Emily the Flareon

So, there is this website that we found earlier today, unlimited:waifu2x. Normally we would care less, but this one has a very big and important difference compared to all the other ones we've found.

It's client-side. As in, it runs in your web browser. And all the ML stuff is written in perfectly readable and tweakable JavaScript. They minified it, but they were nice enough not to change any of the variable names!

Now, the actual source code is terrible: it uses jQuery extensively and is a total pain to reverse. But we went and rewrote it all in clean jQuery-less TypeScript over the course of around 4–5 hours.

This makes us happy for a myriad of reasons, because not only do we now have clean reverse-engineered source code that we (re)wrote ourselves, but we can also add any feature we want and make any changes we want. And also we have learned just a little bit more about how these things work, which is always awesome.

And this is a local thing that is running on our computer only. We downloaded all the models and everything and we're running a local web server (miniserve) to operate this. So not only did we have fun reversing and rewriting everything, we are also now immune to the rest of the world, and we have a permanent and portable image upscaler, because it just works in any web browser.

This makes us far happier than any amount of fussing with Python ever could. We haaate Python. Python doesn't deserve to be the only way to interact with ML models. Seeing JavaScript and getting to convert it into TypeScript makes us happy.

So, yeah. Just thought I would post about that~

reliably sharing information is a huge pain in the ass. protocols weren't meant to be designed. TCP came from the moon and i refuse to learn lessons from it.

will probably turn pt.4 into a big "some footguns i did to myself and how im working around them in a way that feels sane-enough and some tradeoffs im considering in doing so"

but otherwise this is just a tiny vent post

protocols weren't meant to be designed. TCP came from the moon and i refuse to learn lessons from it.

this is how we feel about everything

my excuse to post in rust-lang is that we technically know it, but only because @EternalCuteness learned it

But also we love the language in general, it's easily our most favorite lang ever, and I'm so impressed and glad that she managed to find it and learn it for us

FWIW, her very first project in Rust was a real-time/interactive multithreaded path tracer, which we then ended up collaborating on for a while I think