While world class buildings aren’t being built in the US at the rate they used to be, they are still being built in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and China. Buildings such as Atlantis the Royal.
How are they opening these creations? How about paying for high class stars like Beyoncé and Swedish House Mafia to perform in customized shows. They also invite various movie, music, and other stars to be seen there in red carpet like events. They also bring in high-class influencers as well as having outrageous fireworks displays. In short, they create world class see-and-be-seen events like used to happen in New York and other cities.
The 90’s Demoscene subculture was famous for building incredible visual demos in astoundingly small executables sizes. Many demo scene gatherings had maximum size requirements – often in just a few hundred, or even a few DOZEN, kilobytes. Figuring out how to get the most amazing tech in the smallest size was one of the great innovation points for these contests.
Once developers had exhausted their technical chops on generating amazing art with miniscule code (using all the tricks in the book they could think of), they quickly found that hand-tuned compression became far too tedious and brittle. So, they started building tools to do this compression for them.
Apparently it used a form of code coverage as part of the analysis which ran while you ran the application. This had the dubious effect of allowing people to use the down arrow down on menus but not the up arrow – because nobody ever pressed the up arrow when training the compressor.
It covers all the big features like outpainting, inpainting, prompt matrix, AI upscaling, attention, loopback, X/Y plot, textual inversion, resizing, sampling method selection, seed resize, variations, and a whole host of all the other options along with before/after pictures to help you understand the features better.
While I would never trust a refurbished single drive with my critical data, I run a RAID 5 system with redundancy and find these drives to have been very good in such a setup. If one dies, I can hot swap a spare in and keep going.
Koe Recast comes from developer Asara Near in Texas and it allows you to dramatically change your voice into a wide variety of styles – even opposite genders. They have a website demo that allows you to convert a 20 second clip. It’s a preview of their commercial product currently undergoing private alpha testing.
I guess the old TV trope of concealing your voice with a handkerchief over the telephone are long gone.
“Rest and Vest” is a term that describes some senior engineers at big tech companies. The joke even showed up in HBO’s series Silicon Valley. But with the recent decimation of stock prices, rising competition and rapidly shrinking revenues, those days may be over.
But how does one tackle the issue without alienating the workforce and driving good talent to competitors? Carefully, it turns out – because the best way involves a cultural shift of the company. Implementing draconian and invasive tracking on knowledge workers is not helpful. It alienates workers as well can actually stifle creativity.
Instead, managers can use 2 different social pressures for those in a ‘rest and vest’ mode:
Reminding a person that their subpar contribution is inequitable may motivate them to pull their weight. We have a deep-wired aversion to being perceived by others as a cheat or defector.
Second, it’s about belonging. We’re humans at the end of the day. No person wants to be a social pariah, even one who’s talented. Contributing, belonging, building alongside your fellow creators — this can be a strong motivator to get people involved more evenly.
MSI Afterburner is probably the best known graphics card overclocking software. Unfortunately, it may be dead due to the war in the Ukraine.
The original developer of graphics card overclocking utility MSI Afterburner has warned that the software is “semi abandoned” and “probably dead”. The dev, Russian national Alexey ‘Unwinder’ Nicolaychuk, posted on the Guru3D forums (good spot by TechPowerUp) that due to economic sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, MSI haven’t paid him for his work on Afterburner in nearly a year.
John Carmack has quit Meta and their Meta VR efforts. I think that this is a perfect example of how visionary people get sucked in and are often ill equipped to the workings of large corporate machinations. The very things that make big corporations hugely successful (ability to work at scale, massive market share, highly disciplined and tracked execution) can ultimately be the reason they struggle with prototype development, innovation, or innovative people.
Some clues are in some of the interesting things Carmack says,
Carmack complained that it has been a “struggle” for him to influence Meta’s overall direction and that he’s “wearied of the fight.” Despite his high-ranking “consulting CTO / executive advisor” title, Carmack complained that he is “evidently not persuasive enough” to change Meta’s VR efforts for the better.
“We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this,” he wrote. “I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”
There he talked about his internal efforts to push for the development of a “super cheap, super lightweight” Meta VR headset that could come in at “$250 and 250 grams.” Instead, Meta has put its recent VR hardware efforts behind the heavily overdesigned and $1,500 Quest Pro. In his October keynote Carmack told Meta that “the basic usability of Quest really does need to get better” and that “our app startup times are slow, our transitions are glitchy… We need to make it a whole lot better… much, much faster to get into.”
