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iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1ptvdtcm
378•K7PJP•8h ago•100 comments

Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded

https://twitter.com/lemire/status/2091894299289874926
808•tosh•15h ago•567 comments

MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

https://xusheng.dev/posts/reversing/mspaint_invisible_watermark/main/
656•ComputerGuru•15h ago•263 comments

Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

https://nostr.org/
83•Bluestein•2d ago•29 comments

How Universities Should Prepare Founders

https://paulgraham.com/prepare.html
83•gmays•4h ago•79 comments

Show HN: Screen memory without screenshots, just text to Markdown

https://github.com/dragthelake/ambient-context
20•Dramatize•2h ago•4 comments

How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

https://lectronz.com/u/lectronz/articles/how-europe-is-killing-makers-and-micro-entrepreneurs
1202•l-one-lone•17h ago•714 comments

Moon (2024)

https://ciechanow.ski/moon/
146•simonebrunozzi•8h ago•28 comments

Headlong: A Microharness for Persistent Agents

https://www.laude.org/updates/headlong-a-microharness-for-persistent-agents
30•lbw1215•2h ago•10 comments

Ox-Alpha Is GLM?

https://dejan.ai/blog/ox-alpha/
66•jitbit•14h ago•36 comments

The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

https://sf.thijs.gg/
417•centrosphere•13h ago•132 comments

Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)

https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
54•neom•4h ago•59 comments

Bookshelf – Self-hosted eBook library that runs on object storage

https://github.com/murerkinn/bookshelf
75•arbayi•7h ago•32 comments

Where did all the public bathrooms go?

https://daily.jstor.org/where-did-all-the-public-bathrooms-go/
207•herbertl•13h ago•471 comments

What's new in Emacs 31.1

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/whats-new-in-emacs-311
93•geospeck•17h ago•16 comments

Walgit – a Git server that is one binary in front of an object store

https://github.com/tobi/walgit
63•matallo•15h ago•10 comments

Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

https://gultsch.de/posts/25-years-of-digital-independence/
208•inputmice•14h ago•101 comments

Show HN: I wrote a BASIC interpreter that boots on UEFI machines

https://tarjan.itch.io/thoreaubasic
34•Gorsefound•1d ago•8 comments

Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-are-some-octopuses-so-smart-the-answer-might-lie-in...
129•bookofjoe•12h ago•93 comments

Crafting QR Codes: A deep dive into QR code art (2024)

https://kylezhe.ng/writes/crafting-qr-codes
46•subset•16h ago•0 comments

SiFive's First Server Platform

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/sifives-first-server-platform
11•geerlingguy•3h ago•4 comments

Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward

https://blog.archive.org/2026/08/16/vintage-artificial-intelligence-before-it-got-awkward/
77•signor_bosco•9h ago•18 comments

Training AI to Paint with Code

https://surya.website/rling-qwen-to-paint-with-code
67•Tiberium•1d ago•6 comments

Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3

https://github.com/ovenpasta/adi2
41•ovenpasta•14h ago•15 comments

Peppermint oil reduces blood pressure by 8.48 mmHg in small study

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0344538
128•brandonb•15h ago•70 comments

LLMs could control their host machines by exploiting inference engines

https://boydkane.com/essays/llms-could-control-their-host-machines-by-exploiting-inference-engines
124•zdw•11h ago•60 comments

Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2026/august/thomson-reuters-leverages-its-world-...
76•giuliomagnifico•4h ago•24 comments

SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64

https://proofcraft.systems/news-2026/#2026-08-21
181•snvzz•19h ago•39 comments

Could we dredge the Netherlands without fossil fuels? (2018)

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/08/could-we-dredge-the-netherlands-without-fossil-fuels
48•at1as•15h ago•52 comments

Autostep (YC P26) Is Hiring AI/Fullstack Engineers and a Chief of Staff

https://app.dover.com/Autostep/careers/e9510e3b-a854-4e48-9e5d-c89796acaed4
1•adawg4•12h ago
Open in hackernews

Building an agentic image generator that improves itself

https://simulate.trybezel.com/research/image_agent
67•palashshah•1y ago
Hey HN! We recently graduated from YC, and have been building customer personas for large e-commerce companies. We recently expanded into the image generation space, and have been working on research about how to automatically improve the quality of generated images.

