The Godot Game Engine Now Has Its Own Foundation
More details can be found via the Godot Engine blog.
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Sales And Repair
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Sales And Repair
1715 S. 3rd Ave. Suite #1
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Mon - Fri: 8:30-5:30
Sat - Sun: Closed
More details can be found via the Godot Engine blog.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In City Dreamer, users can ask the model to generate elements from a city designed around a theme of their choice — say, pumpkins, denim, or the color blerg. Imagen creates sample buildings and plots (a town square, an apartment block, an airport, and so on), with all the designs appearing as isometric models similar to what you’d see in SimCity. In Wobble, you create a little monster. You can choose what it’s made out of (clay, felt, marzipan, rubber) and then dress it in the clothing of your choice. The model generates your monster, gives it a name, and then you can sort of poke and prod the thing to make it “dance.” Again, the model’s output is constrained to a very specific aesthetic, which, to my mind, looks like a cross between Pixar’s designs for Monsters, Inc. and the character creator feature in Spore. (Someone on the AI team must be a Will Wright fan.) These interactions are extremely constrained compared to other text-to-image models, and users can’t just request anything they’d like. That’s intentional on Google’s part, though. As Josh Woodward, senior director of product management at Google, explained to The Verge, the whole point of AI Test Kitchen is to a) get feedback from the public on these AI systems and b) find out more about how people will break them.
Google wouldn’t share any data on how many people are actually using AI Test Kitchen (“We didn’t set out to make this a billion user Google app,” says Woodward) but says the feedback it’s getting is invaluable. “Engagement is way above our expectations,” says Woodward. “It’s a very active, opinionated group of users.” He notes the app has been useful in reaching “certain types of folks — researchers, policymakers” who can use it to better understand the limitations and capabilities of state-of-the-art AI models. Still, the big question is whether Google will want to push these models to a wider public and, if so, what form will that take? Already, the company’s rivals, OpenAI and Stability AI, are rushing to commercialize text-to-image models. Will Google ever feel its systems are safe enough to take out of the AI Test Kitchen and serve up to its users?
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Sony also revealed 11 new titles headed to PS VR2 in 2023, and they include The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR, Crossfire: Sierra Squad, The Light Brigade, Cities VR – Enhanced Edition, Cosmonious High, Hello Neighbor: Search and Rescue, Jurassic World Aftermath Collection, Pistol Whip VR, Zenith: The Last City, After the Fall, and Tentacular. While we don’t have a full launch line-up quite yet, Sony did confirm that it is “expecting more than 20 titles” on February 22. You can preorder the system on November 15. Those interested can register today to get ready.
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Meta describes its method as a three-part system trained to compress audio to a desired target size. First, the encoder transforms uncompressed data into a lower frame rate “latent space” representation. The “quantizer” then compresses the representation to the target size while keeping track of the most important information that will later be used to rebuild the original signal. (This compressed signal is what gets sent through a network or saved to disk.) Finally, the decoder turns the compressed data back into audio in real time using a neural network on a single CPU.
Meta’s use of discriminators proves key to creating a method for compressing the audio as much as possible without losing key elements of a signal that make it distinctive and recognizable: “The key to lossy compression is to identify changes that will not be perceivable by humans, as perfect reconstruction is impossible at low bit rates. To do so, we use discriminators to improve the perceptual quality of the generated samples. This creates a cat-and-mouse game where the discriminator’s job is to differentiate between real samples and reconstructed samples. The compression model attempts to generate samples to fool the discriminators by pushing the reconstructed samples to be more perceptually similar to the original samples.”
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How it works: Companies with more than four employees must post a salary range for any open role that’s performed in the city — or could be performed in the city. Violators could ultimately be fined up to $250,000 — though a first offense just gets a warning.
