These instructions are for setting up a Stable Diffusion instance on Google Cloud. I created an n1-standard-4 instance with an nVidia Tesla T4 GPU, which has 16GB of VRAM. I chose the “c0-deeplearning-common-cu110-v20220806-debian-10” image and sized it to 80GB. If I had it to do over again, I’d make a separate disk for the models and the generated output, but it’s not a big deal. Here are the (cleaned up) commands I used.

Idea: an e-paper printer. You can print to it, same as any printer, but instead of producing paper, it displays the last page printed. That’s pretty much it. I’d hang it on the wall in the kitchen, and I’d print recipes to it. It has no buttons or input, so I wouldn’t get food on it. I think the virtual-printer interface is important. I don’t want to write an app or curl to it.

On May 18, I started a four-week potato-only diet. I thought it sounded interesting, and right now has been a good time in my life to try an slightly unusual eating regime. I didn’t really care about losing weight, but I am overweight, so I wouldn’t mind it if I did, either. It’s now the first day after the four-week mark. I lost 7.8 pounds, or 4.3% of my starting weight.

Various geek ideas, maybe startup ideas. Some are ones I’m thinking about, and some are ones I wish you would think about. Solve the Sybil Attack problem. An online game bans a player for being a jerk, but the person creates new “sockpuppet” accounts and keeps being a jerk. It’s a hard problem to solve because it pits decentralization, privacy, and scalability against each other. Most solutions I’ve seen favor scalability over decentralization and privacy.

I’d like to start long-form writing more often. My motivation is to become a clear thinker. I believe that clear writing requires clear thinking, and that practicing writing is the same as practicing thinking. I used to be a good writer and a reasonably clear thinker, but today I wouldn’t describe myself that way. What changed? One difference is that my day-to-day writing doesn’t require as much deep thought as it used to.

My name is Mike Tsao. I live in California. This is me on LinkedIn.