Posts
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/china-has-acquired-a-global-network-of-vital-ports/vi-AA1jxZpO
Monday, November 27, 2023
Friday, November 17, 2023
Meta developing chips for AR smart glasses
MediaTek Partners With Meta To Develop Chips For AR Smart Glasses (9to5google.com)3
During MediaTek's 2023 summit, MediaTek executive Vince Hu announced a new partnership with Meta that would allow it to develop smart glasses capable of augmented reality or mixed reality experiences. 9to5Google reports:As the current generation exists, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses feature a camera and microphone for sending and receiving messages. However, the next generation of Meta smart glasses are likely to have a built-in "viewfinder" display to merge the virtual and physical worlds, allowing users to scan QR codes, read messages, and more. Beyond that, the company wants to bring AR glasses into the fold, which presents a much broader set of challenges. To accomplish this, a few things need to change. AR glasses need to be built for everyday use and optimized to take on an industrial design that looks good but can pack enough tech to ensure a good experience. As it stands, mixed-reality headsets are bulky and take on a large profile. Ideally, Meta's fully AR glasses would be thinner and sleeker.
The new partnership between companies means that MediaTek will help co-develop custom silicon with Meta, built specifically for AR use cases and the glasses. MediaTek brings expertise in developing low-power, high-performance SoCs that can fit within small parameters, like in the frame in a pair of AR glasses. Little to no details were revealed about the upcoming AR glasses, other than directly stating that "MediaTek-powered AR glasses from Meta" would be a thing sometime in the future. Previous leaks position the next generation of smart glasses with a viewfinder as a 2025 release, while a more robust set of AR glasses was referred to as a 2027 product -- if done properly, it would be an incredible product.
The new partnership between companies means that MediaTek will help co-develop custom silicon with Meta, built specifically for AR use cases and the glasses. MediaTek brings expertise in developing low-power, high-performance SoCs that can fit within small parameters, like in the frame in a pair of AR glasses. Little to no details were revealed about the upcoming AR glasses, other than directly stating that "MediaTek-powered AR glasses from Meta" would be a thing sometime in the future. Previous leaks position the next generation of smart glasses with a viewfinder as a 2025 release, while a more robust set of AR glasses was referred to as a 2027 product -- if done properly, it would be an incredible product.
AI turns drawings to software
Working prototype
Live demo
'Make It Real' AI Prototype Turns Drawings Into Working Software (arstechnica.com)30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:On Wednesday, a collaborative whiteboard app maker called "tldraw" made waves online by releasing a prototype of a feature called "Make it Real" that lets users draw an image of software and bring it to life using AI. The feature uses OpenAI's GPT-4V API to visually interpret a vector drawing into functioning Tailwind CSS and JavaScript web code that can replicate user interfaces or even create simple implementations of games like Breakout. "I think I need to go lie down," posted designer Kevin Cannon at the start of a viral X thread that featured the creation of functioning sliders that rotate objects on screen, an interface for changing object colors, and a working game of tic-tac-toe. Soon, others followed with demonstrations of drawing a clone of Breakout, creating a working dial clock that ticks, drawing the snake game, making a Pong game, interpreting a visual state chart, and much more.
Tldraw, developed by Steve Ruiz in London, is an open source collaborative whiteboard tool. It offers a basic infinite canvas for drawing, text, and media without requiring a login. Launched in 2021, the project received $2.7 million in seed funding and is supported by GitHub sponsors. When The GPT-4V API launched recently, Ruiz integrated a design prototype called "draw-a-ui" created by Sawyer Hood to bring the AI-powered functionality into tldraw. GPT-4V is a version of OpenAI's large language model that can interpret visual images and use them as prompts. As AI expert Simon Willison explains on X, Make it Real works by "generating a base64 encoded PNG of the drawn components, then passing that to GPT-4 Vision" with a system prompt and instructions to turn the image into a file using Tailwind.You can experiment with a live demo of Make It Real online. However, running it requires providing an API key from OpenAI, which is a security risk.
Tldraw, developed by Steve Ruiz in London, is an open source collaborative whiteboard tool. It offers a basic infinite canvas for drawing, text, and media without requiring a login. Launched in 2021, the project received $2.7 million in seed funding and is supported by GitHub sponsors. When The GPT-4V API launched recently, Ruiz integrated a design prototype called "draw-a-ui" created by Sawyer Hood to bring the AI-powered functionality into tldraw. GPT-4V is a version of OpenAI's large language model that can interpret visual images and use them as prompts. As AI expert Simon Willison explains on X, Make it Real works by "generating a base64 encoded PNG of the drawn components, then passing that to GPT-4 Vision" with a system prompt and instructions to turn the image into a file using Tailwind.You can experiment with a live demo of Make It Real online. However, running it requires providing an API key from OpenAI, which is a security risk.
