How a cat debugged Stable Diffusion (2023) (opens in new tab)

> Maybe the motherboard? Could that have a speaker built into it? That must be terrible for acoustics, but maybe useful for a little beep when something is wrong?

Yes, it was called the PC Speaker, and that's pretty much exactly what it was used for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker

It was standard equipment through the (mid?) 90s, and completely independent of the (optional) PCM sound card.

Now PCM sound is built in to motherboards and the PC Speaker long ago faded into irrelevance. Modern motherboards don't even have headers to connect a PC Speaker. Some motherboards will emulate the PC Speaker over the built in sound output, but of course you need speakers plugged in and on to hear those beeps.

> I have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). It is basically a surge protector with a big battery in it. So if the power goes out, it automatically falls back to the battery and you can still squeeze another X hours of juice out of it until the main power comes back on.

Often just minutes if you're running them near their rated power. Conventional UPSs are generally designed to power your devices just long enough to shut down your computer "safely" [1] or to start a generator. They advertise power ratings but typically not battery capacity at all, and that's because it sucks.

2026 update: don't buy a (conventional, lead-acid battery) UPS. Buy a LifePo4 power station instead. They're actually designed to keep your devices running for hours without main power. They used to not fail over quickly enough to avoid a typical machine going down (briefly), but now they commonly advertise 10ms to 20ms switchover. Also, you don't need to replace the batteries nearly as often. Like, once every 10 years instead of once every 3 years. And the price has really fallen recently. LifePo4 is (unlike some other lithium ions) known as a particularly safe chemistry, so you don't have to worry about fire risk.

[1] This matters if you have crappy software and/or hardware that loses data if shut down uncleanly. If you use modern SSD/HDDs that flush their write caches when asked to, modern journaled filesystems at their default settings, and modern databases like SQLite or PostgreSQL at their default settings, you should be fine just pulling the power plug any time you feel like it.

The title is so forced and click-baity that I got secondhand embarrassment. The article has barely anything to do with Stable Diffusion except that it consumes more power than typical apps (ofc it does). No one 'debugged Stable Diffusion' in this story.

But glad to see 'slapping AI buzzwords on top of your article to get more views' has been a thing since 2023.

That was tedious to read. No stable diffusion bugs were ever found. Title is simply wrong. Mod down to spare others.

How my cat helped me troubleshoot an issue when I'd use stable diffusion.

Also cheers for the PSA, I don't think the draw is something I'd considered when using my ups.

Now imagine all the power that "AI" datacenters use, and for what purpose? Generating code you could have written yourself? Generating pornographic images of people without their consent?

Cute story. But slightly misleading headline: it led me to expect that the guy did some rubber-duck debugging talking to his cat. Turned out it was "I can't figure out where the beeping is coming from, but my cat, who is smaller than me and can fit into tighter spaces, found it for me".