I used GPT4's multimodal features to accelerate and improve my recently rebooted Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery project now hosted at https://invention.cards. First I used image-to-text models to extract and structure content from pages of Asimov's encyclopedia for accelerated data entry. Then I used text-to-image models to generate visually consistent imagery for each invention and discovery card. This post describes both workflows and my findings. Relevant source code is available in my asimov-gpt repository.

I recently resumed my Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery project, a Civilization-inspired tech tree but for the real life history of science. The content is grounded in Asimov's book with some flourishes added, courtesy of yours truly. Four years since starting the project I'm sharing a significant update. Here's a quick overview of the new viz:

And some major improvements vis-à-vis the original version:

• Revised the visual design of the cards, each of which now features an illustration.
• Improved the UI of the overall system including search and field filtering and a separate timeline component.
• Addressed table-stakes like panning, zooming, and mobile web support.
• Extended the timeline from 1700 to 1850, more than doubling the number of cards to 597.

In the remainder of this short post, I describe challenges I encountered along the way, and their solutions.

Telejam is a web application for musicians to collaborate online in almost real time. Existing solutions like Sonulus, JamKazam and others attempt to provide live, in-sync musical collaboration over the internet. This sometimes works, especially if specialized network hardware is involved and if your collaborators are nearby. The just noticeable delay for music performance is about 30 milliseconds, and players positioned at opposite ends of the Earth will experience at least a 70-millisecond delay.

Exupery was a voice-powered sketching robot. I named it after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry because of the conversation in his most famous book where the Little Prince asks the pilot to draw him a picture of a sheep. You, too, can now ask Exupery to sketch pictures of things, and it will try to oblige. It replicates sketches drawn by real people playing the game Quick, Draw!, and adding a bit of flourish. Try the online demo, and read on to find out more.