Thursday, November 16, 2023
Windows app for iOS, Mac OS and PCs
Better than the old emulator trick.
Windows is Now an App for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and PCs (theverge.com)2
Microsoft has created a Windows App for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows, and web browsers. From a report:The app essentially takes the previous Windows 365 app and turns it into a central hub for streaming a copy of Windows from a remote PC, Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, and Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services.
Microsoft supports multiple monitors through its Windows App, custom display resolutions and scaling, and device redirection for peripherals like webcams, storage devices, and printers. The preview version of the Windows App isn't currently available for Android, though. The Windows App is also limited to Microsoft's range of business accounts, but there are signs it will be available to consumers, too. The sign-in prompt on the Windows App on Windows (yes that's a mouthful) suggests you can access the app using a personal Microsoft Account, but this functionality doesn't work right now.
Microsoft supports multiple monitors through its Windows App, custom display resolutions and scaling, and device redirection for peripherals like webcams, storage devices, and printers. The preview version of the Windows App isn't currently available for Android, though. The Windows App is also limited to Microsoft's range of business accounts, but there are signs it will be available to consumers, too. The sign-in prompt on the Windows App on Windows (yes that's a mouthful) suggests you can access the app using a personal Microsoft Account, but this functionality doesn't work right now.
Monday, November 13, 2023
Switch for killing tumor cells
Researchers Identify a 'Switch' That Might Someday Kill Tumor Cells (ucdavis.edu)5
Cells have a protein receptor that will cause that cell to die — in theory. Unfortunately, "Previous efforts to target this receptor have been unsuccessful," says Jogender Tushir-Singh, an associate professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, Davis.
But he's now led a team of researchers at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center that's identified a receptor-activating protein section. And more importantly, "now that we've identified this epitope, there could be a therapeutic path forward" for targeting that receptor... in tumors.The findings were published Oct. 14 in the Nature journal Cell Death & Differentiation... Death receptors do precisely what their name implies — when targeted, they trigger programmed cell death of tumor cells. They offer a potential workaround that could simultaneously kill tumor cells and pave the way for more effective immunotherapies and CAR T-cell therapy...
Tushir-Singh and his colleagues knew they might be able to target cancer cells selectively if they found the right epitope. Having identified this specific epitope, he and other researchers can now design a new class of antibodies to selectively bind to and activate Fas to potentially destroy tumor cells specifically.
Singh says their research "sets the stage" to develop antibodies that selectively kill tumor cells.
But he's now led a team of researchers at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center that's identified a receptor-activating protein section. And more importantly, "now that we've identified this epitope, there could be a therapeutic path forward" for targeting that receptor... in tumors.The findings were published Oct. 14 in the Nature journal Cell Death & Differentiation... Death receptors do precisely what their name implies — when targeted, they trigger programmed cell death of tumor cells. They offer a potential workaround that could simultaneously kill tumor cells and pave the way for more effective immunotherapies and CAR T-cell therapy...
Tushir-Singh and his colleagues knew they might be able to target cancer cells selectively if they found the right epitope. Having identified this specific epitope, he and other researchers can now design a new class of antibodies to selectively bind to and activate Fas to potentially destroy tumor cells specifically.
Singh says their research "sets the stage" to develop antibodies that selectively kill tumor cells.
Saturday, November 11, 2023
Artificial DNA
Scientists Build Yeast With Artificial DNA (axios.com)11
Alison Snyder reports via Axios:For more than 15 years, scientists have worked to build a complex cell with an entire genome built from scratch. This week they announced a major milestone: They've created synthetic versions of the 16 chromosomes in a yeast cell and successfully combined some of them in one cell. The feat is revealing new information about fundamental processes in cells, and it is a key step toward some scientists' vision of creating programmable cellular factories to produce biofuels, materials, medicines and other products.
The changes researchers made to yeast chromosomes fall into three main categories: increasing stability of the genome, repurposing codons (genetic sequences that carry instructions for reading DNA or RNA) and introducing a system that allows scientists to make millions of cells, each with different genetic properties. "A big problem is a lot of the things you want to make are actually toxic to the cells," [says Benjamin Blount, a synthetic biologist at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. and co-author of some of the scientific papers in a series published this week in Cell and Cell Genomics detailing the work]. With the system that reshuffles the genome and effectively mimics evolution, scientists can make many variants of yeast and pick the ones "that are really good at growing in the presence of what you're trying to make." Then, they're able to look at what's happened to their genomes to enable that particular strain to grow and make the desired product, and use that genetic information to develop strains of yeast suited for an industrial process.
