#solidstatelife

waynerad@diasp.org

Windrecorder is a "personal memory search engine".

"Windrecorder is a memory search app by records everything on your screen in small size, to let you rewind what you have seen, query through OCR text or image description, and get activity statistics."

Sounds like Microsoft Recall, only open source.

I haven't said anything about Microsoft Recall. I'm guessing you all've heard about it. If you haven't, it is a new AI feature that screenshots everything you do, and enable you to ask the AI questions and it can answer by comprehending the screenshots. It seems privacy concerns encourage switching to Linux.

Windrecorder | Personal Memory Search Engine

#solidstatelife #ai #computervision #genai

waynerad@diasp.org

"a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don't miss against drones."

"Modern warfare is dominated by many thousands of ultra-cheap, ultra-fast drones that conduct robotic 'suicide' missions to deliver explosives to enemy territory."

"ZeroMark wants to give those soldiers something better: a system that can be attached to nearly any infantry rifle in around 30 seconds, and that boosts the shooter's probability of taking out those drones."

"The product, which ZeroMark calls a 'fire control system,' has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock."

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don't miss against drones

#solidstatelife #ai #militaryai

waynerad@diasp.org

Kaspersky software banned.

"'The Russian Government has proven that it has the capability and intent to exploit Russian companies like Kaspersky to collect sensitive US personal information and compromise the systems and networks that use these products,' said Elizabeth Cannon, Executive Director of the Office of Information and Communications Technology and Services."

Commerce Department Prohibits Russian Kaspersky Software for US Customers

#solidstatelife #cybersecurity #geopolitics

waynerad@diasp.org

"Translators and interpreters are often near the top of media listicles as the jobs most likely to be killed by AI. When the stories about Duolingo's job cuts circulated, they seemed to confirm that the inevitable AI jobs apocalypse had arrived."

"Duolingo, CEO Luis von Ahn says, still uses human translators to double-check that machine-generated translations don't make mistakes in the company's learning content. But, he says, translators at his company mostly work on more high-value aspects of the business, where the extra cost of employing a human is really worth it."

"And it's not just about mistakes, von Ahn says. The company also uses human translators to ensure consistency in the company's style and tone throughout their app. Turns out, AI can't consistently master 'the same playful voice' Duolingo wants to communicate to users.'"

If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?

#solidstatelife #ai #nmt #translation

waynerad@diasp.org

"WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers, has announced today the launch of a broad-based accelerator program for over 100 news publishers in partnership with OpenAI. The Newsroom AI Catalyst is an accelerator program designed to help newsrooms fast-track their AI adoption and implementation to bring efficiencies and create quality content."

Because there's isn't enough news written by humans?

WAN-IFRA and OpenAI launch Global AI Accelerator for newsrooms

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms #openai #deepfakes

waynerad@diasp.org

Recharging drones while they're flying? Apparently some progress has been made towards this goal ad DARPA has provided additional funding.

"Dr. Ifana Mahbub, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, and her team of researchers are developing wireless technology to transfer electromagnetic waves to and from far distances. Called far-field wireless power transfer, or power beaming, the technology would enable UAVs, or drones, for example, to recharge without having to land at power stations. The technology would mark a significant advance in wireless recharging, which currently is limited to transferring power via low-frequency electromagnetic waves between very short distances, such as to a cellphone from a nearby charger."

To solve the problem electromagnetic waves from scattering along the way, "Mahbub and her team use a system of transmitters, or smaller antennas called phased-array antennas, to steer the electromagnetic waves along a targeted path."

Seems useful for military drones. Maybe that's why it's getting DARPA funding.

Researcher charges ahead with new tech to power drones wirelessly

#solidstatelife #ai #uavs

waynerad@diasp.org

Recharging drones while they're flying? Apparently some progress has been made towards this goal ad DARPA has provided additional funding.

"Dr. Ifana Mahbub, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, and her team of researchers are developing wireless technology to transfer electromagnetic waves to and from far distances. Called far-field wireless power transfer, or power beaming, the technology would enable UAVs, or drones, for example, to recharge without having to land at power stations. The technology would mark a significant advance in wireless recharging, which currently is limited to transferring power via low-frequency electromagnetic waves between very short distances, such as to a cellphone from a nearby charger."

To solve the problem electromagnetic waves from scattering along the way, "Mahbub and her team use a system of transmitters, or smaller antennas called phased-array antennas, to steer the electromagnetic waves along a targeted path."

Seems useful for military drones. Maybe that's why it's getting DARPA funding.

