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.

AI Filmmaking courses

AI Filmmaking courses

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The Future of filmmaking is here – and it’s done by a single person using AI tools. I’ve already posted about AI videos before, and included a number of trailer-like ones on the Curious Refuge channel or these humorous fake commercials from Turbodong2000.

Now Caleb Ward, who is the force behind Curious Refuge, is offering $749 AI Filmmaking classes.

The first 3 courses are completely sold out with waitlists to even apply for the November courses. For that price, you get:

  • 4 Weeks of Video Modules
  • Private Group Chat Access
  • Feedback from Pro Artists
  • Weekly Homework Assignments and Critiques
  • Downloadable PDFs
  • Prompt Templates
  • After Effects Templates
  • Title Templates
  • Notion Templates for Organizing the Production Process
  • Distribution Feedback and Critique

Besides Caleb’s work, here’s some sample student work:

Here’s one that plays more like an ad – with voice matching:


Anti night vision hoodie

Anti night vision hoodie

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This hacker decided to make a hoodie that can blind night vision cameras. It does this by having 12 embedded ultraviolet leds (light that is invisible to the naked eye) that strobe and blow out night vision cameras.

Obviously, this can equally be used for either anonymity or criminal activities. One thing is for sure, if you’re running away from cops or helicopters using night vision – you’re going to stand out like like a Christmas tree.

This is a more active approach to similar anti-paparazzi clothes that came out a few years back. Though those are a little expensive. A trendy anti-paparazzi scarf is $249.

Near-ultrasonic attacks on any device

Near-ultrasonic attacks on any device

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Just because you can’t hear it doesn’t mean your smart device can’t.

Researchers have developed a novel attack called “Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan” (NUIT) that can launch silent attacks against devices powered by voice assistants. The main principle that makes NUIT effective and dangerous is that microphones in smart devices can respond to near-ultrasound that the human ear cannot, thus performing the attack with minimal risk of exposure while still using conventional speaker technology.

The team demonstrated NUIT attacks against modern voice assistants found inside millions of devices, including Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa, showing the ability to send malicious commands to those devices.

Inaudible attacks

NUIT could be incorporated into websites that play media or YouTube videos and tricking targets into visiting sites or playing malicious media on trustworthy sites.

The researchers say the NUIT attacks can be conducted using two different methods.

NUIT-1, is when a device is both the source and target of the attack. For example, an attack can be launched on a smartphone by playing an audio file that causes the device to perform an action, such as opening a garage door or sending a text message.

The other method, NUIT-2, is when the attack is launched by a device with a speaker to another device with a microphone, such as a website or over TV to a smart speaker.

Just one more reason not to have a bunch of smart devices in your house.

Article:

nVidia uses AI for place and route on it’s chips

nVidia uses AI for place and route on it’s chips

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nVidia just published a paper and blog post revealing how its AutoDMP system can accelerate modern chip floor-planning using GPU-accelerated AI/ML optimization, resulting in a 30X speedup over previous methods. Hopefully it doesn’t get the treatment the Google AI place-and-route solution got.

AutoDMP is short for Automated DREAMPlace-based Macro Placement. It is designed to plug into an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) system used by chip designers, to accelerate and optimize the time-consuming process of finding optimal placements for the building blocks of processors. In one of Nvidia’s examples of AutoDMP at work, the tool leveraged its AI on the problem of determining an optimal layout of 256 RSIC-V cores with 2.7 million standard cells and 320 memory macros. AutoDMP took 3.5 hours to come up with an optimal layout on a single Nvidia DGX Station A100. 

Initial metrics shows it does an amazing job – in a fraction of the time. Definitely worth the read.

AutoDMP is open source, with the code published on GitHub. Below is a link to an article about Cadence’s Cerebrus AI place-and-route solution.

Article:

Light Pillars in Oregon

Light Pillars in Oregon

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Light pillars are an interesting natural phenomenon in which a vertical beam of light appears to extend above and/or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light off tiny ice crystals slowly falling through the air, reflecting light rays off of them.

While more common in Canada/Alaska and other northern latitudes, they recently appeared in the night skies over Redmond, Oregon on Christmas Eve 2022. Pretty cool!