The chromosomes still have to be combined in one cell that can survive, which means they have to be "basically indiscernible" from natural chromosomes in terms of the cell's fitness, Blount says. That required a lot of debugging of the genome, similar to what's done for computer code. One team was able to combine multiple chromosomes in one cell and it survived and reproduced, demonstrating a mechanism for bringing them together. Building the genomes -- and seeing when the cell doesn't work as expected as the result of one change or another -- has revealed fundamental information about genome biology, Blount says. For example, the team identified sequences in genes that interrupted a key process in the cell and led to mitochondria dysfunction, which is involved in some human diseases.
The changes researchers made to yeast chromosomes fall into three main categories: increasing stability of the genome, repurposing codons (genetic sequences that carry instructions for reading DNA or RNA) and introducing a system that allows scientists to make millions of cells, each with different genetic properties. "A big problem is a lot of the things you want to make are actually toxic to the cells," [says Benjamin Blount, a synthetic biologist at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. and co-author of some of the scientific papers in a series published this week in Cell and Cell Genomics detailing the work]. With the system that reshuffles the genome and effectively mimics evolution, scientists can make many variants of yeast and pick the ones "that are really good at growing in the presence of what you're trying to make." Then, they're able to look at what's happened to their genomes to enable that particular strain to grow and make the desired product, and use that genetic information to develop strains of yeast suited for an industrial process.
The chromosomes still have to be combined in one cell that can survive, which means they have to be "basically indiscernible" from natural chromosomes in terms of the cell's fitness, Blount says. That required a lot of debugging of the genome, similar to what's done for computer code. One team was able to combine multiple chromosomes in one cell and it survived and reproduced, demonstrating a mechanism for bringing them together. Building the genomes -- and seeing when the cell doesn't work as expected as the result of one change or another -- has revealed fundamental information about genome biology, Blount says. For example, the team identified sequences in genes that interrupted a key process in the cell and led to mitochondria dysfunction, which is involved in some human diseases.
Thursday, November 9, 2023
Custom GPTs and AI agents
https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts
Just click the link to see this video on YouTube
This guy is worth following:
The Passion of the Pee Wee
The Lord moves in mysterious ways.
"The Passion of the Christ" is included with Amazon Prime.
As the credits rolled, I experienced a moment remarkably similar to one ten years ago when I watched Jesus of Nazareth on YouTube.
Given the trajectory of Gibson's filmography, I avoided watching Passion of the Christ because I felt like a 20-minute torture scene was tantamount to making a snuff film about Jesus.
Looking back, I believe Mel Gibson is likely sincere and the treatment is consistent with the in-your-face Catholic way. Despite skipping through a lot of the gore, I got the point. Some things are better left unseen. But, I'll be interested in the upcoming Resurrection film and his depiction of the descent into Hell. Given the onslaught of utter depravity between reality TV and our culture's long obsession with zombies, I hope Mel takes the gloves off and dives into The Rapture to absolute bejeezus out of everyone.
Robot crushes man
Clean up on aisle 12.
Shouldn't robots be augmented with cameras and computer vision to standardize the object recognition needed for differentiating between humans and boxes?
No doubt, Amazon must be a Play-doh fun factory.
From the article:
The industrial robot, which was lifting boxes filled with bell peppers and placing them on a pallet, appears to have malfunctioned and identified the man as a box, Yonhap reported, citing the police.
The robotic arm pushed the man’s upper body down against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest, according to Yonhap.
In March, a South Korean man in his 50s suffered serious injuries after getting trapped by a robot while working at an automobile parts manufacturing plant.
As C-3PO once said, "Oh! How horrid!"
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Lucid dream induction device
"...non-invasive (tFUS) neurotech company building a device to induce and stabilize lucid dreams."
Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9_CuB9AWE4
https://decrypt.co/200538/halo-prophetic-ai-device-lucid-dreams
Company
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/prophetic-ai
https://www.linkedin.com/company/propheticai/
People
Eric Wollberg, CEO, Co-founder
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-wollberg/
Sterling Crispin, Artist, Developer, advisor to Prophetic
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sterlingcrispin/
https://www.sterlingcrispin.com/
Wesley Barry, artist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesley-louis-berry-iii-80b98b15b/
Scientists Are Researching a Device That Can Induce Lucid Dreams On Demand (vice.com)52
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard:[A] new tech startup, Prophetic, aims to bring lucid dreams to a much wider audience by developing a wearable device designed to spark the experience when desired. Prophetic is the brainchild of Eric Wollberg, its chief executive officer, and Wesley Louis Berry III, its chief technology officer. The pair co-founded the company earlier this year with the goal of combining technologies, such as ultrasound and machine learning models, "to detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams" with a device called the Halo according to the company's website. [...]
