I’ve posted videos of AI powered NPC’s in games before (Replica Studios). NVIDIA’s Kairos ACE demo at CES 2024 was equally as amazing. It allows you to create NPC’s in game that that have their own backstories, agendas, and can interact to anything that a person throws at it.
Even more amazing, you can just talk to it like a regular person and it generates realtime voice acted responses.
Here’s a good demo of someone performing an extended interaction with the characters
This of course has all kinds of people in the game industry getting scared – especially voice actors.
You can see the whole host of tools provided by nVidia ACE. Besides game characters, there is Tokkio which provides interactive healthcare, retail, and IT customer service characters. Streaming ultra-realistic rendering, animation blending and playback, audio2face for facial animation and lip sync, and many others.
This is truly revolutionary technology that is going to massively change the landscape of countless industries. You can watch it as it’s unfolding.
Getting floppy drives working on legacy platforms is not easy. As mechanical drives and floppy disks age their failure rates go up. Since no new drives are being built (outside of 3.5″ drives), the number of functioning drives and disks keeps going down. This problem is particularly acute on retro systems that only have rare 8″ or custom drives like knitting machines, early word processors, industrial equipment, and musical instruments from the 80’s and 90’s.
Enter Gotek devices. These devices are designed to plug into your legacy hardware and use new solid state memory so your legacy hardware can boot off of disk images. They plug right into a standard floppy drive port and emulate the hardware your system is expecting. Instead of physical magnetic media, it uses image files stored on a modern solid state drive.
Links:
https://www.gotekemulator.com/ – Home of Gotek devices. Gives you all the information you need to pick the right device for your needs.
HxC Floppy Emulator firmware for Gotek – firmware that adds interesting features to your Gotek device such as emulating 5.25″, 3.5″, and 8″ drives, FM / SD, MFM / DD or HD densities, bitrates, rpm support, modified sector and track skewing/interleaving, and many more
Roger Waters was one of the creative geniuses behind Pink Floyd. As time went on, he ended up in a feud with David Gilmour and the band split – but he did do other work on his own.
Before he left Pink Floyd, they produced one more album: The Final Cut which was plagued by internal band conflict and was mostly material not used in The Wall. David Gilmour felt many of the tracks were not worthy of inclusion and is generally considered fairly poor by fans. After that, Waters left Pink Floyd.
Rogers then went on to a solo career. One of his first albums, in which you’ll hear tons of lyrical and thematic echos of The Wall is his album ‘The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking”
2. Who you go with matters more than where you go.
4. There’s not much point in packing light unless everyone is packing light.
3. After seeing each other for a few months, many new couples take a short trip, which often ends in an apocalyptic, relationship-destroying fight. My theory is that’s the trip working as designed—couples do these trips out of an instinctual desire to stress-test their relationships.
These are great. I would also add these (which are the same if you go hiking too!):
You’ll usually only do as many things as the least adventuresome/slowest person in the group
Each day only starts based on who is the last person to get up and their morning routine
Traveling and expecting everyone to do all the same things together is a recipe for frustration and conflict.
I think the number one reason that many new couples/friends end up in a huge fight during/after travel is because of mismatched expectations. A lot can be avoided by having a very honest talk with potential travel partners about expectations before you decide to travel together.
What are your ‘must dos’/’won’t dos’ for this trip? Do you have physical, dietary, or emotional limitations others need to know about or accommodate? What parts of the trip are important to you? What does an average travel day look like for you? How much together/alone time do you want or need? How much can you physically do (walking/hiking/swimming/kayaking/etc) in a day?
Talk about your ideal travel day with the other(s). Share different wish lists of activities or downtime you each would like. Make sure you mesh. As you get older, you learn to ask these questions and gravitate towards travel partners that travel like you do. Mature couples know what things they can do together and which you can send them off to do while you enjoy your activity.
If this sounds like the same kinds of questions you should have before dating/marrying – you’d be right. Life is just a 60 year journey/travel through life together after all.
Anyway, here’s more:
1. Mindset matters more than where you go.
6. Cultures vary in lots of arbitrary ways—how loud to talk, how (or if) to wait in line, how close to stand to other people, how to behave when you walk into a shop, how to smell, when you can blow your nose, etc. It’s good to be aware of these both as a producer of behavior (not offending others) and a consumer of behavior (not being offended when you’re not “supposed” to be).
7. Different places have different “rules” like if you’re supposed to order drinks before or after food, when you can drink which kinds of coffee, or if you’re allowed (or encouraged) to slurp when eating noodles. After seeing all these variations, it’s hard not to see them as silly, but life is short and I suggest you mostly just conform.
