cdev_gl

Thanks for the release! I'm a big fan of archivebox to combat link rot for documents I frequently reference, and this update looks HUGE! Very excited to try out the new features :)

On mobile it took me three tries to find how to get from "Dungeon Crawler" to "Books Like Dungeon Crawler Carl" - you might consider surfacing those lists outside the "what is this book about" collapsible.

I can't speak to the rest of the text or the laptops themselves, but as someone who works with color reproducibility in video and print, those photos comparing colors of two different screens are worse than useless.

Uncalibrated screens photographed at different angles in different lighting conditions are not a valid basis for comparison. If you want properly calibrated displays, you need to purchase hardware (datacolor makes one such device) and calibrate them.

Even "factory-calibrated" monitors will benefit from this, because the quality of that calibration varies widely and your color reproduction is going to vary based on ambient lighting conditions etc.

Really cool project! I like the twelve color palette the author presents, and the grayscales, but I'd love to see more about the choice to use twelve bits to encode it. Presumably enough of the rest of the possibility space is needed to justify writing a custom encoding. Or maybe it was done because custom color encodings are cool, which they definitely are.

The palette is so pretty, I wonder how the whole LCH color space quantized down to 4096 colors looks. I find limited bitdepth color spaces fascinating to look at, there's so many choices about how to represent color they can look wildly different.

Yea, I too was not expecting a list of past benchmarks. If not the aforementioned actual human deaths, I had expected either a list of companies whose pivot to AI/LLMs led to their downfall (but I guess we're going to need to wait a year or two for that) or a list of industries (such as audio transcription) that are being killed by AI as we speak.

We really do live in interesting times. Usually I feel pretty confident about predicting how a trend will continue, but as it is the only prediction I can make with confidence for this latest AI research is that it is and will be used by militaries to kill a lot of people. Oh, hey, that's another thing this article could have listed!

Outside of that, all bets are open. Possible wagers include: "Turns out to be mostly useful in specific niche applications and only seemingly useful anywhere else", "Extremely useful for businesses looking to offset responsibility for unpopular decisions", "Ushers in an end to work and a golden age for all mankind", "Ushers in an end to work and a dark age for most of the world", "Combines with profit motives to damage all art, culture, and community", etc etc.

I know many folk have strong opinions one way or the other, but I think it's literally anyone's game at this point, though I will say I'm not leaning optimistic.

Absolutely. The minimal mesh is just 3 triangles rendering a 3D texture that contains depth information that gets raytraced in a shader. Or you could send a single point vertex over and have a geometry shader generate the geometry vertices for you.

Or you could reduce the texture complexity to a 2D texture without raytracing if you defined the coin mathematically in the shader. Heck, you could get rid of the texture entirely and just do everything with math in the shader.

3D graphics used to require rigid hardware distinctions between vertices and textures and etc, but in modern pipelines it's pretty much all data and the programmer decides what to do with it.

I was going to argue that remembering "CorrectBatteryHorseStaple.com" is leagues easier than remembering an 128 bit number, but then I did the math and using the 20k most common english words to encode 128bits you'd need an 8 word phrase, which pretty much solidifies the point you've made.

I mean, people can recite poetry far longer, even nonsense poetry ("Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe") so it's not impossible. But generally speaking, yeah. Nobody wants to navigate to that bit of jabberwocky instead of google.com

It does kind of make me long for the days of the HOSTS file, where anyone might alias a hard-to-remember address as something locally meaningful.

This is true, but LastPass proved that by the time the worst case occurs it's already too late. A security breach means, at minimum, redoing all your passwords, and these sites are a very compelling target.

OTOH I wouldn't want to self-host because I know I'm not going to spend the same amount of time and effort a full security staff would, even if my self-hosted box would make a much less attractive target.

It's quite a pickle.

Yea, I feel similarly.

I'm actually really excited for Lenovo's upcoming T1 wearable display. It's a monitor in glasses form, not VR, but I realized that the appeal of VR desktop environments for me is having a large screen, not the whole VR shtick.

Couple that display with output from my phone running JupyterLab, and I'll have a desktop-like development environment that fits in my pocket. Perfect for travel and long backpacking trips.

Before Creative Cloud became subscription only, you could budget the software as a one-time fee; $2500 for their entire suite of software, $600 or so for just Photoshop, iirc.

