43.8% of lesbian women and 61.1% of bisexual women have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime, as opposed to 35% of heterosexual women.
26% of gay men and 37.3% of bisexual men have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, in comparison to 29% of heterosexual men.
After hearing about a domestic abuse case between two lesbians here in Portland, I had no idea that domestic violence in the LGBTQ community was so high – especially between female couples where the rates are almost double that of straight couples or gay men.
MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia is a tool that came out about 3 years ago and can add animation to static faces in your photos to bring life to them. People first tried it on historical images:
Then it became a trend on TikTok to upload images of relatives that have long since died. While it’s not perfect, it brought many to tears to see their loved ones again.
Of course, this can be a double-edged sword. This technology can bring the past to life, but it can also be used to create fake videos of living people.
Rainbolt is one of the world’s best players of Geoguessr – a game in which you are given a 360 picture and you get about 20 seconds to guess where in the world it was taken. A team at Stanford took 2 months and built an AI that can guess 92% of countries correctly and a median miss error of only 44km – which is astounding.
Here’s a head-to-head competition between the AI Predicting Image Geolocations (or PIGEON) and a pro geogussr player:
But there’s another side of this kind of technology. NPR did an interview and presented a few personal photos to the algorithm. PIGEON was able to guess the location the photo was taken to a really high degree of accuracy. This means you can find places taken in old family snapshots, but it also means that algorithms like this can reveal everywhere you are, and have been, based on your social media posts.
How it works
The algorithm that PIGEON uses is an interesting combination of AI model techniques. Besides the AI based learning, they use some interesting methods such as ‘geocells’ that uses political/geographic regions to help narrow locations instead of just naïve squares.
Rainbolt even pointed out that PIGEON picked up on camera lens smudges in the sky that were very common in Canadian google image captures:
You can only imagine where things will be in just a few years. Anyone that doesn’t think AI is already changing the world is missing it as it’s happening.
EMO is an audio-driven portrait-to-video generation framework. Input a single reference image and the vocal audio, e.g. talking and singing, and generate vocal avatar videos with expressive facial expressions, various head poses. Generate any duration depending on the length of input video.
You can make still images talk, sing, or cross-actor operations in which still images can deliver the performances of other actors or in different languages.
Haloasis is an interesting device that uses a rapidly spinning LED bar to produce a constantly changing display inside a clear plastic tube. It seems geared towards creatively displaying lyrics from your music. It’s not even in kickstarter yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how they do. I’m curious how loud it is, because these devices are never exactly quiet due to the high RPM spinning LED bars.
I think it could be more cool as a display for interesting information since my karaoke skills are less than amazing.
Anybody can come up with good ideas. No matter how clever you think you are – ideas are cheap. Trust me, someone’s almost certainly thought of your super-cool idea.
Even if your idea isn’t particularly unique, it’s in the EXECUTION where the professional is separated from the amateur. Can you actually build it? Can you make the right tradeoffs to build it on time? On budget? With high quality? Will it be sustainable or turn into a maintenance nightmare? In a way that customers will like and use? That’s the logistics.
You can’t just say “I’m going to buy an RV park” and expect to pull that off by the end of the week. A professional knows that there is a required amount of time for each step and the sum of those is the actual time it takes to realistically make a purchase. When you make unreasonable expectations you put yourself under undo stress and may even abandon the idea of buying an RV park because you feel that you are a failure. Instead, put a decent timetable to each action step and, even then, acknowledge that there is some element of luck involved in finding an RV park and will remain persistent even if you start to violate your initial time allocation.
Idea people lead teams full of chaos, missed deadlines, and failure because they don’t know the logistics of how to make the idea reality. The logistics are what separates good ideas from a bad ideas. Working out the logistics tells you if you can actually deliver the idea on time, with high quality, and in a sustainable way.
There’s a second layer of logistics beyond just delivering on time.
Countless MP3 players and cell phones were made before Apple got into the game. But Apple destroyed them all. Apple’s success was not due to having a technologically superior product or particularly unique ideas. Instead, they knew how to define an experience then constrain the product to something the logistics said they could solve in a delightful way. The technology experts picked the right technology/methods to deliver the experience flawlessly – versus what would do the same thing but give poor or inconsistent experiences. That one approach is what led Apple to completely dominate the music and phone market when dozens of other players were first and had more modern technology.
Spitbank Fort and No Man’s Fort are some unique properties for sale. The sea forts were 2 armor-plated forts completed in 1878 off the British coast. They defended the Portsmouth dockyards during WW 1 and WW 2. It must have been rough, because it was reported that “Life on site was grim; those serving were deliberately chosen for their inability to swim, to avoid any attempt to escape.” Ouch.
After 1956, they were decommissioned and sat empty until they were turned into a museum in 1982-2009. Spitbank was reportedly purchased for more than £1m in 2009 for and converted into a luxury hotel that folded during the 2020 corona virus pandemic. In late 2020, Pendulum live broadcast a concert from Spitbank.
Now they’re both for sale.
Check out their websites for the cool sales information.
The moment you say “We are going to make a game that is a <genre> with <art-style> graphics” and commit to developing that game you have made about 90% of your marketing decisions for your game.
The games with green titles where the majority surpass the $5000 revenue bar, the uncolored entries are medium sellers, and red are low.
If you make a great 4X game, it shouldn’t be hard to stand out among the +-/25 games 4X games released in the same year. But even if you make a great Puzzle game, it will be challenging to generate traction if there are +/-1000 other games in the segment waiting to be discovered. So coming back to what the article on howtomarketyourgame.com suggested: Yes, a lot of your game’s market potential is determined by the genre or rather segment you chose, but not necessarily because there is a lack in popularity, but rather because it will be hard to win through the hundreds or thousands of other games released in the same segment
