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Month: October 2023

Is Intel’s fab strategy a good idea? AMD exec thinks not

Is Intel’s fab strategy a good idea? AMD exec thinks not

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I am putting this up as a different take on Intel’s recent strategy. I found the comment interesting since it’s a company that has gone the completely opposite direction. Time will tell who is right. 🙂

Asked at the Canalys EMEA Forum 2023 if Intel can succeed [on it’s fab-focused strategy], Darren Grasby, exec VP for strategic partnerships and president of AMD EMEA, replied emphatically: “Of course not.”

He hinted that the decision to embrace contract manufacturing could be a turn that Intel might come to regret.

“Intel has gone down these paths,” he said, “and if you think about the journey of AMD we had our own fabs many years ago and we chose to go fabless, and it was the turning point of the company that allowed us to invest those R&D dollars into the roadmap, and they’re the roadmaps that are bringing that product and leading edge technology to market today.”

Here

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AI Backflip

AI Backflip

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Animator Nikita Diakur thought it would be safer to have a digital stand-in do a backflip after he failed to do a backflip in real life. Maximilian Schneider helped him use machine learning tech to create a photorealistic avatar of himself, use a voice simulator trained for 15 minutes on his actual voice, wire the voice to the mesh on his face, and a few other techniques from the paper Deep Mimic. He then tried to train the avatar.

It’s an interesting way to tell a story – especially when he puts the avatar into his tiny apartment and proceeds to virtually receive what would be numerous serious head traumas, bone breaking collisions, and likely tons of broken furniture.

Mexican Drug Cartels on the Oregon Coast

Mexican Drug Cartels on the Oregon Coast

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A local paper, the Journal Courier, did a pretty interesting piece on the increasing drug problems on the Oregon coast. It turns out, the CJNG cartel from Mexico has been doing a heavy drug trade in more and more rural and coastal Oregon towns – even leaving a grisly warning for those who might talk.

The I-5 corridor has long been known as a transit pipeline on the west coast for drugs and sex trafficking. Portland itself is well known for high rates of underage sex trafficking. It’s interesting to see the hub cities – which is no surprise if you’ve visited any of those cities in the area.

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Gaussian Splatting graphics pipeline

Gaussian Splatting graphics pipeline

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Say hello to Gaussian splatting. It allows high quality, realtime rendering of scenes captured from multiple photos or videos.

Gaussian Splatting is a rendering technique that can produce extremely high quality rendering at very high frame rates. It uses a novel new technique who’s closest cousin is probably photogrammetry. Photogrammetry has been around for awhile (taking many 2D pictures of an object from many different directions and then re-building a 3D object). 3D Gaussian Splatting takes this much further.

Gaussian Splatting starts with lots of pictures like photogrammetry, but it then converts the data into a point cloud. The points become gaussians with are then used by the rendering routine.

  1. Take a collection of photographs or extremely high quality renderings from a number of different camera positions all around the environment. The individual points from each of the photos becomes gaussians in 3D space.
  2. The gaussians are not correct for rendering, so you must run a training pass over them much like a 1 layer neural net – but with special properties like densification and pruning.
  3. From your camera position, projecting the gaussian points back into the 2D plane based on camera
  4. Sort by depth
  5. Iterate over each gaussian for a given pixel and sum the contribution.
  6. This trained set can then be rendered from any angle.

Update 11/2023: There’s also a way of handling animated objects via 4D Gaussian splatting.

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$9 Billion wasted on fish conservation in the Columbia River Basin

$9 Billion wasted on fish conservation in the Columbia River Basin

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Over four decades more than $9 billion in tax dollars were spent on fish conservation in the Columbia River basin.

Research headed by William Jaeger from the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences analyzed 50 years of data to answer the basic question: Is there any evidence of an overall boost in wild fish abundance that can be linked to the totality of the recovery efforts?

The study from Oregon State University shows that all these efforts have not resulted in a notable increase in wild salmon and steelhead populations in the Columbia River Basin. In fact, of all the many different conservation efforts, all the salmon and steelhead population growth can be attributed to one source: hatcheries.

The actual impact of all of these [individual conservation] efforts has always been poorly understood. One of the issues is that most studies evaluating restoration efforts have examined individual projects for specific species, life stages, or geographic areas, which limits the ability to make broad inferences at the basin level.

