GitHub Copilot is evolving to bring chat and voice interfaces, support pull requests, answer questions, and adopt OpenAI's GPT-4.
Recent Posts, Photos and Links
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023
Links of the Day
Unity is building an open and unique AI ecosystem that will soon connect millions of creators with the AI tools they need to deliver amazing RT3D content and experiences to billions of users around the world.
On Tuesday, Adobe introduced its own generative AI model family called Firefly, claiming—like young people tend to do in the throes of pubescence—it’s not like the other scrappy AI image generators. Instead of using training data dredged up from the internet, Adobe said its crafted its service only using images on its stock image site, openly licensed work, and public domain content.
GitHub is using OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 model to go way beyond auto-completing comments and code. Copilot X gets chat and voice support.
Tuesday, March 21st, 2023
Links of the Day
In a demo, Bard was quick but constrained.
The solid-iron core at the centre of our planet is slowing down, according to a new study… and it’s making our days longer
NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is underway and CEO Jensen Huang just wrapped up the company's keynote, full of software and hardware announcements. It seems the company is working pretty hard to make sure that robotics and AI engineers can view NVIDIA as a one-stop shop with not only the brains behind the operation, but also the tools needed to build applications that users need. Huang announced upgrades and huge new features for just about every step of the process of creating and
While this year’s Spring GTC event doesn’t feature any new GPUs or GPU architectures from NVIDIA, the company is still in the process of rolling out new products based on the Hopper and Ada Lovelace GPUs its introduced i
Interacting with AI just became a critical skill. In this short piece, I'm going to show you how I moved away from basic prompts and moved into full
The Hakuto-R moon lander entered lunar orbit late Monday night (March 20), notching a huge milestone for the Japanese company ispace and private spaceflight in general.
Nvidia Corp Chief Executive Jensen Huang on Tuesday unveiled a new product for speeding up the design of semiconductors as it rolled out an array of new artificial intelligence technologies based around its chips and sof
Researchers at Stanford University have taken down their short-lived chatbot that harnessed Meta’s LLaMA AI, nicknamed Alpaca AI. The researchers launched Alpaca with a public demo anyone could try last week, but quickly took the model offline thanks to rising costs, safety concerns, and “hallucinations,” which is the word the AI community has settled on for when a chatbot confidently states misinformation, dreaming up a fact that doesn’t exist.
Alameda food tech company Good Meat is one step closer to bringing its lab-grown chicken to market. The so-called cultivated meat producer received a “no questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in which the regulatory agency accepts the company’s claims that its product is safe for human consumption. The FDA reached the conclusion after an analysis of Good Meat’s cultivated cells, production methods and final product. The company joins Berkeley’s Upside Foods in receiving
South Korean rocket startup Innospace successfully launched a suborbital rocket from Brazil over the weekend, demonstrating a hybrid motor it plans to scale up into a small orbital launch vehicle.
Russia has spent nearly $1 billion on the development of the new Soyuz-5 rocket.
Microsoft continues to add new features to Bing at a brisk pace, as the AI chatbot is now able to generate images. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced Bing Image Creator, which is powered by an advanced version of OpenAI’s DALL-E deep learning model. Just type in a description of anything you want to see, and Bing will generate the image in seconds.
Lowriding is becoming legalized again in California, amid protests by enthusiasts that say they have been unfairly targeted on racial grounds
The 18,000-square-foot facility in Berkeley will power owner Emily Winston’s bagel shops and wholesale accounts
Monday, March 20th, 2023
Blog Posts
Day Tripping: Disneyland, Lemos Farm and California Academy of Sciences
As a family, we love to explore new places, and a month ago we took a trip to Disneyland for my birthday. It was my first time visiting the happiest place on earth with my 8-month-old son, Wesley. Needless to say, it was an experience I will never forget.
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Links of the Day
World needs a “quantum leap” in climate ambition to stave off devastating consequences.
An International Ramen Phenomenon Is Opening a New Oakland Outpost Soon — The San Francisco StandardThe Japanese restaurant chain attracted droves of devoted fans when it first arrived in SF. It will expand to Oakland this spring.
Jon Porter, The Verge:
OpenAI's Status Page - chat.openai.com is down.
A set of Soyuz spacecraft coolant leaks hints that Roscosmos is struggling as the space agency loses international partnerships and funding.
