favourite mouse mat ever was from Blackwell's
| Bookshop.
|
| An oval mouse mat with a beautiful illustration of a
| mouse sitting on a mat, with "Ceci n'est pas un mousemat"
| as the caption.
|
| https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/157766793165878650
|
| Apologies for the pinterest link; not many photos of
| this. And even this one is (like mine was) discoloured
| from decades in the light.
| Biganon wrote:
| Is that term used in Quebec? Why not "tapis de souris"?
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| It's a "franglais" joke.
| na85 wrote:
| Well in France _on se stationne dans un parking_ , but in
| Quebec _on se park dans un stationnement_.
|
| C'est la vie.
| Julesman wrote:
| Yeah, if they upped the brightness. heh.
| galgot wrote:
| When one knows the other dirty meaning of "pipe" in French, one
| can wonder if Magritte had a dirty sens of humour.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Oh that must be where the Swedish "pippa" came from. The
| Swedes were after all enamoured with french culture and
| language for a long time.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| What pipe? That's not a pipe.
| zoover2020 wrote:
| Found the American.
| drusepth wrote:
| Or someone who recognized the pipe from the original
| artwork that includes the line: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" /
| "This is not a pipe".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
| gpvos wrote:
| Would be nice to have an actual pipe-generating AI.
| adonovan wrote:
| Unfortunately the Dall-E demo (openai.com/blog/dall-e)
| doesn't have useful deep links nor let you choose free-form
| prompts, but if you modify one of the existing text prompts
| to "a snail made of faucet", it generates some pretty
| realistic pipes--the plumbing variety--that I'm pretty sure
| do not exist.
|
| Examples: https://cdn.openai.com/dall-e/v2/samples/animal_con
| cept_tran... https://cdn.openai.com/dall-e/v2/samples/animal_
| concept_tran... https://cdn.openai.com/dall-e/v2/samples/anim
| al_concept_tran...
| SamBam wrote:
| I believe Windows had a screensaver that did that decades
| ago...
| teh_klev wrote:
| Back in the day, ~1995'ish I was a tech supporting Windows
| NT4 (amongst many other things) and I had a customer with a
| beefy dual processor server living on premises in a closet.
| For some unknown reason NT would slow down and overall
| performance was a bit rubbish. It turns out that the
| customer had turned on the pipes screensaver and it
| basically soaked up all of the CPU time. Fortunately my
| customer was more agreeable to disabling this compared to
| this similar story from those days of yore:
|
| https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Fat-Pipe
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| Unfortunately, the joke misses (or misses me) a bit.
|
| But it does seem like there is a critical distinction between
| 'this is not a pipe' and 'this pipe does not exist'.
|
| The original targets the distinction between the image and the
| 'reality', the difference between the map and the territory and
| our linguistic/perceptual confusions as to such.
|
| In this case however, this 'pipe' does exist. It can't be said
| to exists in terms of reference to an object outside of the
| image, but the image itself is as extant as any image. We could
| argue about issues of permanence---what happens when I turn my
| device off and the data representing such in memory and on the
| screen evaporates?, etc---but likewise the universe (at least
| according to current scientific understanding) is likely to
| 'evaporate', so in that regard the 'real' world is just as
| permanent as the image on a screen that is only a temporary
| electrical phenomena interacting with human perception.
|
| Maybe I've missed something or am overthinking it.
|
| (And yes, it's just a joke website, but if a joke can't lead
| one to spiraling into existential despair at the nature of
| existence, what's the point?)
| omnicognate wrote:
| Ah, but "pipe" doesn't refer to the picture. That's not a
| pipe. It refers to an actual pipe.
|
| That doesn't exist. :-)
|
| Edit: TBH I'm not sure why they put that picture of a pipe
| there, just a bit of decoration I suppose. :-D
| tetsusaiga wrote:
| It's a reference to a famous surrealist painting:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
|
| My artist girlfriend shared this with me once, and I'm
| happy to be able to pay it forward. haha
| omnicognate wrote:
| I know, I posted the same link elsewhere in the thread
| :-). Just trying to think of ways the domain name can
| work.