With the subscriptions, you're paying $600+ a year, every year, in perpetuity, and you're subjected to invasive DRM that'll do shit like delete fonts you haven't used recently.

Before subscriptions, upgrades were often cheaper than buying new, and you might only buy an upgrade every four or five years (the core requirements of a graphics app don't change majorly, so new versions are more about stability, optimizations, and the occasional niche feature).

... thankfully, there's enough competition in this space that I've managed to completely remove Adobe from my toolset, but it still sucks that I can't even activate my 2013 version of Adobe's Creative Suite (CS6) because the licensing servers no longer function.

If you scroll down a bit there's a wireframe of the skeleton which is what's actually being animated, and you'll notice it's lacking in bones to define the fingers or even possibly hands. Hence why the hands maintain that weird pose throughout all examples.

My gut says that the quality could be rapidly improved without changing the underlying design at all.

The real issue with this, I think, is that motion capture for humans is already widely available and provides much higher fidelity and control than text. Unless I'm misreading the paper badly, this model was trained on exactly such data. Blending between multiple animations through motion capture is also well-understood.

So while the results are impressive, the practical gains seem very marginal. I think perhaps that the equivalent to "inpainting" (as mentioned in the text) and "style transfer" would be the big gain here? If we could use this to retarget animations to different body plans (child, adult, space monster) quickly, or for smarter interpolation between human-authored keyframes, I could see that being a much-desired tool.

The film Arrival (2016) is well known for hiring consultants- experts in linguistics, other scientists, even Stephen Wolfram- to improve its portrayal of an alien language and the people working to decipher it.

Nobody complains when a consultant is hired in this capacity, and yet sensitivity readers, whose role is broadly similar, are somehow considered bad? It's not like they rewrite your whole book- they offer notes for things that don't make sense given the characters and plot, just as a developmental editor might.

A publisher doesn't just print the text they're given, they edit it, suggesting changes they believe will help it be better (and thus sell better). There's a back and forth dialog between editors and authors, and it's entirely possible either side might walk away if there's no willingness to compromise. This happens to all books that aren't self-published. Adding another type of editor to the mix isn't gatekeeping.

I'd wonder if that's an artifact of the source data, drilling down in the possibility space to be more like some subset that duplicates the image label- for example pulling tweets with body text and alt text.

Alternatively I guess it could just pull harder towards the prompt, idk.

When I buy a physical book, I can lend that book to a friend. I own the book.

When a library buys a physical book, they can loan that copy out to patrons. They own the physical book.

For over ten years now, libraries have taken a single physical book, scanned it and removed the book from circulation, and lent out a single ebook. This has been a common practice founded on an interpretation of fair use laws, which allow format shifting (recording a vhs to DVD, for example) and lending, and also copyright laws which explicitly mention the legality of digitizing books for accessibility reasons, to serve the visually impaired.

This "one physical book in storage equals one ebook" lending is the "controlled digital lending" the archive does, and is the issue at stake in this suit. Publishers argue that libraries should not be allowed to lend any ebook except those which they set a specific lending limit to- charging the library a fee every X number of checkouts or every X number of months.

This is obviously not how lending physical books works- the library can buy a hardcover and loan it out to patrons, repairing the spine and binding over and over, eventually moving it to a special collection for viewing on site when it's hundreds of years old and can't be handled.

As a seperate, and legally shaker issue, the internet archive created the "national emergency library" during the pandemic. The logic here was that nearly every library in the country was closed, there were within those libraries physical copies of these books that weren't being lent out, and so the same concept as controlled digital lending could apply. This move by the archive was signed onto and supported by thousands of libraries around the country, who agreed that their uncirculated physical copies could stand in for the extra copies checked out of the archives emergency library.

It's important to note the archive does not loan any book published in the last five years, period. This is a self imposed limitation that your neighborhood library does not work under, but it means that the "lost sales" publishers allege were not of new books. Nobody ever got screwed out of bestseller status because too many library patrons read their book, and that goes doubly so in this case.

All that said, the issue isn't whether the internet archive messed up with it's national emergency library. It's whether the whole concept of loaning a book is limited to printed copies, and thus ebooks must be repurchased by libraries ad nauseum-- or if libraries can keep a physical copy in a storage room and loan out a digital copy one at a time, exactly as they do now.

Bottom line, our libraries (and especially their ebook collections) will be much poorer if this decision goes to publishers.