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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Random semi-useful idea: use an SSH public key as input, giving a very memorable image for verification.

I could also see something like this having applications in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon generation.

“Anime girls” look all the same to me.

There was a time where I didn’t listen to rock music; Pantera and Green Day would sound the same. Memorable is up to cultural fluency...

It's like food connoisseurism. You get a sense for subtleties if you spend enough time with it.

xkcd #915 is titled “Connoisseur”:

https://www.xkcd.com/915/

Suprisingly such concept exists, there is a subreddit dedicated to finding art in modern photography. http://www.reddit.com/r/AccidentalRenaissance/

that's exactly (in ascii, that is) the idea behind randomart, eg

    The key fingerprint is:
    SHA256:s6N0OwlTDKjDez98kZRwUGZbTYaQUArv+EYC6sigFwA ben@eshwil
    The key's randomart image is:
    +---[RSA 2048]----+
    |E   ..o=*o.+o    |
    |.   .oo+oo...    |
    |....  o=..       |
    | o+. o  =        |
    |o .oo ooS.       |
    |* ...+o oo       |
    |oo.. o+o+o       |
    | .   o+o+o       |
    |      .o..       |
    +----[SHA256]-----+

(from https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-how-does-it-wo... )

Why don't we combine those ideas and use ascii waifus?

(yes, that's a thing)

How did you get a picture of my waifu!?

The one thing I've always wanted from identicons is for the system to use a mixed generator composed of at least 20 different algorithms, that all produce results that are completely different-in-kind (like abstract shapes vs. cartoon monsters vs. anime girls vs. swatched spirographs vs. pixel cities vs. ...), such that it's unlikely that any two anonymous users in a smaller conversation will end up with identicons that you have to inspect to differentiate. (E.g. hopefully, if there are two users with identicons of the same style, then they would have very different base colors, which is impossible if all the identicons are of the same style.)

You can just train a conditional GAN on a variety of datasets, such as BigGAN.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/biggan-a-new-state-of-the-ar...

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