I watched the "Project Turntable" video, and that is unbelievably cool.

To work, the AI has to recognize what the drawing represents, figure out how to reverse-transform the 2D representation into a 3D object, and work out what the hidden parts should look like. It's amazing.

It's only a short step between this and working out walk cycles, matching mouth movements to dialogue, adding facial expressions, etc.

This will revolutionize 2D animation.

"so I'm guessing they're crime statistics are roughly in line with ours. ..but I mean for like petty theft like this."

There's an issue across the UK where thugs and drug users will target shops selling 'high' value groceries e.g. large chocolate bars or strong alcoholic drinks.

The criminals will threaten to use violence against any member of staff who intervenes in the theft.

They'll then walk the goods round to a dodgy shop willing to buy them, and so have that as a source of income for buying drugs.

It's an absolute shitshow, and the UK police aren't able to cope with it. Part of the problem is that each crime is small, so that even if you catch someone in the act of stealing one thing from a shop, the culprit would be unlikely to receive a prison sentence from it. The police need to be able to acquire evidence of a pattern of theft, possibly across multiple shops, by a single person.

I'm not sure I would go as far as saying I support the plan, but it also doesn't seem out of scale with the problem being faced by shopkeepers.

Well, Boeing is going to find out what the market thinks.

If a significant number of people will pay extra to avoid flying on Boeing, then that's going to make airline companies want to avoid buying Boeing.

And if airline companies also see the value of an aging Boeing fleet depreciate noticeable faster than an Airbus fleet, then it's going to make selling Boeing planes at a profit to be more difficult.

I'd always assumed that it was to eventually lead on to battery driven military vehicles.

I mean, those exist now, but only as little buggies and dirt bikes. Not great big heavy things.

That sounds like a reasonable guess and probably partly true.

But I also wonder if it's to make sure that PWAs keep working exactly the same, as none of the current PWAs would have been tested on any other browser.

Or not: "Max was advertised as "computer-generated", and some believed this, but he was actually actor Frewer wearing prosthetic makeup, contact lenses, and a plastic moulded suit, and sitting in front of a blue screen. Harsh lighting and other editing and recording effects heighten the illusion of a CGI character."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

> Panicked when TP7.zip was password protected

Your phone is probably capable of cracking that password in under 5 seconds.

Even small amounts of capital is quite powerful.

There is an issue in my city that a lot of 'public engagement' done by the local government is done during the week, during officer hours. That means that anyone who works in a normal job needs to take a day off work to be able to turn up to those meetings to express their view.

For someone who has money to spare, that's not an onerous task. For everyone else, giving up a days earnings to 'possible' influence what the government does is a huge cost.

One result of this is that retirees are much more influential than they would be otherwise, as they can attend many more meetings than working age people can.

Yeah, and she doesn't cost $15 bucks.

> Good luck manufacturing, stacking, and interconnecting a billion separate components for a reasonable price.

I just checked memory prices. I can get 4GB of ram for 15 quid, and that is about 20 billion things that are interconnected.

> The custom silicon race has gone far beyond any possible profit margin scale at this point.

Well, that depends.

For companies making commodity components, or trying to sell devices made from commodity components, then yes, trying to make a profit from them is very hard. And in general, investing in R+D to make incremental improvements is not likely to see a good return on that money.

But if you are a vertically integrated company, and can design upcoming hardware around new hardware, and can sell those devices for a large profit, then the silicon chip race is awesome. Apple is pulling ahead in both high-performance laptops and mobile phones, and making huge profits from selling high-end products. Yes, there's lots of very cheap alternative devices out there, but there's a distinct lack of "almost as good as apple" products.

Without any serious competition for high-end devices, there is no pressure on Apple to reduce their prices....

And yes, that situation is not going to last forever, but an extra couple of 10's of billions of dollars profit per year, for however many years it lasts, is a nice bonus.

That's why he refused the prize:

> Eldagsen subsequently refused the award, saying "AI is not photography. I applied [...] to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not."

The Linux Foundation seems to represent the interests of large for-profit tech companies. It does not seem to represent the interests of Linux projects, developers, contributors or users.

Spending any money on an "Open Metaverse Foundation" is a sign that the organisation is seriously adrift, if not worse. Just because Facebook is spending billions on a dumb idea, doesn't mean that anyone else should be.

> If he’s in the US, he’s probably safe.

If he already works for the CIA and this was one of the projects he was assigned to work on, he's probably looking at a promotion.

> how long for it to drop under $100? Since belief was the only thing sustaining it ...

That's not strictly true. It has a core sustaining it of:

* Money laundering.
* Buying drugs 'anonymously'.
* Enabling ransomware attackers to be paid 'anonymously'.
* Making it easy for the FBI to make huge dragnets to catch low level drug wholesalers.
* Funding insurrections in Democracies.
* Ponzi scheme startups.

For all those activities, a large merchant fee would be acceptable to Bitcoin's users, so there is effectively a tax on those activities and that tax supports the price of Bitcoin.

Although I think it will drop quite low, I also think a lot of people using it for transactions that can't be done through traditional payment providers will continue to use it. At some point people will claim that "crypto has stabilised" and another round of scamming will take place.