Diffusion PDF
A Diffusion Image Model Embedded Entirely in a PDF File
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Hey Hacker News! I'm Alex, I'm 19 and I work at Hack Club!The last two weeks i've been messing around with pdfs. I made slop pdf (https://slop.alexvd.dev -- notice the similar website design), a pdf that generates random ai slop stories when you open it, and I was showing that off to one of my friends who suggested I get the LLM to actually work inside the pdf, without an API call to a relay.I laughed at the idea, but then we did some research together, and we managed to find EvanZhouDev's llm.pdf (https://github.com/EvanZhouDev/llm.pdf). Because it existed, I didn't want to waste my time or my tokens building something like it. So I pivoted, eventually deciding to make a diffusion image model work fully inside a pdf.I forked EvanZhouDev's llm.pdf repo, and eventually managed to get it working (with the help of claude). Here's the finished version.It took a while to train, but was worth it so i can show it to my future classmates (I'm an incoming freshman in college this year).
HN · launched Aug 13, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 87%) · 0 views
Niche: ai image generators · 216 launches, 22 in the last 7 days ▼ -15% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 216 launches in ai image generators →
Could you build this?
No Compiling or implementing an entire diffusion model runtime into an isolated PDF file using embedded PostScript/JavaScript within strict PDF viewer constraints requires esoteric low-level knowledge of PDF specifications and model quantization.
What it would actually take: The architecture involves heavily quantized neural network weights (INT2/INT4 or tiny UNet/diffusion architectures) embedded as PDF stream objects, combined with custom Acrobat JavaScript or PostScript rendering loops that manually compute matrix multiplications without standard WebGL/WASM runtimes. The hard part is overcoming PDF sandboxing, memory ceilings, and the total lack of standard compute acceleration to execute iterative denoising steps inside PDF readers.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 144 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #121 of 145 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 287 days after the earliest competitor.
- The Journal of AI Slop · hn · 2025-12-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- A decent text-to-image model trained for ~$20K (Apache 2.0 Weights) · hn · 2026-11-04 · 284 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- I left Figma to build a diffusion-based UI design tool · hn · 2026-07-21 · 80 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Slop or not · hn · 2026-03-12 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- REPI · github · 2026-09-28 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Manual Diffusion · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- gimp-openfill · github · 2026-10-14 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- sloptrim-zh · github · 2026-10-11 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.41
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