Ai on myByways

Migrating from Grav to Hugo

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Due to issues with updating PHP on my shared hosting which I cannot be bothered to resolve, I am now considering migrating from Grav to Hugo.

Chatterbox Turbo TTS with MLX-Audio

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I tried Qwen3-TTS… This time, I test Chatterbox Turbo by Resemble.ai, which is an open-source, MIT licensed, text-to-speech model with zero-shot cloning.

Qwen3-TTS with MLX-Audio on macOS

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alibaba’s Qwen3-TTS for Speech Synthesis (text-to-speech) was open-sourced (Apache-2.0) on 22 Jan 2026. And within the last couple of weeks, we now have Apple Silicon optimization via MLX-Audio. Here is code to create an audiobook from an ePub.

Reflections on 2025 through the Word(s) of the Year

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In March 2025, I posted an opinion piece entitled “My Disillusionment with Generative AI”. Things have gotten worse since then, to the extent that “Slop” and “AI Slop” have been picked as the Word(s) of the Year for 2025. What follows are my thoughts on the trajectory of technology and, more specifically, AI, as reflected in the Word(s) of the Year (WOTY).

Kokoro TTS and Abogen on Windows

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I described trying out Kokoro text-to-speech (TTS) model via Kokoro-FastAPI web UI in a macOS (native) container. Here, I install Kokoro-TTS and Abogen on Windows, to take advantage of my Nvidia GPU.

Running Kokoro TTS via macOS Containerisation Framework

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A short 2-in-1 post of two things I’ve been meaning to try out on macOS - first, to try the new macOS Container framework on macOS 15.5… and second, to spin up Kokoro Text-to-Speech (TTS) in a container.

My Disillusionment with Generative AI

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a techno optimist by default, I do believe technology can solve the problems we face today, and make our lives better. But I do have concerns with the direction we are taking with Generative AI, and the future we are heading towards. This is an opinion piece…

Using Flux.1 in GGUF format on macOS

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

city96 has published GGUF versions of the Flux1.Dev model and T5 XXL text encoder, along with custom nodes to use them in ComfyUI - thought I’d try them on my M2 Mac mini, hoping for faster inference!

Faster Flux.1

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

More Flux.1-based models! Go faster with FP8 or NF4! New LoRAs and ControlNets! There is quite a bit of interest with this model, as evidenced by the speed of community-led enhancements.

Wow! Flux.1 by Black Forrest Labs

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While I have many posts about SDXL, I do not use Stable Diffusion 3 at all - license concerns aside, it is simply not good, and may never get better. But just a few days ago, a new, freely available, offline model that is better than SDXL was released by the team that presented Latent Diffusion and created Stable Diffusion, Flux.1 by Black Forrest Labs!

Fun with Llama 3 (8B) in Ollama

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I saw a post on Reddit, entitled “Llama 3 rocks with taking on a personality!”. A fun experiment! I thought to replicate it, blatantly copying the puzzle presented. Llama 3, released by Meta just before the weekend, is impressive.

Testing new PAG and Perp-Neg nodes in ComfyUI

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I know it’s bad form to start off with a disclaimer: but the truth is, I do not know what I am doing. I am just testing out two new ComfyUI nodes, PerturbedAttentionGuidance and PerpNegGuider.

Mistral System Message setup to improve Image Generation Prompts

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I used ComfyUI-IF_AI_tools to integrate to the brxce/stable-diffusion-prompt-generator model running in Ollama. I wonder if I could use the base Mistral 7B model to help improve my uncreative prompts instead…

LLM Prompt Generation with Ollama in ComfyUI

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I described running Mistral, a Large Language Model, locally using Ollama. To accompany that piece, I created a prompt and manually used AI to generate an image. Today, I’ll wire up a ComfyUI workflow to Ollama to do this seamlessly, thanks to ComfyUI-IF_AI_tools.

A game with Mistral 7B using Ollama

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I keep posting about Stable Diffusion, but I do experiment with Large Language Models too! I do not have much to contribute in this regard, instead, here is the transcript of a game I played with the open source Mistral 7B model via Ollama.

Stable Video Diffusion

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

More and more AI generated images are shared as short video clips. So, here a quick test of Stable Video Diffusion - which was released back in November last year. Don’t know why I didn’t post this when I posted about AnimateDiff and the Hotshot Motion model around the same time.

TripoSR image-to-3D-object

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want to convert a 2D image into a 3D model auto-magically? On 5 March 2024, Stability AI and Tripo AI released TripoSR: Fast 3D Object Generation from Single Images that does exactly that!

Differential Diffusion for in-painting

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Differential Diffusion is the newest method (framework) of in-painting without an in-painting model. Instead, all that is needed is a mask (map) where the lighter the area, the greater the re-painting applied.