Researcher charges ahead with new tech to power drones wirelessly

#solidstatelife #ai #uavs

waynerad@diasp.org

"Former head of NSA joins OpenAI board".

"OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the US Army and a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors."

"Nakasone, who was nominated to lead the NSA by former President Donald Trump, directed the agency from 2018 until February of this year. Before Nakasone left the NSA, he wrote an op-ed supporting the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the surveillance program that was ultimately reauthorized by Congress in April."

"OpenAI says Nakasone will join its Safety and Security Committee, ..."

Former head of NSA joins OpenAI board

#solidstatelife #openai #aiethics #surveillance

waynerad@diasp.org

"SignWave: An easy-to-use program that transcribes text or audio files into a sign language animation."

"Given how much society has advanced technologically, the fact that there still isn't enough attention given to making communication more accessible for the deaf community is inexcusable. One of our teammates spoke of his first-hand experience with this issue, as his grandfather is a deaf individual who communicates primarily through sign language and visual cues. That's when we had the idea of automating translation to sign language, similar to closed captions on videos. As a result, we have created SignWave, an accessible and convenient translator from English to American Sign Language (ASL)."

Uses OpenAI's Whisper to convert speech to text.

tan-ad / SignWave

#solidstatelife #ai #computervision #signlanguage #asl

waynerad@diasp.org

"Piecing together the secrets of the Stasi".

"In the weeks before the Wall fell, Stasi agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks."

"There were reports on television about a small team manually reconstructing the files. So I thought, This is a very interesting field for machine vision." "At the time, Bertram Nickolay, a Berlin-based engineer and expert in machine vision, was a lead engineer at a member institute of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the German technology giant that helped invent the MP3. With the right scanner and software, he reckoned, a computer could identify the fragments of a page and piece them together digitally."

"The reality proved more frustrating."

Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi | The New Yorker

#solidstatelife #ai #surveillance #computervision #eastgermany #stasi

waynerad@diasp.org

"The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health -- this is why burnout happens."

"We're expected to keep up with multiple specialities that, in a sensible industry, would each be a dedicated field."

[big list]

"These are all distinct specialities and web dev teams should be composed of cross-functional specialists."

"Companies should have CSS specialists on their teams who take care of the complexity of providing stylesheets, ..."

"Tailwind provides a loose approximation of the experience you would get from having a dedicated CSS expert on board." Except "That abstraction falls apart quite often because Tailwind is too thin of a layer to hide the complexities of CSS." "It's very easy to run into a situation where, for example, position: sticky doesn't work and the utility class model makes figuring out the issue much harder."

"But the promise it offers is tantalising: it's your CSS buddy so you don't have to know CSS."

"This is deskilling. It lets employers and managers pretend that web project teams don't need CSS expertise -- or even just pretend that CSS expertise just doesn't exist at all. This is what Tailwind is for."

"We're all-in on deskilling the industry. Not content with removing CSS and HTML almost entirely from the job market, we're now shifting towards the model where devs are instead 'AI' wranglers. The web dev of the future will be an underpaid generalist who pokes at chatbot output until it runs without error, pokes at a copilot until it generates tests that pass with some coverage, and ships code that nobody understand and can't be fixed if something goes wrong."

A discussion about this on Hacker News is not what I expected. I figured people would be questioning this premise that AI is a continuation of the piling on of abstractions (and the resultant complexity) that the software industry has done for decades, rather than a fundamentally new phenomena. Instead, most people seemed to take issue with his idea that "frontend" development should be broken into specialties. I got the feeling many "full-stack" developers felt personally insulted, that he was implying they're not experts at their jobs.

The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health

#solidstatelife #ai #technologicalunemployment #specialization

waynerad@diasp.org

"The Elmer's Glue pizza error is more fascinating than you think."

"Search cannot read your mind. By and large, the context of your information need is obscure to it. And that's good, actually. We've decided quite rightly as a culture that we don't want big companies recording us 24/7 so they can better understand what led us to Google 'Do spiders give you acne?' at 3 a.m."

"Since intent can't always be accurately read, a good search result for an ambiguous query will often be a bit of a buffet, pulling a mix of search results from different topical domains. When I say, for example, 'why do people like pancakes but hate waffles' I'm going to get two sorts of results. First, I'll get a long string of conversations where the internet debates the virtues of pancakes vs. waffles. Second, I'll get links and discussion about a famous Twitter post about the the hopelessness of conversation on Twitter. For an ambiguous query, this is a good result set."

"The problem comes when the results get synthesized into a common answer." "This is a form of 'context collapse', where the different use contexts (jokes, movies, recipes, whatever) get blended into a single context."

