Fast forward and Pyramiden has seen a little rebirth. The hotel has been renovated and reopened with a restaurant, bar, and post office.
The movie theater was also restored and even hosts an annual Pyramiden Cinema Festival in September (facebook page). Even more amazing is that the movie theater housed an archive of over 1000 Soviet era films that sat quietly on the racks when they were abandoned.
Developer Charlie Holtz combined GPT-4 Vision (commonly called GPT-4V) and ElevenLabs voice cloning technology to create an unauthorized AI version of the famous naturalist David Attenborough narrating his every move on camera.
At CES 2024, Samsung is demonstrating a pretty compelling glasses free 3D gaming monitor. It’s just a tech demo and you can never capture the actual effect of these methods on 2D videos, but it sounds compelling. Maybe as compelling as the Nintendo 3DS? 🙂
It’s no secret that Star Citizen is a cash cow who’s development and loyal following has been nothing short of astounding. Driven by fans and that success, they’re now introduced an in-game content pack that’s even more mind boggling.
The Legatus Pack is the Cadillac of all Star Citizen ship packages; it includes every single ship in the game as well as all of their associated paint schemes. It also includes all of Star Citizen’s limited edition/special edition ships that are virtually impossible to buy otherwise. And it costs a whopping $48,000.
This seems like a brazen cash grab by the developers – but ironically the Legatus pack was inspired by the Star Citizen community itself. There was high demand for a package like this from several Star Citizen backers, many of whom utilize their ships across corporations (a guild) which include hundreds, if not thousands, of players. And these players spend money. LOTS of money.
The studio is a cash cow. It brought in $113 million in 2022 and $104 million in 2023. Most of this revenue comes from ship sales and from their ‘Intergalactic Aerospace’ event put on each year. The virtual convention held in game allows everyone to play the game for free and to fly most of the ships in the game for no additional cost. Star Citizen also features ship sales during the event, further incentivizing gamers to buy ships.
This brings up an amazing set of ideas. You now have conventions selling ships. In-game whales that have corporations/clans that might all pitch together to buy packages like this. It reminds me of the same real-world economics of vehicle fleets from rental cars to delivery services use. Could a person create a monthly subscription and ‘rent’ these ships out to their – or even other – guilds/guild members? It could be a fascinating way to make some side money running your own version of Hertz Rent-A-Ship for those that need some extra horsepower for particularly big cargo deal or big battle. Just don’t forget to buy the insurance – space ship windshields are expensive. 😀
Charlie Munger was vice chairman of Berkshire-Hathaway and worked for almost 45 years with Warren Buffett. Munger died at 99 in December. I found his advice good for investing and life in general.
When asked if there was a secret to investing, he said, “I don’t know the secret.” Munger then added that he’d avoided major catastrophes in his life because he was “so cautious,” always avoiding obvious risks in his personal life and career.
“Crazy is way more common than you think,” said Munger. “It’s easy to slip into crazy. Just avoid it, avoid it, avoid it.”
What does Munger think is crazy? In 2018, Warren Buffett said, “My partner Charlie says there is only three ways a smart person can go broke: liquor, ladies and leverage.”
Munger clarified his general stance on personal vices: If it can “take that many fine people into deep trouble,” stay away from it. That included smoking and drinking to the point of alcoholism, he said — noting a prevalence of alcoholics and “near alcoholics” in his own family.
By leverage, he referred to the strategy of borrowing money to invest in stocks or buy another business. Munger said Berkshire Hathaway could “easily be worth twice what it is now” if the pair had used more leverage and risky strategies rather than simply reinvesting its past earnings.
Buffet said they (Buffet/Munger) could absorb significant losses, but Berkshire’s smaller shareholders could not. They intentionally decided to protect their cohorts by running Berkshire in a “very cautious” fashion, favoring long-term investments over short-term gambles.
Big Fancy Homes are almost always a bad idea
Besides ‘avoiding crazy’, Munger often preached the merits of living modestly, he gave advice like “don’t have a lot of envy” and “don’t overspend your income.” He credited his success and longevity to a long-held sense of caution and an ability “to avoid all standard ways of failing.”