Generate transparent images with Layer Diffusion

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ever wished you could generate Stable Diffusion XL images with transparent backgrounds? Well, your wish has been answered by the smart people behind the Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent Transparency paper. They have made their code and models available, and what do you know, Chenlei Hu has ported it to ComfyUI!

SDXL-based 4-step models compared

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With the advent of techniques like Adversarial Diffusion Distillation and Latent Consistency models, A.I. image synthesis based on Stable Diffusion XL has been getting faster and faster. Here is just quick comparison of a few models at 4-steps, some of which are fine-tuned and trained for realism.

Consistent portraits revisisted: InstantID

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Not long ago, in a attempt to obtain Consistent portraits using IP-Adapters for SDXL, I shared a comparison between IP-Adapter-Plus-Face and IP-Adapter-FaceID. Today I’ll look at InstantID.

New Stable Cascase Checkpoints for ComfyUI

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An update to my previous post on Stable Cascade with ComfyUI - instead of requiring four separate model files, we now only need two checkpoints, and the ComfyUI workflow is now very straightfoward!

Stable Cascade with ComfyUI

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On 12 Feb 2024, Stability.ai released Stable Cascade “research preview” (non-commercial license), and over the weekend, ComfyUI was updated to support this new model! Time to give it a go!

Comparing face IP-Adapters for SDXL

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As a follow up to my last post regarding Consistent portraits using IP-Adapters for SDXL, this is a short comparison of the two face IP-Adapters for SDXL by h94 / xiaohu: namely, ip-adapter-plus-face_sdxl_vit-h.bin and ip-adapter-faceid_sdxl.bin.

Consistent portraits using IP-Adapters for SDXL

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Getting consistent character portraits generated by SDXL has been a challenge… until now! ComfyUI IPAdapter Plus (dated 30 Dec 2023) now supports both IP-Adapter and IP-Adapter-FaceID (released 4 Jan 2024)!

Go even faster with SDXL-Turbo!

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the span of a couple of weeks, we got Crazy fast image generation with LCM LoRA for SDXL, which led me to ask if I could get Faster Stable Diffusion on M-series macs?. A few hours ago, Stability.ai gave us their response in the form of SDXL-Turbo… and now we go even faster!

Faster Stable Diffusion on M-series macs?

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

All my recent Stable Diffusion XL experiments have been on my Windows PC instead of my M2 mac, because it has a faster Nvidia 2060 GPU with more memory. But today, I’m curious to see how much faster diffusion has gotten on a M-series mac (M2 specifically).

QR Code Monster for SDXL

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Time to try another ControlNet for Stable Diffusion XL - QR Code Monster v1 in ComfyUI. This ControlNet can influence SDXL such that the generated image “hides” a scan-able QR code, which at first glance, looks like a photo!

Generating animations / videos with SDXL LCM

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I never tried generating video clips or animations with SDXL before, simply because my GPU is not powerful enough. But after testing out the LCM LoRA for SDXL yesterday, I thought I’d try the SDXL LCM LoRA with Hotshot-XL, which is something akin to AnimateDiff.

Crazy fast image generation with LCM LoRA for SDXL

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Stable Diffusion keeps improving at an astounding pace! This time, it’s the idea of distilling a model into a Latent Consistency Model (LCM) for very, very fast image generation with a quality trade-off. On 24 Oct 2023, the distilled Segmind Stable Diffusion 1B (SSD-1B) model was released, followed by a better implementation in the form of Latent Consistency LoRAs for SDXL and SDD-1B released on 9 Nov 2023.

Using the SDXL-Inpainting 0.1 Model

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Stability AI just released an new SD-XL Inpainting 0.1 model. Here is how to use it with ComfyUI.

Improving faces with Impact-Pack Detailers

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Stable Diffusion XL has trouble producing accurately proportioned faces when they are too small. Today, I learn to use the FaceDetailer and Detailer (SEGS) nodes in the ComfyUI-Impact-Pack to fix small, ugly faces.

Improving poses with SDXL ControlNets

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I previously tried Thibauld’s SDXL-controlnet: OpenPose (v2) ControlNet in ComfyUI with poses either downloaded from OpenPoses.com or created with OpenPose Editor. Here are a few more options for anyone looking to create custom poses.

SDXL Revision workflow in ComfyUI

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I tried out Stability AI’s four Control-LoRAs but mentioned that I did not understand the output of the Revision “image-mixing” workflow. I’ve since done a bit more experimentation…

Stability AI Control LoRAs

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Less than a week after my post testing diffusers/controlnet-canny-sdxl-1.0, along comes Stability AI’s own ControlNets, which they call Control-LoRAs! Not one but 4 of them - Canny, Depth, Recolor and Sketch models!

