There’s no rules against household pets speed-running games – so JSR trained his shiba inu Peanut Butter to speed run the 90’s era Nintendo game Gyromite. He didn’t set any world records, outside of being maybe the first dog to complete the game; but dang – what a good boy.
Backup Ukraine, a collaborative project between UNESCO National Commission and Polycam (a 3D creation tool) which enables anyone equipped with a cell phone to scan and capture photorealistic 3D models of heritage sites in order to preserve them in case they are bombed.
Armed with the Polycam software (offered for free for the project) and an iPhone, the technology allows citizen archivists off the frontlines to preserve Ukrainian heritage sites.
Singularity Hub has an excellent article that describes the history of 3D capture as well as this effort at using it for cultural preservation. The article does a good job of covering previous solutions like Cyark, Google Map’s new Immersive view, AI tools like Luma, Scenario 3D, as well as upcoming technologies like Gaussian Splatting and NeRFs.
This kind of cultural and artistic preservation is unfortunately something the West and even my home town of Portland likely needs. In 2020, Portland Oregon saw over 100 nights of rioting and targeted, wide-spread artistic and cultural destruction by increasingly armed left wing protesters.
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If you watch the BBC, you’ll recognize that a shocking number of their shows start like this…
Back in 2019, I wrote about Sasha from Pyramiden. At that time, Pyramiden, located in Svalbard, was essentially abandoned except for a few caretakers like Sasha.
Fast forward and Pyramiden has seen a little rebirth. The hotel has been renovated and reopened with a restaurant, bar, and post office.
The movie theater was also restored and even hosts an annual Pyramiden Cinema Festival in September (facebook page). Even more amazing is that the movie theater housed an archive of over 1000 Soviet era films that sat quietly on the racks when they were abandoned.
Want to take a trip there? It’s possible! Grumant Artic Travel offers 4 day/3 night trips to Pyramiden where you’ll stay at the hotel and enjoy the sights. Or, if you are even more adventuresome, you can sail the entire Northwest Passage.
Cecilia Blomdahl takes us on a trip there and gives us a little tour.
Developer Charlie Holtz combined GPT-4 Vision (commonly called GPT-4V) and ElevenLabs voice cloning technology to create an unauthorized AI version of the famous naturalist David Attenborough narrating his every move on camera.
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William Shatner played some big roles. Everyone knows him as Captain Kirk in Star Trek, or the panicky passenger in the Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20000 Feet, or his bizarre foray into cover songs. He also had some offbeat roles like Incubus – filmed entirely in the dead-on-arrival created language of Esperanto.
I recently watch The Outer Limits season 2 episode 2 titled “Cold Hands, Warm Heart”. He plays an astronaut – which is some real-life foreshadowing of his later roles. It’s also got some really good Shatner over-acting in it and definitely worth a watch for people wanting to see some of his early ultra-cheese.
At CES 2024, Samsung is demonstrating a pretty compelling glasses free 3D gaming monitor. It’s just a tech demo and you can never capture the actual effect of these methods on 2D videos, but it sounds compelling. Maybe as compelling as the Nintendo 3DS? 🙂
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It’s no secret that Star Citizen is a cash cow who’s development and loyal following has been nothing short of astounding. Driven by fans and that success, they’re now introduced an in-game content pack that’s even more mind boggling.
The Legatus Pack is the Cadillac of all Star Citizen ship packages; it includes every single ship in the game as well as all of their associated paint schemes. It also includes all of Star Citizen’s limited edition/special edition ships that are virtually impossible to buy otherwise. And it costs a whopping $48,000.
This seems like a brazen cash grab by the developers – but ironically the Legatus pack was inspired by the Star Citizen community itself. There was high demand for a package like this from several Star Citizen backers, many of whom utilize their ships across corporations (a guild) which include hundreds, if not thousands, of players. And these players spend money. LOTS of money.
The studio is a cash cow. It brought in $113 million in 2022 and $104 million in 2023. Most of this revenue comes from ship sales and from their ‘Intergalactic Aerospace’ event put on each year. The virtual convention held in game allows everyone to play the game for free and to fly most of the ships in the game for no additional cost. Star Citizen also features ship sales during the event, further incentivizing gamers to buy ships.
This brings up an amazing set of ideas. You now have conventions selling ships. In-game whales that have corporations/clans that might all pitch together to buy packages like this. It reminds me of the same real-world economics of vehicle fleets from rental cars to delivery services use. Could a person create a monthly subscription and ‘rent’ these ships out to their – or even other – guilds/guild members? It could be a fascinating way to make some side money running your own version of Hertz Rent-A-Ship for those that need some extra horsepower for particularly big cargo deal or big battle. Just don’t forget to buy the insurance – space ship windshields are expensive. 😀
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Charlie Munger was vice chairman of Berkshire-Hathaway and worked for almost 45 years with Warren Buffett. Munger died at 99 in December. I found his advice good for investing and life in general.
When asked if there was a secret to investing, he said, “I don’t know the secret.” Munger then added that he’d avoided major catastrophes in his life because he was “so cautious,” always avoiding obvious risks in his personal life and career.
“Crazy is way more common than you think,” said Munger. “It’s easy to slip into crazy. Just avoid it, avoid it, avoid it.”
What does Munger think is crazy? In 2018, Warren Buffett said, “My partner Charlie says there is only three ways a smart person can go broke: liquor, ladies and leverage.”
Munger clarified his general stance on personal vices: If it can “take that many fine people into deep trouble,” stay away from it. That included smoking and drinking to the point of alcoholism, he said — noting a prevalence of alcoholics and “near alcoholics” in his own family.
By leverage, he referred to the strategy of borrowing money to invest in stocks or buy another business. Munger said Berkshire Hathaway could “easily be worth twice what it is now” if the pair had used more leverage and risky strategies rather than simply reinvesting its past earnings.
Buffet said they (Buffet/Munger) could absorb significant losses, but Berkshire’s smaller shareholders could not. They intentionally decided to protect their cohorts by running Berkshire in a “very cautious” fashion, favoring long-term investments over short-term gambles.
Besides ‘avoiding crazy’, Munger often preached the merits of living modestly, he gave advice like “don’t have a lot of envy” and “don’t overspend your income.” He credited his success and longevity to a long-held sense of caution and an ability “to avoid all standard ways of failing.”
Another area was the fact both he and Warren Buffet lived in the same house for almost 70 years.
[Buffett and I] are both smart enough to have watched our friends who got rich build these really fancy houses, and I would say in practically every case, they make the person less happy, not happier.
A “basic house” has utility, said Munger, noting that a larger home could help you entertain more people — but that’s about it. “It’s a very expensive thing to do, and it doesn’t do you that much good.” He also purposefully avoided a gaudy lifestyle that might create spoiled children.
They also weren’t fans of multiple homes. At the 2014 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, Buffett reportedly said his quality of life would “be worse if [he] had six or eight houses”.
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