AI generated horror movies
Curious Refuge is holding their 2nd annual AI Horror Film Competition. Using the Infinity V2 model, make a movie and submit it by Oct 21st to win up to $3000.
You can check out the entries here.
Here was one of last year’s winners. It’s probably not going to replace real moviemakers yet, but it’s absolutely a great creative tool to try out ideas and visualize scenes.
Portland has most job losses in the top 50 metro areas in 2024
Continued below average recovery in Portland and Oregon and declining population has lead to Portland having the most job losses in the top 50 metro areas of the country. Unemployment rates are still officially low at 3.9% because they are at the same time experiencing a population decline.
Portland’s true unemployment rate last year was 20%, compared with its official rate of nearly 3.9%, according to a study from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP).
https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/05/09/true-unemployment-rate-layoffs-economy
Mobius Keyboard
Google Japan makes some pretty epic keyboards. Now that have this new one – a mobius loop.
Or a hat that is a keyboard
If that’s to pedestrian, you can be Neo where there is no spoon
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Utilizing YouTube for infinite storage
Cloud storage is increasingly becoming less free. You can’t go long before your iPhone or Google account notifies you that you’re almost full or already full – and give you a link to a handy-dandy subscription. But there is one place where you can upload all you want and the storage is still free – YouTube.
Adam Conway wrote up a fun little program that does exactly that. He creates video frames full of data and uploads them to YouTube. He tried QR codes, but YouTube compression artifacts made that untenable. Instead, he went brute force and each 1 or 0 was a 5×5 block of pixels set to the same color. At 1920×1080, that generates about 10KB of storage per frame.
He fired it up and gave it a whirl. It worked! He even posted the code on github. It’s definitely too slow and uses a tremendous amount of storage. To use for any meaningful data as you need to take the input file and encode each bit into a 5×5 pixel in an image, then encode the images together into a video file.
Still, it’s the one free place on the internet.
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No, pet speaking buttons don’t work
Those pet talking buttons do not work like the YouTube pet owners think they work.
There is no question that dogs are intelligent. But Susan Hazel, an associate professor at the School of Animal and Veterinary Science at the University of Adelaide, and Eduardo J Fernandez assert, that pets cannot understand the human language. Instead, all the research indicates they are reacting from operant conditioning and cite the famous case of Clever Hans.
Pets learn that pressing a button can lead to a reward, but in cases where dogs seem to be able to string multiple buttons together to say something advanced, or where they can press the ‘right’ button when asked, it is very likely they are just responding to their owner’s body language. They almost certainly wouldn’t be able to replicate the behavior if a new pet sitter was asking the command.
Learning complex actions by operant conditioning isn’t new. The Verge writes about how good operant conditioning gets with the Clever Hans phenomenon. Hans was a 20th century horse who could apparently provide answers to simple math questions by tapping his hoof. With careful investigation, it turned out Hans wasn’t doing any arithmetic but was instead reading subtle cues from whoever was questioning him to know when to stop tapping.
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Do you miss PC Gamer magazine CD’s
Remember when PC Gamer magazine had a demo CD attached to the cover?
JacobJazz has released a set of 22 little indie horror games on itch.io. It even comes with a digital spoof of late 90’s PCGamer magazine you can browse (or print out) for hints on the games and prints out front/back covers and all kinds of tidbits you can print out and DIY craft your own malevolent looking disk/magazine at home.
None of the games are particularly earth shattering; but I love the effort put into creating some physical media and reviving the past.
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Science Integrity Digest
Elisabeth Bik has become an unexpected lightning rod. In 2013 she heard about science paper plagiarism and, on a whim, took a sentence she wrote in a paper and put it into Google Scholar to see if anybody had used the text. She found the sentence picked randomly had indeed been stolen by somebody else. The paper plagiarized not only her text but that of many others.
Fast forward to one evening in January 2014. She sat at her computer, sifting through scientific papers as she often did. Imagine her shock when she saw a section of the same photo being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments. The authors seemed to be deliberately trying to cover their tracks by flipping the image back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped differently.
What came next was the discovery of a shocking amount of very obviously duplicated and fabricated images. In a simple scan, she found 800 of 20,000 papers to contain duplicated figures and they estimated about half of the duplications were deliberate. What’s worse, a shocking 2% of all papers she looked at had deliberately copied and manipulated images/figures – indicating clear intent to hide the deception.
Unpaid and unfunded, she now publishes her findings on a blog that’s caused a lot of angry responses from the scientific community – despite the fact she’s uncovering clearly evident, and embarrassingly incompetent cases of fraud. Fraud that has resulted in a shocking number of retractions – from some of the most the world’s most accredited institutions and researchers.
The cases she’s found are incredibly easy to spot – which implies that there’s probably a lot more sophisticated fraud ready to be discovered.
Sadly, all of this should sadly not be too surprising. An international team of professors and authors led by Ilka Agricola has started investigating fraudulent practices in the publication of mathematical research in which publication companies optimize paper rankings in order to secure better funding for those using the services.
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Cerabyte Ceramic storage
In two years, Cerabyte built a prototype ceramic storage system solely from commercially available, off the shelf parts. They believe they can build palm-sized cartridges that can store 10,000TB of data.
Each cartridge is a layer of glass, similar to Gorilla Glass by Corning, with a thin, dark ceramic layer as the actual data storage medium. These cartridges are kept in a robotic library. When data needs to be read or written, the cartridge is moved from the library rack to the read-write device.
Data is written by two million laser beamlets that punch QR code-like nano-scale patterns into the surface of the media. Data can be written at GBps speeds, with TB/square-centimeter densities – much greater than the density of HDDs which only hit 0.02TB/square-centimeter in current drives.
It will be interesting to see how resilient the data storage is for the long term. One disadvantage is likely that they are only write-once media. But if the media is just a piece of glass with a ceramic coating; it may be relatively cheap.
The advantages, however, could be breath-taking. Besides the incredible amount of storage density, these could be game changing for long-term storage since there are no moving parts and the media doesn’t rely on magnetic particles that can drift (HD’s) or polymer substrates that degrade over time (CD/DVD). So long as the ceramic coating doesn’t fade or easily scratch; ceramic storage could last longer than current methods. Immunity from EMP and other electronic attacks is another amazing advantage. One could easily see this used as a failsafe that can re-load literally hard-coded binary data such as firmware, an OS, or a secure bootstrap loader. If it is stable for a long period of time, it might be used for ultra-long term archives of massive amounts of data.
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Cost of Living Index
Summary: The cost goods and services in Portland are more expensive when compared to other large cities, but nothing like California and cheaper than Seattle.
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