Show HN: Sampler Step Explorer – for understanding diffusion sampler updates

[bthornbury]

I built a small standalone interactive to help make diffusion sampler steps more intuitive. It’s focused on the inference-time update: how the sampler moves from the current noised state toward a less-noisy state, one step at a time.

This grew out of a larger post where I try to explain diffusion models in less-dense terms, especially the parts that felt non-intuitive to me when first reading the papers. That post emphasizes that diffusion models incrementally “step” toward a solution rather than generating it all at once, and this interactive zooms in on that sampler-step idea specifically.

Would love feedback on:

- whether the interaction makes the sampler update easier to reason about

- what other diffusion concepts would be useful to turn into small interactives

Link: https://www.bryanthornbury.com/interactives/sampler-step-exp...