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Category: Technical

Google AI Chip Design leads to a drama fueled trainwreck

Google AI Chip Design leads to a drama fueled trainwreck

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Who would think something like improving a chip design tool would cause the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) to get so out of hand it was called a “trainwreck” and an “ambush” of the presenters.

The crux of the clash was whether Google’s AI chip design layout solver was really better than those of humans or state-of-the-art algorithms. In the end, there was a firing and a wrongful termination lawsuit with Google, a team re-doing a years worth of work, ugly accusations and drama, and 2 AI researchers leaving a promising field of AI improved chip design due to the conflict.

The argument involved a lot of factors like comparing different chip placement algorithms, results of reinforced learning, initial placement bias, metrics of success such as wire length, annealing, and general benchmarks – but in the end resulted in a circus of accusations, lawsuits, and drama.

Read more about it here on the IEEE article

The technological development of – Pencil Sharpeners

The technological development of – Pencil Sharpeners

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Who knew something as simple as pencil sharpeners had such a long history. The Awesomer put together this little collection of old-school pencil sharpeners from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s.

Or if you want, go for one of these over-engineered modern ones:

I can assure you that the Palomino Kum Point Pencil Sharpener is pretty awesome (newer model here, and the one with the tip sharpener here). I use it all the time.

You can also check out this video by the ridiculously good Stuff Made Here in which he creates some of the most ridiculous pencil sharpeners he can.

Larrabee GPU booting Windows

Larrabee GPU booting Windows

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Apparently someone found a working Larrabee card that was ‘pulled from an image processing machine connected to a CAT scan machine’.

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)

Interesting to see one of them still up and around. The last working one sold for about $5,000 on eBay.

Other links:

AI reconstructing songs from brain scans

AI reconstructing songs from brain scans

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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.

Articles:

Flexicubes

Flexicubes

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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.

Check out the paper here.

ISA over USB

ISA over USB

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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.
Viewfinder puzzle game

Viewfinder puzzle game

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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.

Why Remotes were called clickers

Why Remotes were called clickers

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“Pass me the clicker”

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.

Packing just got faster and easier

Packing just got faster and easier

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MIT has just developed a new computational method that can figure out how to arrange a dense placement of objects inside a rigid container – while also guaranteeing that the objects are separable/interlock free (can be taken out again without getting stuck on each other).

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).

Definitely worth checking out.