Apple does not want to resort to layoffs, unlike many other major tech companies, which have been downsizing since around the turn of 2023. The tech giant is so desperate to not become another Google, Microsoft, or Meta (which thought 11,000 Meta staff layoffs were so nice that it did it twice) that it has put a hold on some major product releases, like a planned Homepod with in-built screen to allocate more resources to other projects. Any hopes of ChatGPT-like Apple AI powering your smart home
Open source intelligence researchers are verifying and debunking opaque claims about who ruptured the gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
The for-profit AI company argues that its products will automate a vast swath of Americans' job tasks.
Sunday, March 19th, 2023
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Links of the Day
It already has investors.
The presence of such massive galaxies lurking in the early Universe contradicts current cosmological models
The market for underwater robots is expected to reach a value of $1.2 billion in 2023 and $4.3 billion by the end of 2033, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 13.7 percent.
Discover amazing ML apps made by the community
See inside a classic Polaroid, PalmPilot, and more.
What is yet to come when AI is combined with robotics will change everything.
Saturday, March 18th, 2023
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Links of the Day
The Biden Administration approved ConocoPhillips' Willow Project this week, which will use "thermosyphons" to freeze melting permafrost.
OpenAI’s latest LLM is wildly more capable—and still sometimes a loose cannon
Process uses planes and ground-based cannons to shoot silver iodide crystals into clouds, attracting moisture to the particles that falls as additional snow and rain
Ships, noise, and climate change are killing whales. Here’s how to change that.
Friday, March 17th, 2023
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Links of the Day
Researchers say consumers who just want to get the job done may be turned off by a chatbot that shows emotion
Sam Altman stresses need to guard against negative consequences of technology, as company releases new version GPT-4
Documentation for the Tailwind CSS framework.
According to critics, what could have been one of the year's worst movies is surprisingly good
Anthropic aims for "safer" and "less harmful" AI, but at a higher price.
Whatever the AI model, they all need GPUs to run and train them
Let us control diffusion models! Contribute to lllyasviel/ControlNet development by creating an account on GitHub.
Videos have become an increasingly important part of our daily lives, spanning fields such as entertainment, education, and communication. Understanding the content of videos, however, is a challenging task as videos oft
After a 12-year battle, the California Supreme Court declined this week to hear an appeal from a neighborhood group attempting to stop the development of a 315-unit apartment building in Lafayette, clearing the project’s last hurdle and allowing it to move forward.
Observations from space show that the rate of sea level rise is increasing. Knowing where and how much rise is happening can help coastal planners prepare for future hazards.
Stable Diffusion web UI. Contribute to AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui development by creating an account on GitHub.
Thursday, March 16th, 2023
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Links of the Day
When you trade in a smartphone, here’s how it gets refurbished and makes companies money
Following the success of Netflix’s period romance Bridgerton, a spin-off is coming — and this time, the focus moves from the ever-courting Bridgerton brood to Queen Charlotte, the undisputed ruler of “The Ton”, as played by Golda Rosheuvel in the main series.
The more things change, the more this long-running bar and grill stays the same.
For the best corned beef, cure your brisket at home with a mix of curing salt and spices.
The necessity of progress.
Locally run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM . Contribute to antimatter15/alpaca.cpp development by creating an account on GitHub.
783 votes, 119 comments. 1.7m members in the 3Dprinting community. /r/3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can …
After weeks of torrential rain, some restaurant owners are done with parklets—but many more plan to keep them.
Wednesday, March 15th, 2023
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Links of the Day
When Siri was announced over a decade ago, its revolutionary function created a buzz around it, which Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa followed. While all these smart assistants can help people turn on/off lights, create reminders, or reply to easy tasks, they now have lost momentum compared to the next wave of AI-generated conversations, which OpenAI’s ChatGPT leads.
The money and power flooding into AI are warping and intensifying the typical Silicon Valley gold rush, now set to explode with the launch of GPT-4.
AI is going to do a lot of interesting things in the coming months and years, thanks to the detonations following GPTs. But one of the most important
Some late-night hospitality workers in San Francisco will have a new option for getting home after work — a free Cruise robotaxi. The General Motors-backed company announced this week that it’s partnering with a San Francisco nonprofit to pilot free, driverless rides in the city to service workers from 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. daily. “Dozens” of mostly restaurant workers started utilizing the free rides last week, said Amanda Lenaghan, Cruise’s head of social impact, and the company plans to expand “
More of an evolution than a revolution
Nearly 90% of the multibillion-dollar federal lobbying apparatus in the United States serves corporate interests. In some cases, the objective of that money is obvious. Google pours millions into lobbying on bills relate
Date: 14th March 2023 Today saw Microsoft patch an interesting vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook. The vulnerability is described as follows: Microsoft Office Outlook contains a privilege escalation vulnerability that a
Plus, Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s is back open with a new look and a totally fresh menu
Dubbed AxEMU, the next generation suit is designed to be safe, flexible, and capable of withstanding the extreme temperatures experienced at the lunar south pole, where two NASA astronauts are expected to land later this decade.
