Google developed a deep reinforcement learning–based framework for full-body control of humanoid robots, enabling a game of one-versus-one soccer. The robots exhibited emergent behaviors in the form of dynamic motor skills such as the ability to recover from falls and also tactics like defending the ball against an opponent.
Pretty cool. I wonder when we’ll finally replace athletes and replace them with robots.
Articles:
An interviewer and a prompt engineer will sit down with the subject whose memory they are trying to retrieve, as the person recalls a specific event or place the promptographer will input the descriptions into an AI image generator and what follows is a bit of back and forth to get the image right.
“You show the image generated from that prompt to the subject and they might say, ‘Oh, the chair was on that side’ or ‘It was at night, not in the day’,” explains Garcia. “You refine it until you get it to a point where it clicks.”
It’s more like guided painting/drawing of a scene from a description – but using generative AI to do the work is pretty unique.
The team recently worked with an 84-year-old woman from Barcelona called Maria. Maria has vivid memories of peering out from her balcony as a child to try and catch a glimpse of her father who was incarcerated in a prison opposite where they lived.
These childhood memories only existed inside Maria’s mind, but the AI researchers worked with her to bring these reminisces to life by describing the place and the historical context (Maria’s father had been jailed by General Franco).
“It’s very easy to see when you’ve got the memory right because there is a very visceral reaction,” Pau Garcia, founder of Domestic Data Streamers, tells MIT Reivew. “It happens every time. It’s like, ‘Oh! Yes! It was like that!’”
AI image from the Spanish Civil War was co-created by a 90-year-old woman called Nuria who vividly remembers men waiting outside bomb shelters with shovels and picks ready to rescue anyone trapped inside.
It’s not as complex as previous methods of reconstructing images from brain scans, but it’s an interesting approach.
Articles:
I wrote about using AI trained models to re-create images from brain scans before. Improvements have been rapidly developing.
In a paper published in Neural Networks, researchers at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) in Japan were reportedly able to use artificial intelligence (AI) to reconstruct images solely from people’s brain activity with over 75% accuracy.
They recorded the brain activity of subjects who viewed 1,200 various images while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. “Score charts” that included 6.13 million factors such as color, shape, and texture were also created by making the AI recognize the images. The subjects were then shown another set of images that were different to the original images. Their brain activity was measured under the fMRI 30-60 minutes later while asked to imagine what kind of image they had seen.
According to the publication, the scientists’ groundbreaking method allowed them to use AI to reconstruct original images with a 75.6% accuracy rate — which is a big step from previous efforts with allowed a 50.4% accuracy rate
Articles:
I got to work with Mark Subotnick while he was here at Intel and during Project Offset.
Should you service your Subaru Crosstrek CVT with a fluid change? There’s lots of conflicting information, but MrSubaru1387 gives us a great skinny. Long story short:
Here’s a video of him doing a CVT service on a Forester with 189591 miles that was having some hesitation off the line. Afterwards it
A Waymo driverless taxi was attacked and burned to the ground Feb 10, 2024 in San Francisco’s Chinatown around 9PM PT. A crowd formed around the car, covered it in spray paint, broke out its windows, and set it on fire.
The Verge couldn’t figure out who did it, but I have a pretty good guess where to go look first. It’s not like they’re being subtle about it since they talked about doing exactly this in the New York Times as well as publicly talking about destruction of property.
Connecting old floppy disk drives to modern hardware is not easy. Resurrecting old MFM and RLL hard drives is even harder. The primary method would simply be to get an old PC with the legacy hardware to read the hard drives. But now there’s a few soltuions.
DREM:
DREM is based on the high performance FPGA platform and does not require the use of a PC for any file encoding operations. DREM is equipped with an VGA output, PS/2 keyboard input and file manager software. A user can browse the SD card and insert DSK images into virtual drives.
DREM uses DSK disk image files, which contain the raw dump of a disk. The raw image consists of a sector-by-sector binary copy of the source medium.
If you’re just looking for floppy emulation, I recommend GreaseWeazle or other solutions.
MFM Board Emulator:
Also available, but doesn’t seem quite as well baked, is the pdp8online MFM board emulator.
I was recently looking for good baptism gifts for an adult joining the church.
Yet another report has come out demonstrating the incompetence and failures of Oregon and Portland leadership – this time (again) due to Multnomah Vega Pederson. It’s a story of incompetent management, millions poured down the drain, doing things for political show, and hiding failures of leadership.
The “Housing Multnomah Now” initiative was supposed to use $14 million to house 300 people into apartments. A year later, however, the program has only placed 37 individuals or households in apartments.
Over the last month, Vega Pederson and other county officials repeatedly refused to answer questions on the record or provide details about how they set the program’s initial targets, identify officials who set them or say whether any review or analysis was conducted.
Read more about how badly this has gone from this article on Oregon Live.