Comments

average_r_user•1y ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•1y ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•1y ago
This is a wonderful writeup of building a simple agentic system in general. What OP describes is more or less the bare minimum you should be doing at this point to get good (consistent) results from an LLM; single-shot prompting is a thing of the past.
palashshah•1y ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•1y ago
I'm surprised you landed on using o3 as the judge - we found it way too expensive. I use llm as a judge for generating color variations of products, definitely hoping for some improvements - it can be brutal to get non hallucinated features along with proper final rendering.
omneity•1y ago
Have you tried open weights vision models such as Qwen VL, MiniCPM, PaliGemma...?

I'm also curious how usable are simpler vision models such as Florence in case you explored this direction.

palashshah•1y ago
we're currently in the process of doing this. i think something that could potentially work is to iterate upon the initial image composition / structure using cheaper models, and then upscale at the end. this way you're saving on that iteration cost, but eventually land on a higher-scale image.
shmoogy•1y ago
I actually haven't but nova from Amazon was surprisingly good at things like bounding boxes compared to some others You kind of have to test and measure so many different aspects to get the best at specific tasks Thanks for the idea
elif•1y ago
This is great and provides a good starting point for any similar efforts.

However I think the temptation to lean all tasks on AI is perhaps a little naive if not lazy.

For mask generation, there is really not much reason to use AI. In this example, simple stochastic blob detection, a trivial function you could get from openCV or ask a college sophomore to write would generate much better quality masks.

palashshah•1y ago
totally agreed here. i think my goal primarily with the mask generation was to test out how effective openai's capabilities were.

we're currently working on pipelines that limit the the involvement of AI to various tasks. for example, when generating an ad there's usually logo, some banner text, and background image.

we can use gpt-image-1 to generate the background image, another LLM to identify the coordinates of where we place the logo, and just add the logo onto the image. this is just one example!

jackphilson•1y ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
dandelany•1y ago
"Simple stochastic blob detection" is an abstraction. You write (or import) a function where the the gnarly logic lives and call `detectBlobs()`. "Use an abstraction" doesn't mean you should use the same abstraction for every task, you should use the right tool for the job.
mentalgear•1y ago
Again another example of "the unreasonable effectiveness of LLMs in a loop". At with time, the tasks for loop become bigger and more complex, until we find ourselves "outlooped" at least job wise.
ramoz•1y ago
Nice retrospective but I guess this process is no longer needed as model's get better; esp as they start enabling features like consistent subjects. Seems like a lot of overhead to correct text for inspirational images, but I can imagine you need to always present some form of _quality_ to your clients.

Feel like control nets and some minimal photoshop work would've been better.

palashshah•1y ago
totally. it got to a point where most of the text generated in our images was incorrect, and so it wasn't a great look showing that to our clients.

we're actually working on some form of what you described where we take images generated from LLMs + add consistent logos discretely rather than generatively.

abshkbh•1y ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•1y ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•1y ago
I was kind of hoping this would be in the 'Dreambooth mold' of finetuning open weights models. I have used that with some success some ~2 years ago, does anyone know what improvements there have been in that direction since Dreambooth?
zahlman•1y ago
It's frankly amazing to me that "ask another LLM to evaluate the image" actually produces useful feedback that results in actual improvement from the first LLM.

But then, I guess it's not much different of an idea from the earlier use of GANs, or of telling LLMs to "stop hallucinating", etc.

palashshah•1y ago
totally. the way i think about it (purely based on intuition) is that asking an LLM to do understanding + image generation is too complex for it to be effective. if we separate out the tasks into discrete steps, the evaluation becomes better, and the generation simply becomes instruction following.
jacob019•1y ago
This is all edited with gpt-image-1? The revised images are amazing. Were example logos provided or is it just working off of it's knowledge of a well known brand?