| layer8 wrote:
| I think you're overthinking it :). The original meant "this
| [depiction of a pipe] is not a pipe", and the website is
| saying "this pipe [depicted here] does not exist".
| AkshatM wrote:
| You answered yourself in your explanation.
|
| A picture of an imaginary pipe means the pipe it _represents_
| does not exist.
|
| At the same time, a picture of an imaginary pipe is not
| itself a pipe.
|
| They are two separate statements that aren't connected to
| each other - it's just that they are both satisfied
| independently by this website, so it's a happy and fun
| coincidence.
| mbb70 wrote:
| This is Not A Pipe That Exists, which returns some AI
| convolution of many pipes with some heavy weighting toward the
| Magritte pipe would be ideal for me.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| This appears to be Dim Carcosa, on the shores of the lake of
| Hali:
| http://thiscitydoesnotexist.com/static/images/nautdopwpynver...
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Where flap the tatters of the Yellow King...
| tasha0663 wrote:
| That ruptured eyeball peninsula is prime real estate.
| ummwhat wrote:
| It's ok, but it never takes any bold risks putting in any
| distinctive "this landmark does not exist" buildings. It would
| never generate a gaudy pile of lights like Time SQ nor an
| oversized oyster shell like the Sydney opera house. I'd be fairly
| impressed if it generated distinctive features that feel like
| deja vue.
| paskozdilar wrote:
| I wonder if this could be used as a seed for videogame terrain-
| generator
| rob74 wrote:
| As with all these "this X doesn't exist" sites, the images look
| ok at first sight, but when you start to look closer you notice
| that some things aren't quite right. In this case, it's mostly
| roads that don't seem to connect to anything...
| msdrigg wrote:
| I wonder if you could improve this GAN by taking a cropped part
| of each generated image and trying to discriminate against that
| part of the image as well.
|
| Because the problem seems to be in the details. The GAN is
| great at the global picture but the details are off. And this
| problem benefits from the fact that a picture of a section of a
| city should also be recognized as a picture of a city.
| hajhatten wrote:
| I'm surprised you managed to notice that. The images are so low
| res.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The low resolution to me undermines the entire thing. On some
| of these images I couldn't even tell if there was even a city
| or just a barren landscape with a handful of warehouses
| uoaei wrote:
| All bow before the rough-approximation power of L2 loss
| functions!
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep. I was quite impressed by how mine appeared to stick
| bridges in logical positions. Then I noticed one of them only
| got halfway across the river...
| brk wrote:
| That's not a bug, it's just bureaucracy. Wait 6 months and
| refresh.
| ogig wrote:
| As someone spending time looking at satellite and orthographic
| photos, i agree, this looks weird. City grid looks like cloth
| texture, roads and rivers make no sense. In any case, it
| manages to slightly impress me.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| How does one get an orthographic photo that is not
| artificially made? I know what an orthographic camera does in
| 3D graphics, but how can you accomplish that in a real life?
| detaro wrote:
| they are "artificially made" by postprocessing aerial
| images. (You can actually do cameras that create
| orthographic images, but that's more for industrial vision
| etc since the frame covered obviously can't be larger than
| the lens, which doesn't really work for aerial photography,
| so if people talk about "ortophotos" in that sense they
| mean processed)
| dTal wrote:
| >As someone spending time looking at satellite and
| orthographic photos
|
| That's presumably the same training the AI had :p
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| It's like it can't decide between a city on a grid or not,
| and instead ends up with a weird fusion of both - and like
| you said - looks like a woven fabric instead.
| jzig wrote:
| Cool. Someone do this for TTRPG maps!