I think Carmack is a skunkworks technical leader. He’s used to working with a small team of extremely talented engineers on rapid development of extraordinary projects. Skunkworks and vision projects like this get crushed when you try to scale too quickly to dozens of interconnected teams. Instead, one must develop the solid core of the idea and prove it 100% – then scale to production. If you try to scale without 100% coherent vision and the issues sorted out, you’ll end up bleeding money, vision, and worst of all: time and energy switching direction. I think that’s why he feels exhausted and only sees people being 50% effective.
It’s the common case of agility vs scale. Big organizations with skilled but compartmentalized development teams often fail slowly after wasting tons of people’s time. Not because they are bad teams, but because they are often given delivery goals and usually do not have the power to switch direction on their own or often see the bigger picture to ensure the solution works properly across groups. This costs a lot in money, management time, and possibly reworks. Instead of one person failing, approaching the lead with alternatives and then re-thinking the approach at a higher level, the team continues to try to meet the goal without the ability to see the bigger picture or make better wholistic changes.
Reset your graphics driver – Win + CTRL + SHIFT + B
Remembering a wifi password you entered forever ago: c:\> netsh wlan show profile < shows a list of wifi profiles you have connected to > c:\> netsh wlan show profile <wifiProfileName> key=clear < shows the wifi password you last entered >
Message every single windows system on the network c:\> msg * <message>
Hackertyper – Hit F11 to fullscreen your browser and then look like a hacker. https://hackertyper.net/
FakeUpdate – go to the website, get on your friend’s computer, load the update screen for that OS, hit F11 to go fullscreen, and then see how long they’ll sit there before resetting. https://fakeupdate.net/
“You’re always afraid to take that first step, because all you see is every negative thing ten miles down the road.”
Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting
If I could sum up the fear, anxiety, and even the core of the negativity that is so pervasive in our culture today – it would be this line. But it is more than this. It seems that public opinion and policy is now driven more by fear than by truth or true courage. How?
It is fear that prevents an entire generation from committing to marriage because they fear commitment, divorce, or hurt — yet the world applauds continual transient relationships. It is often fear that prevents people from having children or being open to children because they fear economic conditions, unrest, political and social uncertainty, career impacts, personal struggles — yet the world lauds keeping the birth rate shrinking and putting careers first. It is fear of engaging in the world and dealing with actual messiness of human lives that keeps perfectly healthy individuals on forums and social media instead of actually engaging in real world work of change — while social media posts are rebranded as heroic action. It is fear that tells a woman she must be able to kill her own child, and that she cannot succeed without that right – while the world says it is empowerment. All of these things bring immediate gratification/simplicity – but rob of us of the deep growth that gives real meaning to our lives.
So what would true courage look like? It is easier to just go from relationship to relationship uncommitted, but robs us of the freedom a committed relationship gives us to express ourselves with another person. Or as Jessie Jackson said decades ago, it is simply easier and cheaper to promote abortion among the poor and minorities than actually build support and education systems for people to actually have the choice to keep their children. It’s far easier to push for shrinking population growth instead of changing our behaviors to be more sustainable. It’s easier to spend all our money on ourselves instead of helping others. It’s easier to simply legalize homelessness than actually spending the money and effort to address the substance abuse, mental health, education, and skill training issues that caused the homelessness. It’s easier to repost divisive social media rants than go out and actually dedicate our lives to helping others in the actual messiness of life or find common ground to unite people and build constructive relationships.
Contrast that with the hope in the words of John Paul II, a man that faced down all the power of the Soviet Union and was critical in the fall of the Iron Curtain. Here’s a man that knows that the impossible becomes possible with faith:
Do not be afraid! Open, I say open wide the doors for Christ. To His saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization, and development. Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch…. I plead with you–never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid!
Why should we have no fear? Because man has been redeemed by God. When pronouncing these words in St. Peter’s Square, I already knew that my first encyclical and my entire papacy would be tied to the truth of the Redemption. In the Redemption we find the most profound basis for the words “Be not afraid!”: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (cf. Jn 3:16).
Peoples and nations of the entire world need to hear these words. Their conscience needs to grow in the certainty that Someone exists who holds in His hands the destiny of this passing world … And this Someone is Love.