Another area was the fact both he and Warren Buffet lived in the same house for almost 70 years.
[Buffett and I] are both smart enough to have watched our friends who got rich build these really fancy houses, and I would say in practically every case, they make the person less happy, not happier.
A “basic house” has utility, said Munger, noting that a larger home could help you entertain more people — but that’s about it. “It’s a very expensive thing to do, and it doesn’t do you that much good.” He also purposefully avoided a gaudy lifestyle that might create spoiled children.
They also weren’t fans of multiple homes. At the 2014 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, Buffett reportedly said his quality of life would “be worse if [he] had six or eight houses”.
Waifu Enjoyer shows off UEVR. UEVR allows you to play just about any Unreal Engine 4 & 5 game in VR – even if it wasn’t made for VR. It does this by hooking into the DirectX API and then overriding.
Via ferrata routes have been around for more than a century in Europe. They original had been developed in WWI to move troops and supplies through the mountains but continued to be a popular, beginner-friendly (provided you’re not afraid of heights) way for people to spend time in the mountains. Today, more than 1,000 via ferrata routes spider across the Alps alone.
Guests of Amangiri and Camp Sarika, two ultra-luxurious properties in Utah, can use any of the seven resort’s via ferrata’s. The most stomach-tightening course arguably involves the Cave Peak Stairway, a 200-foot-long steel bridge that spans from one peak to another 400 feet above jagged rock.
Tordrillo Mountain Lodge Via Ferrata, Alaska
The via ferrata completed by Tordrillo Mountain Lodge features a network of metal rungs, 1,200 feet of cable, and two suspension bridges, which all together help guests gain 900 feet of elevation. Throughout the course, climbers can see the 28-mile-long Triumvirate Glacier and Tordrillo Mountains which includes Mount Spurr, an active volcano.
Only guests of the lodge are allowed to use the via ferrata—and it would be challenging to sneak a climb on it otherwise, as it starts on a rocky shelf only accessible by helicopter, 4,000 feet above sea level.
Cloud Ladder Via Ferrata, Estes Park, Colorado
Cloud Ladder at Estes Park Colorado is billed as the steepest via ferrata in the United States, it’s roughly 600 feet of vertical climb. Two tightrope-style suspension bridges, one of which stretches 45 feet across a 200-foot chasm. However, from the top (roughly 9,200 feet in elevation) are views of Rocky Mountain National Park and the Mummy Range.
Quarry Trails Metro Park Via Ferrata, Columbus, Ohio
One of the first urban via ferratas in the U.S., the Quarry Trails via ferrata is found in Columbus and opened in May 2023. The route stretches 800 feet horizontally across a limestone cliff and includes two aerial walkways, a 54-foot steel staircase, and a 90-foot suspension bridge that hangs 105 feet above a pond.
Telluride Via Ferrata, Telluride, Colorado
One of only three, free, and open-to-the-public trails in the United States, the Telluride Via Ferrata has been operational since 2007. Nestled into the eastern end of the box canyon on the southern-facing wall below Ajax Peak, this route is technically 2.2 miles long, but only 1,600 feet of it has cable—the rest is a single-track trail. However, that trail is very exposed—it’s on a ledge of a more than 12,000-foot mountain.
Rutledge said what he likes most about the route is how it differs throughout the seasons. “In the spring, you’ve got Bridal Veil Falls, the tallest waterfall in Colorado, just gushing right next to you. And in the fall, you’re above this sea of gold and amber trees.”
Daniel Coppen recently teamed up with media artist Tomo Kihara to develop “How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car,” a street-based game designed to improve people detection in autonomous vehicles by challenging people to avoid being recognized by an object-detection algorithm.
Participants use creative maneuvers like cartwheels and disguises to test and potentially enhance the AI’s ability to identify pedestrians in varied and unpredictable scenarios. The game’s creators hope to conduct a global tour to gather diverse data, aiming to share it with researchers and self-driving car developers for better training of these systems.