SDXL 1.0 with SDXL-ControlNet: OpenPose (v2)

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As promised in my last post, today I am testing out Thibaud Zamora’s SDXL-controlnet: OpenPose (v2) model using ComfyUI. I keep saying I’ll keep my posts short but never do…

Fooocus KSampler Custom Node for ComfyUI SDXL

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I tried Fooocus by Lyumin Zhang (Illyasviel) which fulfills its promise to allow one to “Focus on prompting and generating” - it is certainly easy to use! But shortly after its release, someone has “ported” the code to ComfyUI as a Custom Node! So of course it’s time to test it out…

SDXL 1.0 with SDXL-ControlNet: Canny

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Stability AI documentation now has a pipeline supporting ControlNets with Stable Diffusion XL! Time to try it out with ComfyUI for Windows.

Scale and Composite Latents with SDXL

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, I experiment with latent scaling and latent compositing with SDXL 1.0 using ComfyUI. That is to say, increasing / decreasing the size of the image, and combining multiple images into one à la green screen (chroma key) compositing.

Two Text Prompts (Text Encoders) in SDXL 1.0

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

SDXL 1.0 uses two text prompts used to guide image generation. In my first post, SDXL 1.0 with ComfyUI, I referred to the second text prompt as a “style” but I wonder if I am correct. I have no idea! So let’s test out both prompts…

CLIPSeg with SDXL in ComfyUI

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Onward with SDXL and ComfyUI! Sometimes I want to tweak generated images by replacing selected parts that don’t look good while retaining the rest of the image that does look good. Rather than manually creating a mask, I’d like to leverage CLIPSeg to generate a masks from a text prompt.

SDXL with Offset Example LoRA in ComfyUI for Windows

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I mentioned in passing that my Nvidia RTX 2060 with 12GB could not run both SDXL 1.0 Base and Refiner models in a single ComfyUI workflow. Today, I show you my workaround and also experiment with adding the SDXL 1.0 Official Offset Example LoRA to the workflow.

Stable Diffusion SDXL 1.0 with ComfyUI

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Stability.ai has released Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) 1.0 (26 July 2023)! Time to test it out using a no-code GUI called ComfyUI!

myByways Simple-SD v1.1 Python script using Safetensors

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Epic Diffusion recently came to my attention, a high-quality merge of various models by John Slegers: “Epîc Diffusion is a general purpose model based on Stable Diffusion 1.x intended to replace the official SD releases as your default model. It is focused on providing high quality output in a wide range of different styles…” Figured I’d give it a spin.

Fast Stable Diffusion using Core ML on M1

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently (around 14 December 2022), Apple’s Machine Learning Research team published “Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon” with Python and Swift source code optimized for Apple Silicon (M1/M2) on Github apple/ml-stable-diffusion. Here I’m trying it out on a MacBook (though the code also works on iPhones and iPads)…

myByways Simple-SD v1.0 Python script

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I refactored my previous Stable Diffusion code, to clean up, OO it a little, and add new features like tiling, upscaling, PNG metadata. As I mentioned before, I don’t understand AI/ML… but I do understand programming! So here is my new, more elegant Simple-SD v1.0 Python script.

Adding CLIPSeg automatic masking to Stable Diffusion

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have more ideas for Stable Diffusion. My nights and weekends are consumed! This time: For inpainting, why create a mask image manually, when A.I. can automatically build a mask from a text prompt? Someone much smarter has already published a paper (arXiv:2112.10003 [cs.CV]), with source code, to do just this!

Stable Diffusion script with inpainting mask

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

More Stable Diffusion! This time attempting to add inpainting / masking based on my previous code, to merge both txt2img.py and img2img.py capabilities, disregarding the out-of-box inpainting.py code, which does not have parameters for positive or negative prompts. Keyword being attempting…

My simplified Stable Diffusion Python script

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing around with the Stable Diffusion scripts a little (to be exact, Ben Firshman’s version). To help me understand the script, I decided to re-write it the way I prefer to use it… either breaking or optimizing it in the process :P

Stable Diffusion image-to-image mode

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Following from my previous post, AI-generated images with Stable Diffusion on an M1 mac: This time, using the image-to-image script, which takes an input “seed” image, in addition to the text prompt as inputs. In this case the model will use the shapes and colors in the input image as a base for the output AI-generated image.

AI-generated images with Stable Diffusion on an M1 mac

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There has been a lot of buzz about Stable Diffusion for text-to-image synthesis, which saw its Public Release around 22 Aug 22. You can read more on the Stability.AI blog and try it at Hugging Face. What’s groundbreaking is is that is open source, with a pre-trained downloadable model and modest system requirements, so anyone can try it on their own computer… anyone… like me!

Running GFPGAN Face Restoration in a container

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Almost a year ago, Tencent researchers released their GFPGAN Face Restoration, an AI model which is trained specifically on faces, to better upscale and restore details in low-resolution or damaged portrait photos. I thought I’d give it a whirl.