• ComfyUI SeC Nodes – ComfyUI custom nodes for SeC (Segment Concept) – State-of-the-art video object segmentation that outperforms SAM 2.1, utilizing the SeC-4B model developed by OpenIXCLa

    https://github.com/9nate-drake/Comfyui-SecNodes

    What is SeC?

    SeC (Segment Concept) is a breakthrough in video object segmentation that shifts from simple feature matching to high-level conceptual understanding. Unlike SAM 2.1 which relies primarily on visual similarity, SeC uses a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to understand what an object is conceptually, enabling robust tracking through:

    • Semantic Understanding: Recognizes objects by concept, not just appearance
    • Scene Complexity Adaptation: Automatically balances semantic reasoning vs feature matching
    • Superior Robustness: Handles occlusions, appearance changes, and complex scenes better than SAM 2.1
    • SOTA Performance: +11.8 points over SAM 2.1 on SeCVOS benchmark

    How SeC Works

    1. Visual Grounding: You provide initial prompts (points/bbox/mask) on one frame
    2. Concept Extraction: SeC’s LVLM analyzes the object to build a semantic understanding
    3. Smart Tracking: Dynamically uses both semantic reasoning and visual features
    4. Keyframe Bank: Maintains diverse views of the object for robust concept understanding

    The result? SeC tracks objects more reliably through challenging scenarios like rapid appearance changes, occlusions, and complex multi-object scenes.

  • What the Boeing 737 MAX’s crashes can teach us about production business – the effects of commoditisation

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    newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution

     

     

    Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software (or VFX?) —another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.

     

    The beginning of the end was “Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctional firm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO (Harry Stonecipher) who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” And all that came with it. “Stonecipher’s team had driven the last nail in the coffin of McDonnell’s flailing commercial jet business by trying to outsource everything but design, final assembly, and flight testing and sales.”

     

    It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators.

     

    There was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.

     

    Down in South Carolina, a nonunion Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.

     

    Shockingly, another piece of the quality failure is Boeing securing investments from all airliners, starting with SouthWest above all, to guarantee Boeing’s production lines support in exchange for fair market prices and favorite treatments. Basically giving Boeing financial stability independently on the quality of their product. “Those partnerships were but one numbers-smoothing mechanism in a diversified tool kit Boeing had assembled over the previous generation for making its complex and volatile business more palatable to Wall Street.”

    (more…)