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator
| yobbo wrote:
| Crop shapes outside of the desert cities: it learned shape and
| colour palettes separately.
|
| Some shapes that seemed like roads but had small river deltas
| fanning out.
| bregma wrote:
| I swear one of the images that came up was New Jersey.
| pavlovskyi wrote:
| It could be really to generate synthetic data for semantic
| segmentation tasks.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Somebody should make thiscityshouldexist.com
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's gonna be the title of the Ukraine reconstruction
| project.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The lack of atmospheric correction makes this hard to appreciate.
| amarant wrote:
| This is cool! There has been a bunch of these lately, is there
| some more or less comprehensive list of *doesnotexist websites
| somewhere? Would be fun to browse through them all for
| inspiration.
| pmmucsd wrote:
| https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/
| kingcharles wrote:
| https://thisrentaldoesnotexist.com/ was hilarious. The
| bedroom of one looked like a squalid Soviet dorm-room, while
| the kitchen of the same rental looked like it was from a
| $100m megamansion.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I'm disappointed that it doesn't generate equations with no
| solution, such as x = x + 1
| throwamon wrote:
| Off-topic: @dang, was the title automatically stripped of a
| leading "This"?
|
| Off-topic^2: @dang, If you're reading this, what is the proper
| way of notifying you of minor stuff like this (if at all)? And
| how exactly do you see these comments? Do you just read ALL
| comments, or is there a system that detects mentions or stuff
| like that?
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Sometimes the HN algo will strip what it thinks is non-
| essential leading words from submissions. When it does that,
| the contributor can edit the title to replace it ... and the
| algo won't argue.
| smugma wrote:
| Would be good if algo were tweaked to keep the opening "This"
| if the title ends in "Does Not Exist".
| newbamboo wrote:
| Dang does not exist.
| timerol wrote:
| Emailing HN moderators is the best way to reach (without loss
| of generality) dang
| aleksandarbos wrote:
| Novi Sad Serbia
| abletonlive wrote:
| Y'all need to stop making stuff like this because when we go into
| the dark ages or humanity is wiped out, future people or aliens
| will be trying to find things that don't exist.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Yeah, stop writing novels! Plato was right.
| hwers wrote:
| I've started to think that the plausibility of recovering a lot
| of the digital data we're creating in the case of a nuclear
| winter might be really low. Imagine walking a wasteland of
| abandoned computers in a fallout-style land. The vast majority
| would be behind passwords and even when it wouldn't, the
| internet wouldn't be accessible. Raid serverfarms? They'll be
| torn apart for metal or even if not, behind even stronger
| encryption than regular computers. Feels like our accumulated
| knowledge is a lot more fragile than we acknowledge.
| kingcharles wrote:
| True. What's the chances of stumbling upon an abandoned
| Facebook data centre and actually being able to exfiltrate
| any meaningful data from it?
| mbg721 wrote:
| You mean, things like humanity? On a more serious note, I think
| it's kind of cool that archaeology has sometimes worked in kind
| of the opposite way; everyone assumed the Trojan War was just
| made up, and then they found Troy.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Bielefeld?
| JrProgrammer wrote:
| I was thinking that too but this seems to be in line with the
| https://thispersondoesnotexist.com series of websites where
| they are AI generated
| aivisol wrote:
| In the light of current Russian military activities: Borne
| Sulinowo
| aivisol wrote:
| To avoid misunderstandings: Borne Sulinowo - town in Poland
| which during the Cold War housed large Soviet/Russian
| military base and therefore was erased from maps [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borne_Sulinowo
| fho wrote:
| Na ... I can see some part of it right now ... although maybe
| that is just what they want me to tell you.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I wanted to post the same comment but luckily remembered to use
| the search function!
| pornel wrote:
| This one looks like a graphical Markov chain generator.
|
| At this level of detail it's hard to tell if the generated city
| is implausible, because cities are shaped by many factors that
| aren't visible on the map (history, soil, location within larger
| region, economic and social policies, etc.) So a clump of
| buildings near a river avoiding mountains is a good guess every
| time.
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(page generated 2022-03-03 23:01 UTC)