Faces

Turning a face into a chibi: a tour of LAM, Gaussian Splatting, and what happens when you push on the mesh underneath

A few weeks ago the only thing we wanted from a "talking-head avatar" was for it to look like the person in the input photo and to blink at roughly the right moments. By this week we wanted to grab th

Why the squint slider needed an ArcFace anchor — the v1c → v1k failure ladder

From FluxSpace edits to a working glasses slider — what five days taught us

Composing a smile without losing the face it belongs to

Demographic-PC Extraction, End to End: Ridge vs Prompt-Pair, Two Kinds of Cliff

Date: 2026-04-20 Series: Follows Perception Before Training. That post framed a six-level perception curriculum gated on a Level-0 engineering task: build a demographic subspace in Flux conditioning s

Perception Before Training — A Curriculum Interlude Between Parts 2 and 3

Date: 2026-04-20 Series: Sits between Part 2: The Math of Pattern Preservation and whatever Part 3 turns out to be. Part 2 argued for a training pipeline that preserves patterns from text through face

Faces as a Data-Mining Puzzle — Part 2: The Math of Pattern Preservation

Date: 2026-04-16 Series: Part 2 of 2. Part 1 here covered positioning — why faces, why a game, why co-discovery. This post covers the math: how we know when a built pipeline actually preserves the pat

Faces as a Data-Mining Puzzle — Part 1: The Case for an Unlikely Interface

Date: 2026-04-16 Series: Part 1 of 2 — positioning. Part 2 covers the math of pattern preservation. Audience: technical readers who know embeddings, neural networks as black boxes, and basic ML, but n