Tuesday, March 14th, 2023
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Links of the Day
San Francisco's official calendar is a little more heavily booked than other cities — Bay to Breakers, opening day of crab season and festivals like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass all come to mind.
The little-known origin story of the science that won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics
This old school instructional video still imparts some essential photographic knowledge.
Patrick McGee and Tim Bradshaw, reporting for The Financial Times, under the headline “Tim Cook Bets on Apple’s Mixed-Reality Headset to Secure His Legacy” (archive link, just in case your FT login credentials aren’t working):
Americans’ favorite lunch is a ‘heart bomb’ of salt, preservatives and sugar. But doctors say there’s a way to build a healthier sandwich—here’s how.
Ramen Champ and the ultra-rich, toppings-laden cult of ‘Jiro-style’ ramen.
Monday, March 13th, 2023
Blog Posts
Reverse Engineering Read Later Data from the Apple News App
As we navigate the digital world, we often come across articles we don't have time to read but still want to save for later. One way to accomplish this is by using the Read Later feature in Apple News. But what if you want to access those articles outside the Apple News app, such as on a different device or with someone who doesn't use Apple News? Or what if you want to automatically post links to those articles on your blog? That's where the nerd powers come in.
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Links of the Day
Microsoft says it connected tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 chips and reworked server racks to build the hardware behind ChatGPT and its own Bing AI bot.
Artificial enzymes could fight viruses like COVID and other tough diseases
Yearslong examination of thousands of boot drives provides unique perspective.
A rich diversity of snails in north-west Western Australia is sublime evidence of evolution in action.
Thanks to Meta LLaMA, AI text models may have their "Stable Diffusion moment."
If you’ve spent much time looking through a microscope, you know that their narrow depth of field can be a bit challenging to deal with. Most microscopes are designed to only have a very thin slice of the specimen in focus, so looking at anything above or below that plane requires a focus adjustment. It’s tedious and fussy, and that makes it a perfect target for automation.
Microsoft announced a mysterious AI event for March 16th, and it looks like we’re getting a big ChatGPT upgrade this week in the form of GPT-4, which comes with multimodal support. That might mean nothing to most people, given that ChatGPT stormed the tech landscape just three months ago, and we’re still learning what it can do and how it can disrupt tech as we know it.
Sunday, March 12th, 2023
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Links of the Day
A group of local investors and business owners is pushing an ambitious plan to redevelop parts of San Francisco’s iconic Fisherman’s Wharf neighborhood into a seafood-focused attraction spotlighting the area’s historic identity as a working port, complete with a food hall, seafood processing center and fish market.
Regulators take control of a second bank and race to roll out emergency measures
March 18, 1965 was an ordinary Thursday for the majority of people located on planet Earth. But for 30-year-old cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, one of two people who happened to be off-world at the time, it was all about making history and cheating death. Exactly 52 years ago this Saturday, Leonov and mission commander Pavel Belyayev blasted into space aboard the Soviet spacecraft Voskhod (“Sunrise”) 2. Several crews, both Russian and American, had already orbited Earth, so Voskhod 2 had been tasked
Russia is investigating the possibility that a manufacturing defect caused two of its spacecraft to spring coolant leaks in a two-month span recently.
Officials at the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation discussed the idea to backstop all deposits this weekend, the people said, with only hours to go before financial markets opened in Asia.
Saturday, March 11th, 2023
Links of the Day
There are major privacy risks.
Deep learning based semi-supervised learning algorithms have shown promising results in recent years. However, they are not yet practical in real semi-supervised learning scenarios, such as medical image processing, hyper-spectral image classification, network traffic recognition, and document recognition. In these types of scenarios, the labeled data is scarce for hyper-parameter search, because they introduce multiple tunable hyper-parameters. A research team has proposed a novel meta-learning
They set out to save rainforests — and stumbled upon a way to help prevent the world’s next deadly pandemic.
This week researchers claimed to have discovered a superconducting material that can shuttle electricity with no loss of energy under near-real-world conditions. But drama and controversy behind the scenes have many worried that the breakthrough may not hold up to scientific scrutiny.