The role of hatcheries in recovery plans is controversial for many reasons, but results do indicate that hatchery production combined with restoration spending is associated with increases in returning adult fish. However, we found that adult returns attributable to spending and hatchery releases combined do not exceed what we can attribute to hatcheries alone.

It’s another example in Oregon’s sadly long list of feel-good measures and huge tax spending programs that failed to provide the promised results. This is very disappointing not only because of the wasted money, but because a great number of the conservation groups that lobbied for these programs have told us their science showed the expensive efforts would improve fish populations. It turns out they were wrong about both their science and policies.

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Free AI spoken audiobooks

Free AI spoken audiobooks

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Audible provides a great collection of audiobooks, but you do need to pay for a subscription or buy individual selections. Now, Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. The project has been selected as one of the ‘Best Inventions of 2023′ by Time magazine.

Traditionally, AI narrators and voices have limitations. Early generated voices were barely good enough for simple one phrase statements. For longer text, they tend to be very flat/monotone and have bad pacing to the point of being very painful to listen too for any extended period of time. While this is still somewhat the case, this version is much improved.

I personally love combining my workouts/hikes/drives with audiobooks – and having a new free source of good material is great.

The book selection obviously are works in the public domain, but that includes lots of classics – such as some of my favorites: Edwardian and Victorian ghost stories.

You can go to the project’s main page here to learn more, or browse the collection here.

The audiobooks are also hosted on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and the Internet Archive.

Star Trek communicators at the Paris Fashion show

Star Trek communicators at the Paris Fashion show

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Humane technology has been showing off it’s little AI powered wearable devices – this time at the Paris Fashion show. They paired up with Coperni fashion and pinned the devices to their models.

What these devices do is – well – nobody really knows. Officially they are a “screenless, standalone device and software platform built from the ground up for AI. The intelligent clothing-based wearable uses a range of sensors that enable natural and intuitive compute interactions and is designed to weave seamlessly into users’ day-to-day lives.” It appears to be powered by a Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 processor and have ‘AI-powered optical recognition and a laser-projected display’.

There is some speculation they are a little like the Google Clip, but the AI Pin claims to be completely standalone and not tethered to other devices (like the iWatch, etc)

Right now there is almost no information about what they do or if they even turn on. There’s a lot of speculation that right now they are in ‘hype’ mode to collect investors. But with no actual working prototypes nor information about them – many are wondering if this is a case of the emperor has no clothes.

Still, it is an interesting thought experiment. If you did have one of these devices – what WOULD you want in a wearable little device like this? There doesn’t appear to be any screen; so how would it fit in the economy that has cell phones, digitally connected watches, and possibly screenless wearable devices?

Update 11/2023:

There’s a little more information here on Time’s ‘Best Inventions of 2023‘; though they do disclose that 2 TIME co-chairs were investors – so maybe a little bit of thumbs on the scale there.

HOMILY OF JOSEPH RATZINGER April 2005

HOMILY OF JOSEPH RATZINGER April 2005

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A then mere cardinal Ratzinger gave a prophetic homily April 18th, 2005.

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.

We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An “adult” faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deception from truth.

HOMILY OF HIS EMINENCE CARD. JOSEPH RATZINGER
DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS
Maze Mania

Maze Mania

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Did you know one of first live action video games was played on a Laserdisc system? Before CD games like Mad Dog McCree, Night Trap, and other console and PC live action games, laserdisc games were a thing. Unfortunately, laserdisc technology was expensive and was quickly replaced by cheaper magnetic recording media like VCR and CD’s.

Welcome to Maze Mania. It was one of the first laserdisc games, and the folks over at Don’t Make Us Bored invited fel_temp_reparatio to hook up his actual 1980’s era laserdisc and play through one of the 4 games on the disc (They play Maze Mania at 1:54:00 into the video).

The laserdisc plays a live action video sequence for a short time, and then like a choose your own adventure book, the video stops and you are presented with a trivia question. If you answer right (by typing in the right fame number of where to continue), the video story continues. Answer wrong, and your story ends.

The low-budget productions, bonkers plots (like men in monkey suits jump out of piles of hay in westerns), and cheesy acting are definite a treat for people that like corny stories.