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Month: September 2023

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

AI powered NPCs fill a city

AI powered NPCs fill a city

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Combining live voice recognition, voice synthesis, and an AI large language model, Replica Studios’ Smart NPCs for Unreal allows you to carry out real-time, non-scripted conversations with anyone on your virtual streets. You can even download the demo here and try it yourself (warning: it’s 25 gb!).

These fully simulated AI characters will respond to your live-spoken language in the demo. You can ask where they’re from, whether they believe in aliens, complement their clothes, what car they drive, get food recommendations, tell people you don’t like their haircut, ask for directions to the park (and they’ll give it to you and tell you to feed the pigeons), talk about their insurance plans, what crimes they have committed, start some rumors and conspiracy theories, and anything you can think of. It’s got a few quirky bits, but it’s pretty surreal.

If you think that’s crazy, also check out their AI powered voice actors. The amount of dynamic quality in their voices is pretty amazing. It is almost good enough to replace main character voice actors, but it sure could be used to fill out dozens and dozens of minor roles.

The original channel comes from Jeff Favignano:

https://youtu.be/rMfCpUhvbVg?si=7Dbvg-TaA6-u3ben
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.

Woman in Black London stage play ends, then doesn’t

Woman in Black London stage play ends, then doesn’t

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https://vimeo.com/864191686

I was crushed to hear the famous London play ‘Woman in Black‘ was closing on March 4, 2023. The award winning and record setting Stephen Mallatratt adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel had been running continuously at London’s Fortune Theater since 1989. I have always wanted to see it, despite having made 2 trips to London and not having time to catch a play.

I saw the adaptation at Chicago’s Royal George Theater right before the pandemic and it was fantastic (The theater closed in 2020).

What I’m excited about is that the play is now on tour throughout the UK for 2023/2024. Not only that, but it appears to also be making its way across the US in 2023/2024.

Unbeknownst to me, it was in New York’s McKittrick Hotel and San Francisco in late 2021-early 2022.

Upcoming, it looks like it will be in New Jersey – Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center October 13 to October 29th, 2023. It will be in the Herberger Theater Center‘s in Phoenix from Feb 8 to 25th, 2024. Hopefully they have some additional showings as well!

Sesame Street pinball number count song

Sesame Street pinball number count song

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Charles Cornell sat down with the deceptively simple song about counting to 12. You almost certain know this song if you were a kid between 1977 and 2002.

Called the Pinball Number Count on Sesame Street, Cornell peals back the surprising layers of complexity. Odd time signatures (7/4 or pairs of 4/4 + 3/4), funky chord compositions, and famous musicians that had no business being on a kids show. It’s definitely fun watching a musician pull apart this little masterpiece.

It was written in 1976 by Walt Kraemer, arranged by Ed Bogas, and vocals were performed by the Pointer Sisters. Yes, the actual Pointer Sisters. It first appeared on Sesame Street in Season 8 which aired in1977. It appeared continually until 2002. Andy Narell plays the steel drums for numbers 2, 4, 9, and 12. Mel Martin plays the soprano sax bits for numbers 5, 6, 7, and 10.

More details about the song from someone that interviewed Walt Kraemer about this song can be found here.

Or, you can play the Number Count pinball game from the Sesame Street website.

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:

Acting for film and stage are different beasts

Acting for film and stage are different beasts

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“The theatre is an operation with the scalpel, I think movie acting is an operation with the laser.” In this documentary, Michael Caine teaches the art of movie acting to five young actors, who perform scenes from “Alfie”, “Deathtrap” and “Educating Rita”. He shares all kinds of learnings, tricks, and ways to think about different kinds of close-ups, props, and a variety of other cool things viewers likely take for granted.

While this is likely dated now as framing decisions, camera technology, pacing and storytelling have changed a lot, I think it’s really cool to see what the actors are thinking when portraying a role and all the different kinds of methods and understanding they have.

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.