A member of the LinusTechTips community over at Reddit managed to obtain a working Larrabee sample from ‘a friend who got it from their work.’ There were obviously no Windows 10 drivers, but it could still work as a basic graphics adapter. GPU-Z recognized the graphics adapter as an Intel GPU and read its device ID (8086 2240 – 8086 2240)
The 15-second audio clip sounds like a muffled version of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall played underwater. Except Pink Floyd didn’t perform any of the music in the clip. Instead, the track was captured by a team of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, who looked at the brain activity of more than two dozen people who listened to the song.
That data was then decoded by a machine learning model and reconstructed into audio — marking the first time researchers have been able to re-create a song from neural signals.
Creating 3D meshes from a variety of images or point clouds is not new technology. Doing it well, however, is difficult.
nVidia did an amazing job AI generating 3D meshes from text prompts using GET3D (also here). While it looks a little better and more advanced than the Stable DreamFusion code I played with earlier, it still suffers with some of the similar problems. The meshes they generate can be pretty rough, bumpy, missing features, poor textures, and other issues generating 3D geometry from AI generated data.
Marching cubes and DMTet have existed for some time – but nVidia has introduced an even more interest technique called FlexiCubes. The algorithm is designed to be a drop-in replacement for marching cubes and not only generates better quality meshes from point or course voxel data; but meshes that can easily be dropped into physics simulations.
Plugging in old ISA cards is something that hasn’t really been possible since 80486 days. This makes plugging in cool things like Sound Blaster, Adlib, Monster3D and other ISA cards pretty much impossible for modern computers. It also means things like attaching 5.25″ floppy drives and old MFM/RLL drives are also off the table. Well, maybe. 🙂
There have been a few efforts to enabling plugging in ISA boards to modern pc.
dISAppointment that I wrote about before is a USB plugin that exposes an ISA interface.
Uses the LPC (low pin count) interface that still has actual legacy ISA hardware support in any PC with a TPM port on the motherboard.
ISASTM card is a little more involved setup but is able to be slotted into a ISA backplane and address multiple cards with one adapter. It seems to work with soundcards and video cards – though the USB 1.0 interface isn’t quite fast enough. A switch to USB 2 might yield enough bandwidth if Manawyrm has the time.
Viewfinder is a new 3D puzzle game on PC and game consoles. It involves taking a picture with a film camera, then using the 2D picture to overlay the 3D world. The 2D picture then replaces/augments the 3D world with the 3D that was in the picture. It’s hard to describe, but very interested technique.
There’s also folks like Willlogs who are making their own versions in Unreal and describing how they think the mechanics work.
My grandfather used to say that when he wanted us to pass him the remote. I never understood why he called it a ‘clicker’. They didn’t click.
But I later found out that they used too.
Here’s a great article on the Zenith Space Command – a remote that didn’t need batteries, infrared, nor even line of sight to the TV. Instead, it worked on sound.
The optimal way of positioning 3D objects of varied sizes and shapes in a container is still considered an unsolved problem. In fact, it is classified as NP-hard, which means it cannot be solved exactly — or even approximately, to a high degree of precision — without gargantuan computational times that could take years or decades depending on the number of pieces that need to be fit into a confined space.
Researchers from MIT and Inkbit (an MIT spinout company in Medford, Massachusetts), headed by Wojciech Matusik, an MIT professor and Inkbit co-founder, is presenting this technique, which they call “Dense, interlocking-free and Scalable Spectral Packing,” or SSP, this August at SIGGRAPH 2023
The method leverages a discrete voxel representation and formulates collisions between objects as correlations of functions computed efficiently using a novel cost function that can be efficiently solved with a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).
FoxMaster uses a wide variety of AI tools: vision, object recognition, chatgpt, and others to give Laura Croft the AI treatment. She not only can traverse the game, but also has personality and narrates what is going on.
Foxmaster admits some of this is not complete and may be stretched a bit – but his analysis and breakdown of the problems of navigation, identification, and character personality into discrete problems is very interesting.
Beginning early July, mirrored spheres began popping up in cities across the world. It is not public art but a 6.2 pound biometric imaging device designed to scan your eyeballs and capture your irises.
No, it’s not a joke. The company doing this is Worldcoin. Worldcoin was founded three years ago by Alex Blania and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Their intent is to create “a new identity and financial network connecting billions of people in the age of A.I.” via a privacy-ensuring digital identity it calls World ID and a digital currency, WLD. World ID is supposed to be a ‘perfectly safe’ global identity protocol to enable individuals to prove their personhood online in an era of rampant A.I. deepfakes. WLD is a tool to build an “A.I.-funded UBI [universal basic income]”
This should all sound familiar because they’re the same arguments being made for digital currencies like Bitcoin. The company stresses they have security all along the trust chain, but it reads more like a dystopian nightmare in which everyone has been cataloged and identified by an unknown party with unknown motives. This is a company that could be working for anyone. A 3rd party agent that has unknown motives, unknown technical expertise, and unknown longevity to keep your biometric data safe. You do not really know which government, people, nor company is really behind it all nor what their values nor legal protections you would have. It’s a terrify black box of giving up your biometric data to an almost completely unknown entity. I vote a hard no.
In my opinion, this is a violation of privacy and an extremely bad idea. Even if they are secure today – are they really ready to protect your biometric data, collected surreptitiously, without consent, for all time, and never to sell it? It seems pretty unlikely as every country and every company who has promised this before hasn’t lasted 10 years before being hacked, leaking, being forced to turn over that data, or just flat selling you and your data to the highest bidder when they’re bought out or go bankrupt. Ready for North Korea, China, or Putin to have access to your World ID and any money you put in WLD?
So, maybe be sure to wear some good sunglasses when you find a shiny orb laying on the street.
At least some folks are starting to do an investigation – one I suspect will end badly for Worldcoin considering the EU’s less than open stance on collection/storage of biometric data collection and privacy.
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