Prophetic does not make any medical claims about its forthcoming products -- Halo is tentatively slated for a 2025 release -- though Wollberg and Berry both expressed optimism about broader scientific research that suggests lucid dreams can reduce PTSD-related nightmares, promote mindfulness, and open new windows into the mysterious nature of consciousness. To explore those links further, Prophetic has partnered with the Donders Institute, a research center at Radboud University in the Netherlands that is focused on neuroscience and cognition, to generate the largest dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) observations of lucid dreamers, according to the company. The collaboration will also explore one of central technologies behind Prophetic's vision, known as transcranial focused ultrasound (TUS). This non-invasive technique uses low-intensity ultrasound pulses to probe the brain, and interact with neural activity, with a depth and precision that cannot be achieved with previous methods, such as transcranial electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation.
At this point, both the possibilities and limits of Prophetic's concept remain unclear. While ultrasound devices have been widely used in medicine for decades, the process of stimulating parts of the brain with TUS is a relatively new development. Within the past few years, scientists have shown that TUS "has the potential to be used both as a scientific instrument to investigate brain function and as a therapeutic modality to modulate brain activity," according to a 2019 study, and "could be a useful tool in the treatment of clinical disorders characterized by negative mood states, like depression and anxiety disorders," according to a 2020 study. What is not known, yet, is whether TUS can induce or stabilize lucid dreams, though the Prophetic team is banking on a positive answer to this open question. Its wearable headband prototype, the Halo, was developed with the company Card79 and can currently read EEG data of users. Over the next year, Prophetic aims to use the dataset from their partnership with the Donders Institute to train machine learning models that will stimulate targeted neural activity in users with ultrasound transducers as a means of inducing lucid dreams.
Prophetic does not make any medical claims about its forthcoming products -- Halo is tentatively slated for a 2025 release -- though Wollberg and Berry both expressed optimism about broader scientific research that suggests lucid dreams can reduce PTSD-related nightmares, promote mindfulness, and open new windows into the mysterious nature of consciousness. To explore those links further, Prophetic has partnered with the Donders Institute, a research center at Radboud University in the Netherlands that is focused on neuroscience and cognition, to generate the largest dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) observations of lucid dreamers, according to the company. The collaboration will also explore one of central technologies behind Prophetic's vision, known as transcranial focused ultrasound (TUS). This non-invasive technique uses low-intensity ultrasound pulses to probe the brain, and interact with neural activity, with a depth and precision that cannot be achieved with previous methods, such as transcranial electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation.
At this point, both the possibilities and limits of Prophetic's concept remain unclear. While ultrasound devices have been widely used in medicine for decades, the process of stimulating parts of the brain with TUS is a relatively new development. Within the past few years, scientists have shown that TUS "has the potential to be used both as a scientific instrument to investigate brain function and as a therapeutic modality to modulate brain activity," according to a 2019 study, and "could be a useful tool in the treatment of clinical disorders characterized by negative mood states, like depression and anxiety disorders," according to a 2020 study. What is not known, yet, is whether TUS can induce or stabilize lucid dreams, though the Prophetic team is banking on a positive answer to this open question. Its wearable headband prototype, the Halo, was developed with the company Card79 and can currently read EEG data of users. Over the next year, Prophetic aims to use the dataset from their partnership with the Donders Institute to train machine learning models that will stimulate targeted neural activity in users with ultrasound transducers as a means of inducing lucid dreams.
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Disable blue caps lock indicator in Mac OS Sonoma
Disable the blue caps lock indicator in Mac OS Sonoma:
Open terminal, paste the following script, enter your password, then reboot.
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain
sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Add 'redesigned_text_cursor:Enabled' bool false" /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/UIKit.plistFriday, November 3, 2023
AI cameras, smart cities
https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-took-over-town-america/
https://www.fusus.com/rtc3-products/fusus-ai
https://www.youtube.com/@fusus5476
Private commercial and residential AI cameras integrate with the Atlanta police program
Core device shop, integrates cameras to police program
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Surely You Can't Be Serious
https://www.audible.com/pd/Surely-You-Cant-Be-Serious-Audiobook/B0BV4PNGYF
Surely You Can't Be Serious
- The True Story of Airplane!
- Narrated by: "Weird Al" Yankovic, Arne Schmidt, Barry Diller, Beau Bridges, Bill Hader, Bob Weiss, David Zucker, Dick Chudnow, Hunt Lowry, James Murray, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jimmy Kimmel, Joe Praino, full cast
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Release date: 10-03-23
"We have to find somebody who not only can fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner."
The audiobook honestly conveys the creators' remarkable naivete and their challenges in gaining buy-in to produce such a novel, unconventional comedic form.
The assembly of anecdotes lends testimony and context to the impact of the film at the time of its debut and to its current relevance.
The team also shares how audience screenings helped forge their fourteen comedic "rules" that govern the timing and effectiveness of the gags to ultimately craft the signature sensibility of the final film.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)