Alright, so check it, today I’m spillin’ the beans on my little “porn plopping” adventure. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not as wild as it sounds.
It all started when I was messin’ around with some image recognition stuff. I had this idea – what if I could train a model to, like, identify scenes in… well, you know… adult films? Purely for science, of course.
First things first, I needed data. A LOT of data. I spent a solid week writing a script to crawl a bunch of sites and download snippets. Trust me, that part wasn’t fun at all, just tedious. I made sure to only grab small, like, 5-second clips, so I wasn’t hogging bandwidth or anything. Then came the really boring part – manually labeling each clip. Categorizing them based on the “action” (or lack thereof) going on. Let me tell you, hours doing that makes you question your life choices.
Then, I tried to throw it all in a basic convolutional neural network (CNN), I’d built with TensorFlow. To be honest, the first model was crap. It kept confusing, like, a bedroom scene with a kitchen scene. I’m no expert, but I figured more data and a deeper network would help.
So, back to square one. I crawled for another week. This time I was smarter; I set up multiple virtual machines to grab the clips in parallel. The labeling was still a pain, but I had some buddies help me out (with the promise of pizza and beer, of course). We split the work and got it done way faster.
I messed around with the model architecture, added more layers, tweaked the learning rate, the usual. This time, it was better. Way better. The accuracy jumped from like 60% to almost 85%. Still not perfect, but good enough for a proof of concept.
- Crawled a bunch of sites for video clips
- Manually labeled those clips (ugh)
- Trained a CNN model
- Improved model with more data and architecture tweaks
I even built a little web app where you could upload a video and it would spit out predictions in real-time. It was kinda janky, but it worked. I showed it to a few friends, and they were… impressed, to say the least. One even suggested using it to automatically skip the boring parts of a video. I was like, “Woah there, partner!”
Lessons Learned
Look, this was just a fun side project. I learned a ton about image recognition and TensorFlow. I even got to brush up on my Python scripting skills. But the main takeaway? Labeling data is a total grind. Seriously, if you’re thinking about getting into machine learning, be prepared to spend a LOT of time labeling stuff. That being said, seeing it actually work was pretty damn cool.
So, yeah, that’s my “porn plopping” story. I’m not planning on turning it into a real product or anything. But it was a fun and educational experience. Who knows, maybe I’ll use what I learned to build something actually useful someday. Stay tuned!