The Elmer's Glue pizza error is more fascinating than you think

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms

waynerad@diasp.org

"Is the AI Revolution losing steam or is this just a media narrative?"

You know, subjectively, I find myself alternating between feeling excited and feeling bored with AI. New announcements come out, you see a demo like Sora, and it's mindblowing. And then 6 months later, announcement come out of similar technology or improvements, and I feel like, yawn. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe it's because of my experience using coding AI. I know programmers who say they're twice as productive. I've found AI tools to me mostly, but not entirely, useless. I'm willing to try anything, of course, because I need anything I can get to crank up my development speed.

It reminds me of when in 2016, Elon Musk, looking at the rapid rate of AI progress, predicted Full Self Driving by 2017. Then in 2017, he predicted it for 2018. Then in 2018, he predicted it for 2019. And so on. Today, Telsa Full Self Driving is rumored to be just reliable enough to lull people into complacency, which is actually kind of dangerous. Nobody is ready to rip the steering wheel out of their cars and declare they'd rather have the AI do all the driving because it's better than human drivers. But that's what "Full Self Driving" is supposed to mean.

There's an old saying in software development, "The first 90% of the project takes the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time."

People look at AI's current ability to write code and predict real soon now it's going to be taking over all coding tasks for whole codebases and racing software development forward. But it seems like, just like Tesla Full Self Driving, we reached that 90% threshold really fast, and the remaining 10% is taking a long time. Today's generative AI models feel like that to me.

Yes, I know, OpenAI says they are seeing no sign they have reached the end of getting better models as they scale them up. Yes, AI image generators had problems a year ago, like not being able to draw fingers, that are pretty much completely solved now, so it's reasonable to expect with today's video generators, music generators, code generators, and "AI agents" to get progressively better with time.

Anyway, this YouTube video explores a number of media narratives that the AI revolution is losing steam, and concludes (spoiler!) actually, no, the AI revolution is not losing steam. AI companies are gobbling up chips as fast as they can (not caring at all about the exorbitant cost), businesses everywhere are getting familiar with the technology and learning where it makes sense to use it to add business value, adoption is actually faster than the internet or any previous technology, and innovation in the field is continuing, so, no, the AI revolution is not losing steam.

Is the AI Revolution Losing Steam? - The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News

#solidstatelife #ai #futurology

waynerad@diasp.org

"Volvo Autonomous Solutions today unveiled Volvo's first-ever production ready autonomous truck at the ACT Expo in Las Vegas. The Volvo VNL Autonomous brings together Volvo's commercial vehicle expertise with industry-leading autonomous driving technology from Aurora Innovation (NASDAQ: AUR)."

"Today" was May 20th.

"This truck is the first of our standardized global autonomous technology platform, which will enable us to introduce additional models in the future, bringing autonomy to all Volvo Group truck brands, and to other geographies and use cases."

Am I the only one who feels a little nervous about the idea of autonomous gigantic trucks? But they say the system is safe.

"The new Volvo VNL Autonomous has been made with safety in mind. The Volvo VNL Autonomous therefore has redundant steering, braking, communication, computation, power management, energy storage and vehicle motion management systems."

"The Aurora Driver consists of powerful AI software, dual computers, proprietary lidar that can detect objects more than 400 meters away, high-resolution cameras, imaging radar, and additional sensors, enabling the Volvo VNL Autonomous to safely navigate the world around it."

"The Aurora Driver has been extensively trained and tested in Aurora's sophisticated virtual suite where it's driven billions of miles. It also has driven 1.5 million commercial miles on public roads, where it deftly navigates end-to-end trucking routes traversing highways, rural roadways, and surface streets day and night and through good and bad weather."

"The Volvo VNL Autonomous will be assembled at Volvo's flagship New River Valley (NRV) plant in Dublin, Virginia."

The Volvo VNL Autonomous -- proving the way forward

#solidstatelife #ai #autonomousvehicles #aurorainnovation #volvo

waynerad@diasp.org

Paper monitor, but the hardware designs for this one are entirely open source.

"The Modos Paper Monitor is an open-hardware 13.3-inch, 1600 x 1200 monochrome or color e-ink monitor with a fast 60 Hz refresh rate, low latency, multiple image modes and dithering options, and flexible screen update control. It can be connected using HDMI and USB-C and works on Linux, macOS, and Windows."

There's a link to a document below that explains everything you ever wanted to know about paper monitors and e-ink.

Modos paper monitor pre-launch on crowd supply

#solidstatelife #papermonitors #eink