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Category: Interesting or Cool

Making shoes with no stitches or glue

Making shoes with no stitches or glue

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Starting with the basic idea of using a hot glue gun to form and build up a model, why not make whole objects in this way? Why not shoes? If you attach that glue gun to a robotic arm and the glue into a light filament – voila: LightSpray.

LightSpray is a technique that use a robot arm to spray a recyclable filament around a mold to create a seamless one-piece upper that is directly attached to the midsole, eliminating the need for stitching or glue. The entire shoe is fully assembled in just 3 minutes. Supposedly coming Fall/Winter 2024.

The video is pretentious – thinking they invented something new – but it does get the idea across. Like Nike’s attempts at 3D printing, and 3D printed clothing, I think it’s definitely going to change things.

More Tetris firsts – probably the last

More Tetris firsts – probably the last

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Just a few months back, Blue Scuti got the first Tetris kill screen; now DogPlayingTetris just got the last remaining achievement of NES Tetris.

The NES Tetris community has long been aware that you could (theoretically) avoid the crash at level 255 and then cause the game to loop all the way back to level 0. Rebirth has been the game’s mythical true ending – thought thought to likely be impossible/extremely unlikely.

Just today, NES Tetris rebirth has finally been achieved by “DogPlayingTetris” or “Dog” or “Michael Kahnh” at 1:40:34

Medieval Jams

Medieval Jams

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Teenage Engineering makes some beautiful products. Now they’ve come up with a new one: the EP–1320 which features hundreds of built-in medieval sounds. Create your own medieval melodies with drums and medieval string and pipe instruments such as their kind of wacky intro video below.

There’s also some folks already making medieval jams on youtube.

Luno custom car camping mattresses

Luno custom car camping mattresses

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Luno makes a lot of cool car camping gear. Pillows, window covers, camp fans, organizers and other upscale tidbits for your #vanlife. Now they’re offering their AIR+FOAM custom fitted car camping mattresses. They claim to be better than a standard air mattress because they use air and perforated open-cell foam sandwiched between protective layers.

Each set is custom fitted for your specific vehicle. You put in your make/model/year and it’ll find the set that perfectly fits your vehicle (if available). It looks like they charge a flat $499 for most vehicles.

For the more budget minded, they have cheaper pre-owned/upcycled/returned products.

Car camping is fun, but something you should always keep in mind is that these pretty much take up all your cargo space (unless you use only one – which is a nice feature). So, if you’re bringing any other gear/food it better all fit in the front seat or it’ll sit outside all night (in the rain/snow/elements and with critters or bears around to nibble on anything edible). Some other tips for car camping here – like always sleeping with your head pointed uphill (since it’s been shown being inverted for long periods has even led healthy people to death).

Ravey Light sticks

Ravey Light sticks

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Now on their 5th version, Light Toys Visual Poi V5 MAXI are LED light sticks that can produce some amazing patterns when swung around. Persistence of vision illusions (in this case a pair of sticks) uses densely-packed RGB LEDs and circuitry that displays a line at a time to produce complete images when spun. They are pretty amazing, but ought to be since a pair costs an eye watering $2190

Amaze your friends at the next rave for about 30 minutes – or more likely synced up as a backup dancer for the next Super bowl concert.

Apple’s electric car project is dead (again)

Apple’s electric car project is dead (again)

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Apple has halted its long-rumored “Project Titan” that was developing an electric car (Bloomberg). The company reportedly announced the news internally on Tuesday and said many people in the 2,000-person team behind the car will shift to other AI efforts instead.

Despite hiring industry leaders like Tesla’s former Autopilot director, the project has been plagued by high turnover (including chief Doug Field in 2021), constantly changing plans, and internal skepticism. More recent rumors suggest that the $100,000 car would likely not have self-driving capabilities.

Given this, it likely makes sense apple is re-directing the efforts of the automotive team to more established AI plans.

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Midjourney’s is now open to everyone – but only for 25 images

Midjourney’s is now open to everyone – but only for 25 images

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Midjourney is the pre-eminent image generator; but used to require submitting prompts in a fiddly way through Discord and then paying for anything beyond a few free ones. Last year they made a more intuitive website; but you had to have a special account.

They’ve now opened the Midjourney website to everyone – but you can only generate 25 images and then need to buy a paid plan. You’ll need to log in with your connected Discord account, or use your Google account. Apparently it even will show your history of previously generated images to browse when properly connected.

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Drowning in AI generated content

Drowning in AI generated content

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Neil Clarke, the founder of Clarkesworld sci-fi magazine, says they are drowning under an onslaught of low-quality AI-generated story submissions. Clarke says almost 50% of their sci-fi story submissions are obviously AI generated. In Feb 2023, he had to shut down online submissions and implement a rudimentary filter. But the problem is only getting worse, and there is a worry the massive amounts of AI generated content will overwhelm his small business.

Why do people submit low-quality AI generated content? Clarkesworld pays about 12 cents a word for an accepted story; so if you can get ChatGPT to generate a story and get is accepted it’s basically free money.

Clarke blamed influencers for the flood of AI generated submissions. He suggests that there are “[influencers] waving a bunch of money on YouTube or TikTok videos and saying, ‘Oh, you can make money with ChatGPT by doing this [using ChatGPT to generate a story then get free money if it’s accepted].'”

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