Reality check: It’s a pretty squishy requirement. The law requires only that salary ranges be in “good faith” — and there’s no penalty for paying someone outside of the range posted. It will be difficult for enforcement officials to prove a salary range is in bad faith, Bloom says. “The low-hanging fruit will be [going after] employers that don’t post any range whatsoever.” Many of the ranges posted online now are pretty wide. A senior analyst role advertised on the Macy’s jobs site is listed as paying between $85,320 and $142,080 a year. A senior podcast producer role at the WSJ advertises an “NYC pay range” of $50,000 – $180,000. The wide ranges could be particularly reasonable if these roles can be performed remotely, as some companies adjust pay according to location.
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A help center post and the community guidelines offer a little more detail. They say that “text, images, and videos that contain nudity, offensive language, sexual themes, or mature subject matter” is allowed on Tumblr, but “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts (or content with an overt focus on genitalia)” aren’t. There’s an exception for “historically significant art that you may find in a mainstream museum and which depicts sex acts — such as from India’s Sunga Empire,” although it must be labeled with a mature content or “sexual themes” tag so that users can filter it from their dashboards.
“Nudity and other kinds of adult material are generally welcome. We’re not here to judge your art, we just ask that you add a Community Label to your mature content so that people can choose to filter it out of their Dashboard if they prefer,” say the community guidelines. However, users can’t post links or ads to “adult-oriented affiliate networks,” they can’t advertise “escort or erotic services,” and they can’t post content that “promotes pedophilia,” including “sexually suggestive” content with images of children. On December 17th, 2018, Tumblr permanently banned adult content from its platform. The site was owned by Verizon at the time and later sold to WordPress.com owner Automattic, which largely maintained the ban “in large part because internet infrastructure services — like payment processors and Apple’s iOS App Store — typically frown on explicit adult content,” reports The Verge.
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The study found that on average, travel times for car trips in Atlanta during evening hours increased between 9.9-10.7% immediately following the ban on shared micromobility. For an average commuter in Atlanta, that translated to an extra 2-5 minutes per evening trip. The authors also concluded that the impact on commute times would likely be higher in other cities across the country. According the study, “based on the estimated US average commute time of 27.6 minutes in 2019, the results from our natural experiment imply a 17.4% increase in travel time nationally.”
The study went on to consider the economic impact of that added congestion and increased travel time. […] The economic impact on the city of Atlanta was calculated at US $4.9 million. The study estimated this impact on the national level could be in the range of US $408M to $573 million. Interestingly, the entirety of the study’s data comes from before the COVID-19 pandemic, which played a major role in promoting the use of shared micromobility. A similar study performed today could find an even greater impact on congestion, travel times, and economic impact on cities.
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Now this evening is a comment from a Google engineer on the Chromium JPEG-XL issue tracker with their expressed reasons: “Thank you everyone for your comments and feedback regarding JPEG XL. We will be removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium for the following reasons:
– Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely
– There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL
– The new image format does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default
– By removing the flag and the code in M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome”
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Kwon’s TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and sister token Luna suffered a $60 billion wipeout in May as confidence in the project evaporated, exacerbating this year’s crypto meltdown. Hodlnaut’s Hong Kong arm made the near $190 million loss when it offloaded the stablecoin as its claimed dollar peg frayed. In a letter dated July 21, Hodlnaut’s directors “made an about-turn” about the impact and informed a Singapore police department that digital assets had been converted to TerraUSD, according to the report. Much of the latter was lent out on the Anchor Protocol, the report said, a decentralized finance platform developed on the Terra blockchain.
Hodlnaut, which operates out of Singapore and Hong Kong, halted withdrawals in August. The judicial report said more than 1,000 deleted documents from Hodlnaut’s Google workspace could have helped shed light on the business. The judicial managers haven’t been able to obtain several “key documents” in relation to Hodlnaut’s Hong Kong arm, which owes $58.3 million to Hodlnaut Pte in Singapore. About S$776,292 appeared to have been withdrawn by some employees between July and when withdrawals were halted in August, the report stated. Most of the company’s investments into DeFi were made via the Hong Kong division, it added.
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