Friday, March 10th, 2023
Links of the Day
Medical technology company Ondine’s photodisinfection process kills pathogens in a person’s nostrils.
Fungi are some of the strangest living things on Earth. Some are single-celled organisms like bacteria, other are multicellular beings akin to plants and animals. Some can even shapeshift between these forms of life. However they look, they’re an integral part of the environment: Many fungi act as nature’s recyclers, breaking down dead organic matter into something that can be reused by others. And we regularly rely on fungi in a variety of ways, including as food.
For over a century, scientists have sought a holy grail of materials: a room-temperature superconductor, a material that can carry electrical charges without resistance, which would revolutionize the energy landscape as we know it.
Thursday, March 9th, 2023
Blog Posts
AI and The Potential Risks of Autonomous War Bots
In 2008, I had the opportunity to tour SPAWAR, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, now known as NAVWAR. SPA/NAVWAR is a research and development laboratory for the U.S. Navy. During my visit, I was fascinated by the various autonomous military robots that were being developed and tested there. I photographed the tour and wrote about it for WIRED News.
Fast-forward to 2023, and with the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT and Bing AI, it's possible to imagine how these robots could be controlled using AI in ways that are frankly somewhat terrifying. With great power comes great responsibility, and we must consider the potential risks of relying on AI-powered machines in warfare.
Wednesday, March 8th, 2023
Blog Posts
Explosive Experience: How Illegal Fireworks Almost Blasted Me Out of My 20th-Floor Apartment (And Why My Cats Are Still Hiding Under the Bed)
On the night of July 4th, 2018, I was in my apartment at The Vermont in Koreatown when illegal firework mortars started exploding right outside my window on the 20th floor. The massive amount of explosive materials being set off on the street below was almost too much for my apartment to handle. My cats were less than impressed with the spectacle, and I can't blame them. Despite the danger, I couldn't resist capturing the colorful chaos with my camera. And let's just say, it was an explosive experience!
Links of the Day
Results come from a lab that had an earlier superconductivity paper retracted.
The Fast and Furious franchise would be jealous of this 2:29-long short. A user on Reddit shared a stop-motion video of an epic Hot Wheels battle using only an iPhone. The trama is full of plot twists, and the Redditor uses several different toys from the Hot Wheels franchise to tell the story.
Twitter CEO and supreme overlord Elon Musk apologized to former employee Haraldur Thorleifsson for mocking his disability, proving that even tech’s biggest villain has a heart, or at the very least the sense to smell a huge incoming lawsuit.
Tuesday, March 7th, 2023
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Monday, March 6th, 2023
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Sunday, March 5th, 2023
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Saturday, March 4th, 2023
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Friday, March 3rd, 2023
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Wednesday, March 1st, 2023
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Tuesday, February 28th, 2023
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Monday, February 27th, 2023
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Sunday, February 26th, 2023
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Saturday, February 25th, 2023
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Friday, February 24th, 2023
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Thursday, February 23rd, 2023
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Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023
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Tuesday, February 21st, 2023
Blog Posts
Photographing The Deep Space Network at Goldstone
The Deep Space Network (DSN) is one of the most critical components of space exploration and communication. The network comprises a series of antennas that are used to communicate with interplanetary spacecrafts, such as the Mars rovers and the Voyager spacecrafts, as they travel through the solar system.
Monday, February 20th, 2023
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Sunday, February 19th, 2023
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Saturday, February 18th, 2023
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Friday, February 17th, 2023
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Thursday, February 16th, 2023
Blog Posts
Extracting Celebrity and Object Information from Photos: An Overview of Amazon Rekognition's Capabilities
Have you ever stumbled upon a photo and found yourself wondering who that celebrity is, or what kind of object is in the background? Enter Amazon Rekognition, a powerful deep learning-based image and video analysis service that can help answer those questions.
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Wednesday, February 15th, 2023
Blog Posts
Using GPT-3 to Write Captions Based on Image Keywords, People, Albums, and Locations
Have you ever wanted to caption your photos automatically? With the GPT-3 Davinci model from OpenAI, you can do just that! By using image keywords, people, locations, and the album name, you can use AI/ML to generate captions that are not only descriptive, but also entertaining (and frequently hilariously wrong).
In this post, I’ll explore the capabilities of GPT-3 for writing captions based on image data, and how it can add a new dimension to your photos.
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immersiveness
pleasant-perspective
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harmonious-color
pleasant-composition
well-timed-shot
interesting-subject
pleasant-symmetry
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