22. If you spend a ton of money and stay in very expensive hotels and whatever, you can eliminate almost all of the frustration and uncertainty of travel. But it also feels like you never leave the global monoculture
If the point of travel is to experience something new; then insulating yourself from that newness defeats the purpose. One of travel’s number one lessons is that you learn there are whole countries of people that do things differently and they don’t collapse overnight. Rick Steves reminds people that you don’t have to pack everything – you can buy almost anything you need in other countries. Millions of people survive just fine on what they find in their local stores – so can you if you’re willing to try a new kind of toothpaste or wear local made socks.
This teaches you that not everything has to happen as you want and that flexibility is a muscle you can build. It’s fun watching 20-somethings travel overseas. After those first trips, they come back and LOVE to loudly tell everyone that country X does things so much better. After my years of travel, it’s more the truth that different ways of doing things are not always ‘better’ or ‘worse’, but instead have balanced different different pros and cons. Every way of doing things has pros and cons. The question is, what does that way maximize and what are you sacrificing for that goal?
11. You can wash clothes in the sink. I think basically everyone does this but doesn’t talk about it?
12. Clothes dry much faster with body heat.
I definitely hand wash and stain treat things in my sink when needed; but I have also discovered the joys of getting your clothes locally laundered. Many hotels/hostels have laundromats for some local coins, but you might also ask your hostel/hotel if there is a nearby laundry service. I still remember the little hole in the wall laundry place in Rome with an old lady that did my entire backpack of clothes for 1/3 of what it would have cost in the hostel basement. And they were SO clean and folded in a way I have never seen things folded. There’s nothing like putting on a fresh pair of laundered socks and underwear when traveling.
10. Some places sell “travel” clothes, e.g. “travel” pants made of quick-drying nylon with zippers so the pants can convert to shorts. While I maintain you should fly your flag high, I also really, really, really think you might be more comfortable if you weren’t wearing these.
Nothing screams ‘American tourist’ more than those nylon pants with zipper off legs. Like it or not, you’ll be treated as a tourist. Instead, what I now do is watch some YouTube videos of the places I’m going and bring clothes that would blend in with the local garb. I have succeeded when I travel to another country and a local will start speaking to me in the local language first before realizing I’m a tourist. Or even better, buy some local clothes. There was nothing like getting fitted for some dress shirts in a fancy store in Rome (ps: I’m not cut like a skinny Italian guy anymore :D)
23. Despite being only 0.3% of the world’s population, Australians seem to make up 10% of overseas visitors everywhere on the planet. Do not be disturbed by this well-known optical illusion.
I laughed because this is so true. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere in the world I didn’t run into a traveling Australian. Doubly true if you do any hosteling.
Definitely read the rest, because they’re really good.
I wrote about Disney’s VR floor before, now comes VR shoes from FreeAim. They strap to your feet a little like rollerskates. What’s interesting is that the shoes sense where they are and apply small auto-corrections to bring you back to the center of your play space.
It sure seems a bit more viable than some of the treadmill systems like the Kat Walk in which you’re strapped on top of a slick curved surface.
It’s easy to get duped by home camera systems. Many of them sell you the equipment really cheap only to find out they have a limited trial and then require expensive long-term subscription services to even use the devices or store data.
Even better, it’s not like they are nerfed with expensive pay-to-play higher end features. The cameras are able to do person, vehicle, pet, package detection, capable of sound detection for a baby crying, glass breaking, and dog barking – all without paying a cent more or a subscription. It even has the ability to save to local or your own cloud storage.
It’s nice to see a company still keeping control in the hands of the users/owners.
I love listening to other cultures impressions of what English sounds like. I’ve written about it before. This video from Japan had me rolling. It’s pretty spot on for imitating the younger US tourist crowd that often goes to Japan – which is likely who these Japanese folks run into most of the time.
Things I noticed about their impressions:
Immediately start speaking 50% louder
Heavily annunciate/separate syllables
It’s US English (vs British English)
Throw in a lot of body movement and body language – hip-hop style/Italian style
In other local news, despite one of the most consistently progressive administrations for almost 50 years, and hundreds of millions spent, Oregon has usually rated in the bottom 5 states for mental health. Oregon was dead last in 2023.
Ryan Trahan used VR goggles and a camera attached to a rig looking down on him from the classic 3rd person game camera location. He then tried to survive the next 50 hours doing everyday things.
It appears to have largely gone comically rough for him. Doors, curbs, playing basketball, manipulating anything small (eating food with utensils, picking up coffees, brushing his teeth) were his worst enemies.
However, I think he might be onto something. It makes me wonder if the camera setup was better and could be moved to left/right so he could see his own hands then someone could likely make a living being a ‘living robot’ who livestreams their life.
