Combining ChatGPT with Boston Dynamics Robots
How could this go wrong? Smart as ChatGPT and fully autonomous.
Robotics and AI enthusiasts at the YouTube channel Underfitted recently upgraded their Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robots with ChatGPT.
Pumping your own gas in Oregon
After a 72 year ban on self-serve gas, despite it passing unilaterally through the Oregon house and senate, and despite the governor waffling and ‘wanting further input from citizens’ before signing – as of today you can now pump your own gas in Oregon.
Don’t worry – local news is alway helping with instructions for scared residents that are sure this is what’s about to happen all over the state:
Hacking the original XBox and Tesla
This is a great video on the various issues that led to the hacking of the original XBox.
It turns out, a similar method by causing a processor fault has recently been used to hack Tesla cars recently.
Google Tensor Processing Units – version 4
I’ve written about Google’s custom silicon TPUs before (Google’s Tensor Processing Units – v1).
One of the big reasons for Google and others web services to develop their own custom chips is that general purpose CPUs are flexible but typically need a lot of power. That power costs a lot of money in electricity bills and cooling costs in huge data centers. So, why buy chips with lots of stuff you don’t need when you can build your own – and save millions of dollars a year in a data center with lower cooling and power costs?
In just a 6 years, Google has managed to design and build 4 ever increasingly capable AI data center chips. They had somewhat humble beginnings – but they are becoming increasingly powerful. Now they have just published information about TPU version 4.
What is this new chip capable of?
- a nearly 10x leap forward in scaling ML system performance over TPU v3
- boosting energy efficiency ~2-3x compared to contemporary ML DSAs, and
- reducing CO2e as much as ~20x over these DSAs in typical on-premise data centers
Even crazier, it’s the first system to use purely optical switching.
TPU v4 is the first supercomputer to deploy a reconfigurable OCS (optical circuit switching). OCSes dynamically reconfigure their interconnect topology and are much cheaper, lower power, and faster than Infiniband. The figure below shows how an OCS works, using two MEMs arrays. No optical to electrical to optical conversion or power-hungry network packet switches are required, saving power.
Add to this, the newest version claims to be 1.2-1.7x faster and 1.9x more efficient than nVidia A100 chips.
Worth a read.
Links:
- TPU v4: An Optically Reconfigurable Supercomputer for Machine Learning with Hardware Support for Embeddings: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2304/2304.01433.pdf
- https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/tpu-v4-enables-performance-energy-and-co2e-efficiency-gains
Import any location in the world into Unreal Engine
Bring anyplace in the world into your game in about 5 minutes – including the 3D buildings. Using the Cesium plugin, you can bring Google Maps data into Unreal Engine in just a few minutes.
This guy is a little over-energetic, but it’s pretty clear instructions on how to do it as well as improve the look and feel of the import.
Police chases in Brazil
This crazy motorcycle chase from São Paulo, Brazil looks like something out of a recent James Bond movie.
My favorite part is when the cop catches up to them and just laughs. Darn kids!
Waking up to Pure Imagination
This is probably the best arrangement of the song “Pure Imagination” sung by Gene Wilder in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Here it is performed in 2017 as the morning wake-up call for the Jersey Surf professional marching band. The sublime harmonics of the euphoniums, balance of the horns, and acoustics is absolutely magical. If I was woken up to this, I would think I was waking up in heaven.
Jersey Surf is a world class drum and marching corps. There is the huge DCI (Drum Corps International) competition every year in Indianapolis and my guess is this is the band spending the night hosted in the local gym at George Washington Technical High School in Indy where this was shot.
Update Early 2023:
Man, this thing has taken off. There were videos taken from both sides as it turns out. Left side and Right side (original). This person combines the two so you get them in stereo!
Update Nov 2023:
Here’s another version that was taken in 2023. The trumpet chokes a bit, but the rest is perfect.
BMW e-ink paint job
BMW demoed a black and white e-ink paneled body at CES in 2022.
In 2023, they upped the game by creating a colored e-ink version:
Riven’s holographic imager
Riumplus was inspired by the imagers in the game Riven (the sequel to Myst) to create his own working andotrope for Mysterium 2023.
Here’s the imager from the game:
And here’s his version:
It works by rotating two tablet/phone inside a cylinder that has slits cut in it so you only see the faces of the tablet directly facing you. He has a great writeup on how he created the device, filed a patent for it, and as has a video:
Layoffs in 2023
There’s been a lot of layoffs in high tech this year – just over 200,000 workers. Combine that with companies changing direction due to higher interest rates, canceling projects, and the 150,000 or so tech workers let go in 2022 and that’s a lot of people looking for new roles.
Jonathan Lyon writes up the 12 lessons he learned during his most recent layoff and landing a new position. Some I had heard before, others were new. Worth a read if you are facing an involuntary, or voluntary, job switch.